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What better way is there to try and get the best assessment of someone’s coding ability in a 45 minute timeframe?
IMO not doing it. Why'd you do it? There are much more important factors than someone's ability to do a whiteboard exercise while under stress. You can e.g. check their Github, ask them to make a simple example project at home, etc.
I work at Google and no it's not easy for us either. I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. That said I see two kinds of interviewers. One kind (the good kind) takes a medium difficulty question and uses it to explore the candidate's coding, algorithms, communication, and problem solving skills. The other kind has a super hard question with a s…
I got the same response from an old friend who has worked for Google for the better part of a decade. FWIW my understanding is that the Hiring Committee tends to discard feedback from interviewers like your latter type here.
Just like getting into YC isn't necessary to be a successful founder, getting into Google isn't necessary to be a successful engineer. There are tons of companies out there, and many pay better than Google.
Any good examples of “whiteboard questions”, I’m not super familiar with the phrasing.
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> Here's an NP-hard problem you haven't heard of, write correct code for nlogn solution on whiteboard in language of choice I guess that would be a trick-question then, as nobody ever solved an NP-hard problem in linearithmic time.
I should have said "n log n heuristic approximate solution" (my defense: I'm actually a biologist pretending to be a computer scientist). Many problem solutions at Google are effectively heuristic approximate solutions to NP-hard problems (or less hard but interesting problems). There's no trick, they just want to know you can figure out how to compute things quickly so they can run online in a server or a batch job.…
Any good examples of “whiteboard questions”, I’m not super familiar with the phrasing.
It was good of him to still post it but it showed that someone currently employed at Facebook would have been screened out at the phone call stage had he applied again without any preparation.
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I should have said "n log n heuristic approximate solution" (my defense: I'm actually a biologist pretending to be a computer scientist). Many problem solutions at Google are effectively heuristic approximate solutions to NP-hard problems (or less hard but interesting problems). There's no trick, they just want to know you can figure out how to compute things quickly so they can run online in a server or a batch job.…
But I suppose appropriate heuristic solutions are typically only "pondered about" and not "found" at the whiteboard, because they require extensive testing with real-world data to see if they are actually efficient in practice.
I am a SWE at Google, and yes, most Googlers are pretty good at solving whiteboard problems. It's not like we are born with those solutions in our heads, but we enjoy solving those questions especially with other people. It's a lot of fun to "explore" answers to these questions, and that's what I think interviews are all about. I know HN hates whiteboard problems, but just like anything, you get good with it if you'r…
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Indeed, although it's not unheard of for mathematics lecturers at university to throw in a question within a twenty-question problem sheet for their course that is actually equivalent to some important unsolved problem, on the off chance that one of their students sees things in a totally new way and makes a ground-breaking discovery. Solving something NP-hard in linearithmic time would certainly qualify...
Do you have a cite/example of a lecturer doing that on an exam? Are there any examples where that has been successful? I had never heard of that happening! It would be extremely cool if it ever worked.
https://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathemat...