Your question is my argument against puzzle questions in interviews.
When you see a seemingly impossible question in an interview. You know there’s a trick. You’ve been handed a riddle to be solved.
When my boss hands me a seemingly impossible problem, it might actually be impossible. At best it’s a mystery, at worst an enigma, or a paradox. It’s a very different skill set to go searching for a solution that is not obvious and not found in the literature (because nobody wrote it down or they used jargon nobody else knows).
I have a coworker who says things like, “we can do anything in software” if he says it again I’m getting him a biography of Claude Shannon, because apparently he did not learn about Information Theory in school.
When you see a seemingly impossible question in an interview. You know there’s a trick. You’ve been handed a riddle to be solved.
When my boss hands me a seemingly impossible problem, it might actually be impossible. At best it’s a mystery, at worst an enigma, or a paradox. It’s a very different skill set to go searching for a solution that is not obvious and not found in the literature (because nobody wrote it down or they used jargon nobody else knows).
I have a coworker who says things like, “we can do anything in software” if he says it again I’m getting him a biography of Claude Shannon, because apparently he did not learn about Information Theory in school.