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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

#81

Post by yajoe »

cletus wrote: post #36

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 o…

I've interviewed with Google twice, and both times I was so unhappy with the experiences I declined the offers. Many friends work at Google and are happy, so this seems like an instance of getting unlucky with the loops... but don't dismiss off the cuff.

The very first question I got in fall 2010 on a phone interview was "How many ping pong balls fit within a school bus?" The second question was "When would you use a virtual destructor in C++?" without C++ being on resume or confirming if I had any experience with it. I used C++ many years ago and could reason through, but I did walk away thinking how unfair the interviewer was. There were other small instances that led me to say no.

Then in fall 2011 at the Googleplex, my first question was "I'm XYZ and I worked on Google+. That's all you need to know about me. Why am I interviewing you?" It was pretty condescending, and if that was based on my resume then shame on me. If this had been at a bar I would have responded more colorfully, but during an interview all you can do is be polite and answer the question.

While I fully believe most of Google tries to be fair and reasonable during interviews, I've had two experiences where individuals were not. YMMV.

P.S. The bit-wise question sounds like the interviewer asking why UTF-8 is preferred over UTF-16 or something and how you would detect which encoding was used. Regardless of what language you know you should be able to answer this as it affects everyone on the web. At least, that's going to be my new question for interviewing people :)

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

#82

Post by TheCapn »

mquander wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

Further, a technical interview question is rarely designed to have you solve that question but show that you have an understanding of the subset of knowledge to solve that kind of question.

If they want you to solve bit manipulation questions they could come up with something terribly obscure and difficult to explain or they could give you one that can be solved by anyone with the basic knowledge of bitwise operators a bit of problem solving. Having to Google this answer either shows failure on your behalf or the inability to actually sit down and address the problem critically before running off to find help from others (who will often be unable to help you on actual problems)

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

#83

Post by thedufer »

TheCapn wrote: post #78

The best coders I've ever worked with rarely memorized the nuance little algorithms that they want you to regurgitate during these interviews. The ones that I know that are capable of this are terrible coworkers because they lack other necessary skills to function in an organization or team environment. This is anecdotal but sort of sticks with me. The interview processes used by these software giants weeds out the k…

"Knowing how to code a mergesort" is specifically not what they're looking for, in my experience. The idea is to come up with a problem that requires an interesting algorithm that very few people will know, and see how the candidate reasons their way to an answer.

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

#84

Post by utlanning »

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…

Many of these exotic/novelty interview processes are completely disrespectful of the candidates' time as well. In the past few months I've undertaken a few pretty "rigorous" application processes. A couple of Bay Area startups (I don't live in the Bay Area), and a bunch of other companies both locally and for remote working possibilities.

Startups seem to be the worst when it comes to turning the hiring process into a huge time sink for the candidate. At its worst was one of the Bay Area startups. They outline a 7- or 8-phase interview process. There are independent programming exercises, pair programming over Skype, phone interviews, then at the end they have the candidate in for "cultural fit evaluation" which turned into a six-hour interview gauntlet after flying across the country that morning.

Another bit of inconsideration of my time and my actual job where I work to make money was a company that wanted me to come in in the middle of the afternoon on a workday for 2 hours to "meet the team". I told them I did not feel comfortable leaving the office at 1:30 and go AWOL/take a half day of vacation so I could interview at another place. I wound up backing out of the interview process because of their unwillingness to pick another meeting time, even over lunch.

Then finally tomorrow I am meeting with a company, and they told me yesterday afternoon that they'd like me to prepare a presentation on something I'm passionate about (they liked Jeff Atwood's blog post[1] I guess). This actually I don't mind at all, and think it's a great idea... but I need more than a couple of days' notice. I work 8-10 hours a day, commute a couple more, and by the time I get home I've got 3 hours to spend with my kid, relax, eat dinner, etc. In that 3 hours I also need to prepare a talk on a topic I'm passionate about.

To me that last one is emblematic of these interview processes: good ideas, but not structured with much consideration toward respecting the time of the candidate. I get that hiring the right person is crucial for small teams, no doubt, but I'm getting tired enough of jumping through hoops that I'm not really interested in doing it anymore, even for a great job where I know I can make an awesome contribution.

1 http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/how-to-hire-a-progr...

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

#85

Post by strlen »

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…

> My girlfriend is in the medical profession.

Ask your girlfriend about her rotations (where students literally cry after being screamed at while working insane hours), MCATs, and how difficult it is to get into any medical school. Job interviews don't have to be as difficult as credentials are both required (there are folks at Google and Facebook without CS degrees -- and that's a good thing, obviously) and are difficult to get irrespective of where you go to school (CS programs wary widely, as this is still a young discipline unlike biology).

Pharmacy is also similar, with a few caveats: pay is somewhat below what a software engineer can expect mid-career (~$120,000 for retail pharmacy, somewhat less for pharma research), residency is not required, but rotations are still insane, and schools are still selective.

In some ways, I think it would benefit the patients if the medical profession was somewhat more meritocratic and less focused on pushing students to their breaking point during rotations and residency, which continues because "that's the way it has always been done". It still somewhat scares me just _what_ a sleep-deprived student could do to a patient due to the very basics of sleep deprivation.

[Full disclosure: I work at Facebook and have dated a pharm student/pharmacist.]

Of course "in the medical profession" doesn't equal "doctor or pharmacist". Likewise, "software engineer" doesn't equal "software engineer at Google or Facebook": there are plenty of firms that don't use coding interviews. Nobody says that to be a software engineer, you have to work at a licensed firm that has to (as part of licensing) use a certain hiring process, require certain credentials, etc...

(This also isn't an endorsement of all modern interview practices: it's particularly silly for startups to cargo-cult interview questions they've overheard at other companies without measuring their effectiveness and calibrating candidates' response.)

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

#86

Post by utlanning »

Cyndre wrote: post #72
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 can't believe the general attitude programmers are putting forward. Here is a person in the medical field that requires at least twice the schooling, huge entry barriers etc getting an hour interview. We are subjected to full day flights, multiple phone interviews etc. She deals with life, not code. This tells me one of two things. Either our hiring practices are severally broken, or its harder to program then be a…

I think there's a cargo cult mentality around hiring process. Hiring the right person is hard, and hiring the wrong person can be devastating, so everyone's looking for a magic elixir.

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

#87

Post by laconian »

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…

Employers are risk averse with their hiring and so, in the absence of compelling evidence, they will choose to not hire a candidate. Pasting in an answer from somewhere else turns the question (and possibly the whole interview) into a no-op waste of everybody's time. It just doesn't provide the interviewer with good data to make a decision.

My word of advice to you is this: study harder next time, be honest when they hit a gap in your knowledge (maybe they will offer to fill in that gap!), and don't Google on the phone. Interviews are like tests at school - closed book, unless stated otherwise.

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

#88

Post by ajross »

alecbenzer wrote: post #47
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…

Reading stuff like that generally makes me feel much less insecure about my college. It used to be that hearing that someone was from an ivy-league/ivy-league equivalent would make me think they were really, really smart. (narcissism warning) I've come to realize that on average I'm probably about as smart as people from more prestigious universities, if not smarter, despite being an MIT/Columbia/Princeton/Cornell re…

There's a lot of spread, as in all things. I did the Ivy League thing many (yikes, many!) years ago, and met plenty of genius types and a handful of dunces. And in programming, the divide between people who can learn the subject well enough to pass the course and those who can Get Things Done is very pronounced even at top schools.

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

#89

Post by phamilton »

cletus wrote: post #36

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 o…

I've been asked bit twiddling in O(log n) questions before and it was in no way supposed to be a test of my knowledge. It was a way for the interviewer to evaluate my ability to not know how to answer a question. It took me almost an hour to solve, but it gave the interviewer a pretty clear insight into my ability to approach something new.

In my experience the best interview questions I've had have been situations where I was asked a question about something I was not familiar with. The interviewer then gave me a 5 minute overview of the things I need to know (like which synchronization methods are available in pthreads, for instance) and then give me the chance to apply the things I just learned. I think most employers care far more about how quickly you can pick up new things than they care about what you already know, and it left me with the feeling that they gave me an offer because of what I can do, rather than what I already know.

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

#90

Post by calibraxis »

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's amusing to think that someone may be subverting my silly interview questions. If you were being cleverer than the interviewer, I suppose that's a fair way to succeed.
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