[protomyth]

"Not long ago I screwed up a tech interview because I couldn't remember/figure-out-on-the-spot the iteration condition for estimating square roots by the Newton-Raphson method, and I was not willing to cheat by looking it up on Wikipedia while I was on the phone. Their loss."

Out of curiosity, what type of developer position were you interviewing for?

[clifanatic]

> what type of developer position were you interviewing for?

A square-root estimator developer position, of course.

[argonaut]

I could see this question being a valid question to ask for a research scientist role if the applicant has a PhD in CS/Mathematics/Operations Research and their research area is optimization or machine learning, or they claim to have taken coursework in convex optimization. Because you definitely have heard of Newton's method in those contexts.

[lisper]

Not quite sure how to answer that. Do you mean what was the label on the job req? I don't remember. I think it was "Senior software developer" or something like that. Is that what you meant? (And if so, why do you ask?)

[protomyth]

I'm trying to figure out what software development job that would ever come up? graphics?

[lisper]

Ah. No, definitely not graphics. I can't say much without giving away the identity of the company, but like I said, the technical side of their business had to do with network optimization. It was "Uber for X" for some value of X.