How is "What's the angle between clock hands when it's 3:15?" a trick question? It's not 0.
It's kind of a trick question because it's trivial unless you forget that the hour clock hand doesn't move?
My Job Interview at Google (2008)
51–60 of 169 posts
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#52I recently had an interview at a taxi firm that followed this format. One two three pre-interviews followed by a day of 5 grueling 1 hour interviews. I didn't get the role. Apparently the frontend guy I had the first interview of the days five was concerned about my technical skills. I mean, I find it insulting, having worked for the last 12+ years as a developer to be told that there were "concerns about your techni…
I understand your frustration, but it seems clear to me that there is difference in what you consider high level technical skills, and what others might perceive as such. In a highly paid position, both selling yourself and your ideas, and smoothing out differences such as this one, are expected from the employee. While I believe that with your experience, you have accomplished a high degree of strong delivery... You…
The problem is that this whole dealing with people thing isn’t solely dependent on yourself, the people you are dealing with need to go along.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#53I recently had an interview at a taxi firm that followed this format. One two three pre-interviews followed by a day of 5 grueling 1 hour interviews. I didn't get the role. Apparently the frontend guy I had the first interview of the days five was concerned about my technical skills. I mean, I find it insulting, having worked for the last 12+ years as a developer to be told that there were "concerns about your techni…
I've never failed a take-home test (out of 7) and I do it by doing things no reasonable person would do for production code.
I will write a comment for every line (within reason). I will write an entire page of documentation for a one hour project. I will write a test to check for the presence of a title in the rendered page. I will make sure to host it on AWS or Azure and give them instructions on how to upload it themselves (even if any dev should know how to throw a git repo onto the cloud).
They seem to just be looking that you can do things to a certain level of excellence (even if practically unreasonable).
The most recent take-home test was one hour of code and two hours of window dressing. Totally absurd, but I keep doing fine on that step.
EDIT: If you are talking about the Hackerranks, those are frustrating simply because you can't clarify requirements. I remember back in university that we gathered in groups to do them to just cover as many test cases as a team as possible.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#54Sounds like a Quiz, not Interview :)
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#55>At first I thought I would be applying for a software developer position but after we went through my skillset, the recruiter concluded that I would better fit as an SRE. I've got to say, I've been contacted by recruiters for Google a few times, and it has always been for SRE roles. I got the distinct impression that it's less about whether my skillset fitted being an SRE, but more that they need lots of SREs and ha…
Because a SRE is just a software engineer that’s always on call?
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#56I recently had an interview at a taxi firm that followed this format. One two three pre-interviews followed by a day of 5 grueling 1 hour interviews. I didn't get the role. Apparently the frontend guy I had the first interview of the days five was concerned about my technical skills. I mean, I find it insulting, having worked for the last 12+ years as a developer to be told that there were "concerns about your techni…
I find that the interviewing style of a company is often very telling of its' general work culture. You've missed our on opportunities and had to settle in less prestigious jobs, but are you sure they would've fulfilled you any better.
I tend to agree with this view - if the interviewing experience (for you) was awful you probably dont want to work there.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe Google scale isn't for me. Google employs the very elite of the elite. If you're working there you're probably at the very top of your field. Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.
> Google employs the very elite of the elite Do all people with a @google.com email address keep telling themselves that?
I’ve never worked at Google. Have you done one of their interviews?
How do you think the world leading research results that they do without world leading people?
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#58Reading that stuff always makes me feel incredibly stupid (or rather clueless). I wouldn't be able to answer most of those questions off the top of my head. Including this weird clock hand question (which is probably some trivial math that might or might not have been taught to me more than a decade ago and which I never ever actually applied since). Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfull…
I feel the same way, except I think the clock-hand question is quite straightforward. Except for that one, just like every other time this sort of thing is posted almost every question is either: 1. About fairly low-level details of computer networking, or 2. What would you do if your data doesn’t fit in memory? I’ve been a successful developer for years and never had to deal with either of those problems.
It's been the same experience for me. I've been successful as a developer and yet have never encountered many of these problems that interviews in the past demanded I know.
Ultimately if I end up encountering a problem like that in my career, the honest answer is to pick up a book or begin reading through articles on solutions. Sadly that kind of answer seems to be frowned upon because it's better for you to lie about what you know than to admit you don't know the solution and figure out ways to rectify it.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#59Reading that stuff always makes me feel incredibly stupid (or rather clueless). I wouldn't be able to answer most of those questions off the top of my head. Including this weird clock hand question (which is probably some trivial math that might or might not have been taught to me more than a decade ago and which I never ever actually applied since). Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfull…
The clock should be simple -- the hour hand is a quarter of its way to 4 o'clock, so: 360*((1/12)/4) = 7.5 degrees.
Is the trick that some people think it’s zero or something?
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#60Ah screw it, I'll be the boy in "the emperor's new clothes". Google sucks! They try to put themselves on cloud9 and look at us "mortals" like we should be grateful for 8 interviews, LOL.
Age has caught up with them, they just refuse to acknowledge it. They are no longer the "hottest" company on the planet yet they keep behaving like they are.
To me personally, Google has become tne old IBM, a giant tech behemoth who cannot move normally and is riding on a single product and old glory.
I would rather work at Microsoft right now than at Google (although I am aware I don't have "qualifications" for neither"