At my previous employer NetApp® (Network Appliance), funny things would often happen around April 1 each year (surprise!).

The year 2002 was not a particularly happy one in silicon valley.  Following years of dotcom fueled growth, NetApp and other companies saw the business environment weaken.

NetApp had been growing quickly and was rapidly constructing offices to hold the expected employee growth.  Following the downturn, unfinished construction and materials sat idle, a sad sight. 

Also disheartening – NetApp sat in a sprawling corporate park, with the nearest espresso shop miles away.

A New Sign

On the morning of April 1, 2002, employees arriving to work were pleased to see a new sign.  Starbucks® was coming to town! 

The Future Home of Network Appliance sign had been replaced with a sign announcing a forthcoming coffee shop, a welcome sight.

One of the funniest things about this event was that it generated very little buzz on April 1.  Starbucks shops were spreading like weeds, and it simply was not surprising to see yet another one arriving down the street.

Widespread discussion did not ensue until the next day, when the sign was pulled down.

“What happened?!?  I thought we were getting a Starbucks!” and similar comments were frequently heard in the office hallways.

Then and Now

I’m happy to say things have changed in the years since.

NetApp recovered, resumed growing, and filled the empty field with new buildings and parking facilities.

But still no Starbucks.

My disclaimer: Starbucks and their logo are registered trademarks of Starbucks Corporation.  The appearance of the new Starbucks location described here appears to have been a hoax (though if true, would have been welcome).  I think their coffee is tasty and recommend it, but I otherwise have no association with Starbucks.

I was discussing recently with friends that it would be amusing to create a computer science reference for parents.

So for those of you out there who know something about computers and babies, I offer a few definitions.

critical section

The urgent period between removing the old dirty diaper and securing the clean new one.

code review

A diaper fails the sniff test, and you request a clean-up.  Ideally this is done by the person who was holding the baby when the error occurred.

core dump

Self explanatory

debugging session

You lift the baby, sniff the diaper, but can’t make an obvious conclusion.  You start opening layers of clothing in search of additional evidence.

scope creep

You ask spouse to “hold” the baby, knowing full well that a diaper change is already needed.

turing machine

A device which formerly accepted tape as input, but is now gummed up with oatmeal.  “Turing complete” means “filled entirely” with oatmeal.

code re-use

Examine yesterday’s clothes for obvious signs of stains / barf / poop.  Continue using if they don’t look or smell too bad.

heap

An arrangement of toys, ideally in a storage bin.  Often these are scattered randomly around the house; we call this “fragmentation”.

thrashing

You cannot get out of the house because each child poops / barfs at a frequency greater than they can be cleaned up and prepped for departure.

port exhaustion

Juggling baby, bottle, barf cloth, iDevice, tissues, you finally run out of appendages available to hold anything.

child process

What you got.

sleep(unsigned int seconds)

This is formally deprecated, having been delegated to child processes.

encapsulation

You hired a baby sitter.

resource leak

Maladjusted diaper results in loss of … resources.

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Here is my part 2 follow up from Oddball Questions Part 1.

These are my responses to the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions from Glassdoor, presented in Snappy Answers format.

Snappy Answers 13-25

13. “Name 5 uses of a stapler without staple pins.” – (EvaluServe)

Snappy answer: Entirely useless. See also: caffeine-free coffee and alcohol-free beer.

Alternatively (1) dental drill (2) geosynchronous satellite (3) pizza cutter (4) forklift (5) crampon.

14. “How much money did residents of Dallas/Ft. Worth spend on gasoline in 2008?” – (American Airlines)

Snappy answer: About $3.00 a gallon?

15. “How would you get an elephant into a refrigerator?” – (Horizon Group Properties)

Snappy answer: Cuisinart (The easy answer – this question is the subject of some amusing math responses)

16. “You have a bouquet of flowers. All but two are roses, all but two are daisies, and all but two are tulips. How many flowers do you have?” – (Epic Systems)

Snappy answer: None, I tossed them out after they wilted.

17. “How many planes are currently flying over Kansas?” – (Best Buy)

Snappy answer: Euclidean or Cartesian?

18. “How many different ways can you get water from a lake at the foot of a mountain, up to the top of the mountain?” – (Disney Parks & Resorts)

Snappy answer: Infinite number of ways. Isn’t that obvious?

19. “What is 37 times 37?” –(Jane Street Capital)

Snappy answer: BD1

20. “If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess?” – (Rain and Hail Insurance)

Snappy answer: The power to end senseless interviews in a single bound!

21. “If you were a Microsoft Office program, which one would you be?” –(Summit Racing Equipment)

Snappy answer: Notepad.

22. “Pepsi or Coke?” – (United Health Group)

Snappy answer: Yes please.

23. “Are you exhaling warm air?” – (Walker Marketing)

Snappy answer: Get your hand off my leg, you pervert.

24. “You’re in a row boat, which is in a large tank filled with water. You have an anchor on board, which you throw overboard (the chain is long enough so the anchor rests completely on the bottom of the tank). Does the water level in the tank rise or fall?” – (Tesla Motors)

Snappy answer: If the anchor is thrown far enough so it clears the side wall of the tank, the level will rise. If the anchor consists of a massive sponge larger than the tank, then the level will fall.

25. “How do you feel about those jokers at Congress?” – (Consolidated Electrical)

Snappy answer: They’re not nearly as funny as I am

One item I really enjoyed was Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, and those come to mind as I continue my thread on interview questions.

Oddball Questions

Glassdoor recently had an article titled Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions.

Oddball, indeed.  In reading them over, was sorely tempted to answer them with “snappy answers”.  Here are a few for your amusement.

The original questions from the article are in this color.  The snappy answers are basically what occurred to me when I first read the question.

Snappy Answers 1-12

1. “How many people are using Facebook in San Francisco at 2:30pm on a Friday?” – (Google)

Snappy answer: All of them.  It’s San Francisco.

2. “Just entertain me for five minutes, I’m not going to talk.” – (Acosta)

Snappy answer:

3. “If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you prove it?” – (Hewlett-Packard)

Snappy answer: Measure all instances of Germans pairwise against all other humans by transporting them all to Düsseldorf and placing them back-to-back in the Marktplatz . This means measuring all 81 million Germans against the other 7 billion inhabitants. This only requires worst case  67,000,000,000,000,000 comparisons and hence is computationally efficient. We can accomplish this in a few hours on a dual core Pentium, though it may require a little more time on an Apple ][ running iOS.  If all Germans are pairwise taller than all other humans, it is proven.

4. “What do you think of garden gnomes?” – (Trader Joe’s)

Snappy answer: White hat or black hat?

5. “Is your college GPA reflective of your potential?” – (Advisory Board)

Snappy answer: Not sure why they would be related.  To measure my potential, I recommend a voltmeter.

6. “Would Mahatma Gandhi have made a good software engineer?” –(Deloitte)

Snappy answer: Unlikely. This great man passed in 1948, only two years after the debut of ENIAC.  Though Turing complete, programming the ENIAC was pretty far removed from what we now call software engineering.

7. “If you could be #1 employee but have all your coworkers dislike you or you could be #15 employee and have all your coworkers like you, which would you choose?” – (ADP)

Snappy answer: If the company has fewer than 15 employees, I’d choose #1.

8. “How would you cure world hunger?” – (Amazon.com)

Snappy answer: First solve for global conflict; this generalizes to solve world hunger by side effect.

9. “Room, desk and car – which do you clean first?” – (Pinkberry)

Snappy answer: Work from home.

10. “Does life fascinate you?” – (Ernst & Young)

Snappy answer: Very much so! I particularly like the Gosper glider gun.

11. “Given 20 ‘destructible’ light bulbs (which breaks at certain height), and a building with 100 floors, how do you determine the height that the light bulb breaks?” – (QUALCOMM)

Snappy answer: Drop one from the 100th floor.  If it breaks, you have found a height at which it breaks.  If compact fluorescent, report to the EPA.

12. “Please spell ‘diverticulitis’.” – (EMSI Engineering)

Snappy answer: P-I-T-A

More soon.

A few years back, a colleague asked me to ponder a Wizards and Dwarves puzzle as a potential interview question.  A typical statement goes something like this:

A village of wizards is nearby a village of dwarves.  Once a year, the wizards visit the dwarves, and line up the dwarves in increasing order of height, so that each dwarf can only see the dwarves smaller than himself.

The wizards have white and black hats.  They place a white or black hat on the head of each dwarf (using a strategy of their choosing, perhaps even randomly).  Then starting at the back of the line (the tallest dwarf), they ask each what color hat he is wearing. 

Each dwarf who answers incorrectly is killed by the wizards.  The other dwarves can hear his answer, but do not know whether he was killed.

What strategy minimizes the number of dwarves killed?

Ok, I thought about it.

Pondering

Among many irritations I have for puzzle questions, the fiction is frequently distracting: 

Why villages?  Why wizards and dwarves?  Why in order of height?  What if they are all of the same height?  How can you kill a dwarf and not have his neighbor nearby hear it?

And my brain spins with other tangents:

Dwarves have high magic resistance and constitution – don’t they get a saving throw?  Toss in a few +5 battle axes and there would be a wizard slaughter!

Meh.

Wizards, Dwarves and Barometers

In the spirit of the barometer question, I formulated the following responses:

• Non-violent non-cooperation.  It is not stated that there is a penalty for non-cooperation.  In the spirit of Gandhi, the dwarves refuse to be sorted by height, do not line up, and will not wear hats.  Wizards are known weaklings and will be unable to forcefully move the dwarves into place.
• Scatter.  The dwarves split their village up into smaller villages, until each village consists of a single dwarf.  Each dwarf now has an equal chance of survival (this strategy, while fair, will be popular with the tall dwarves, but less so with the short ones).  The maximum number of dwarves killed will always be one.
• UN Convention on Genocide.  The dwarves are being unfairly singled out as a group for destruction.  Citing Resolution 260 (III), they appeal to the United Nations and await protracted discussion.
• Mini-guns.  Despite their diminutive size and desire peace, the dwarves obtain special weapons training, obtain mini-guns and when threatened, and whoop some major wizard ass.
• Mobile Phone.  First variant – dwarf uses a mobile phone to take a picture of his hat, revealing the color.  Second variant – dwarf snaps a photo of the dwarf in front of him and texts it to him.
• Low tech (no mobile phone required).  Dwarf turns around and asks the dwarf behind him the color of his hat.
• Vacation.  The wizards arrive once a year.  The dwarves arrange to be out of town on that day (ideally somewhere warm and sunny).
• Insubordination.  Each dwarf takes off his hat and reports its color.

And so on.

Conclusion

If you follow the intended script, you can find solutions in which no more than one dwarf is killed (the tallest has no knowledge of his hat color and his odds are essentially subject to chance).

But as shown above, one can simplify and further optimize the solution by exploiting ambiguities in the fiction.

And it’s a lot more entertaining.