Are you smart enough to work at a start-up?

http://www.news.com.au/business/companies/are-you-smart-enough-to-work-at-a-startup/story-fnda1bsz-1226732117936

by striker44 • 13 years ago

7 23 13 years ago

news.com.au

jnord• 13 years ago

Looks like that number is in base-36 instead of base-10 (decimal). Using http://www.unitconversion.org/numbers/base-10-to-base-36-con... yields number 80113871 as the last 8 digits of the phone number.

aaronpk• 13 years ago

Looks like you are smart enough to work at a startup!

gooderlooking• 13 years ago

You too can be like Zuckerberg, by becoming employee #336 at a company rebranded in 2009 as a startup!

vjeux• 13 years ago

You can also type the following in your JS console :)

    parseInt('1bp49b', 36)

"The only problem is it's so tough, no one has managed to crack it yet." is very silly

yeah_ok• 13 years ago

I agree, "The only problem is it's so tough, no one has managed to crack it yet" is a very silly comment. Anyone who's done high school computing can probably figure this one out :(

jdoconnor• 13 years ago

in ruby '1bp49b'.to_i(36)

ajtaylor• 13 years ago

That was my first thought as well. Please don't tell me no one in Sydney managed to think of this.

sharner• 13 years ago

Do it by hand and I'm impressed :)

freyr• 13 years ago

The number is 1bp49b. The base-10 values of b and p are 11 and 25, respectively. The decimal value of the number is then:

    1*36^5 + b*36^4 + p*36^3 + 4*36^2 + 9*36^1 + b*36^0
    = 36^5 + 11*36^4 + 25*36^3 + 4*36^2 + 9*36 + 11
    = 80113871

I'll start on Monday.

broodbucket2• 13 years ago

Kinda silly given they tell you the base...it'd be cooler if they didn't give you the base and you had to play with it until you had something that fit the phone numbers in the area that the company is in

Also, where's the startups in Brisbane anyway :-/

shearnie3• 13 years ago

There's some of us here in Brisbane. There's just not as much as in Sydney to get that kind of press coverage I think.

broodbucket2• 13 years ago

As someone soon to be entering the job market, can you suggest a good way to look around? All the dev positions I see around are just generic enterprise Java/.NET/etc for some corporation

chickensoup64• 13 years ago

Can anyone explain how the conversion works? I don't get how it works even after looking at the conversion table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36

msohcw• 13 years ago

In decimal, when you reach numbers after 9, there's no longer a single symbol you can use to represent the next number. Hence, you represent it as 10, which is one 10 and zero 1s. 11 is one 10 and one 1. This decimal, or base 10 system hence uses only 10 symbols, (0-9). In base 36, you can use additional other symbols, up to 36 different symbols. In this case they are 0-Z, changing to the letters of the alphabet A-Z as the remaining 26 unique symbols needed. Hence A is 11, B is 12 ... Z is 35. 36 (base 10) is then represented as 10 (base 36), one 36 and zero ones. 36^2 = 1296 (base 10) would be represented as 100 (base 36).

shearnie3• 13 years ago

That ad needs to be on a round manhole cover

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

Out of Z types of people in the World, Y don't know anything about Base-36.

kondro• 13 years ago

Trivial puzzle, but I have no desire to ever work for BigCommerce.

  require 'sinatra'
  require 'twilio-ruby'

  ACCOUNT_SID = "Your SID"
  AUTH_TOKEN = "Your Token"
  BIG_COMMERCE_NUMBER = "+612#{1bp49b".to_i(36)}"
  APP_URL = "http://path.to.this.app.com"
  YOUR_NUMBER = "+61211111111"

  get '/' do
    twilio = Twilio::REST::Client.new(ACCOUNT_SID, AUTH_TOKEN)
    twilio.account.calls.create(
      from: YOUR_NUMBER, 
      to: BIG_COMMERCE_NUMBER
      url: APP_URL + "/give-me-a-job"
    )
  end

  get '/give-me-a-job" do
    r.Dial callerId: YOUR_NUMBER do |d|
      d.Number(CGI.escape(YOUR_NUMBER))
    end
  end

gefuns• 13 years ago

Did anyone actually call up and checked if that is the solution? The base 36 thing was also the first thing that came to my mind, and after evaluating the number, I saw that the start is 8..., quickly checked the australian number codes and saw that sydney is indeed +61 02 8..., so for me there's a chance that's the solution. However, since it seemed kind of trivial to me, I thought maybe it's a prank of some sort...

shruubi• 13 years ago

Got bored, solved it in 3 seconds, called the number and left my name.

Not really a complex puzzle by any means...

carlosdp• 13 years ago

Or no one has cared to try... Being able to identify a base-36 number isn't a good measure at all of being a good engineer, obviously. Google used to do something similar to this and then stopped once they figured that out.

Are you smart enough to work at a start-up?

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