Fail or Not?

Post by **thibodeaux** » Thu May 14, 2009 7:32 am

http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009....ns.html

A lot of commenters say he blew it. What do you think?

Edited By thibodeaux on 1242300787

Post by **TPRJones** » Thu May 14, 2009 8:17 am

If it's true that he was annoying his interviewer as much as he indicates, then yeah, he blew it.

Not that you should be kissing ass or anything, but being annoyingly pedandic in an interview is usually to be avoided.

Post by **TheCatt** » Thu May 14, 2009 8:32 am

One the one hand, it shows someone who's willing to not just make assumptions, but will drive down into the issues of a problem, given how rarely IT requests are as simple as they appear on the surface.

On the other hand, he went down a whole road of possibilities without any apparent context for what the product was going to be used for, and without trying to find out.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Thu May 14, 2009 9:25 am

If you ask a big-ass open-ended question, don't be shocked if someone punk hits your back w\ a big-ass open-ended answer.

The dude looks like he clearly wandered down the tangential road of "I like this aspect of the problem, so I'll go on about it..." The dude interviewing him probably wanted those hash function-specific questions (which seemed extremely dumb-ass considering the math given in his hash collision argument).

I vote fail on both sides -- the interviewer wasn't bright enough to steer the question back on track to get the the answers he wanted, the interviewee didn't pick up on what must've been some obvious "move the fuck on with it" signals. & anyone that makes a distinction between "written" & "verbal" forms of a language earns my ire. Unlike other forms of communication, English has the same form whether written or spoken. Should have.

Post by **thibodeaux** » Thu May 14, 2009 9:53 am

Yo dat be wack.

Post by **GORDON** » Thu May 14, 2009 10:02 am

Malcolm wrote: & anyone that makes a distinction between "written" & "verbal" forms of a language earns my ire. Unlike other forms of communication, English has the same form whether written or spoken. Should have.

Don't you mean should of?

Alhazad · Post by **Alhazad** » Mon May 18, 2009 11:42 pm

Malcolm wrote:If you ask a big-ass open-ended question, don't be shocked if someone punk hits your back w\ a big-ass open-ended answer.

The dude looks like he clearly wandered down the tangential road of "I like this aspect of the problem, so I'll go on about it..." The dude interviewing him probably wanted those hash function-specific questions (which seemed extremely dumb-ass considering the math given in his hash collision argument).

I vote fail on both sides -- the interviewer wasn't bright enough to steer the question back on track to get the the answers he wanted, the interviewee didn't pick up on what must've been some obvious "move the fuck on with it" signals. & anyone that makes a distinction between "written" & "verbal" forms of a language earns my ire. Unlike other forms of communication, English has the same form whether written or spoken. Should have.

Except that the initial question was about single-word usage, not forms. I doubt you'd see the same figures for speech and published writing, if you could even get reliable figures on speech day-to-day.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Tue May 19, 2009 1:31 am

Alhazad wrote:
Malcolm wrote:If you ask a big-ass open-ended question, don't be shocked if someone punk hits your back w\ a big-ass open-ended answer.

The dude looks like he clearly wandered down the tangential road of "I like this aspect of the problem, so I'll go on about it..." The dude interviewing him probably wanted those hash function-specific questions (which seemed extremely dumb-ass considering the math given in his hash collision argument).

I vote fail on both sides -- the interviewer wasn't bright enough to steer the question back on track to get the the answers he wanted, the interviewee didn't pick up on what must've been some obvious "move the fuck on with it" signals. & anyone that makes a distinction between "written" & "verbal" forms of a language earns my ire. Unlike other forms of communication, English has the same form whether written or spoken. Should have.
Except that the initial question was about single-word usage, not forms. I doubt you'd see the same figures for speech and published writing, if you could even get reliable figures on speech day-to-day.

The point being that English doesn't really discriminate between written & verbal tenses ideally; whereas, some fucked-up languages, like I dunno, FRENCH, have fucked-up rules which do make a distinct cleave between written & verbal. & it pisses me the fuck off because I had to learn BOTH FUCKING TENSES.

Alhazad · Post by **Alhazad** » Tue May 19, 2009 6:54 pm

Malcolm wrote:
Alhazad wrote:
Malcolm wrote:If you ask a big-ass open-ended question, don't be shocked if someone punk hits your back w\ a big-ass open-ended answer.

The dude looks like he clearly wandered down the tangential road of "I like this aspect of the problem, so I'll go on about it..." The dude interviewing him probably wanted those hash function-specific questions (which seemed extremely dumb-ass considering the math given in his hash collision argument).

I vote fail on both sides -- the interviewer wasn't bright enough to steer the question back on track to get the the answers he wanted, the interviewee didn't pick up on what must've been some obvious "move the fuck on with it" signals. & anyone that makes a distinction between "written" & "verbal" forms of a language earns my ire. Unlike other forms of communication, English has the same form whether written or spoken. Should have.
Except that the initial question was about single-word usage, not forms. I doubt you'd see the same figures for speech and published writing, if you could even get reliable figures on speech day-to-day.
The point being that English doesn't really discriminate between written & verbal tenses ideally; whereas, some fucked-up languages, like I dunno, FRENCH, have fucked-up rules which do make a distinct cleave between written & verbal. & it pisses me the fuck off because I had to learn BOTH FUCKING TENSES.

No, I understand your point; but you've missed the author's.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Tue May 19, 2009 8:23 pm

Fine, fine, fine, all that notwithstanding ...

When someone asks you a question to which the answer is, "That's not even a feasible concept," they're either looking for that answer specifically or they just don't know the question is bogus.

I get a feeling the interviewer that asked the question qualifies as the latter scenario of those two. When that's the case, you don't pound on the idiocy, you try to provide the "correct" answer to his fucked-up query.