H. Mijail's Blog

Lately I came across Codility, a company which present themselves quite simply: “we test coders”. I had been thinking for some time about trying my hand at some coding competition, and was in the process of searching for a new job, so I became curious. But after a quick look at their website the curiosity became disdain. It all sounded like boasting to be a coarse-grained filter to separate the chaff from the wheat, quickly. Only that the chaff are people too. Sounded pretty dystopian. Probably this is a First World problem, but hey, after interviewing in a couple of places things seemed sufficiently bleached and dead inside as to not need any more automatic filter to dehumanize the interviewing / testing even more. Typically in my interviews I missed feeling anything that would make me want to work with the interviewers; I wanted to find someone with passion, instead of someone boringly fulfilling the recruiter role for a hollow company. And the Codility premise didn’t seem to hel...

I had heard about those questions in job interviews where you are asked to estimate on the spot something, though having no real data about it. There was some example about estimating the quantity of gas stations on the whole USA; I seem to remember that was for a Google job application. The guy had the guts to throw up numbers in a hunch with the handwaviest idea of how they could be good numbers… and, luckily, at the end the result was even not a bad approximation. I realize now that at the moment, when I read that, the “luckily” part is what stuck on me. While it’s true that the guy had the wit to back the numbers and/or the chutzpah to pick them out of thin air, and even though he also had some brillian moments to just turn around and cross-check some imagined number by using another set of assumptions … the thing is that finally he was near the true number. Luckily . It was fascinating, and rather intimidating. How in hell would I be able to do something like that?