[whstl]

I have prompts but I give the solution away. It's basic shit like factorial or fibonacci. People still fail. Resume fraud is rampant.

EDIT: Another thing: about 80% of the candidates I interview wouldn't be able to pass our Product Manager SQL interview. It's basic shit, but not as basic as the stuff I ask. All the PMs in my current job have better skill than 90% of the backend engineers I interviewed in the last two years. Resume fraud is rampant.

[FireBeyond]

> our Product Manager SQL interview

Your what now? (Well, unless you're a database company.)

In all my time as a PM I've never had to know, let alone prove competence in, my SQL knowledge.

In all my time as a PM, the vast majority of my "SQL" usage is crafting slightly more advanced filters and queries in Jira or similar.

There are analytics platforms, telemetry, metrics, you name it.

I've worked as a PM on fairly complex products (integrating and manipulating healthcare data, managed platforms atop Kubernetes, etc.) and never needed SQL knowledge.

As a general rule in terms of how I allocate my PMs and their efforts now? "PMs have far more valuable things to be doing than lovingly crafting handwritten SQL for god-knows-what reasons."

[charleslmunger]

If you have analytics, a PM being able to answer their own behavior/business questions by querying logs is really valuable.

[lazyasciiart]

Yes, I would love for my PM to do any analysis from our logs.

[whstl]

I know right? Sounds a bit crazy. But we are successful in hiring great PMs, so I can say it's working.

But it's super basic SQL. Select and joins, mostly.

Developers with several years of experience in their resume still fail it.

[lucb1e]

FYI I wouldn't know how to do fibonacci sequence because I don't know its definition. I could make a guess because it came up as a toy problem before, but because I never actually needed it for anything I'm not super familiar. Compound interview stress and I'd potentially get factorial wrong as well because that's also not something I'd normally implement.

I might recommend, when asking this question, to give the definition with a few example inputs and outputs. That should avoid these types of issues where people are perfectly capable of coding the requested algorithm but aren't mathematicians / toy problem experts

[whstl]

> FYI I wouldn't know how to do fibonacci sequence because I don't know its definition

OP here. As I said, "I give the solution away".

I basically tell the definition/formula at the beginning, and give examples and test cases for you to check your results against.

I also help people along, like I would in pair programming.

A lot of people still fail. Some with allegedly 25 years of experience. Luckily this is at the beginning, so I don't have to spend the whole interview with them.

[KeplerBoy]

ohh come on. Nobody ever needed Fibonacci or Factorial for anything, but if you bomb those after a few clarifying questions (like not knowing the initial values of fib or it's definition) I'm not sorry.

Factorial is just a for loop and with Fibonacci you might want to talk a bit about recursion and caching. That's it.

[fullstackchris]

Things like these are rote memorized solutions that fill what could otherwise be useful problem solving or software knowledge space in my brain.

They're dumb.

[whstl]

Then don't memorize. I'm OP and as I said I give the solution, candidate only has to code. Like I would with FizzBuzz.

People still fail.

[valicord]

> I wouldn't know how to do fibonacci sequence because I don't know its definition

You know you can ask the interviewer about this, right?

[lucb1e]

Yes, and I would because if I don't know then that's my only option (short of sitting there and going "no can do"). However, given their phrasing "basic shit like factorial or fibonacci" I got the vibe this is supposed to be known by the candidate and they'd judge the candidate negatively (before having written a single line) for needing to ask

[valicord]

I'd assume that the purpose of a simple question like that is to test basic programming skills (can you write a loop?). Testing knowledge of a specific math concept is doesn't really fit into this goal, so you're unlikely to be penalized for it.

[whstl]

You are correct.

We do give the definition of Fibonacci, and we steer the candidate in the right direction if they make math errors.