it's not about that particular algorithm, it's about weeding out devs who cannot come up with something as basic as decimal-to-binary conversion. A former boss of mine used questions like "What year did the First World War start?" to cut, well, not enough intelligent people off - worked pretty well actually
I disagree with either of these types of questions being used to measure a person's intelligence. Lack of knowledge is not the same thing as lack of intelligence. As a thought experiment: What if Leonardo DaVinci were asked to answer either of those questions? He would not have access to our knowledge of history and most likely not the mathematical experience converting numbers to different base systems. I don't think most people would consider his contributions any less significant or that he was less intelligent because he didn't know some random tidbit of knowledge.
A former boss of mine used questions like "What year did the First World War start?" to cut, well, not enough intelligent people off - worked pretty well actually
Why would a history quiz be on a programming job interview and be used to judge intelligence? I consider myself pretty well versed on history and I don't even know the answer to that. Why would the year Franz Ferdinand was shot be relevant at all to the job?
@phillip
What makes you think Leonardo would be a good software developer? :) @mike
It was just a quick test if the person was actually learning something during his high school years. Also it was in Russia, for the US you might want to replace it with something more culturally relevant as people born/raised outside Europe are usually pretty hopeless at European history (unless there was a movie or music band)
Oof, history was never a good topic for me. That's why I got into tech and not studying history. That'd be a great way to weed me out of wanting to work for a place, asking me history questions during a technical interview. lol
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it's not about that particular algorithm, it's about weeding out devs who cannot come up with something as basic as decimal-to-binary conversion. A former boss of mine used questions like "What year did the First World War start?" to cut, well, not enough intelligent people off - worked pretty well actually
I disagree with either of these types of questions being used to measure a person's intelligence. Lack of knowledge is not the same thing as lack of intelligence. As a thought experiment: What if Leonardo DaVinci were asked to answer either of those questions? He would not have access to our knowledge of history and most likely not the mathematical experience converting numbers to different base systems. I don't think most people would consider his contributions any less significant or that he was less intelligent because he didn't know some random tidbit of knowledge.
Why would a history quiz be on a programming job interview and be used to judge intelligence? I consider myself pretty well versed on history and I don't even know the answer to that. Why would the year Franz Ferdinand was shot be relevant at all to the job?
@phillip What makes you think Leonardo would be a good software developer? :)
@mike It was just a quick test if the person was actually learning something during his high school years. Also it was in Russia, for the US you might want to replace it with something more culturally relevant as people born/raised outside Europe are usually pretty hopeless at European history (unless there was a movie or music band)
Oof, history was never a good topic for me. That's why I got into tech and not studying history. That'd be a great way to weed me out of wanting to work for a place, asking me history questions during a technical interview. lol