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Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

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Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#31
post #7

The real question is why people care so much about working for Google. If you're good, then you'll find success with or without Google, and if you're not good, then why would one complain about Google not hiring them when you don't even believe in your own ability. It's bizarre, really.

Thank you. Tech’s constant lionizing of the Big Five is noxious. Feels just like high school.

Falsehoods programmers believe: all the best devs work at the Big Five.

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#33
post #25

Isn't inverting a binary tree just this? (That's what some people seem to think, when I search for the problem.) 1> (defun invert (tree) (if (atom tree) tree (list (invert (cadr tree)) (invert (car tree))))) invert 2> (invert '(((1 2) (3 4)) ((5 6) (7 8)))) (((8 7) (6 5)) ((4 3) (2 1))) Here I modeled the binary tree using two-element lists as the nodes (thus using two cons cells where one would do) for the sake of p…

I would have written the same. I have no idea what Google understands by "inverting a binary tree", but to me it looks this. "Recursively swap left with right." Now just convert that to an inferior language, like java or python, so they can understand it.

If you are faced with a question like this in a Google interview, and you simply state the answer above right away, you are only solving part of the problem.

A Google interviewer expects you to ask questions and clarify any simplifying assumptions you may have made.

For eg: Are you assuming right at the beginning that the entire tree fits in memory? If so, Google interviewers expect you to clarify that at the beginning. They might later ask you to modify your solution for cases where your assumptions don't hold true.

From what I know, the biggest mistake people make during tech interviews with the big 5 is directly jumping to solutions without probing deeper. At the scale at which the big 5 operate, many routinely simple assumptions can be problematic.

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#34
post #30

He just got unlucky. It's always luck of the draw with job interviews. Just like those poker players that say they should have won the hand. I'd like to try this in an interview: how would you re-root a binary tree such that the ordering of the elements remains the same, but the root node of the tree changes.

So implement "rotateToTop" in an AVL tree?

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#35
post #21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952574

I have not worked at Google and have no idea what the list in question is, who maintains it, or what it takes to get on said blacklist. Speculation admits a lot of possibilities, including your own, but there's no evidence that managers created that list. It could well be line staff producing and publishing their own list of preferences. As a random example, perhaps a list of known sexual harassers that HR has not acted on, curated by an individual contributor with a victim's right's motive, and shared with at-risk coworkers. In such a situation, a person might legitimately wish to not put themselves in another stressful, high anxiety situation involving harassment.

Either option and many more are possible. All the ones I can think of suggest that Google's hiring and transfer process needs work.

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#36
Google used to hire the best and the brightest. While there are still a lot of smart people there, they have diluted that process in favor of other things and the quality of their workforce has slipped. The truth is that outside of search most of the other business units do not bring in nearly as much profit and are not as critical, but they need to look like they have an encore after search or the stock price will tank. Max is one of the many who were passed over so that they can focus on the other politically motivated hiring criteria, vs actual merit. Truth be told they could generate the majority of their current profit (which is primarily from search) with a much smaller workforce. What started out as a scrappy search startup is now a boated corporation.

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#37
>>Google in fact gave me seven interviews and I did well in the software engineering ones,

That is way too many interviews. I don't think I would have lasted that long. After the second one I probably would have found the third one too much of a pain. But if you really want something I guess you do what it takes.

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#38
post #7

The real question is why people care so much about working for Google. If you're good, then you'll find success with or without Google, and if you're not good, then why would one complain about Google not hiring them when you don't even believe in your own ability. It's bizarre, really.

hes not good , if he was he would be hired by google ... this is the silver lining here folks.

Big personality , decent coder ... but google level tech guy? Good enough to be among the best (the kind google go for) I guess not? Lets see who picks him up but if he gets some kind of manager position at a startup we can be assured hes more talk then tech.

Hard worker and organized results driven guy maybe, but some people dont really have the skill to be great engineers.

This guy got to the big leagues and realized that outside of the OSX world we care about hard engineering performance and scaling optimizations, not so much the rounded corners and glossy ui.

Google makes alpha-zero, what are they going to do with a guy like Max. Even he admits his application is not feature complete, so hes not even a "finisher".

I think they let him down easy , saying it was not a good culture fit , instead of telling him like it is, hes just not good enough.

Question: Do you think there is not a person at google with a worse personality than Max? I bet there are and I bet they out perform all of us in this thread. If they "should" have hired you , they would have hired you Max. They would have found a place for you.

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#39
The whole affair seemed stupid for me when I first read about it. The obvious position for this guy at google is "making sure that google open-source products are popular among developers" and he is obviously well-qualified for it. I don't know why he applied specifically for a run-of-the-mill software engineer position, but if google HR were a bit more flexible, they should have asked him "Hey, are you sure? How about this other thing instead?" instead of going through a lot of whiteboarding interviews.

Re: Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google

#40
post #3

But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that. No, Google shouldn't have hired him, and he made it very clear why: he's a dick. Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1…

I also question why anyone would want to work at a place that... didn't want you.

Google shouldn't have... followed their own guidelines?

To say someone should have, is to say they would regret it.

Google isn't a person. And they most certainly will not regret a thing...

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