What I found interesting about this presentation is:
the existence of a (not-so-)secret IBM Emerging Technology Project called M2, which IBM calls an insight engine for enabling ad-hoc business insights for business users, at Web scale
the emergence of a new class of business application that might be called Big Data Analytics
Under 'Big Data Business Patterns,' IBM counts:
Computational Journalism
Business Fraud Detection
Evidence Based Medicine
IT Systems Management
as just a few examples.
And the chief enabling technology? None other than Hadoop.
Reverse every word in a String (abc def becomes cba fed).
What method would you use to look up a word in a dictionary?
Write a function that returns the angle between the hour and the minute hands of a clock, given input of the time.
Write a function that takes a string consisting of numeral characters and returns all possible alpha character strings of same length as input that correspond to the keypad of a typical telephone.
Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
How would you test an elevator?
How would you test a vending machine?
How would you test a program that takes in two points and outputs the distance between the two points?
Test the Windows scroll bar.
Switch every pair of words in a string ('ab cd ef gh' becomes 'cd ab gh ef')
Write the function for strstr function (finding a substring inside a string)
Reverse the order of words in a string ('ab cd ef gh' becomes 'gh ef cd ab')
Write the function for string comparison. How would you test it?
Write a function to zero all duplicate values in an integer array. How would you test it?
Write a function that compares two strings and returns a third string containing only the letters that appear in both.
I guess I'm surprised at the breadth of irrelevancy of the questions. Image that you have a closet full of shirts?? How would you test a pen?
Are we hiring Ron Popeil, or are we hiring programmers and QA testers?
Even the technical questions seem incredibly pointless. Reverse the order of words in a string?
The real question is this: Suppose someone does well on these questions. Do they end up doing a good job for the company? Do they do well at Microsoft? Does Microsoft do well? How do you track those things? How do you know what was (in retrospect) a good interview question to ask -- a question that had predictive value, a question that told you whether the interviewee would be a productive employee -- versus a crappy question to ask, a question that ended up predicting nothing, or (worse) caused the wrong person to be hired?
Does Microsoft track such things? One has to wonder. If not, then all of this becomes a silly hazing ritual with no demonstrable value to anyone. I suspect Microsoft (like most companies) has no metrics whatsoever for determining the business value of interview questions. In other words, it's all basically a joke. Please someone tell me that's not true. (And then post the reason to Wikipedia.)
Yesterday's visitorship numbers by browser type (click to enlarge). Chrome-users (blue) edged out Firefox users (green) for the first time.
Yesterday, as luck would have it, was the first day (since I've been monitoring Google Analytics for this blog) that more visitors to this blog surfed here using Chrome than using any other browser. In second place? Firefox.
Out of 1247 total visits to this blog yesterday, 484 came from Chrome users. Some 461 visits came from Firefox users. IE accounted for just 120 visits.
The beginning of a trend? Or the ending of one, perhaps? You decide.