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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

#91

Post by roguecoder »

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…

MIT is vastly different than Yale: it is a vocational school in the best sense of the world. Possibly slightly less so now that 6.001 isn't LISP-based, but I still can't imagine a MIT CS grad not understanding bits.

People coming out of a liberal arts college I tend to expect to know algorithms, state machines, possibly data structures, probably C++ and/or Python and have next-to-zero useful code-writing experience unless they got it elsewhere.

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

#92

Post by tptacek »

TheCapn wrote: post #82
mquander wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ridiculous. The question here isn't "how would you design X" or "estimate the amount of time to do Y" or "explain how you'd debug Z" (all infinitely better interview questions, by the way). It was "how do I perform a particular bit manipulation in C". Google is a fine resource for questions like that.

I also sincerely believe that the more you know about C bit manipulation (particularly the kind of manipulation you need to, e.g., figure out whether a UTF-8 encoding is nonminimal), the less unreasonable that Google search seems.

I've been a C programmer since 1994 and interviewed lord knows how many C programmers and I'd never flunk someone for looking this up, nor would I care if they told me if they had looked it up. Obviously, 'cletus feels differently, but I think he's wrong.

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

#93

Post by daenz »

mquander wrote: post #39
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe if interviewing for developer positions wasn't so fucked in the first place, a candidate wouldn't feel like telling the interviewer that he used google as an aide would diminish his chances.

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

#94

Post by phamilton »

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 think an interview would be completely useless if there no friction in hiring and firing. But it takes a while to get an employee trained and up to speed. It takes even longer to replace a fired employee, as you either scrap what they were working on or you try to get their replacement to pick up where they left off.

More friction in hiring and firing results in more careful hiring practices. I'm not sure how much friction there is in the medical profession but I'm guessing there's less friction there than in software development (not counting politics).

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

#95

Post by dpark »

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…

I've never understood these vague hand-wavey claims about it being more important to know when and how to use X or a modified version of X than to be able to implement X (here X is mergesort, but could just as easily be some bit twiddling or a TCP connection or just about anything). How can someone simultaneously claim that they understand an algorithm well enough to know when best to apply it (and when to modify it!) and also admit that they can't actually implement it.

If you can't muddle through a basic implementation of mergesort 45 minutes, I can't believe that you are actually in a position to know when mergesort is a good or bad option, and certainly not that you are capable of writing a custom version for some domain-specific needs.

If someone wants to claim that it's simply not necessary to know mergesort, that's a reasonable stance (though I disagree). But to claim to truly understand it without being able to implement it seems like a bit of a fib.

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

#96

Post by mkopinsky »

utlanning wrote: post #84
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…

Re: presentation

I was once given this requirement for a scientific computing-type position at an industrial research lab. Most of their applicants were PhD-types, for whom giving an hour-long presentation on their last six years of research was par for the course. For me, it meant I had to scramble to put together a PowerPoint of my undergrad curriculum and research opportunities.

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

#97

Post by utlanning »

mkopinsky wrote: post #96
utlanning wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Re: presentation I was once given this requirement for a scientific computing-type position at an industrial research lab. Most of their applicants were PhD-types, for whom giving an hour-long presentation on their last six years of research was par for the course. For me, it meant I had to scramble to put together a PowerPoint of my undergrad curriculum and research opportunities.

Yeah, that sucks. Fortunately my presentation doesn't need to be an hour long. I still haven't settled on a topic. :P

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

#98

Post by yzhengyu »

alasdair_young wrote: post #61
archangel_one wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I can't remember it, but there was an interview where Gosling said it was for simplicity.

And rather amusingly (and if I remember correctly...) the char data type in Java is not really the equivalent of char in the other C derivatives.

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

#99

Post by mkopinsky »

pashamur wrote: post #49
citricsquid wrote: post #41

> A mediocre programmer could memorize the examples given in Programming Interviews Exposed and do very well in a Bloomberg interview. or in a phone interview just google for an answer to the question they're being asked! oh wait that's exactly what they did do... How is using google to find an answer to a question okay and knowing the answers before hand not? crazy.

I've been asked a question in a phone screen the answer to which I had read on the glassdoor page for that company. A lot of people/companies recycle questions on a regular basis.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is a glassdoor page? I have not come across this term in the past.

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

#100

Post by nessus42 »

yajoe wrote: post #81
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…

I find questions like the ping pong ball question rather trying, but I guess there's a long precedent for it. My understanding is that you're supposed to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation that gets you within an order of magnitude or so of the correct answer.

One problem with questions like this is that unless you know that you're supposed to just do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, they can leave you completely flabbergasted, as the questions sound as if they are asking for an accurate answer, which you'd have no reasonable way of determining.

Also, for me, asking me to do any math at all while someone is staring over my shoulder, or what have you, is going to cause me to make mistakes like sqrt(36) == 9, and I have a degree from MIT. Consequently, I hate this style of interview with a passion.

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