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Yeah, try discrediting the article than fix your mistakes. Real mature, Google.
... Sorry, are you accusing me of working for Google? My identity is very public, I don't.
So stop right there and run back into your PR cave.
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... Sorry, are you accusing me of working for Google? My identity is very public, I don't.
Then you're most likely trolling everyone, by commenting that you know more about their processes than most outsiders do. So stop right there and run back into your PR cave.
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There are different clues in different contexts. The hardest is if there is a very technical definition that makes another answer more correct. Maybe in a test of English: "John has less _____ than Mary. So they decided to go to Mary's apartment for breakfast." A. Bread B. Window C. Eggs D. Times " This is an incredibly stupid question oh my God. What would I even pick. All of the choices, and the whole question, is…
Less window is informal but I don’t see how it’s incorrect. Bread is both correct and fits the context better.
You are right that window exists in that sense but in this case it's clear that the question writers didn't think about it.
For "window" in particular, we rarely say it the way you imply, the whole Internet has just 4 instances of these words after each other:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22had+less+window+than%22
(you can try 'have' and 'has' for 'had'). But you might be right that the informal sense of "window" that I think you imply (window of time) might be technically the best answer in a different context but absolutely not the answer to pick!
So it actually is a good example of a potentially better answer that you shouldn't pick after analyzing the question!
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Surely the correct answer is you Google how to do it!?
These questions are supposed to work as a proxy for experience. Everybody can google the answer to trivia, but if an applicant doesn't know the answer by heart that's an indication for lack of experience.
This was posted previously, in October 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272 An actual Google director of engineering pointed out that these are individual-contributor SWE/SRE questions (and I can attest I got very similar questions as a new college grad). As I commented previously: "Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds…
Assuming he didnt lie about the exchange of words, this guy could be a homeless person make believing hes getting hired as ceo of google and this interview would still be an affront to proper advancement. You cannot possibly justify making a quiz that asks about kill in unix and doesnt accept SIGKILL ~literally kill with SIGTERM the default. If you are looking for the default level (15) you should specify. If this in…
Quicksort does NOT have "the best big-O". It's big-O time complexity is O(n^2). Big-O refers to the worst case time complexity. Quicksort will on average take (n log n) time complexity, but that's not its big-O, that's its big-Theta. Some try to skirt this by saying "if you randomize the order of the data first, it will be sorted in big-O of n log n" but again, that's the average time complexity, not the pathological case.
A lot of CS books teach this wrong. Please stop being wrong: O(Quicksort) is O(n^2)
This was posted previously, in October 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272 An actual Google director of engineering pointed out that these are individual-contributor SWE/SRE questions (and I can attest I got very similar questions as a new college grad). As I commented previously: "Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds…
But (per [1]) then what would be the charitable mis-remembering of the recruiter saying "that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper." If it were someone technically competent, that would never be the response; it would be a technical explanation of the error. The most likely scenario is that a non-technical person is being expected to gauge technical answers.
Incidentally, someone on that thread [2] suggested making a meme of that, where the interviewer regards an answer as wrong, despite being very good, because it's "not what they have".
Example from my experience:
Interviewer: "What would be the run time if you did it this way [explanation]."
Me: "Oh, wow, that's a pretty clever approach! In that case, it wouldn't even depend on the input size. Then it would only be limited by IO."
Interviewer: "Wrong. It's constant."
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"Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent." Is this really true, though? Are they losing out on more top end candidates? There are other places with interesting work and big paychecks. Some of them aren't building reputations for annoying interview processes.
An annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated , but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it…
(How cool, I get multiple downvotes which means that the average non-important people (I could use stronger words, but you do know where you fit) don't agree, which makes me flattered. Thank you.)
(The other guys upvoting me, thank you, you are somehow restoring my faith, that not everyone is a zealot)
Tossing my hat in the ring with a similar experience. Was approached in 2003 because of an app I had written that got attention, and was told that Googlers wanted to speak with me about the app. What followed was three calls with gate-keepers of sorts, between which there was zero knowledge transfer from call to call. None of them inquired about the app and all of them asked questions so unrelated to the app that the…
I agree that your experience in 2003 was terrible, but to draw this conclusion from the article is extremely presumptuous. There are lots of well-intentioned people working in recruiting at Google, and you are suggesting that none of them have made any improvement in the process in 15 years?
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I doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my…
> I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. I have had a pleasure of interviewing a 'veteran' who listed both Emacs and vim on his resume, among dozens of other keywords and many, many years of professional experience. I asked him, how do you exit these text editors? "As any other program", he answered,…