41–50 of 94 posts
A good source for the history of these questions and interview style, as well as a bevy of sample questions, can be found in "How Would You Move Mt. Fuji?" http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts-Puzzle/dp/...
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If you can comment, I would be interested on the standard of coding that successful candidates exhibit once employed. Personally, if I could only ask a candidate one question, it would be something that involved writing code. Too many times I've seen candidates with impressive resumes, technical knowledge, or conversation skills, fail miserably to implement trivial (e.g. stricmp) functions.
On the other hand, I don't understand how non-technical interviewers can tolerate not knowing how good a non-technical applicant is for the same reasons you mentioned. Do teams ever recruit athletes without watching them play?
"One subject in Outliers is what Gladwell calls the "mismatch problem," which refers to his idea that the qualifications which people look for/companies require in candidates when hiring often do not necessarily have any correlation to successful job performance - and often leads to poor hiring decisions."
He's also written on the problems in scouting athletes & picking teachers in the New Yorker.
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probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all). In any highly skilled profession, 95% of the time someone with very little of your skill could do your job. The valuable part is that you can also be counted on for that 5% as well. Most of my time at Google hasn't involved any substantial theoretical work. One time though, I did have to come up with a algorithm for comp…
I'd like to believe this story (haven't found an authoritative source yet) that I heard once from a professional speaker of the FedEx main processing facility in Memphis. One day it completely stopped dead - usually it is controlled mayhem with the packages and machines running - the silence was deafening - thousands of dollars lost every minute. They brought in the best expert they could find. He investigated and we…
A woman walks up to Picasso, later in life, as he sits at a cafe table. "Could you draw me a sketch?" she asks, thinking she'll make a quick buck. "I can pay you for it."
Picasso shrugs, says "sure", and quickly scratches out a little something on a napkin. "That'll be $10,000," he says.
"$10,000! But it only took you a few seconds!"
"Just the drawing of it took a few seconds," Picasso replies. "Learning how took my entire life."
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No, it's not. It's a trivia question. Nobody uses such techniques any more because looking at raw memory dumps is not the right way to debug these days.
Using a "magic marker" like this doesn't imply looking at a raw memory dump (which, however, is still needed in several places Google is involved e.g., kernel hacking, embedded devices). For example, I used it myself when debugging an issue where our processes morphed into un-killable zombies. I was dealing with crash dumps, where I was walking through the process list in the kernel (it's a doubly linked list) in cra…
If you want to find engineers with talent then you need to do a lot more leg-work in plumbing their knowledge, experience, and skill than merely ticking off a checklist of shibboleths.
P.S. Personally I love hacker jargon and lore, I like knowing about scratch monkeys, core memory, the usenet cabal, and even 0xDEADBEEF, but I wouldn't take ignorance of those things to translate to ignorance of engineering fundamentals or of passion in software development.
Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
I know this attitude won't win very many friends, but I wouldn't accept a position where I wasn't asked to write code during the interview. I'm going to be writing code for money and they don't want me to prove that I can before hand? That's like hiring a "farmer" from the inner-city.
From anecdotal but first-hand experience (went through a couple of interview rounds), Google interviewers indeed don't ask the questions on that list. But the questions they do ask are hard and often academic - as in, you have likely never run into them in a real-world scenario before and you likely never will. At first I was like 'wow, Google must be populated with demi-gods'. Then I spoke to some Googlers off the r…
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probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all). In any highly skilled profession, 95% of the time someone with very little of your skill could do your job. The valuable part is that you can also be counted on for that 5% as well. Most of my time at Google hasn't involved any substantial theoretical work. One time though, I did have to come up with a algorithm for comp…
I'd like to believe this story (haven't found an authoritative source yet) that I heard once from a professional speaker of the FedEx main processing facility in Memphis. One day it completely stopped dead - usually it is controlled mayhem with the packages and machines running - the silence was deafening - thousands of dollars lost every minute. They brought in the best expert they could find. He investigated and we…
http://pinds.com/2007/05/27/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/
http://www.guidancechannel.com/default.aspx?M=a&index=65...
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/agile/sessions/sess...
http://pocky.tumblr.com/post/49520543/knowing-which-screw-to...
Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
Would you consider the primary output and product of your company software? Perhaps you are just working in a position creating software in a non-software company.
What about all the plugging for that interview site that suspiciously only have google account login? Nobody noticed that? Also, glass door has better content.
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No, it's not. It's a trivia question. Nobody uses such techniques any more because looking at raw memory dumps is not the right way to debug these days.
The "right way" depends on the task at hand and the tools you have at your disposal. For any type of low-level work, being able to view, understand, and observe regions of memory is pretty much essential.