Cracking the Coding Interview, 4 Edition - 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions

Interview War Stories | You Can (Maybe) Count On Me
You Can Count on Me, Just Not Until Early Afternoon
Ahhh, 1999. The crest of the dot-com bubble, and the tightest labor market in history. Our
company was racing to expand its development team, and we would have hired a German
Shepherd if it knew HTML. Instead, we wound up hiring Ian. We should’ve hired the dog.
Ian was a cheerful, friendly guy who had a gift of natural charisma. He got along fantastically
with all of the interviewers, and seemed very intelligent. Skill-wise, he was adequate. He
hadn’t written a single line of computer code outside of his college courses, and didn’t even
have his own e-mail address. When we gave Ian the chance to ask us questions at the end of
the interview, he asked about flexible work hours, and how soon he could take vacation time.
Instead of showing an interest in the career opportunities, or in company’s growth prospects,
he asked whether he could take the all-you-could-drink break room soda home with him.
The questions grew more bizarre from there.
Ian was very interested in our Legal Assistance benefit. He wanted to know if it covered the
cost of filing lawsuits, if it covered him if he got sued himself, if it applied to any lawsuits he
currently was involved in, and if he could “theoretically” use it to sue the company itself. He
also asked us if he could use it to help him “fix” some unpaid speeding tickets.
In any other year, that should have been it for Ian right there. But, in 1999, we were hiring
anybody who was even remotely competent. Ian collected paychecks from us for eighteen
months, and he was about as productive as a traffic cone. He usually sauntered into the office
around ten-thirty with some sort of lame excuse (by my count, he had to wait for the cable
guy sixteen times in a six-month period). He usually killed the morning by answering e-mail
and playing ping-pong, before breaking for a two-hour lunch. After lunch, it was more pingpong,
and maybe an hour of writing bad code, before bolting the office sometime around
three. He was the dictionary definition of unreliable.
Remember, your potential future team members need to know that they can rely on you.
And they need to know that you won’t need constant supervision and hand-holding. They
need to know that you’re able to figure things out on your own. One of the most important
messages that you, as a candidate, can convey in your interview is hiring me will make your
lives easier. In fact, this is a large part of the reason for the famously difficult interview questions
at places like Amazon and Google; if you can handle that kind of unpredictable pressure
in an interview, then you stand a good chance of being useful to them on real projects.
To cite a more subtle example, once I was on a four person team that was desperately trying
to recruit new members to help work on an old pile of software. It was a real mess; we'd
inherited a nasty ball of spaghetti, and we needed people who could jump in, figure things
out, and be part of the solution.
There was one very smart fellow, Terry, who would have been a great asset for our team –
but we didn’t hire him, despite his excellent technical and personal skills. It was because he
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Cracking the Coding Interview