[Baypiggies] Programming Puzzles (discussion forked from Salary Ranges)

[Andrew Dalke]

On Feb 17, 2010, at 5:06 PM, Andrew Akira Toulouse wrote:
> Getting rid of puzzles at Facebook is a suggestion they are unlikely
> to agree with, as it has worked well for them.  ... They are not
> only looking for the best communicators, but excellent
> problem-solvers.

And the correlation between puzzle-solvers of the sort
which can be done during an interview and problem-solvers
of the sort which might take days of work is ... ?

I ask this because the major reason I can do those common
interview puzzles is because I've read most of them in
case they were asked of me some day.

While I've spent a month developing a solution to find the
maximum common subgraph in a set of N graphs. (Rather,
of substructures in a group of molecules.)

> the only person I can think of who started to approach the
> lone ranger stereotype was someone who was working on an
> extremely hard optimization problem that required heavy
> engineering experience and rare algorithmic talent.

Hmm.... And perhaps the space I work in has algorithmically
harder problems than Facebook.

				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com