this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I knew he did homebrew, why "tree inverter" though?
here’s a hacker news thread that talks about it. to be fair to Max, the question (and the Google-style interview in general) is absolute bullshit. to be entirely unfair to Max, he seems like a fucking asshole and his recent projects have been crowd-sourced consent violations.
Dude couldn't invert a binary tree in an interview and so couldn't get a job, allegedly.
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
No one could figure out what inverting a binary tree actually means. Like maybe swapping left and right or something?
In which case the best way to invert a binary tree of course being:
Don't change the tree. Change your perception of the tree.
I mean sure? Swapping the pointers recursively is also fine. It's a question meant to see if the interviewee can talk about data structures or code, not to come up with a perfectly optimal working solution. Having a lengthy discussion about what "inversion" of a binary tree even means would even be totally fine imo.
I've interviewed a fair number of candidates and I ask them a very simple question with a bunch of edge cases and grade them based on how they talk about it, not the final solution.
I get the feeling that Max got frustrated and wasn't able to coherently speak about the problem, or the interviewer was dumb as rocks. I think both are equally likely.
Oh yeah I've had the misfortune of giving hundreds of interviews -- mostly programming interviews, but also talking interviews which I consider vastly superior. As well as being on the receiving end of a few.
I've definitely had people do poorly under pressure before. This can be over-complicating the problem, clamming up (surprisingly common), or simply getting too worked up by the interview setting. I hate that because I often think they could have met my rubric in a more relaxed environment.
I've also been on the receiving end of bad interviewers. Don't get me started on HP asking me to implement offsetof in C++... n.b. implementing offsetof in C++ w/o undefined behavior is impossible it has to be a compiler builtin.
idly, first time I've seen lemmy do any sensible render with a textblock, which retro-informs a lot about the choices for text handling (which we've wondered bout in the other thread)
I'm now in favor of puzzle interview questions, just so this guy gets asked them
EDIT: I was trying to reply to a different comment whoops. this is from the hackernews thread
His complaint seriously backfired here, because it makes working on a chalkboard sound epic. The act of rubbing one rock against another becomes ascendance into the highest realms of thought? That's fuckin' alchemy, bro.
yeah, I'm thinking there were a few more problems than not being able to invert a binary tree
I will quote the entirety of Max’s website here:
what a fucking metric. I’m a lot closer to being a legendary open source developer than I thought.
also I found his TED talk on AGI while I was looking that up:
Wait, the dude wrote that about himself? Jesus fucking christ, I wouldn't hire him for anything just based on that. "Hello, I am Max Howell and I have a LEGENDARILY giant dick that pleases multitudes." Get the Howell outta here.
he authored a tweet
boo