Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You actually do. All of those puzzle-style questions of the sort of "how many liters of water in Mediterranean" ask you to develop a solution with a vague requirement by leveraging what you know roughly to demonstrate you can specify requirements yourself (oh, Mediterranean is roughly 5000sqkm [-> I need surface area], on average 50m deep [-> I need average depth], this gives me A x B liters total) — I'd call these the leet-code version of requirement understanding/development.

But really, any interview is really about giving you a requirement, and seeing _how_ you understand it, how you clarify it with your stakeholders (interviewers), and then how you address them.



These are called Fermi problems.


yup! And no SWE in the history of mankind that can code has lost an employment opportunity because of it.


URL please?


Uhm, I wasn't under the impression this was Wikipedia: look for "FAANG interviews" at Google.com or Kagi.com or....

(I am not sure what part you want to challenge, so getting a better response is really hard — if it's all of it, I can't do better than above)


if those silly “puzzle questions” are important (they are not) they’d be a website where SWEs would be competing/hacking on etc - leetcode style.

no one gives a flying fuck about that if you can code - no one




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: