Recruiting trip can be pretty boring, especially most of the candidate you interviewed are not good. The only rewarding parts are the great food here (may not be the best in China, but definitely much better than Bay Area), and the various conversation with other fellow engineers discussing technical questions.
It all started from the questions on the paper exam we monitored last night. Since we had nothing to do while standing at the front of the classroom, we went over the questions and started to come up with variations of the questions. So most of the conversations last night and this morning surrounded 2 technical questions:
1. Prove that the lowest bound of the algorithm to find the top Nth element within 2 sorted arrays of size N is O(log(N)).
2. Try to prove that the algorithm for finding the kth sum of 2 numbers, each from an array of size N, is/is not O(Nlog(N)). We came up with a close enough proof, although it still has a little pitfall when the distribution of the numbers in the array is exponential.
And surely we had a lot of fun.
Last night I got an email from a friend, who talked about how he played politics in a group to achieve what he needed. The way he planned and executed it was totally a piece of art, and to me, much more complicated than the technical questions we solved. I am sure I would never
be able to come up with that kind of solution in the same situation.
And that's probably why engineers can never be CEOs.
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3 comments:
I guess that would make you a geek for life. :P
The difference between politics and engineer is that engineering will have one best answer and politics there will be multiple answers that compete with each other. I find the engineering answers much more intuitive and efficient. And I often wonder why people like the inefficient way of dealing with people. Dealing with politics seems evil, but it is merely necessary for survival sometimes...
You travel a little more to China, it can improve you.
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