A Microsoft Interview Question (aka basic Bayes' Theorem)

[bobbyi]

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Did you take off points, if the applicant pulled out a pen & paper?

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We have whiteboards in our offices and applicants are certainly welcome to try to work out a problem like this on the board. For code/ pseudocode problems, writing the code on the whiteboard is pretty standard. Remember that the point of a problem like this isn't primarily to see what answer the applicant comes up with. It's to see how they think and reason. That means that it would be very silly to penalize someone for doing something that demonstrates how they are trying to arrive at the answer. If you were encouraged to just sit in silence and ponder the question and then blurt out an answer a few minutes later without showing how you came up with it, do you think that would really make for an effective interview process?