
A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering - neilpomerleau
https://engineering.linkedin.com/puzzle
======
yadamo
OP has posted this link before, both here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10990206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10990206)
(with the title "Get an interview at LinkedIn by solving this puzzle") and on
the Who's Hiring threads
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014173)

As an exercise, I wrote a quick and dirty python script to solve this back in
February (albeit it's not the most elegant solution but far better than brute
force) and submitted my answer and subsequent contact info hoping to
eventually hear back about said interview, and never did.

Which is quite frustrating from the perspective of someone on the job hunt.
Why use something like this as a hiring tool and not follow up on it?

</rant>

~~~
ProAm
Is LinkedIn a desired place to work? I've never heard anyone clamoring to work
there.

~~~
impish19
I work at LinkedIn. Let me be the first one to tell you that it is an amazing
place to work at! Everyone is super smart and talented. The infra teams have
some really amazing projects under their belt - a lot of which are open
sourced. I work on the applications team and I love the culture in our org -
everyone is super friendly, helpful and it's a privilege to be working on
products that are used by hundreds of millions of people and being able to
call shots on them. Also as a relatively inexperienced dev, I'm given ample
responsibilities to drive my projects and mould them that I feel are helping
me grow. The perks are absolutely amazing - pretty comparable to the ones you
get at FB/Google. My favorite ones are $2k reimbursement for fitness related
expenses per year, an entire week off during Independence day and Christmas, a
day off to yourself and your team each month (search for InDays), and frequent
company and team outings (there was a screening for the last Star Wars movie
and is another one for Batman vs Superman soon). I'll probably never work for
another big company again after this for an entirely different set of reasons,
but I am absolutely glad about my decision to join LinkedIn.

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jammaloo
If you enjoyed that, there's plenty more where that came from at
[https://regexcrossword.com/](https://regexcrossword.com/)

~~~
eric_h
The linked in one was so easy that I felt compelled to play some harder ones -
you definitely cost me a couple hours of productivity today - I've played
through a couple dozen of these things...

So, thanks, and also no thanks ;)

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russellbeattie
LinkedIn thought, "We have a problem, not enough good devs." Then they
thought, "Hey, let's recruit using a regex puzzle!" Now they have two
problems. (With apologies to jwz.)

~~~
smt88
Point/joke taken, but let me play devil's advocate: anyone very familiar with
regular expressions probably has a lot of experience as a developer. Is s/he a
_good_ developer? That's harder to say. But s/he definitely does have some
passion for solving puzzles, at least.

I'd even argue that LinkedIn doesn't really even need amazing developers. As
far as code goes, they're only really solving problems that have been solved
for decades. Infrastructure is another matter, but I doubt they're doing
anything insane on that front either.

------
S_A_P
This is typical of the same crap I see on my linkedIn feed. Solve this if you
are a "GENIUS"!!!! popsicle + popsicle = 6 toilet * toilet = 9 popsicle +
toilet =???!?!??

I have made heavy use of the block feature. And to those of you thinking of
answering those, its a lose-lose proposition, you either get it wrong and look
ignorant, or you get it right and look like a slacker...

~~~
danbruc
Obviously 0 or 2/147\. ^^

------
danbruc
_Only 12% of people who attempt this puzzle solve it._

Static text or real statistics?

~~~
jonhohle
I received the same stat.

~~~
heroprotagonist
Same here. It's probably a hard coded message. You'd think the hacker news
post would skew it a bit if it was realtime. Either that or they have a really
massive data set on it that's hard to skew.

~~~
myfonj
That "solved" content is loaded from "static-sites" location [1], so most
certainly hard-coded.

[1] (spoiler alert, do not read the slug of this URL)
[https://engineering.linkedin.com/content/dam/static-
sites/en...](https://engineering.linkedin.com/content/dam/static-
sites/engineering/puzzle/rrrddeinlrnineen)

------
syserror
Solved this puzzle last time and LinkedIn basically told me "we won't actually
interview you unless you have 2-4 years of industry experience" new grads be
warned.

~~~
Zafira
I really don't understand what the point of creating these puzzles and then
failing to disclose that you'll reject, out-of-hand, an entire subset based on
such hidden criteria. It feels like firms want anyone else, but _themselves_
to train junior|entry-level|new grads or only accept new grads with the
requisite level of moxie who have had the luxury of time and money to have
trained themselves or been able to establish businesses.

Some people had to work whatever job(s) they could find or had family issues
to deal with and go to school at the same time. Are they less qualified
because of it?

</rant>

------
prisonerzero
I solved it! They reached out about a day later (edit: and asked for a copy of
my resume) and showed me a couple of job listings I'd be a good fit for. They
wanted me to relocate which was kind of a buzzkill, but it was fun getting to
talk with one of their engineers about how they've set up most of their
projects. They were super nice, but it does take a while to hear back from
them.

------
dantillberg
To up the ante, it would be a fairly good challenge to write a computer
program that solves this puzzle efficiently.

~~~
smt88
Another commenter mentioned having written a program that solves it (though
not necessarily efficiently).

I think that's what distinguishes the truly excellent/"lazy" coders from the
head-down, 9-to-5 types.

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vdnkh
This seems like a twisted idea of a "fun" interview question that "our
candidates really enjoy"

~~~
arrakeen
if i had gotten this puzzle in a job interview i would certainly enjoy it but
ymmv

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stanmancan
Can anyone explain what the solution is supposed to look like? What actually
goes in the boxes?

~~~
ericlee4
You fill the characters that would be matched by the regular expression given.
So the character has to match both the row/column expressions at the position
where they intersect.

~~~
stanmancan
Oh I gotcha. That makes more sense; I was confused since most of the
expressions match more than 4 characters. Thanks!

------
sakopov
This was a cool problem. What would be even more interesting is generating
puzzles like these.

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Redoubts
Usually crossword answers make sense. This ended up just looking like a jumble
of letters.

~~~
127001brewer
The jumble of letters made sense in the context of the regex problems.

~~~
alanh
The first regex crossword I ever saw — [https://gregable.com/p/regexp-
puzzle.html](https://gregable.com/p/regexp-puzzle.html) — also was sort of a
jumble of letters, but it actually encoded a secret message (I don’t want to
say more — spoilers)

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mbrd
I enjoyed doing this but I got a sore neck from reading diagonal text!

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phat4life
only 12% of people got this puzzle it says. I used rubular.com though, so
maybe that was cheating...

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akavi
What I got out of this: regex precedence rules are really unintuitive to me.

~~~
betenoire
What is a precedence rule in regex? You can either derive a string or you
can't. Precedence problems result in ambiguity, there shouldn't be any
ambiguity here

~~~
sedeki
The regex operators can be ordered by precedence. The whole point is of course
to avoid ambiguity...?

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enknamel
It was fun but pointless. I would have been more impressed if the solutions
were unique and dictionary words rather than trying to make silly regexs like
'not working'. Is LinkedIn even hiring with their current stock plummet and
rumors of layoffs?

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greenpizza13
This was fun, thanks! Solved it in about 10 minutes.

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keehun
I barely have any experience with Regex and it was not too hard to complete! I
feel that it certainly could have been more difficult.

