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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

#61

Post by alasdair_young »

archangel_one wrote: post #32
libria wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't out and out asked, but it certainly came up when trying to optimize a solution.

NOTE: if you are a Java developer, make sure you remember that bytes are signed! (I have no idea who thought that one was a good idea)

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

#62

Post by mzarate06 »

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…

A handful of candidates I interviewed not long ago from nearby universities (Austin area) had Java backgrounds, although C++ still seems to be pretty common.

We may include generic coding questions that can be answered in any language of the candidate's choosing, but we always try to include a couple in languages that the position targets.

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

#63

Post by mmahemoff »

why-el wrote: post #25
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…

I doubt open source is a requirement at any of these companies, but it's a huge asset for any job application if you have some good work to show. It stands to reason that if you're going to be spending most of your day writing to code and interacting with coders, people will be interested to see if you have a good repo and handle issues well. So a good Github repo is a huge asset to any job seeker in this industry. It will also help you to be approached by quality companies if your project's popular/high-profile, as savvy recruiters will look at this kind of thing.

And, you're likely to be asked about open source in your interview. So if you can say intelligent things about it and show you care about it, it might improve your interview performance too.

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

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)…

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by mquander »

tptacek wrote: post #45
mquander wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're asking a question that is effectively, correctly, and decisively addressed by a single Google query made in real time during the interview, the fault is with the question, not with the candidate.

I basically agree (although it sounds like in this case, the candidate only Googled for help on some part of the question, so who knows.)

But the fault is still with the candidate. It's unethical to get external help in an interview without telling the interviewer what you're doing, full stop, end of story. It doesn't matter if you don't think much of the question. Doing so screws up the interviewer's ability to actually compare you meaningfully to their other candidates.

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

#68

Post by mbell »

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…

> But luckily we have plenty of people that know Ruby/JS that I've never had to do that...

My take on hiring is that I don't care what languages the person knows. Being versed in what we're using is a plus, but not a strong plus. I'm far more interested in how the person thinks and tackles problems than I am that they are expert in "stack X". If you get the right people, picking up a stack/language isn't rocket science.

In the same vein, googling for answers is fine. I'd rather a person to whom I can say "we need to do X", when they have no prior knowledge of "X", but yet can figure it out (well), and be the new company "expert" on X.

I bring it back to the way my EE school operated. Tests never were about material we covered in class, they were always about applying that knowledge to a new problem that has its root issues in what we discussed in class, you'd have to apply what your learned in class to a completely new situation, often in multiple ways, to come up with a reasonable answer.

The only problem is, that to make this work, you can't give out interview questions that are literally a google query away. You have to come up with open-ended or slightly obscure questions where they have to go google 5 different topics, combine the information, and come up with a reasonable answer.

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

#69

Post by BlackJack »

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…

I'm a rising junior at Yale, and I know Sean well and we both took systems programming together. We definitely covered bit manipulation and bit tricks, as well as number representation and lots of other stuff.

Sean's an incredibly bright guy but he's more interested in building world-changing apps and web dev. as opposed to low-level systems programming. There are other classes here where you have to code in assembly and do all sorts of bit manipulation (OS's comes to mind). The core CS sequence in our school is also in C, which differs notably from other places that use Python, Java, etc.

For anyone who wants to learn more about bit manipulation, Henry Warren's "Hacker's Delight" is a terrific book (http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S-Warren/dp/0201...).

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

#70

Post by socialist_coder »

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

I also have a Wordpress blog on a Linode and I'm curious if you tried any caching plugins or Cloudflare before resizing?
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