51–60 of 68 posts
In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country? Thoughts?
The author of "Crack the Coding Interview" and careercup.com claims[1] this list is very, very fake (for "software engineer" questions). She claims to have served on Google's hiring committees for over 3 years, so I would take her word over this blog's author. In my own experience Google does not ask these types of questions. If you do your own research on glassdoor.com and other sites where candidates self-report th…
Certain interviewers have preferences for certain types of questions. I had questions similar to the listed ones in each category (including basic ones in Engineering).
Generally in their engineering interviews, you're expected to know sorting and search algorithms and their big-O complexity - and expected to code on the board.
>How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? I can't see how there would be a correlation between answering this question well and being a good Product Manager. What's most upsetting about this style of question is the 'holier than thou' attitude that comes along with them. If you're not willing to play the game, don't expect to be seen as a good candidate.
There are apparently 5.7 million good piano tuners.
I'm surprised, my first big question from them wasn't listed: You have search results coming in from a thousand servers, as a big stream. How do you sort them by Pagerank and send it down to the client? How do you do this on a page-by-page basis? (This was for a software engineering position on the build tools team, about a month ago.)
FYI, I believe interview questions are covered under the NDA, so if you did interview (and presumably had to sign an NDA at the time) you shouldn't actually be talking about the questions you were asked.
Google Interview: AdWords Associate • How would you deal with an angry or frustrated advertisers on the phone? And this would be important to google how? Since when did they have telephones installed for customers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost every interview I've ever been on that consisted of these kinds of questions, I've gotten an offer. I agree it's a mostly useless exercise in trying to determine someone's technical skill, but as an interviewee, ultimately it makes more sense to just "play the game" and memorize the mostly-exhaustive list of questions. Conversely, one interview I do remember where I didn't end up getting an offer, was going sw…
I'd answer the question of why I haven't published on CPAN (which I haven't, and I primarily program in Perl for work) is that I don't have the time. I've published some small add-ons for Warhammer Online (Lua, not Perl), and have found that even such a simple thing as that, where it is common for add-on authors to abandon their add-ons and users do not expect much support, was a lot of time. That's because if I put…
My philosophy is that it's still better to have your code out there and unsupported where someone can have the option of using it, rather than leaving it stuck on a hard drive never to be seen or useful to the world at large.
While it pains me not to answer every person who emails me about code I put out there, I try to live with it. Plus, it gives them a chance to solve their problem for themselves. :)
In order to get to that point I had to get past the "Oh noes, what if people/future employer/rockstars see my code deride it, laugh in my face and not give me a job because the hacky code I put out is..hacky". I still have flashbacks though. :)
I would encourage you to lower your standards for publishing your code. Is there a "CPAN Unplugged" where lower standards are explicitly accepted and okay?
In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country? Thoughts?
A more fruitful question might be: what is the average family size in a country with these birthing habits?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An NDA would not and could not cover abuse, and I highly doubt it covers your impressions either (e.g. "it was terrible and the interviewers were all rude!"), so I don't really agree with your first point. For your second I can see where you're coming from, although at least in this case I don't see droves of people interviewing and then saying the process was terrible. But there should be (and perhaps is?) an easy w…
Buy me a beer and I'll tell you the story of my worst interview ever. I'm nice enough to the founder of that company not to name them here, but it was incredibly bad. In fact, it was so bad I later got a written apology for what happened.
One good interview trick I learned: First, you only ask one of these silly questions during the interview. And it should be one that makes the candidate sweat and think out loud a lot, but one where they'll eventually be successful -- I like the one where you ask the candidate to think of as many uses as possible for X and you just keep going until they run out of ideas. As soon as this question is over, the candidat…
I once had an interviewer suddenly ask me if I liked beer. My first reaction was to quickly guess what kind of answer he was looking for. Obviously, his goal was that to see if I was being honest or just trying to give the right answers. Anyways, I told him I liked beer :)
One good interview trick I learned: First, you only ask one of these silly questions during the interview. And it should be one that makes the candidate sweat and think out loud a lot, but one where they'll eventually be successful -- I like the one where you ask the candidate to think of as many uses as possible for X and you just keep going until they run out of ideas. As soon as this question is over, the candidat…
I once had an interviewer suddenly ask me if I liked beer. My first reaction was to quickly guess what kind of answer he was looking for. Obviously, his goal was that to see if I was being honest or just trying to give the right answers. Anyways, I told him I liked beer :)