My girlfriend is in the medical profession. She's gotten job offers after 1 hour conversations. The last job interview process I went through had 3 separate phone interviews (each with coding questions) before they were to fly me over for a full day interview. She was pretty surprised at how intensive the process was. I have a CS degree from a top-10 school and have 5+ years of work experience. This is the kind of stuff that makes me sad to be in software.
Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#12Great 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)…
FWIW, these questions have no relation to any questions that are asked in engineering interviews at Google. We mostly focus on software design, implementation, and algorithms. (SREs get some UNIX/networking questions, SETs get refactoring questions, and so on. And some interviewers like math questions.)
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#13Great 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)…
The explanation given in wsj for problem 2 is totally wrong. The balloon will do the same as a person in the car (nod backwards), only less pronounced due to air resistance.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#14My girlfriend is in the medical profession. She's gotten job offers after 1 hour conversations. The last job interview process I went through had 3 separate phone interviews (each with coding questions) before they were to fly me over for a full day interview. She was pretty surprised at how intensive the process was. I have a CS degree from a top-10 school and have 5+ years of work experience. This is the kind of st…
I've gotten most of my programming jobs with a quick chat. The bigger companies set a higher bar because they don't have any pre-existing knowledge of the candidates like smaller companies do. Google gets tens of thousands of resumes that all look essentially the same. A CS degree and 5 years of experience doesn't narrow things down much, so it's simplest to just ask the candidates a bit about programming and see how they respond.
I think this process, while annoying, is worth it. I don't want to risk having to work with someone whose competence with respect to software engineering has not been verified in a controlled environment. I've done it before and it meant every time I said something like "state machine" or "graph", I had to explain what state machines or graphs were. And at Google, I don't have to do this. The amount of shared knowledge is amazingly high which makes interaction much more productive.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#15Great 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)…
This is bullshit. None of these could be a real google interview question.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#16"Simultaneously, I quickly Googled ‘how to use bitwise operators in C’ and found this wonderful code snippet on StackOverflow that made the problem easy to solve. I wrote a solution with time to spare, and the interviewer seemed content with my answer."
Wow. NB to all interviewers: this guy's a cheat.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#17Do 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…
Learning programming languages is easy. I did all my Google interviews in Perl. Now I write all my code in Java. The skills transfer easily.
I personally would prefer someone who is good at multiple programming languages. People that spend all their time in Java ignore subtle things about how computers work that C programmers are intimately aware of. People that never use scripting languages assume they are "toys" and waste many hours writing "production quality" throwaway applications. So it's good to have experience with everything, but experience can be obtained after hire too :)
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#18My girlfriend is in the medical profession. She's gotten job offers after 1 hour conversations. The last job interview process I went through had 3 separate phone interviews (each with coding questions) before they were to fly me over for a full day interview. She was pretty surprised at how intensive the process was. I have a CS degree from a top-10 school and have 5+ years of work experience. This is the kind of st…
I've gotten most of my programming jobs with a quick chat. The bigger companies set a higher bar because they don't have any pre-existing knowledge of the candidates like smaller companies do. Google gets tens of thousands of resumes that all look essentially the same. A CS degree and 5 years of experience doesn't narrow things down much, so it's simplest to just ask the candidates a bit about programming and see how…
Let me add why this makes me sad.
Most companies want to hire the best people, and employees want to work with the same. Why doesn't work experience or education count for anything in our field? Yes ... I've met idiots with CS degrees who can't code FizBuzz to save their life. I've also met idiots who have aced interviews at Microsoft, Google and Amazon by cramming on algorithms books for 2 weeks.
We've really gone off the deep-end with interviews. If you've been a professional developer for 5+ years, do you really remember the details of your algorithms course? Competent devs can figure out the details of this stuff in minutes ... something not conducive to the high-stress environment of interviews. And this is not even considering how much time both parties waste in this process.
Given how smart we are (i.e. software geeks), it boggles my mind how silly our operating procedures are. Just like I've told students that they should never accept unpaid internships on principle, I wish enough of us would tell prospective employers that we won't submit to an unreasonable hiring process.
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#19Do 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…
I'd say Joel Spolsky is somewhat unique in this, although Google has had bias for C++ in the past [1]. Spolsky has long been an advocate for expecting developers to be competent in C [2].
[1] http://www.cforcoding.com/2010/07/my-google-interview.html
[2] http://scott.yang.id.au/2008/04/joel-spolsky-and-jeff-atwood...
Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
#20" Simultaneously, I quickly Googled ‘how to use bitwise operators in C’ and found this wonderful code snippet on StackOverflow that made the problem easy to solve. I wrote a solution with time to spare, and the interviewer seemed content with my answer." Wow. NB to all interviewers: this guy's a cheat.
NB to all interviewers: this girl has knows how to solve problems efficiently, effectively, and in a manner appropriate to their role. I would not be pleased if my employee always tried to re-write what has been solved and perfected decades prior by someone smarter than her.