The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
I&#x27;m grateful for all the engineering interview questions I&#x27;ve gotten in person, and not for any of the ones that were homework.  Dude I promised myself as a child I would never do homework after my studies, that promise is sacred, your company is not.<p>So I never got caught out (EDIT:  meaning to be clear caught out unable to solve the problem), which you would expect because in fact engineering interviews are actually no use for interviewing engineers, but in fact are great for interviewing for algorithmists, and you&#x27;d expect me to do well because I say I say I&#x27;m an algorithmist, and sure enough I did solve all of them.  Nobody caught me with my mouth open, I&#x27;ve solved every single interview question without timing out, despite (actually because of) not getting a CS degree from Stanford (which I did attend).  No advance prep, although that&#x27;s bullshit, I spent every second I could on advance prep incidentally by working on algorithms.<p>But no leetcode.  I did look at it once, at one problem, and it sucks, I saw a problem regarding getting the popcount of all the numbers in a range and tons of people got the top 100 points.  That&#x27;s stupid, I knew a superior answer that took morally no time, and would I get more than 100 points for it?  Doubtful.  There&#x27;s a very low cap.  Not truly elitist.  There can&#x27;t be a max score.<p>There is one problem that I couldn&#x27;t get, and that was &quot;how do you find a single element in a list that is not present in an otherwise identical other list?&quot;  Like tons of problems, the answer is to sort the lists and take a binary-search analog.  That&#x27;s the answer, but you need faster-than-state-of-the-art sorting.  The thing I was supposed to say that they wanted me to say, not to be confused with &quot;the answer&quot;, was you had to add the elements and then subtract.  I instantly replied, &quot;no, just xor them, less energy.&quot;  Which was a satisfying response, and marked as a pass.  I didn&#x27;t get the job anyway on a gut check.<p>Unfortunately I did terribly at the very few jobs at which I did get hired.  Because I could only get hired at doomed companies, I had between one and three weeks to prove myself, do or die.  Died every time.  One place, Unholster, gave me one day to set up my environment, seven work days to prove myself, and after a coworker spent an hour insisting I be fired and the boss saw the stories (epics?  The point system thing).  Ended up saying I objectively amounted to negative-one-half-a-person, concluded &quot;With your curriculum, nobody would give a níspero for you.&quot;  Níspero is a plentiful fruit that is sweet and is nourishing, but come to think nobody eats because nobody values it.<p>And this is NOT slander, well first off it&#x27;s true and that&#x27;s all you need legally, but secondly (morally) that&#x27;s just what a doomed company is like, I&#x27;m actually not being negative.  They had to fire like twenty people and had two employees left, and that&#x27;s public information, tells you everything.  Like basically all Chilean companies, they had bad Chilean debt, the Chilean bank leaves a tiny glimmer of hope, that&#x27;s it, they have to grind through meat until they find the savants.  Tons of companies like this, in fact I have a relatively high opinion of them considering.  Really liked Unholster.  They didn&#x27;t cheat me out of money or time, so above average.  And even when they were for sure getting nothing more out of the relationship, the boss agreed to just talking about why my career was fucked, for like fifty minutes.  &quot;I would sign [something for you] saying there&#x27;s better guys at algorithms than you.&quot;  &quot;Sign what?  Sign what, exactly?&quot;<p>They were hiring another guy, my replacement, I met him, in the time I worked there and he also thought this would be his chance.  And it was, I don&#x27;t know how it went for him, but the point is it is a chance, only it&#x27;s very very narrow.  They wanted to be cool, too, read Hacker News.  Smart guys, really good to talk to in the lunch breaks, I liked all of them.  They were just living in a shark tank.  And truth be told, I wasn&#x27;t that good at the job, sure if I got three months like everyone&#x27;s supposed to it&#x27;d be easy, but that&#x27;s really easy, I told them I&#x27;d be much better than that.  I wanted to be.  I wasn&#x27;t good at the job.  Just at the interviews.