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

[Andrew Akira Toulouse]

I think you misunderstand the puzzles I'm talking about:
http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php

These are puzzles you work on at your own pace, with a variety of
language choices. You can certainly spend a month coding a
super-awesome solution. In fact, it's often noticed by the engineers
making the puzzles and thus by HR if you submit enough well-executed
solutions.

--Andy

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 5:23 AM, Andrew Dalke <dalke at dalkescientific.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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