Great Debugging skills weak problem solving
- by Mahmoud
For the 5 years I worked for various companies, I worked in large software like computer vision kits, embedded, games. I found myself very good at debuggins skills, I've even found and fixed bugs in frameworks and I solved them. The problem is that I'm very weak at problem solving. I got interview with Qualcomm, and they said you're fine at software, but you have a limited problem solving, I also had the same results with Google.
I'm very bad at solving puzzles and brain teasers. During the interviews I solve all of the software related problems on the blackboard, but when I went to the GM and face math problems and probabilities, I struggle.
How can I improve my problem solving skills?
Edit
Some of the problems:
A cake that is cut from anywhere and needs just one cut to halved in equal. I told him cut it horizontally, he said No, consider it as a 2D Problem!.
Consider a concenteric 3 circles, each one can get a color, but not matched with the other circle, how many blobs you can make out of those circles ? this was with the GM ( Augmented Reality SDK)
Consider a train, an infinite one, and you looked at the window, and there are two cars, one big, and one small, what is the probability of having only a big car, I said 50%, he said, what if that two cars you dont know their length, and you want to get the probability of getting the biggest one, I struggled, didn't solve it... I was really exahusted after long day of interviews
prob of having a number divisible by 5 in numbers from 1 to 100.. struggled!!
All coding questions I solved them like reverse a string, detect a cycle in a linked list,..etc.
