How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process • Hacker News Board

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#81

Post by BrandonM » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 1:18 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #80

BrandonM wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true? One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job. Personally, I don't like my current job bu…

Want to work in Chicago? Our interview process mostly consists of asking you questions you should know the answer to. If your answers make sense and you seem pleasant, welcome to the team. Oh, did I mention you'll probably make twice as much here than at Google? Incidentally, more people want to work at Google than want to work at Bank of America, even though there is plenty of interesting code to write at the Bank,…

I love Chicago... that sounds good to me.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#82

Post by BrandonM » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 1:20 AM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #76

BrandonM wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And certainly your day-to-day work would involve answering questions about those data structures and algorithms in real time, with your future career depending on it, without external references.

I think not. Your day to day work involves sitting in front of an editor of your choice and writing code that may or may not compile or interpret properly, may or may not contain bugs, and may or may not have the correct logic. Simply having a computer at your disposal with the Internet handy, a step debugger, or the ability to run a shell or interpreter in an interactive mode puts you light years ahead of someone st…

> I think we're agreeing.

Yep. Sorry if my sarcasm broadcaster had a weak signal

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#83

Post by TGJ » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 1:24 AM UTC

I know that the larger more prestigious companies will require more intensive hiring processes but I think this kind of attitude is really hurting smaller companies. The process for getting hired at smaller companies is getting so convoluted for one particular reason. It is hard for a company to simply hire and fire. In the most logical situation, you hire the best application, work them for a week and throw them out if they don't fit. As it is now, people whine, sue and pitch a fit when they get fired so that companies have to come up with aggravating hiring practices to get the people that will work out.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#84

Post by sourcefrog » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 1:28 AM UTC

The problem with "what do you know" questions is not (or so much) that they may reject people who know stuff but recall it differently, but that they aren't selective for having the ability to stick with something for an extended time. Avoiding distraction with the internet, or the more subtle types of distraction into futzing with things rather than doing the most important but more discouraging tasks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690578

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#85

Post by ciupicri » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 1:48 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #80

BrandonM wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true? One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job. Personally, I don't like my current job bu…

Want to work in Chicago? Our interview process mostly consists of asking you questions you should know the answer to. If your answers make sense and you seem pleasant, welcome to the team. Oh, did I mention you'll probably make twice as much here than at Google? Incidentally, more people want to work at Google than want to work at Bank of America, even though there is plenty of interesting code to write at the Bank,…

Could you please give some examples of interesting code at Bank of America?

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#86

Post by lutorm » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 1:59 AM UTC

bnoordhuis wrote: post #8

I interviewed with Google for a SRE position earlier this year and their screening process sure is tedious: Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture, like how to write good, maintainable software. I like nerding about graph traversal algos as much as the next guy, but not for 90 minutes on the phone after a long day of work. I'm sure the screening proce…

I interviewed two years ago and I think it was pretty reasonable: one 45min phone interview and two 3h on-site interviews. I interviewed for a stat position and the questions were mostly a "see how you think on your feet" problems, talking through how you would solve some problem. I thought it was quite a pleasant experience, the whiteboard-discussion style was quite similar to what we do in academic research.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#87

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 2:18 AM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #85

jrockway wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to work in Chicago? Our interview process mostly consists of asking you questions you should know the answer to. If your answers make sense and you seem pleasant, welcome to the team. Oh, did I mention you'll probably make twice as much here than at Google? Incidentally, more people want to work at Google than want to work at Bank of America, even though there is plenty of interesting code to write at the Bank,…

Could you please give some examples of interesting code at Bank of America?

Fraud detection.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#88

Post by Dornkirk » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 2:56 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #80

BrandonM wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true? One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job. Personally, I don't like my current job bu…

Want to work in Chicago? Our interview process mostly consists of asking you questions you should know the answer to. If your answers make sense and you seem pleasant, welcome to the team. Oh, did I mention you'll probably make twice as much here than at Google? Incidentally, more people want to work at Google than want to work at Bank of America, even though there is plenty of interesting code to write at the Bank,…

What language(s), tech, framework is used for the software (web-apps? desktop? etc) at BoA?

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#89

Post by mkelly » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 3:03 AM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #78

zppx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SRE (Site Reliability Engineers) according to Tom Limoncelli (a Google's SRE) is a kind of sysadmin, I doubt that this would ever be the case.

Right. I interviewed for SRE at Google. It's basically a sysadmin job. You're expected to be proficient at scripting in some language (Python, Perl, bash, etc), but I would assume you're not expected to write code for most Google applications. I would think the senior SRE engineers know enough about the code base to poke around and make suggestions ("found a bug in module.py at line XYZ that causes bad performance wh…

An important distinction that's missing in this discussion is that you can be either an SA-SRE or a SWE-SRE. You can figure out which is which from how the SRE job postings on google.com are phrased.

SWE-SREs have to pass SWE interviews. I work down the hall from Tim. Nobody keeps track of who came in through which side (SA or SWE), but some of the SREs I work with wrote large parts of the services they support.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#90

Post by mkelly » Wed, Sep 15, 2010, 3:05 AM UTC

zppx wrote: post #67

KaeseEs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the position they were interviewing you for actually involved writing efficient software, and thus required thorough knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science (data structures and algorithms &c) and systems programming?

SRE (Site Reliability Engineers) according to Tom Limoncelli (a Google's SRE) is a kind of sysadmin, I doubt that this would ever be the case.

And how many systems does a google sysadmin administer? :)

(Answer: a lot.)