Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ameliaquining | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

ameliaquining

Ah, my least favorite technical interview question. (I've been asked it, but only after I first read about it online.)

View on HN

Indeed, it kind of feels like asking if someone knows what the number 5318008 means.

Horses for courses.

It's silly to as ask a web dev these questions and expect these XOR approaches.

Low-level developers ("bare metal" as the kids say), on the other hand? They should have a deep enough understanding of binary representation and bitwise operations to approach these problems with logic gates.

> Ah, my least favorite technical interview question.

The epitome of turning technical interviews into a trivia contest to make them feel smart. Because isn't that the point of a tech interview?

Is there any other field where they give you random brain teasers for an interview? My friends outside of IT were laughing their heads off when they hears about the usual interview process.

I've always had reasonable interview questions. Get some data from an API and display it in a table. Make a class that can store car data and get them by plate number. Make a class that calculates tax based on a bracket system.

I haven't even read the article so I don't know what this is about really but if an interviewer seriously asked me about some obscure xor trick I'd laugh at them.

In what way is that question trivia?

I believe you under-estimate what a good interviewer is trying to do with questions such as these:

Either you've seen the trick before and you get an opportunity to show the interviewer that you're an honest person by telling him you have. Huge plus and the interview can move on to other topics.

Either you haven't and you can demonstrate to the interviewer your analytical skills by dissecting the problem step by step and understanding what the code actually does and how.

Bonus if you can see the potential aliasing problem when used to swap two variables.

Not a trivia question at all.

It has no connection to modern software engineering. It's a clever and irrelevant trick for 99.999% of programming jobs out there.

Stop asking these asinine questions and ask questions relevant to real-world software engineering. Software engineers are their own worst enemies.

I knew a guy who would ask the binary search question in interviews (i.e. "you have an array of sorted values, what's the fastest way to find if an element is in the array?"). I always felt like this was an unfair question to ask somebody as well - it doesn't seem like something you'd be able to come up with on your own if you hadn't seen it _in an interview situation_. OTOH it's a quick way to screen people who actually did a CS degree.

Imagine asking to prove a relatively difficult theorem. That's a similar type of question and it's a waste of time during an interview. Once you know the proof (know the algorithm), the idea might seem trivial, but coming up with such idea (inventing the algorithm) took people possibly a very long time in the first place.

You shouldn't expect it to be possible during the course of the interview for those who don't know it already, it makes no sense to expect that.

At best, the question will check if someone memorized such stuff. But I don't see a lot of value in that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com