How do you know that it's OK to make assumptions like that? How do you know that a quick estimate is acceptable? Is this level of accuracy acceptable? How do you know?
I can't get the point of this.
The interviewer wants to know how many golfballs fit on the bus, but he doesn't even know what kind of bus? He hasn't decided what things are on the bus, and how many of them, and whether there is a driver, and what kind of track he's going to be driving the bus on? And he probably doesn't know why the golfballs are being put on a bus at all? And he doesn't care as to what kind of accuracy this estimate is being made, as long as it just seems I've gone through some kind of motions?
This is ludicrous. It doesn't resemble any real-world task.
'We have an idea for a game where you walk around a real-looking representation of London, with realistic traffic and people on the side walk. We'd like to have this on the iPhone, PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS. We want you to write the engine for it.'
So, what do you do, start developing and hope for the best?
The fact that it's balls in a bus and not polygons on a screen is not a negative. It makes clear that the point is not to test your knowledge of the RAM of each platform, the point is to see if you can reason while facing unknowns.
> I can't get the point of this. The interviewer wants to know how many golfballs fit on the bus [...]
No, no, no. The point is to see if you give up (a large proportion do), or if you make bad assumptions (e.g. hand-wavy 'Lets say there's 1000 golf balls in a cubic meter').
The polygons onscreen question is a far better one, as it gives me a clue about the reason for asking, the kind of assumptions I can make, and the level of accuracy needed. The golf balls on bus example does not.
I can't get the point of this.
The interviewer wants to know how many golfballs fit on the bus, but he doesn't even know what kind of bus? He hasn't decided what things are on the bus, and how many of them, and whether there is a driver, and what kind of track he's going to be driving the bus on? And he probably doesn't know why the golfballs are being put on a bus at all? And he doesn't care as to what kind of accuracy this estimate is being made, as long as it just seems I've gone through some kind of motions?
This is ludicrous. It doesn't resemble any real-world task.