So I got like 10 minutes until my radio show, but I'm doing pretty well at pumping out these posts so here's another one.
Last week I had an internship interview with Thomson Reuters, the largest IT employer in the state and the largest bandwidth user in the 5 state area. It went pretty sweet, I think I did alright in talking and answering questions. So hopefully I can get an internship there for the summer, 9 to 5, 5 days a week of technology internship with pay, sounds good right. I figure if I don't like it, it's only a 3 month deal and I can drop it and never work in an office building again (yeah right).
But the best part of it was a question they asked me during the "so you think your a compsci major?" part. The question is this: How do you determine if an integer is odd or even?
I'll let your brain digest this one for one sentence.
So, the next day after the interview, I have my comp sci seminar with my co compsci peoples. After class I was walking in front of a few of them and heard one mention the interviews. So I slowed down and started chatting with them about it. This one guy mentioned how he didn't know the answers to the questions they asked and I was like, well, I felt alright about them. So they talk about the even or odd question and they go over what they said for it. The first kid's answer was: "I said I'd divide it by two, and if it's divisible by two, then it's even. But they asked how I knew if something is divisible by 2 or not, and I didn't know." So, the next kid chimes in: "Wouldn't it be something like checking if the last digit is a 0, 2, 4, 6, or an 8?" Well, those are both really inefficient ways of doing the problem, which is why I was smiling the whole time because in my interview I got the question and replied: "Well, I'd mod 2 it and see if the remainder is 1 or 0." Then one of the interviewers slammed his hand on the table and exclaimed "That's what I'm looking for!" It was great at the moment, bu now I have the suspicion that I was after a string of wrong answers, meaning I probably left an impression, which is a great thing to do in an interview.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
dear god you blog a lot. How do you find the time?
ReplyDeleteSo Mod 2 is the most efficient way, but how does the mod algorithm work? Like, as computer science majors we just get used to all this algorithm stuff that's already been written, and I find myself wondering how the function used for taking the square-root, sqrt() in most languages, works.
Just interesting, at least initially, until I get too bogged down in difficult math :)
I love your blog.
ReplyDelete