Math questions at a programmer interview?
- by anon
So I went to an interview at Samsung here in Dallas, Texas. The way the recruiter described the job, he didn't make it sound like it was too math-oriented. The job basically involved graphics programming and C++. Yes, math is implied in graphics programming, especially shaders, but I still wasn't expecting this...
The whole interview lasted about an hour and a half and they asked me nothing but math-related questions. They didn't ask me a single programming question, which I found odd. About all they did was ask me how to write certain math routines as a C++ function, but that's about it. What about programming philosophy questions? Design patterns? Code-correctness? Constness? Exception safety? Thread safety? There are a zillion topics that they could have covered. But they didn't.
The main concern I have is that they didn't ask any programming questions. This basically implies to me that any programmer who is good at math can get a job here, but they might put out terrible code.
Of course, I think I bombed the interview because I haven't used any sort of linear algebra in about a year and I forget math easily if I haven't used it in practice for a while. Are any of my other fellow programmers out there this way? I'm a game programmer too, so this seems especially odd. The more I learn, the more old knowledge that gets "popped" out of my "stack" (memory).
My question is: Does this interview seem suspicious? Is this a typical interview that large corporations have? During the interview they told me that Google's interview process is similar. They have multiple, consecutive interviews where the math problems get more advanced.
