[hintymad]

It will be rat race when there are so many interview books and courses and websites. It was a not rat race before 2005, when there were only two reasons that one can solve problems like Pirate Coins or Queen Killing Infidel Husbands: the person is so mathematically mature that such problems are easy for them; the person is so geeky that they read Scientific American or Gardner's columns and remembered everything they read.

[littlestymaar]

You're missing the third category: people like myself who absolutely love this kind of riddles and destroy them in a few minutes, without any significance on their actual work abilities.

I don't think I'm a bad engineer, but I'm certainly not the rock star you absolutely need for your team, but when it comes to this kind of “cleverness” tests, I'm really really good.

I've had the “Queen Killing Infidel Husbands" (with another name) in an interview last year and I aced it in a few minutes, and I didn't knew about "Pirate Coins", but when I read your comment HN said your comment was "35 minutes ago" and now it says "40 minutes" which means I googled the problem, figured out the solution and then found the correction online to see if I was right in less than 6 minutes, and so while I'm putting my son to bed!

It's really sad because there are many engineers much better at there job than me who will get rejected because of pointless tests like this…

[dekhn]

If somebody asked me logic/brainteaser questions like that, I would politely stop them, explain that if they're asking me that question I'm not a good match for the company, and if they would like to ask a better question, I'm open to it, but otherwise, we can end the application process now. I did that recently with a junior eng who asked me a leetcode question literally with the same exact test data as the leetcode page. I ended up explaining to the CEO that at the very least his engineers should be creative enough to come up with different test data, but that realistically, if "recognize the need for, and implement binary search in 45 minutes" is your go-to question, I'm not gonna be a match at your company.

I had to fight my way into google by doing every bit of prep and practice to solve stupid questions and code quicksort but when I joined, nothing I did in the 12 years I was there required any of that. And I wrote high performance programs that ran on millions of cores (I did know some folks who needed that skill, like the search engine developers, or the maps engine, or the core scheduling algorithms in borg). The entire time I was there I tried to get people to understand the questions they're asking are just not good indicators of programming, but it was repeatedtly pointed out, the goal is to minimize false-positive hires.

I do admire your ability to solve problems like that quickly, always wished I could.

[eez0]

> If somebody asked me logic/brainteaser questions like that, I would politely stop them, explain that if they're asking me that question I'm not a good match for the company

This is exactly what I started to do after I was asked a leetcode-based question for a SRE manager position.

It turned out that by making clear my "profile", I stopped to have bullshit interviews and started to get ones more aligned to actual daily work.

[hintymad]

The Queen problem first showed up in a Putnam Math Contest. If you solved it in no time, then you're mathematically talented, which puts you in the first category.

[littlestymaar]

I'm not questioning the fact that I'm kind of gifted when it comes to mathematics (I actually ranked #72 in a nation-wide math contest in France when I was 10) but you were talking about “maturity” and not innate skill. Since don't have a math degree and I haven't done math in more than a decade, I'm definitely far from “mature” on any mathematics perspective that can matter for a job.

And after ten years working in the industry, I can assure you that it is not a skill I can leverage a lot in my job…