Brain teasers during Tech Interviews

Genre and Sub Genre — Verbal Folklore: Riddles & Brainteasers

Language: English

Country where Item is from: United States

 

Informant Data: Nan hu ’18 is a senior here at Dartmouth. He is a computer science and mathematics double major. Nan is from Seattle, Washington, where his parents worked in the technology sector. Nan interned twice, once sophomore summer as a software engineer at a company called Pegasystems in Cambridge, MA, and another time junior summer as a software engineer at Microsoft. He is a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. After graduation, Nan will return to Microsoft as a software engineer.

Social Context: Given that aspiring Tech professionals are often anxious about what technical questions they can expect within interviews, they will often ask more senior undergraduates what particular questions they encountered within their interviews. The folklore in question here is therefore shared among “techies” of both sexes, and of all academic years.

Cultural Context: Given the very competitive nature of Tech interviews and the premium placed on the ability to think in a structured and logical way, interviewers will often ask prospective candidates to solve complex technical questions, relating to coding or otherwise, on the spot. Given the prevalence of this particular practice, we wanted to gather definitive stories illustrative of people being asked to solve complex questions, or brain teasers as they are often called, within the context of a tech interview. Towards that end, Trent Shillingford, one of our collectors, interviewed Nan Hu on-one-one in quiet setting in the library.

 

Item: Nan Hu noted having been asked to solve the following question. He was asked by the interviewer to, after having been given restrictive parameters within which to operate in looking for a potential solution, to find the next highest  palindrome of any given number

 

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Relevant Portion: 14:45 — 16:50

Transcript of Associated File:

  • Trent Shillingford: What is a question that was out of left field for you when you had your interview?

 

  • Nan Hu: …Um the questions I received during the interviews seemed pretty reasonable.. Although I think… I guess .. I don’t really have any specific examples off the top of my head but I think some more general out of the blue ones.. are if there are a lot of stricter parameters on the problem so basically.. Sort of it’s a problem that you might be able to solve but they are they expecting or trying to push you to solve it in a specific way that you might not know or that you’re not comfortable with or just like generally hard problems.. There are algorithmically difficult problems that can be given you to solve .. like what the heck.. Something from the general category that everyone knows is difficult

 

  • Trent Shillingford: Can you give me an example of an interview question that you had and how you solved it .. high level ?

 

  • Nan Hu: Essentially… ahh .. so the question was given a number, find the next highest palindrome.. So, basically let’s say I give you a 100, you have to write a function that returns 101

 

Collector’s Name:

  • Trent Shillingford

Tags/Keywords:

  • Verbal Folklore, Trick Questions, Riddles, Brain Teasers

 

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