Sun 27 Aug 2006
Lately, my technical friends (especially Beau, Josh, Burdette and Kevin) and I have been talking about Utah Tech interview questions we’ve experienced. (I blogged about this before.) Here are some more questions from those conversations:
- How do you reverse a string in the fastest possible way?
- How do you count the number of 1 bits in a string in the fewest number of cycles?
- Design a monopoly game in your favorite object oriented language.
- Write pseduocode for the steps you need in building a house
- You have a 3 and a 5 gallon bucket. You need 4 gallons of water. How do you use the two buckets you have to get exactly 4 gallons of water. (There are at least two ways, with and without the use of another container)
- Two people standing at a crossroads. One person tells only the truth, the other tells only lies. You are allowed to ask one question to one person to determine which road to take. What’s your question?
There are three doors. Behind two doors are goats. Behind one is a new car. You select door number one. Before that door is opened, you are shown another door and you see there is a goat behind that door. You have the option of staying with door one or switching to the other unopened door. What’s your move?- Two people A & B have coins. If person A gives one coin to person B, they will both have the same number of coins. If B gives a coin to A, then A will have twice the coins as B. How many coins does each A and B have?
- Imagine you were reduced to the size of a nickel and placed into a blender. You have sixty seconds before the blender turns on. What do you do?
- How many piano tuners are there in Utah?
- How many gas stations are there in California?
- How would you move Mount Fuji?
- Given an array of integers wherein all but one number is repeated an even number of times, find the most efficient way of determining the number that is repeated only an odd number of times.
- Given a binary search tree, produce an ordered list of the nodes
August 28th, 2006 at 11:39 am
I was actually asked the 5th one during the interview for my current job:
Other Container Method: Fill the 5-gallon, poor it into the 3-gallon, leaving 2 gallons left to poor into the 3rd container, repeat.
No Other Container: Fill the 5-gallon, poor it into the 3-gallon, leaving 2 gallons. Empty the 3-gallon container, and pour the remaining 2 gallons from the 5-gallon container into it. Then fill the 5-gallon container again, pour 1 gallon into the 3-gallon (till full), leaving 4-gallons in the 5-gallon container.
August 28th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
[…] A week ago my work buddy, Mike Nelson, gave me the following puzzle: “Imagine you were reduced to the size of a nickel and placed into a blender. You have sixty seconds before the blender turns on. What do you do?” (Sharp eyed readers will recall I included the puzzle in my recent blog entry How would you move Mount Fuji) […]
February 28th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
[…] I’ve blogged about Technical Interview Questions before. I’m on the other end of the Interview process lately: giving interviews rather than getting them. Usually I enjoy asking a mix of technical questions and brainteasers. Today’s puzzle (actually given in an interview today): “You have two hard eggs. But the question is ‘how hard are they?’ You have a 100 story building and only the two eggs, how would you find out which is the highest floor of the building you can drop the eggs from, before they break? It could be the 1st floor but it could also be the 99th floor—you must try dropping the eggs from different floors and see what happens. Your goal is to find the answer with the least number of egg drops.” […]