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A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering

66 pointsby neilpomerleauabout 9 years ago

18 comments

yadamoabout 9 years ago
OP has posted this link before, both here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10990206" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10990206</a> (with the title &quot;Get an interview at LinkedIn by solving this puzzle&quot;) and on the Who&#x27;s Hiring threads <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11014173" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11014173</a><p>As an exercise, I wrote a quick and dirty python script to solve this back in February (albeit it&#x27;s not the most elegant solution but far better than brute force) and submitted my answer and subsequent contact info hoping to eventually hear back about said interview, and never did.<p>Which is quite frustrating from the perspective of someone on the job hunt. Why use something like this as a hiring tool and not follow up on it?<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;
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jammalooabout 9 years ago
If you enjoyed that, there&#x27;s plenty more where that came from at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regexcrossword.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regexcrossword.com&#x2F;</a>
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russellbeattieabout 9 years ago
LinkedIn thought, &quot;We have a problem, not enough good devs.&quot; Then they thought, &quot;Hey, let&#x27;s recruit using a regex puzzle!&quot; Now they have two problems. (With apologies to jwz.)
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S_A_Pabout 9 years ago
This is typical of the same crap I see on my linkedIn feed. Solve this if you are a &quot;GENIUS&quot;!!!! popsicle + popsicle = 6 toilet * toilet = 9 popsicle + toilet =???!?!??<p>I have made heavy use of the block feature. And to those of you thinking of answering those, its a lose-lose proposition, you either get it wrong and look ignorant, or you get it right and look like a slacker...
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danbrucabout 9 years ago
<i>Only 12% of people who attempt this puzzle solve it.</i><p>Static text or real statistics?
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syserrorabout 9 years ago
Solved this puzzle last time and LinkedIn basically told me &quot;we won&#x27;t actually interview you unless you have 2-4 years of industry experience&quot; new grads be warned.
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prisonerzeroabout 9 years ago
I solved it! They reached out about a day later (edit: and asked for a copy of my resume) and showed me a couple of job listings I&#x27;d be a good fit for. They wanted me to relocate which was kind of a buzzkill, but it was fun getting to talk with one of their engineers about how they&#x27;ve set up most of their projects. They were super nice, but it does take a while to hear back from them.
dantillbergabout 9 years ago
To up the ante, it would be a fairly good challenge to write a computer program that solves this puzzle efficiently.
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vdnkhabout 9 years ago
This seems like a twisted idea of a &quot;fun&quot; interview question that &quot;our candidates really enjoy&quot;
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stanmancanabout 9 years ago
Can anyone explain what the solution is supposed to look like? What actually goes in the boxes?
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sakopovabout 9 years ago
This was a cool problem. What would be even more interesting is generating puzzles like these.
Redoubtsabout 9 years ago
Usually crossword answers make sense. This ended up just looking like a jumble of letters.
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mbrdabout 9 years ago
I enjoyed doing this but I got a sore neck from reading diagonal text!
phat4lifeabout 9 years ago
only 12% of people got this puzzle it says. I used rubular.com though, so maybe that was cheating...
akaviabout 9 years ago
What I got out of this: regex precedence rules are really unintuitive to me.
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enknamelabout 9 years ago
It was fun but pointless. I would have been more impressed if the solutions were unique and dictionary words rather than trying to make silly regexs like &#x27;not working&#x27;. Is LinkedIn even hiring with their current stock plummet and rumors of layoffs?
greenpizza13about 9 years ago
This was fun, thanks! Solved it in about 10 minutes.
keehunabout 9 years ago
I barely have any experience with Regex and it was not too hard to complete! I feel that it certainly could have been more difficult.