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Software Engineering

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    I don't know about you, but when interviewing, I prefer to describe an actual hard problem that came up in our company's world recently, and see how the interviewee would approach it. Funnily enough, we have not recently had any clients engage us to measure quantities of water using two buckets. Mostly what we do involves computer programming. Commented Apr 14, 2011 at 21:31
  • @Carson63000 not that a real problem that your company encountered would be a bad idea, but often time-prohibative because of the specifics of the real world problem and implementation of the solution. Thats why puzzles involving buckets are great because the cost of entry is so tiny, and gets straight to the interesting bits. Commented Apr 16, 2011 at 20:57
  • I imagine you can see the analogy between the bucket problem and, say, writing software to accomplish a task while using a minimum number of disc seeks, or http requests. Commented Apr 16, 2011 at 22:25