I once met a man who was intimately familiar with the details of the linux kernel and how the new chiplet architecture in AMD processors resembles a NUMA architecture and thus impacts VM performance. He was well versed in shell scripting, k8s, docker, the principles of observability, and infrastructure as code. He could explain the difference between READ COMMITED and REPEATABLE READ or LSTMs or distributed consistency models off the top of his head. He didn't have a CS degree so obviously he wasn't as intelligent as me, but even so I found him a little intimidating for some reason.
But then I asked him -
"Given an array of positive integers target and an array initial of same size with all zeros.
Return the minimum number of operations to form a target array from initial if you are allowed to do the following operation:
Choose any subarray from initial and increment each value by one.
"
He was stumped. As I had suspected, he wasn't quite up to the job of an SRE. I immediately failed him and returned to editing my networking.yaml file. Someone has to maintain the bar around here..
But then I asked him -
"Given an array of positive integers target and an array initial of same size with all zeros.
Return the minimum number of operations to form a target array from initial if you are allowed to do the following operation:
"He was stumped. As I had suspected, he wasn't quite up to the job of an SRE. I immediately failed him and returned to editing my networking.yaml file. Someone has to maintain the bar around here..