This is the thread about job searching.

WTF!? What sort of job would ask such a question (programming?)

Seriously, at first I thought it was somekind of trick thing like "hah I'd drop it into traffic and a truck would smash it, so - once, if I aim right" but if you dont know the physical makeup of "nearly unbreakable" bulbs how can there be an exact answer?

Well, the 'fewest number of attempts' bit makes me think you'd just go straight for the roof and drop them from there. I'd probably give a stupid answer like 'whichever floor has a hammer with which I could smash them' or 'the floor on which the management is located in order to tell them that this is an inefficient and uneconomical use of resources'.

Seriously. How is the 50th floor not the answer? Especially taking into account the "fewest attempts possible" disclaimer.

A link to the puzzle and a solution, don't know if it's the best:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/google-and-the-puzzle-of-dropping-eggs/

lol Ed, that wasn't an elongated "eff you", that was a general comment on job-searching

Ledge that Q&A is posed quite differently to how akm phrased his (it makes a little more sense that way)

aye well i figure akm's may have been somewhat garbled in translation :)

there's a better solution in the comments of that link:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/google-and-the-puzzle-of-dropping-eggs/#comment-106915

OK so I guess I didn't blow the phone screening because I got a another call today and have an actual face-to-face interview next Friday!

I got a definite start date for a new job today.

Not the job I want, but need some jazz money for my jazzings, asap

Might even temp a couple weeks before start date. Ugh.

I think the proper wiseass response to the bulb question is to point out that light bulbs, no matter how nearly unbreakable, surely suffer cumulative weakening damage with repeated drops, so you could well need a lot more than two test subjects to solve the problem.

that is essentially the question as asked, but what was confusing in the phone screen (to me, at the time) was that he did not make it clear if they were looking for the number of drops, or the floor. I'm guessing that the person asking may have known what answer he was looking for but may not have been able to answer the question himself, frankly.

The company I interviewed at was Keas, which is a company that promises to be the Google of Health Care web tools when it finally launches. Unfortunate because they sounded awesome, although they also said "no weekends, no sleep" for the next four months so I'm lucky I didn't wind up working there because I don't do that shit.

the trouble is that no one is in a wiseass frame of mind when they're trying to find a job and this question has an annoying smug power mongering feel to it, you can bet the recruiter would have spent an hour having someone else explain the answer to them. my brain would have seized up in protest. xp

i hope your new job is going well, kyle.

Yeah umm I am not suggesting wise-ass answers to interview questions are a smart move

Although according to 80% of American movies, it's possible that if you give the wise-ass answer, the other person will go "I like the way you think, kid -- you're working for me now"

and then you get no weekends, no sleep for the rest of the movie.

I've never been to the US, but I don't think it's much like American movies. But if the US is like it appears in American movies, then I'm coming over to wear sun glasses and drive a police car through a shopping mall...

^^^ the "is" after the second US should be italicised, not the second US itself

It's like the movies here, snoball, but not those movies

The lightbulb puzzle is about determining what is the highest floor you can drop them from without breaking, in the fewest attempts.

^^ dude, that is exactly the same as figuring out the lowest floor you can drop them from to break them, only minus one floor

haha, that's true, but the way akm was originally describing the puzzle was more like "how do you break these lightbulbs in the fewest attempts?", which is different.

Oh, right -- I was looking earlier, and his wording does kinda explain the puzzle, it's just really ambiguous:

we want to know which floor you need to drop them from in order to make them break

hahaha basically a hell of a lot is riding on that "need"

protip: pay attention to the email address you are using to send your resume. I saw one today that was like luvs2getfunky_gmail.com.

I don't like to break anything, this was my downfall. I want to preserve the lightbulbs in case of emergency.

the answer above is def. not right...

it's been a looooooong time that I was in engineering school (lol college) but it definitely takes something like a divergent series to determine the answer... is that even the name of the sum of a string of natural numbers (eg, 1+2+3+4+5+6+7...)

ok its 14

basically you would test the first drop on floors 14+(14-n) as n approaches infinity.

then once the first lightbulb breaks, you'd drop the second (third, fourth, etc.) bulb on descending floors until it withstands the impact.

let me see if this makes sense, here are the floors of the building.

100
98
95
90
84
77
69
60
50
39
27
14

okay, starting at the bottom you'd drop the first bulb and if it breaks, then you'd descend a floor and then drop the next bulb and repeat until the bulb withstands the impact.

the maximum # of drops = 14. the minimum = 1.

....HIRED!

See I still don't think I get it, but this is why I always failed maths and will never work for google ;_;

Actually a friend of mine was going for a google job - 2 by-phone interviews here in aus, then flew over for final interview(s?) at their HQ, very gruelling all up.

Still didnt get the job.

And he's *good* at what he does (*nix geek, writes a column on linux for a big PC mag )

nicely done shasta!! so for posterity then in akm's problem:

10
19
27
34
40
45
49
50

max attempts =10

I got two bits of news today that gave me a sliver of hope:

1) I applied for a statistician job with the Dept. of Energy and my application was forwarded to the SME (subject matter expert, apparently), which means I at least passed the basic qualifications for the job. This is step 1 out of 102000392, because now the SME decides whose applications get passed on to the "decider", but hey, it's something.

2) Random dude at E.P.A. emailed me directly today, saying he likes my resume and wants to talk to me about "several positions here in Washington, D.C."

Pro: I MIGHT GET A JOB...
Con: in Washington, D.C.
Pro: But shit man, times are rough, I really need a job..
Con: in Washington, D.C., fuck.

RE: #1, I've been talking trash about the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the section of the Dept. of Energy that gathers energy statistics, for years now. And now I could potentially be working for them and using their shitty models. In my nerdy dreams I think about getting in there and gradually making their projections more accurate and useful, but in my nerdy daily life I would probably become a total stooge. Fuck, man.

DC rocks, dude. Seriously. It would take you approx. 24 hours to find somewhere you would like, regardless of what that is.

Good luck with the job leads.

What is a good website for searching for IT jobs in London?

I tried jobsite.co.uk but that's "down for maintenance"
monster.co.uk doesn't appear to let you search by salary (wtf??)

apart from that I only know jobserve.co.uk - anyone know any good ones, IT-specific or otherwise?

fish4jobs?

ooh I haven't tried them, ta

hmm either their website doesn't work very well in Firefox or just doesn't work very well because whenever I click on a job it takes me to a blank page...

reed.co.uk

it's great when you're job searching and you get an HR mail from someone who has filled out the fields on their mail client lastname resources, firstname human, because then in your inbox you suddenly get a response from a human for once, at least it looks that way, at first

this thing where HR sites (mostly universities ime) have you upload a CV, then it makes you fill out ALL THE SHIT THAT'S ON YOUR CV in forms spread over 500 pages, then you copy/paste your carefully formatted cover letter into a text field, then you submit it, then you never hear anything ever, it makes me so mad

one place sent me a go-fuck-yourself email and then apparently added me to their promotional mailing list and spam me now

the 'paste it into a text field' part is the worst

actually no it's any application which asks you to answer an open-ended question and gives you a little undersized box to put your answer in—you're evidently expected to write more than fits in the box, but how much more??!?

So fucking bummed out today. I found a job listing at a rather large corporation to get into their architecure/building department, something I was super excited about. As a bonus, my cousin worked for them and was more than happy to help me out as much as possible.

So I spent the past 6 days just furiously updating my resume and editing it (with the input of quite a few people) over and over again, and crafting a new cover letter. It was a bigger chore than usual, since my resume was previously really specialized to target "architecture" jobs and I needed to really redo a lot of work on it. So I finally get it finished over the weekend and I go to complete the process this morning.

As mentioned above, its one of those online standardized things that makes you basically recreate your entire resume from scratch. Fine. Annoying, but fine. But it also had the added bonus of really specific questions about the job scope and qualifications for which you have to answer 'Yes' or 'No'. 99% of the questions were no problem, but there was one that was worded in such a weird, specific way that I couldn't answer 'Yes' and be truthful and there was no place or field for which I could explain or offer any nuance. I figured I'd rather be truthful and answer 'No'. I'm definitely qualified for what they are asking for with the question, just not in the super specific way they asked it. My resume and cover letter both cover how I can meet this qualification, quite easily, in another way. So I clicked 'No' and moved on, wrapped up the whole process about 30 minutes later.

Twenty-two minutes(!) after I click submit and get the confirmation email, I get the automated rejection letter. Based on what I've since researched, I can almost guarantee that it was because I clicked that 'No'. There is no possible way a human being even saw my resume and cover letter in that short of a time. Just infuriating that I was rejected by a fucking machine without any opportunity to explain the nuance or other factors involved. These automated application things are so stupid. I'm feeling crushed about losing the job, but also completely deflated after all that effort and I couldn't even get a human being to lay eyes on my resume.

Holding out slight hope that my cousin passing my resume to the hiring manager directly might improve my odds.

I think it will improve your odds. That story is exactly why those systems are bullshit for this kind of job.

22 minutes. Ugh.

Yeah, it's maddening.