Great Debugging skills weak problem solving

Posted by Mahmoud on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Mahmoud
Published on 2013-11-12T08:38:51Z Indexed on 2013/11/12 10:20 UTC
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For the 5 years I worked for various companies, I worked in large software like computer vision kits, embedded, games. I found myself very good at debuggins skills, I've even found and fixed bugs in frameworks and I solved them. The problem is that I'm very weak at problem solving. I got interview with Qualcomm, and they said you're fine at software, but you have a limited problem solving, I also had the same results with Google.

I'm very bad at solving puzzles and brain teasers. During the interviews I solve all of the software related problems on the blackboard, but when I went to the GM and face math problems and probabilities, I struggle.

How can I improve my problem solving skills?

Edit Some of the problems:

A cake that is cut from anywhere and needs just one cut to halved in equal. I told him cut it horizontally, he said No, consider it as a 2D Problem!.

  1. Consider a concenteric 3 circles, each one can get a color, but not matched with the other circle, how many blobs you can make out of those circles ? this was with the GM ( Augmented Reality SDK)

  2. Consider a train, an infinite one, and you looked at the window, and there are two cars, one big, and one small, what is the probability of having only a big car, I said 50%, he said, what if that two cars you dont know their length, and you want to get the probability of getting the biggest one, I struggled, didn't solve it... I was really exahusted after long day of interviews

  3. prob of having a number divisible by 5 in numbers from 1 to 100.. struggled!!

All coding questions I solved them like reverse a string, detect a cycle in a linked list,..etc.

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