February 25, 2011 at 7:04 am
JP Dakota (2/23/2011)
I was once asked for the absolute value of Pi. There isn't one.
You wasted a perfect opportunity to spend the rest of the interview spewing out numbers!!! After about five or six digits, you wouldn't even have to be correct, because nobody's going to bother to fact-check you. 🙂
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
February 26, 2011 at 5:54 am
Pi = 22/7 easiest answer.
February 26, 2011 at 7:04 am
sharon-332366 (2/26/2011)
Pi = 22/7 easiest answer.
22/7 and Pi are only equal to the second decimal place
22/7 = 3.142857142857143
Pi = 3.141592653589793
Regards,
Jason P. Burnett
Senior DBA
February 26, 2011 at 1:40 pm
Jason P. Burnett (2/26/2011)
sharon-332366 (2/26/2011)
Pi = 22/7 easiest answer.22/7 and Pi are only equal to the second decimal place
22/7 = 3.142857142857143
Pi = 3.141592653589793
355/113 is accurate to 6 decimal places: 3.141592
104348/33215 is accurate to 9 decimal places: 3.141592653, but at that point you might as well just memorize the digits of Pi.
I have heard of these used in older embedded systems applications where they did not have floating point operations available, but I doubt that would be needed with any modern microprocessor.
March 4, 2011 at 12:49 pm
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March 7, 2011 at 4:37 am
kent.kester (3/4/2011)
Just recently I had a question from someone in HR: "Let's say, hypothetically, that you are giving a presentation to the executives. One of them stops you in the middle of your presentation and asks you to go get him a cup of coffee. What would you do?"My answer: "Are you serious?"
(she was)
My final answer: "If you want someone to follow orders blindly because someone says so, you don't want to hire me."
Oddly, they made me an offer. :unsure:
That sounds like an incident that really happened. I'm betting the exec in question had a tendency to derail meetings with stuff like that.
March 14, 2011 at 12:39 am
kent.kester
Instead, I got the most brutal, rapid-fire, questions about everything from the minor details of SQL Server's limits (max index size, max table name length, etc. - for 2000 - 2008.
I find these type of questions really silly to say the least. Most of us will never run into these types of problems, and all this really proves is that you remember something which you read somewhere about the min and max values of SQL.
This will never prove whether you are a good DBA or programmer.
March 14, 2011 at 1:01 am
GSquared (2/25/2011)
JP Dakota (2/23/2011)
I was once asked for the absolute value of Pi. There isn't one.You wasted a perfect opportunity to spend the rest of the interview spewing out numbers!!! After about five or six digits, you wouldn't even have to be correct, because nobody's going to bother to fact-check you. 🙂
I haven't kept up with this thread, but seeing this reminded of an individual in high school. He memorized PI to 20 decimal places, and was working toward 30 before graduation. Yes, we did in fact fact check him, and he was successful to 28 digits before graduation.
March 14, 2011 at 11:47 am
This was removed by the editor as SPAM
March 17, 2011 at 9:47 am
Actually the absolute value of Pi is Pi.
Just like the absolute value of 5 is 5.
As a mathematician, Pi is a number. It has decimal approximations.
The absolute value function is the distance from 0.
The absolute value of -Pi is also Pi.
Carol Dewar
March 17, 2011 at 10:21 am
kent.kester (3/4/2011)
...Just recently I had a question from someone in HR: "Let's say, hypothetically, that you are giving a presentation to the executives. One of them stops you in the middle of your presentation and asks you to go get him a cup of coffee. What would you do?"
...
Just say: "No"
March 21, 2011 at 9:09 am
[font="Tahoma"][/font] I was interviewed for a mainframe posting by BT way back when psychos were mandatory on the panel. My psycho pushed the applicants to see if they would get pissy with awkward "customers". After an immaculate performance in which my past was examined for drinking, timewasting, unpleasant infectious diseases and womanising, all strenuously denied, I was asked "did I ever notice the grimy ring around the bath". I cracked. My reply was to enquire as to what a "bath" was. End of interview but I got the job. The run-you-ragged interview tainted my whole experience with the company. Goes to show you shouldnt try to f**k people over when all they want to do is work for you.
March 21, 2011 at 10:13 am
I am no longer in a position where I have to do interviews but when I was I probably asked alot of questions that people may have veiwed as odd. There was often no right answer per say to these wuestions but merly a tool that allowed me to determine something about the person. for example one of the things I used to do routinly in the interveiw was ask people to rate themselves on a scal of 1-10 on their knowledge of certain aspects of IT. If I went through a list of 10 items and you rated yourself a 10 on the majority then I could fairly easily conclude that you were simply asnwering in a means you thought would please me.
Most questions are not about the answer as much as about the thought process. If I ask you what animal you would be and why I realy don't care what animal you are but here are two example answers.
"A Dog." I ask why "I don't know I just like dogs"
"A Dog." I ask Why "I realy have not given it a lot of thought but dogs are loyal and I like to think that is a good traight to have"
Now the difference in between the two questions could be argued is simply fluff and a load of BS added in for good messure and you would be right but it also shows a thought process. I often would tell my employees "You can come in and tell me I am the biggest jerk you have ever met and I can still respect you if you can do one thing. be prepared to tell me why I am a jerk." If your answer is because I am then I would quickly loose value for your oppinoin of me.
While this may give you some insight why such questions are asked you will likely find that the interveiwer has no real idea why they asked that questions they simply read it off a list of questions that was provided or they looked up.
Dan
If only I could snap my figures and have all the correct indexes apear and the buffer clean and.... Start day dream here.
March 21, 2011 at 10:46 am
About a year ago, an interviewer pressed me on esotheric points of high-performance C#. Could I make Replace() faster? How would I go about it? Would endian encoding slow my proposed solution down? ...
I got the assignment, and I wrote one custom action handler for MSBuild and three post-deployment scripts.
March 21, 2011 at 3:51 pm
I would like you to build me a toaster, how would you do that?
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