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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I don't take crap like this from interviewers.

One time an interviewer asked me "how would you go about counting the ridges of a US quarter?"

I rattled off some ideas about counting the ridges in an arc and then multiplying to get total ridges but the interviewer kept prodding and eventually ended the question and said he was looking for me to say "google it" (I didn't realize it was a known, fixed number).

I just rolled my eyes and laughed and said "Huh, good one, but how would you go about counting the ridges of a foreign coin assuming it's freshly minted and the number of ridges is unknown?" The interviewer shifted uncomfortably and just said "yeah, I'd probably do something like what you said - count the ridges in an arc and multiply..."

(i.e. "if you are going to give me bogus lateral thinking puzzles to test my competence I'm going to fire them back to see how you handle them")

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It's funny that his expected answer was "Google it". In most cases when people answer with that (it could be the answer for any tech interview question...) you get encouraged to actually do the problem, so it's a time waster. For the interviewer it gives them no signal outside of you having the ability and awareness of the existence of search engines, although there could be some vague behavioral signal that shows you have a stronger urge to find existing solutions rather than waste time creating your own. This is a really toxic interview because you're basically expected to read the interviewer's mind. I've had a couple of these with peak Silicon Valley companies. At pre-IPO Zynga I was asked by a GM "what the most important number in game design is", at River Studios (Mike Rothenberg's company...) the entire interview was basically this style of question.

False. We want you to be confident and admit you Google all day every day. Simple as that. You seriously would have done all that before Googling it?

>> We want you to be confident...

Who is this “we”?

Interviewers who want to make sure you don't think Googling is shameful.

Every interview is different. You're asking people to read your mind: https://hiringfor.tech/2020/03/02/are-you-asking-candidates-...

That article doesn't seem to contain a point relevant to this particular issue.

If I ask you "How can you attempt to get the answer to this in under a minute" or "what's the first thing you would do" and you don't say "search for existing solution" (it doesn't have to be Google), you fail. You don't have to read my mind; I want to know where YOUR mind goes first. And if it goes to anything more complicated than "I'll try to look it up" you just simply fail; I can't afford to have you wasting any more of my business' time.

Note: This doesn’t work Bing

People assume interviews are to prove technical competence. Answering with “Google it” is more of a test of someone’s humour. While in practice it might be true that you’d Google it, most people have been conditioned by the education system to answer with something more substantive and demonstrative of their technical thinking ability.

I'm not responsible for your conditioning. I want you to tell me the truth. If you're playing a game in your mind that causes you to give me a more complex answer than you need because you think that's what I want to hear, you're going to have similar pathology as an employee and IMO this is a great screen for exactly that!

Edit: doing any "technical" work prior to doing research is a display of technical INcompetence.

What was the answer?

Years ago Zynga asked me how would I design a vending machine for blind people which was annoying because I asked it immediately back and clearly they hadn't even thought about it themselves. But then I brought up Ian Bogost and it was a hard stop basically, lol.

edit: Is it health? Like health tracking / indication? Not all games require it but maybe in the right context this would be the most important. This is snarky but I think you could run with it (health being the most important "number").

The answer was 3 I think, referring to rock paper scissors balance relationships in RTS games, and fighting games, but it was Zynga in 2011 so they were mostly thinking about casual strategy. I think I said 1 at first because the question was kind of silly and I trend toward reductive answers with silly questions.

response to your edit: Your interpretation of the question makes a little more sense. He was talking about a specific number, not a concept\variable that is common in games. For Zynga I'd probably say energy or money or something, although any tracked resource that determines loss, victory or progression would work for your version.

Sounds like your interviewer smoked too much pot before the interview. What the hell kind of question is that and what information could it possibly give you to help make a candidate selection

I don't think googling is even a valid answer. If he asked "how would you find out how many ridges are on a quarter" then yes (and I think Google it would be everyone's first answer). But counting, as a verb implies the act of measurement, not just obtaining the final number. Assuming that he used that word, it sounds like a trick question.

I was once asked how many golfballs could fit in a school bus. I blathered on about measurements of the bus, volume of a ball, the average due to gaps between balls, are the seats still there, etc... bottom line we could spend a lot of time getting an ever more precise estimate. The guy seemed satisfied. Later at home I realised that my test engineer friend may have suggested doing an actual experiment - rent a bus and a few tons of balls. The later would be easy since there is a local company here that recovers lost balls from golf courses (even from the water), repaints the and sells to driving ranges. You can buy them in bulk.

Which answer is better? Which were they looking for? Who knows.

If we live in a world where reality is on deck, and not the seemingly arbitrary and capricious one that folks sometimes weave, I think you can determine what answer is "better" with more context.

Renting a bus and filling it with golf balls is significantly more effort intensive than calculating, but it might give interesting, real world insights if the values differ.

For the purpose of running a business, the choice, to my mind, hinges on how much your revenue / customer satisfaction / product depends on the real world intelligence such an endeavour might bring. The situation illustrated is contrived, so it's hard to contrive an answer to that question.

There's hybridized approaches. Here's a 3D/AV interactive developer's contribution to your approach list:

I've used lidars and depth cameras as a hammer quite a bit over the last year, so I'd do thus - Realsense D435 capture the inside of a bus. Use meshlab to align and stitch all your pointsets. Perform reconstruction on it so you get a 3d mesh. Use your tool of choice to perform a physics simulation on golf balls (I'd probably use Unity3d, because customers love simulations they can play with.)

Run your simulation a ton of times with epsilon changes to initial conditions. Maybe even do it with an evolutionary algorithm that tries to maximize the count!

Either way, report back with a distribution. Also capture frames every once in a while so you can give them a timelapse. God customers love timelapses.

They are black-box testing your mind.

The tradeoff with this approach, if you fail to build a good rapport with the interviewer, you'll get labeled as not a good culture fit. Calling them out for a dumb question or critiquing the expectation of an 'expected answer' is not going to get you the job.

That doesn't sound like a tradeoff per se to me. Chances are that if the interviewer gets offended by a candidate turning a question back at them, that candidate may not actually be a cultural fit. It's much lower cost for both the company and the candidate to find this out earlier rather than later, so I'd actually call it a win-win.

Speaking of wasted time, this reminded me.

I was interviewing during the time covid started and everyone started working from home. I was interviewing with a company. I had a call with recruiter then with a hiring manager. I also got a project to work on over weekend.

Then got response something like, we really like you, but currently our hiring is suspended, we will let you know when it is back up.

Like, why did you wasted my time if you knew that I can't proceed to the on-site interview and you won't do it remotely?

I've witnessed this a few times. Usually because you actually passed the current hurdle, but the company got cold feet because the next step requires more effort from them and they can't make up their mind...eitherway as irritating as it is you probably dodged a bullet

Its sort of like companies doing subconscious window shopping...absolutely infuriating stuff

> I just rolled my eyes and laughed and said

In this case, it sounds like the mood was right in the room for it to be taken well candidly.

When he inevitably asked you to code an algorithm as the next question I hope he also accepted using Google for the answer.

I see nothing wrong with this, why would I write algorithm X from memory or taking my best guess at it on the spot, isn't the whole point of learning them recognising when are they applicable and how to find them quickly ?

It's kind of like knowing multiplication tables, or intervals in music. There's some stuff you just gotta know.

Knowing the multiplication table is such steaming nonsense. I know 7x10 is 70 so half of that, 7x5 is 35. I can add seven to 35 fast enough that I don't have to memorize 7x6 is 42.

Memorizing is not knowing.

How did you divide 70 in half and get 35?

I hope his google doesn't land on this thread: The US 25 cent denomination coin or 'Quarter' has eleven ridges

I am thinking that a google search about an interview question about the number of ridges on a US quarter or "Quarter" (whatever the 25 cent coin is) would unlikely point to this thread, or to your statement, which is (paraphrased): the US quarter has 11 ridges.

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