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Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

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Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#21

Post by jrockway »

throwaway1979 wrote: post #18
jrockway wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Work experience and degrees very much do count. You need those, and you need to prove you know what someone with that experience and degree should know. Nothing wrong with that. (Some programs don't cover algorithms in enough detail. Some people forget them after not using them for five years. Experience does not imply growth in all areas.)

I wish enough of us would tell prospective employers that we won't submit to an unreasonable hiring process.

I like this hiring process and I would implement the same thing at my own company. There is so much software that needs to be written, though, that someone who refuses to "submit to an unreasonable hiring process" need not do so. Just grab a job from rent-a-coder and relax!

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#22

Post by [deleted] »

laconian wrote: post #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.

[deleted]

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#23

Post by MattRogish »

jrockway wrote: post #17
MattRogish wrote: post #8

Do 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" an…

I'm not saying being a polyglot is bad - it's certainly very awesome and desirable; but if your interview process is all in C, you're gonna turn away folks that can't do it. That seems suboptimal to me, although if you're FogCreek I guess you get so many people applying you can make C literacy a requirement.

I learned C++ back in, oh, 1996. I haven't coded in it much since about 2001. I'd fail virtually any C++ exam today unless I spent a lot of time relearning my C++.

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#24

Post by luigi »

shaufler wrote: post #9
jamalkhan wrote: post #2

everytime 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

Caching is your friend:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#25

Post by why-el »

throwaway1979 wrote: post #11

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 st…

I am really, really interested to hear from senior developers about this. Especially their comments on the growing trend of requiring open source experience. (I for one thing don't have any open source, most of my projects are locked in the university and I currently intern at a company building cool things which, well, I can't open source).

Update: I don't have a problem with this really. I am in fact trying to make some time to code, but I don't like how this can sometimes be required.

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#26

Post by mquander »

hack_edu wrote: post #20
laconian wrote: post #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.

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.

Absolutely. That's why I paid my smart classmates to do all my take-home tests in school; it's an efficient, effective way to get the right answers!

I don't know if you interview people, but I do, and it's hard. I try hard to come up with questions that probe people's knowledge in specific ways and help discriminate between large ranges of ability. It's fucked up to try to ruin the information I'm getting by cheating without telling me.

If you hold the principled position that looking everything up during an interview is a reasonable way to demonstrate your competence, then you should come out and tell me that's what you're doing, so that I can make a decision which isn't based on lies of omission.

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#27

Post by eta_carinae »

sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #6

Great 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)…

Brain teasers of this kind were banned at Google circa 2006.

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#28

Post by jrockway »

MattRogish wrote: post #23
jrockway wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" an…

I'm not saying being a polyglot is bad - it's certainly very awesome and desirable; but if your interview process is all in C, you're gonna turn away folks that can't do it. That seems suboptimal to me, although if you're FogCreek I guess you get so many people applying you can make C literacy a requirement. I learned C++ back in, oh, 1996. I haven't coded in it much since about 2001. I'd fail virtually any C++ exam…

I can't get to the original article, but I assume that this is documented there. Yes, I think it's silly to require proficiency in a certain language. Google does not have this requirement. You must know a programming language well enough to be an expert, but it doesn't have to be Java/C++/Python/Go.

Also, FWIW, Google intern interviews and full-time interviews are completely different. Interns must interview like everyone else after their internship to be converted to full-time employees.

Re: Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc

#30

Post by tptacek »

laconian wrote: post #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.

Looking up bit manipulation on Google isn't cheating. Sorry.
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