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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

#31

Post by hack_edu »

mquander wrote: post #26
hack_edu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, but I fired the last guy who billed me for that time he needed to re-discover the quadratic equation.

An interview should evaluate the skills one needs for the job, not puzzles that make you feel smart. Were I interviewing someone, I would happily accept an answer something along the lines of "that's been solved already, I would use an existing library so I can move on and solve my real problem" with regard to bitwise operators.

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

#32

Post by archangel_one »

libria wrote: post #19
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…

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...

FWIW, Google generally expect engineers to know bit manipulation. Certainly I was asked some, I don't know if everyone necessarily is but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

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

#33

Post by siavosh »

ajross wrote: post #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…

He said 'didn’t have much experience manipulating individual bits'. I think it might be worth giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's covered it in class but hasn't extensively worked with them.

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

#35

Post by shaufler »

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.

I would have to disagree that what I did was "cheating".

Software engineers are given problems to solve, and their job is to solve these problems efficiently. You don't always have the solution to every problem off of the top of your head. That's why programmers use Google, StackOverflow, and documentation as resources. The primary skill employers are looking for is learning how to learn new things quickly. And I believe I demonstrated that skill in my interview.

Also, I declined to mention this in the article, but after I finished that UTF encoding problem in my interview, the interviewer asked where I got the check-bit macro (he saw me paste it in). I told him I got it from StackOverflow. It didn't seem to concern him.

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

#36

Post by cletus »

Bizarre.

Yes, Googling an answer to a Google interview question from SO is in fact verboten. A seasoned interview can normally pick that up anyway. But a note to potential Google interviewees: if you're caught doing this it will pretty much disqualify your application. We're interested in how you think and how you solve problems, not what you can pass off as knowing.

Interestingly, he mentions the NDA and then goes on to broadly describe the question anyway. If all this is true, I'm not a fan of bit-twiddling questions. It's something you either know or you don't (like reversing bits in O(log n)). This is meant to be an interview not a trivia quiz. I get mad every time I see those kinds of questions asked.

Anyway, another note: if it's on your CV, it's fair game to be asked about. So if you put that you wrote a low of embedded C/C++ in such a way that you'd be expected to do a lot of bit-twiddling then yes, bit-twiddling is absolutely fair game (IMHO).

If however you put that you've only done Python/Django, Clojure and Scala then it's a stupid question to ask (IMHO).

The second phone interview if accurate disappoints me as well. Perhaps this was a product of the position you applied for or what you put on your CV?

As far as intern matching goes, yes there is absolutely room for improvement there.

Note to other commenters: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop spreading this nonsense that Google asks engineering interviewees stupid questions like "a man drove his car to a hotel and lost his fortune, what happened?" This is NOT what we do. The sooner people stop spreading this misinformation the better.

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

#37

Post by dfc »

mquander wrote: post #26
hack_edu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Looking up everything during an interview is a principled position? What principle are you standing up for? The right to google?

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

#38

Post by eta_carinae »

shaufler wrote: post #35
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.

I would have to disagree that what I did was "cheating". Software engineers are given problems to solve, and their job is to solve these problems efficiently. You don't always have the solution to every problem off of the top of your head. That's why programmers use Google, StackOverflow, and documentation as resources. The primary skill employers are looking for is learning how to learn new things quickly. And I bel…

It is cheating.

Interviewing is different from a real job. You need to show you can do more than look up solutions on the web.

I can't blame you for trying to cheat your way into a job and I certainly blame the interviewer for not seeing through your cheat, but make no mistake: you cheated.

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

#39

Post by mquander »

tptacek wrote: post #30
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.

It's absolutely cheating if you don't tell the interviewer. If a candidate doesn't know X, then just tell me, and I'll explain X! That's quicker than Googling and they'll get a better answer. But the whole point is to figure out which Xs they know, for many values of X.

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

#40

Post by emperorcezar »

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…

I do web development, so arbitrary algorithms questions seem to me to be not applicable to what I do 99% of the time. The other 1% I can easily look up the answer, or at least look up the details I need to find the answer.
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