Story:

• Regularly scrolling through x.
• Wondering which AI research guy Meta might poach next.

At first sight, this just seemed like another hiring post to me. But wait, that's an elegant graph! I should probably still click the link...what if it's about trees? :D

And so I did. The link landed me on a clean page with only one problem, and it is indeed a graph theory one.

Here I am, typing the LaTeX down for you to enjoy the problem :)

After spending 10 minutes trying to understand the task, 60 minutes thinking about it, 30 minutes writing down my solution — and 1 second realizing it was wrong, I have to admit that this is a challenging (and elegant) problem.

Yet, it’s just like one of those competitive programming problems on Codeforces (you’ll see if you read it!), the kind I simply enjoy thinking about.

Now this is just a boring story about me, why am I bothering to post it on Codeforces?

I have applied to internships/jobs before, and for each and every one of those applications, I was required to fill in a bunch of lengthy questions (e.g. how do you handle project collaboration? min: 300 words), which I hate doing. I believe this applies for the majority of you who are reading this as well.

But this job hiring process is different. It was the first time when I actually enjoyed the application process: You get to solve an interesting task, and they will read your thinking process and decide to move you directly to the last round of the process.

Here we were being evaluated based on how we think, not on how fancy our resumes look. This is what job hiring processes should be like. This is also what I hope to foster through writing this post (by making more people hear about this!).

Appreciate you reading this, let's hope we can get to solve algorithmic problems instead of filling job forms in the future :)

Here's what happened next in my story, if you're curious!