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Comment by tomchristie | Hacker News Reader

> "how many golf balls can you get in a double decker bus"... > 1) i don't have enough information and 2) its not relevant to this position.

Whilst I agree somewhat with the sentiment, I don't think that's at all an unreasonable question.

1. You do very clearly have enough information to make a decent informed guess. 2. It is a relevant question.

It's relevant because it assesses your general sense of numeracy. Whilst that won't show how quickly you'd be able to deal with a database issue, it does give an indication of how you might go about making broad judgement calls in the absence of any hard-and-fast numbers. For example: Is it worth looking into this database issue, or is it likely to be insignificant compared to the network overhead?

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But if that's the information you're after, why ask for golf balls and busses? These are real world quantities with decidedly different qualities than whatever appears in standard computing scenarios. Describing how you'd go about troubleshooting a three layer architecture with inordinate network load on the database might be a better question then?

I actually think that's a decent question - in many cases you have to estimate something based on incomplete information in a domain that you aren't an expert in and maybe all you are after is an answer to the nearest order of magnitude.

In my experience some people simply won't answer those questions - not because they can't but because they aren't happy working that way. Of course, in some situations you absolutely do need people who will always work things through from first principles and attempt to give as precise an estimate as they can, but sometimes you don't.

really what sort of bus? Routemaster ,Bendy Bus, one of those new Boris busses, a US school Bus. Also how does one easily estimate the free space inside a bus. How many pasendgers are there with or with out a driver or conducter can I remove the seats and other furnature inside.

Of course one can trivialy estimate the number if one assumes that bus is a cuboid and that a golfball is an incompressble sphere - I would would probly have to look up the theorems on Google as its a long time since I used this sort of thing in anger - though bak in the day I did correct a bridge design for the 4th largest consulting engineers when the Engineer had use 2d rather than 3d :-)

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