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I got the snowman one “wrong” because the problem didn’t say you couldn’t throw away excess snow. Maybe the lesson is that it’s hard to write word problems.

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Generally, if you find a simplification that makes the problem trivial you’re interpreting it wrong and should reconsider.

It’s funny because that’s the opposite of what you’d want in a new hire: you want the engineer to pick a trivial solution rather than over-designing everything, so they can solve more problems for your company.

Ha. Right. I guess it’s just one more way in which the interview is an anti pattern for the behavior we want in a coworker.

Can I Google this? Sorry no.

ChapGPT? Pretend it’s not available.

Use a library? No no no.

Ask for help? Thanks for coming in.

I gave up on that one after finding no non-trivial explanation that made sense to me. I guess in hindsight it makes sense the building material is just given in sphere radius, but that didn't click at the time.

I couldn't make sense of the 100-m race one either. The only thing I could come up with is maybe the clock freezes/race ends when the first person finishes, and the scores are then done by distance to the finish line.

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