Interview questions gone wrong...
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Had an interview over the phone today. Totally bunged the question. They asked for a test to check if a number is a power of 2 and I answered it as a test to see if it was divisible by 2! Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))). What a dolt I be! I was so nervous I messed up other simple ones too. Needless to say I didn't get the job failing the technical questions. Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn Engineering -
Had an interview over the phone today. Totally bunged the question. They asked for a test to check if a number is a power of 2 and I answered it as a test to see if it was divisible by 2! Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))). What a dolt I be! I was so nervous I messed up other simple ones too. Needless to say I didn't get the job failing the technical questions. Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn EngineeringBy the way...
Fuzzychaos wrote:
Had an interview over the phone today.
Fuzzychaos wrote:
Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))).
How do you say that over the phone?
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Had an interview over the phone today. Totally bunged the question. They asked for a test to check if a number is a power of 2 and I answered it as a test to see if it was divisible by 2! Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))). What a dolt I be! I was so nervous I messed up other simple ones too. Needless to say I didn't get the job failing the technical questions. Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn EngineeringFuzzychaos wrote:
Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
"Have you ever had problems with a co-worker?" Yeah, just don't answer that one. Definitely don't launch into long stories. :-o
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Fuzzychaos wrote:
They asked for a test to check if a number is a power of 2
My answer would have been, why are you testing to see if a number is a power of 2?
Fuzzychaos wrote:
Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
I think, anyone that asks me to interview, I would say, "um, thanks, but I'd rather interview YOU and YOUR programmers" which I've done, not explicitly, but most people don't know how to interview, and it is SO easy to get them to talk about themselves. And programmers of course love to complain, so the "what do you like about this job, and what do you hate about it" is an awesome interviewee question. ;) Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh SmithMarc Clifton wrote:
My answer would have been, why are you testing to see if a number is a power of 2?
Easy, for mathematical factorization like Mersenne primes. You change your algorithm if it is a power of two +/-1.
"I know which side I want to win regardless of how many wrongs they have to commit to achieve it." - Stan Shannon
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Had an interview over the phone today. Totally bunged the question. They asked for a test to check if a number is a power of 2 and I answered it as a test to see if it was divisible by 2! Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))). What a dolt I be! I was so nervous I messed up other simple ones too. Needless to say I didn't get the job failing the technical questions. Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn EngineeringI guess it sort of depends on the type of programming you will be doing, but seriously, folks, when was the last time you had to do that in a program? I've been writing code for 25 years. I'll be polite: this is a bs question. If someone asked me that question over the phone, I'd have a hard time not laughing. I think I would respond with, "could you give me an example of actually using such a silly question?" Am I the only one here thinking this?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
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I guess it sort of depends on the type of programming you will be doing, but seriously, folks, when was the last time you had to do that in a program? I've been writing code for 25 years. I'll be polite: this is a bs question. If someone asked me that question over the phone, I'd have a hard time not laughing. I think I would respond with, "could you give me an example of actually using such a silly question?" Am I the only one here thinking this?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
It was for embedded systems development on a mobile device job interview.
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn Engineering -
It was for embedded systems development on a mobile device job interview.
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn Engineering -
Alvaro Mendez wrote:
x % 2 == 0 is probably what they were expecting.
:confused: How will that help determine if a number is a power of 2? Powers of 2 are 1,2,4,8,16,32...
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
Currently working on C++/CLI in Action for Manning Publications. Also visit the Ultimate Toolbox blog (New)Nishant Sivakumar wrote:
How will that help determine if a number is a power of 2? Powers of 2 are 1,2,4,8,16,32...
Oops, perhaps he meant multiple of 2. :-O At least, that's what I understood. :~ Alvaro
If [God] knows what we are going to do then we have no free will and are just characters in a play written by him. Without free will, morality for humans makes no sense. Without free will and morality, any sort of punishment or reward system loses any justification. Heaven and hell would be places where [God] could watch the souls he created, predestined just for eternal happiness or agony. - Mark Thomas
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Had an interview over the phone today. Totally bunged the question. They asked for a test to check if a number is a power of 2 and I answered it as a test to see if it was divisible by 2! Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))). What a dolt I be! I was so nervous I messed up other simple ones too. Needless to say I didn't get the job failing the technical questions. Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn EngineeringMan, all my recent interviews have been what are your strengths/weakneses? I actually had one guy who admitted he hadn't interviewed anyone in about 5 year. So I got out of tought questions. (Man I wish those guys would call me back with an offer!) :badger:
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Man, all my recent interviews have been what are your strengths/weakneses? I actually had one guy who admitted he hadn't interviewed anyone in about 5 year. So I got out of tought questions. (Man I wish those guys would call me back with an offer!) :badger:
i like that wanky one about biggest weakness - i give them the "oh you mean hwo i always work too hard" with the eyerolling and p*ss takign then i tell them that my biggest weakness is that i tend to speak my mind. "why is that a weakness?" "because sometimes i don't bother preparsing it, so if you don't want to hear what i have to say, dont hire me" works well in nz, australia and the UK though Dunno how that would go down in america land- but i'm not in Amexica ;) - suspect i might get away with it coz i'm not a local Bryce
--- To paraphrase Fred Dagg - the views expressed in this post are bloody good ones. --
Publitor, making Pubmed easy. http://www.sohocode.com/publitorOur kids books :The Snot Goblin, and Book 2 - the Snotgoblin and Fluff
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It was for embedded systems development on a mobile device job interview.
Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
A programmer with a dream can accomplish anything. So, start by implementing your castle in the clouds and then working on its interface to a foundation :-D Quote by: Jeremy Pemberton-Pigott
New Dawn EngineeringFuzzychaos wrote:
It was for embedded systems development on a mobile device job interview.
Whatever it was meant for, unless you are un-employed, you'ld be happy not to work for them: I can't see how can be so important the ability to determine if a number is the power of two; I can find tons of sample in dozens of languages just goggling, if I ever needed it. In my opinion, the most important thing in a developer is not how to solve such a small problem, but how to properly design an application, so that it's stable, easy to correct and expand and possibly performant (but this may vary, depending on the target). Looks like yor interviewer is (or was) a coder, not a programmer. Good luck for next time!
Marco Turrini
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By the way...
Fuzzychaos wrote:
Had an interview over the phone today.
Fuzzychaos wrote:
Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))).
How do you say that over the phone?
Right bracket, x, logical and, not, right bracket, x, binary and, right bracet, x - 1, left bracket, left bracket, left bracket ;)
Pablo Sometimes I think there's no reason to get out of bed . . . then I feel wet, and I realize there is.
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I guess it sort of depends on the type of programming you will be doing, but seriously, folks, when was the last time you had to do that in a program? I've been writing code for 25 years. I'll be polite: this is a bs question. If someone asked me that question over the phone, I'd have a hard time not laughing. I think I would respond with, "could you give me an example of actually using such a silly question?" Am I the only one here thinking this?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
I would only see it being valid if it was for something along the lines of game programing or some sort of math intinsive software.
Pablo Sometimes I think there's no reason to get out of bed . . . then I feel wet, and I realize there is.
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By the way...
Fuzzychaos wrote:
Had an interview over the phone today.
Fuzzychaos wrote:
Should have been (x && !(x & (x - 1))).
How do you say that over the phone?
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If that is of some comfort to you: I screwed up a simple binary search in an interview once.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -Brian Kernighan
Most people do. I saw something recently about how most binary search implementations don't work if the start and end pointers are above 2GB in memory. Normally the algorithm finds the mid-point by adding start and end together, then dividing by 2 - if the start and end pointers are above 2GB, you get an integer overflow and the 'mid point' ends up right down near address 0. This doesn't work very well. Most of us will still be fine on Win32 because it's hard to get a user-mode pointer above 2GB. You can only do it by booting with the /3GB switch (on OSs which support it) and linking the executable with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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Marc Clifton wrote:
My answer would have been, why are you testing to see if a number is a power of 2?
Easy, for mathematical factorization like Mersenne primes. You change your algorithm if it is a power of two +/-1.
"I know which side I want to win regardless of how many wrongs they have to commit to achieve it." - Stan Shannon
Strangely, I'm not in the habit of doing that every day as a programmer. (If you happen to be programming strong cryptographic key generation and wish to check that the key you generated is strong enough to withstand easy factorization, then go ahead. I'll use CryptoAPI where someone else has already written it.)
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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Strangely, I'm not in the habit of doing that every day as a programmer. (If you happen to be programming strong cryptographic key generation and wish to check that the key you generated is strong enough to withstand easy factorization, then go ahead. I'll use CryptoAPI where someone else has already written it.)
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
I agree... Ive been writing both production and shrink wrap code for over 11 years and I have always looked up anything that I didnt know. Why memorize something that you may never use? I'd rather have a developer on my team that has a good attitude, understands the business problems that they are trying to solve and knows where to look when they dont know the answer to a quetsion...
Jake-
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Strangely, I'm not in the habit of doing that every day as a programmer. (If you happen to be programming strong cryptographic key generation and wish to check that the key you generated is strong enough to withstand easy factorization, then go ahead. I'll use CryptoAPI where someone else has already written it.)
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
I agree that those types of questions are probably more about the interviewer's ego than finding the skill level of the applicant. But, that question made me think, a little.:doh: Consider this. All powers of 2, in binary are in the following form: 01, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 etc... which of course is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc... So the easy way to tell is just any number that in binary is a single 1 followed by all zeros.
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Nishant Sivakumar wrote:
How will that help determine if a number is a power of 2? Powers of 2 are 1,2,4,8,16,32...
Oops, perhaps he meant multiple of 2. :-O At least, that's what I understood. :~ Alvaro
If [God] knows what we are going to do then we have no free will and are just characters in a play written by him. Without free will, morality for humans makes no sense. Without free will and morality, any sort of punishment or reward system loses any justification. Heaven and hell would be places where [God] could watch the souls he created, predestined just for eternal happiness or agony. - Mark Thomas
The interviewer meant POWER of 2 ie..1,2,4,8,16,32 and i believe, (((x&(x-1))+1)==2*x) is the right answer.... coz any power of 2 will be of the form 00001000.... and x-1 will of form 00000111.... Now when we do x&(x-1)...ie. bitwise and we get 00001000... 00000111... ------------ 00001111... whichh is 1 less than 0001000 ...(x*2)
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Fuzzychaos wrote:
Anyone have other mixed up interview questions?
"Have you ever had problems with a co-worker?" Yeah, just don't answer that one. Definitely don't launch into long stories. :-o
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Yeah, that's like "do I look fat in these pants?" or "do you like that girl?" There are around 14,000 answers to those questions, all of which are incorrect.
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