I was interviewing for my company last week, and I met this guy, who has inspired this entire article. This dude was the best I’ve ever seen. Do you know how some people use the policy “If you can’t convince, then confuse”? This guy was using “To hell with convince, simply confuse”.

He walks in the room where the interviews are happening. Knocks on the door, politely asks if he can come in. He’s wearing a tie, a pressed, spotless white shirt and formal pants and shoes. I’m wearing a faded jeans and a T-shirt that says “Thou shall kick butt”. I ask him to come in and take a seat.

I’ve noticed during interviews, most people are *very* nervous. I’ve interviewed people who were shivering with nervousness. But this guy seemed very calm. He had the confidence of a person who knows everything inside-out.

Me : “Hi. How are you doing?”
Candidate : “I’m a very confident person and it is my objective to contribute proactively to a growing organization to create a positive work environment. I thrive on change, and strive for challenging work and it is my ambition to be recognized as a thought leader in the company”

I knew a guy in college who used to talk like that. But most people respond with a mumbling “fine sir, thank you”. I remembered that this is the kind of junk I used to put on my resume on the first line.

Me : “That’s very nice. You seem like a very confident person. So what do you do apart from computers?”

I got him on this one. He wasn’t expecting such a question, and he shuffled a little bit. He mumbled something about how he has won programing contests and quizes.

Me : “Great. Lets get started then. You can use any language that you want during the interview. Which language are you most comfortable with?”
Candidate : “English, Sir”

Oh man, this was going to be a great interview. I knew it right then.

Me : “No, I meant programming language. Are you comfortable with ‘C’ or ‘C++’ “
Him : “Oh! yes, sir, I’m sorry sir. ‘C’ will do fine”
Me : “OK, lets get started then…”

I asked him a question about how to search for an element in a list.

Him (very thoughtfully) : “The most obvious solution is to use a bit-vector to lookup based on a hashmap into a binary tree that I will construct while iterating over the linked list. I’ll store the resulting values in a union so that I can extract a long value from an int.”

I was like “Dude!”. He was just spewing jargon like a BTS bus spewing smoke. There was so much he had said in that one sentence, that I didn’t know what to ask him next.

Me : “Err…OK…So…hmm…What is the time complexity of this solution?”
Him : “Since we are doing a hash-insert into a binary tree, it is O(log n). The complexity of a binary tree is log(n).”

I think he had decided what answers he’d give even before the interview and had practised them to perfection. I’ll bet he would have said the same thing if I had asked him “So, is the binary tree vegetarian?”

Me : “Can you explain how you got the log(n)?”
Him : “Since the binary tree is binary, the operations will be binary. Therefore we can write the number of operations it takes by using the fourier expansion. Then, we can simply differentiate the series to get the complexity”

Me : “Great. Can you write code to implement this algorithm?”

After some time, he came up with some thing that I had a lot of difficulty reading. I realized why he had mistaken “language” earlier, because the thing that he wrote was definitely not English. I thought it resembled japneese, but I could be wrong.

Intersting as it was to interview this guy, I decided to end the interview. I’m sure he’d have become a great politician or TV anchor or something, but he was not exactly a star coder.

The moral of the story? Don’t try to confuse interviewers. You’ll end up being the subject of a blog post making fun of you.

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