Introducing Real World Problems

Posted on December 4, 2011 by mike

Introduction

We received a ton of great problem feedback from CodeSprint 1 participants; the overwhelming consensus is that they were a set of some damn interesting problems.

Company problem feedback, however, was highly bimodal. For certain companies, our problems were the perfect test for the jobs they were hiring for. Other companies, though, found our problem set to have questionable correlation with their hiring needs; not all programming positions require deep knowledge of graph theory.

In order to make the test more appropriate for more companies, we’re doing two new things for CodeSprint 2:

  • We are allowing companies to weigh problems in company scoring. They’ll be able to zero out an unhelpful problem and triple up on an especially relevant one. The exact methodology has yet to be determined, and we’ll follow up this feature with another post later on.
  • We are introducing Real World Problems

Why Real World Problems

As the name implies, Real World Problems are actual problems that CodeSprint companies have actually dealt with. There are a number of advantages in including Real World Problems, such as increased problem variety and reduced load on our now-highly-overworked problem creator, but most importantly, Real World Problems will increase test fidelity. There isn’t a more relevant problem for companies than one that they’ve already worked on. We’ve been collaborating with some of our CodeSprint 1 companies, and they’ve come up with some pretty good ones. (We are still accepting Real World Problem submissions: see the bottom of this post)

Sample Real Problem: quora_nearby

Here’s a screenshot of a draft problem that we’re working with Quora to implement. Please note that this is actually not the best representation of a Real World Problem; Quora contributed several problems, and this problem is the least interesting one. We’re keeping the other ones secret for the actual competition. (A hint: Start familiarizing yourself with the Machine Learning library of your preferred language)

If you are a CodeSprint 2 company…

We are still accepting Real World Problem drafts until Friday, December 16th.

Real World Problems must:

  • Come from a CodeSprint 2 participating company
  • Be related to a company’s actual technical work
  • Be able to be automatically graded, with meaningful partial credit
  • Be damn interesting

The benefit to companies? Sexy problems attract great programmers, and companies will be showing off those problems to a whole bunch of them.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Chirag-Matta/100000213450701 Chirag Matta

    I always face problems in the adjustment of the input & output in all the problems of interviewstreet.com..

    can anyone help me for that.
    for example.
    it says “the first line contains 3 inputs”
    how to take such input in java.
    M confused how to show their alignment ..
    can anyone help me ??
    plz help . what dataype  i m supposed to take

  • Manish

    read them as a single String use string split to get the values individually .. this is one possible solutionnot only one :)

  • mgosemath

     you can use StringTokenizer for taking multiple inputs in one line…
    eg:
    Input:
    1 2 3
    Code:
    String s=”1 2 3″; //input string
    java.util.StringTokenizer st=new StringTokenizer(s,” “);
    int a[]=new int[st.countTokens()],i=0;
    while(st.hasMoreTokens())
    {
          a[i]=Integer.parseInt(st.nextToken());
          i++;
    }