It has discussed in other comments as well, but you seem to only grudgingly acknowledge that other people's preferences are as valid as your own, and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed. It comes off as arrogant and disrespectful.
No. The reason is because a lot of the people on this thread are also people who take these huge photo albums that are full of just random geometry and devoid of animals or people. As with 99% of humanity, people take negative opinions or criticism against them as a personal attack. That's just the way people are. People need to get defensive rather then face a possible reality that their hobby and personal works are just not good.
> and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed.
They don't have to be followed but they "must" be followed for the album to be "good" in the eyes of the general public. There is a shared reality here that exists outside of peoples individual preferences. Good books exist, good movies exist, but also Bad movies exist and horrible books exist that represent a sort of mass social group consensus on a topic. You either acknowledge that reality or you live in a delusional bubble.
I am saying this. For most of these photography albums taken by software engineers that are devoid of people and only contain inanimate objects, most honest people will think those photo albums are boring and not good in general. You can make make a point that I am wrong about this general consensus. That many people actually find those photo albums to be amazing.
But to call me arrogant and disrespectful? That's wrong. I respect everyone, but that does not preclude me from sharing my opinion however negative it is. I will not lie. "Must" is an appropriate all encompassing word here in expressing a general consensus on the topic I am addressing.
Additionally you should know that I have a lot of upvotes on the parent comment because people agree. I have downvotes on some of the branching threads from people who took it personally. Overall the evidence on this thread supports my thesis in that the general population agrees with me.
>The fastest I had a candidate solve the entirety of the problem with all bells and whistles was in 20 minutes, by a freshman from the University of Waterloo, the type who did high-school competitions.
>The most depressing failure I saw was a PhD graduate from University of Toronto who could not produce working code for the first section of the problem in 45 minutes.
>I once had a candidate with 15-years work experience give me lots of attitude for asking them such a simple question, while at the same time struggling at it.
All of this data points to the fact that this question may not be good. A phd graduate and a person with 15 years of experience rejected for someone who practices programming for competitions? What gets me is that the data is painting an obvious picture here. A very obvious picture. An obvious picture that we aren't sure what's a good interview and a bad interview question.
But the problem is that most people when looking at this completely miss it. It's not obvious to the interviewer and it's not obvious to alot of people who like google style questions. We literally have not much data and not much science backing any of this up.
It's an illustration of how biased humans are and illustration of how extra biased interviewing for software positions is. If there's anything more unknowingly biased and then the replication crisis in science it's technical interviews for companies. There needs to be real feedback loops that correlate interview question passing with Actual performance.
Google is in a good position to grab this data but I'm not sure they are doing so given how they just okayed this guys gut decision to go against the grain and use this question. I'm not against this question, but certainly to call this great in the face of controversial data that he himself gathered and listed on his post is just a complete blueprint of the extent of human blindness.
The reality of what's going on here is the person here in the interview is just getting off on dominating other people with a hard question. It's not on purpose but he's doing it without realizing it. The blog post in itself is a bit showy. It's like "I can answer this question but a phd graduate can't".