"This is a Fermi problem — an estimation or approximation problem with limited information and back-of-the-envelope calculations. There's no right answer: interviewers want to understand how you think and how well you can explain your reasoning, rather than what you already know.
Recall the formula for Fermi problems:
Ask clarifying questions
Catalog what you know
Make equation(s)
Think about edge cases to add to equation
**Breakdown components of your equat"
Exponent - "This is a Fermi problem — an estimation or approximation problem with limited information and back-of-the-envelope calculations. There's no right answer: interviewers want to understand how you think and how well you can explain your reasoning, rather than what you already know.
Recall the formula for Fermi problems:
Ask clarifying questions
Catalog what you know
Make equation(s)
Think about edge cases to add to equation
**Breakdown components of your equat"See full answer
"Bitshift the number to the right and keep track of the 1's you encounter. If you bitshift it completely and only encounter one 1, it is a power of two."
Nils G. - "Bitshift the number to the right and keep track of the 1's you encounter. If you bitshift it completely and only encounter one 1, it is a power of two."See full answer
"My experience with JavaScript is extensive and grounded in a deep understanding of both the language itself and the ecosystems built around it. I can work with modern JavaScript (ES6 and beyond), including concepts like arrow functions, destructuring, modules, promises, and async/await. I’m well-versed in core language features such as closures, the event loop, hoisting, scope, and prototype inheritance. Additionally, I can assist with both front-end and back-end development using popular framew"
Komal K. - "My experience with JavaScript is extensive and grounded in a deep understanding of both the language itself and the ecosystems built around it. I can work with modern JavaScript (ES6 and beyond), including concepts like arrow functions, destructuring, modules, promises, and async/await. I’m well-versed in core language features such as closures, the event loop, hoisting, scope, and prototype inheritance. Additionally, I can assist with both front-end and back-end development using popular framew"See full answer
"How much does the Empire State Building weigh?
I will estimate the weight of the Empire State Building using a structured approach. I’ll start with clarifying questions, define an equation, make reasonable assumptions, perform calculations, and address trade-offs and potential errors.
Clarifying Questions
To refine the scope, I considered:
How many floors does the Empire State Building have?
What is the area per floor?
What materials are used (e.g., steel, concrete)"
Nishtha - "How much does the Empire State Building weigh?
I will estimate the weight of the Empire State Building using a structured approach. I’ll start with clarifying questions, define an equation, make reasonable assumptions, perform calculations, and address trade-offs and potential errors.
Clarifying Questions
To refine the scope, I considered:
How many floors does the Empire State Building have?
What is the area per floor?
What materials are used (e.g., steel, concrete)"See full answer
"This is a Technical question. It tests your ability to understand high level technical concepts. Even though your job won't have any coding involved, you'll still need to understand these concepts. Being able to cover all these topics with clarity communicates confidence in your interviewer.
Unfortunately, there's no formula for technical questions, but some general tips are:
Use analogies when you can
Break your solution into clear, bite-size steps
Don't be afraid to use examples to b"
Exponent - "This is a Technical question. It tests your ability to understand high level technical concepts. Even though your job won't have any coding involved, you'll still need to understand these concepts. Being able to cover all these topics with clarity communicates confidence in your interviewer.
Unfortunately, there's no formula for technical questions, but some general tips are:
Use analogies when you can
Break your solution into clear, bite-size steps
Don't be afraid to use examples to b"See full answer
"A Random Forest works by building an ensemble of decision trees, each trained on a slightly different version of the data. The key mechanism is bagging: for each tree, we sample the training data with replacement (bootstrapping), so every tree sees a different subset of examples. On top of that, at each split the algorithm randomly selects a subset of features, so trees explore different predictors.
These two sources of randomness decorrelate the trees. When we aggregate them — by averag"
Yuexiang Y. - "A Random Forest works by building an ensemble of decision trees, each trained on a slightly different version of the data. The key mechanism is bagging: for each tree, we sample the training data with replacement (bootstrapping), so every tree sees a different subset of examples. On top of that, at each split the algorithm randomly selects a subset of features, so trees explore different predictors.
These two sources of randomness decorrelate the trees. When we aggregate them — by averag"See full answer
"This is a fun Fermi problem asked recently by Facebook — an estimation or approximation problem with limited information and back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Recall the formula for Fermi problems:
Ask clarifying questions
Catalog what you know
Make equation(s)
Breakdown components of your equation
Review and state assumptions
Compute
Sanity Check
Summarize
Ask clarifying questions
It's wise here to slow down and get some clari"
Exponent - "This is a fun Fermi problem asked recently by Facebook — an estimation or approximation problem with limited information and back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Recall the formula for Fermi problems:
Ask clarifying questions
Catalog what you know
Make equation(s)
Breakdown components of your equation
Review and state assumptions
Compute
Sanity Check
Summarize
Ask clarifying questions
It's wise here to slow down and get some clari"See full answer