Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
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Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#2everytime I try the link I get a timeout request!
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#3everytime I try the link I get a timeout request!
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#4everytime I try the link I get a timeout request!
Wordpress will do that to you when your site gets any type of traffic.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#5I applied to a bunch of software engineering internships last fall and was amazed by the variation from company to company in terms of how I was dealt with as an intern candidate.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#6Great overview of the different interview styles being used. I cannot say I am convinced you always get the best people through.
I don't have any aspirations to interview at Google, but did stumble across an 'Google Interview' book at the local bookstore. It makes great reading.
WSJ did an article on Google interviews late last year, including answers. Here are the questions (click the link below if you want answers).
"1. What's the next number in this sequence: 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66 … ?
2. You're in a car with a helium balloon on a string that is tied to the floor. The windows are closed. When you step on the gas pedal, what happens to the balloon—does it move forward, move backward, or stay put?
3. Using only a four-minute hourglass and a seven-minute hourglass, measure exactly nine minutes—without the process taking longer than nine minutes.
4. A book has N pages, numbered the usual way, from 1 to N. The total number of digits in the page numbers is 1,095. How many pages does the book have?
5. A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?"
[Answers] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020455230457711...
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#7Wow we had different experiences. I only interviewed at start-ups and none of the companies I talked to asked me any ANSI C questions. I had some interesting Python do-in-whatever questions at one company (which I did all in Python) and on the other I went to them with something I had already made of their unofficial platform and skipped programming challenges.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#8Do kids still learn C in college? It's been my experience that new grads are primarily taught in Java...
That said, we do all our interviewing in the langage I expect them to be developing in - namely Ruby, JavaScript, and/or SQL. Is that the norm or do people still interview candidates using, say C or Java, for Ruby/Python/JS positions?
I suppose if we were interviewing someone who didn't know Ruby but knew Java, we could fallback to that. But luckily we have plenty of people that know Ruby/JS that I've never had to do that...
Although you don't have pointer stuff, you can do really interesting things with Ruby and JS.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#9everytime I try the link I get a timeout request!
the traffic spike from HN crashed my server. i'm resizing my linode instance now, so the site should hopefully be up again in a few minutes
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#10"Hi, I'm Sean Haufler, rising senior at Yale [...] Position: Software Engineer Intern [...] I didn’t have much experience manipulating individual bits"
Sometimes I want to cry for what the world has become. At least I can be content knowing I have job security. (To be fair: the ability to google the answer quickly and implement it is exactly the skill that kind of test is supposed to screen for. Still, three years at school and no bit math?)
Edit: several of the responses have interpreted this as my sniping at the author. I'm not (he got the question right, after all!). I'm depressed at the status of software engineering and computer science education, such that dealing with the in-memory representation of data is treated as an "obscure" skill that comes up only on job interviews.