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Comment by dmbaggett | Hacker News Reader

At ITA Software, we found in-person quizzing to be a lot less useful an indicator than looking at puzzle (or other) code someone had written "offline".

We also found puzzles to be a useful talent magnet. If you're Google (or perhaps 37Signals) you don't need a talent magnet. If you're a small company nobody's heard of, one can be quite helpful.

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Not that it matters anymore since this was pre-Google, but I swear to god, someone actually asked me the manhole cover question when I interviewed at ITA in 2010. This was for a DevOps type role, so maybe they were less well organized on that side of the house.

At first I laughed because I thought he was joking until he I saw he was serious. He followed that up with something about stacking weights on a seesaw.

Not my fault -- that was after I was gone. :)

I remember actually working on some of the puzzles that were posted by ITA in the Boston MBTA subway. I didn't submit them (since I wasn't interested in working at ITA) but they introduced me to interesting problems. For example, there was a problem related to generating rebusses* whose solution contributed to the solution to another problem I was working on.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus

That one was mine (in its original conception, at least). :)

I think it's the opposite. If the first thing you confront me with in your interview process is a puzzle and I don't know anything about your IT department, I'm going to assume that all your managers are pointy-haired bosses.

Empirical evidence from over 10 years suggests you're an outlier.

This is just signalling. "Do X and I will think you are an idiot!" is his way of saying "please don't do X."

I'm no longer sure what we're arguing about. ;)

I wonder if ITA Software is still able to use this recruiting approach now that they are a part of Google.

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