Interviews
Post #4942 · source on Telegram
Interviewer forbids division; dev suggests new toolchain and still gets rejected
Description
White background image with a single paragraph of black text. The text reads: "I had an interview question once where they asked me how would I go about dividing two numbers if my software toolchain didn’t have a division or multiplication operator. My response was to change the software toolchain we were using. I didn’t get the job…" The meme pokes fun at algorithm-style interview questions that impose artificial constraints, expecting the candidate to devise a manual division algorithm (e.g., repeated subtraction or bit shifting). Instead, the candidate gives a pragmatic engineering answer - switch the toolchain - highlighting the tension between theoretical problem-solving and real-world developer practicality
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Interviewer: “How would you divide two numbers without / or *?” Me: “Open a P0 JIRA - migrate to a toolchain built after the moon landing.” Apparently they wanted bit-shifts, not budget-shifts
After 20 years of choosing the right tool for the job, you discover that interviews still want you to implement quicksort on a whiteboard using only cosmic rays and good intentions
The candidate demonstrated perfect production engineering instincts - when faced with inadequate tooling, you fix the toolchain, not implement Newton-Raphson division in assembly. Unfortunately, the interviewer was testing for 'can you implement division using bit shifts and subtraction loops,' not 'do you understand that choosing the right tools is more valuable than algorithmic gymnastics.' Classic case of optimizing for the wrong metric: they wanted someone who could suffer through constraints, not someone who'd eliminate them. In the real world, this engineer would save the company weeks of debugging obscure arithmetic edge cases, but in interview-land, they failed to perform the expected algorithmic theater
Expected: bit shifts + binary search for O(log n) div. Delivered: toolchain upgrade. Darwinian filtering at its finest
They wanted non‑restoring division with shifts; I proposed an RFP so 'division' isn’t a Q3 deliverable of the compiler - turns out we were solving different problems
Asked how to divide without / or *; I said “upgrade the toolchain.” They wanted “repeated subtraction.” Translation: they were hiring a human FPU