101–110 of 123 posts
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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.
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.
What do you make of Knuth's quote about how many people implement binary search wrong? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Search#Implementation_is...
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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
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…
When I interviewed at Google, they let me pick the language. I did some C++, some Java, and C#. As long as both you and the interviewer can understand it, they don't care about the language. They want to maximize your comfort.
When I got hired, I ended up doing JS full-time. Google assumes you can pick up a new language.
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…
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Yeah, that sucks. Fortunately my presentation doesn't need to be an hour long. I still haven't settled on a topic. :P
Nah, it didn't suck. One of the strongest "soft" skills I learned in college was giving Powerpoint presentations. Almost as many engineering classes had Powerpoint requirements as papers. In my case, I didn't need to choose a topic - the topic was my educational background and research I had done.
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…
Out of curiosity, did the interviewer ever explain this odd introduction, or what he/she was trying to get at?
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Nah, it didn't suck. One of the strongest "soft" skills I learned in college was giving Powerpoint presentations. Almost as many engineering classes had Powerpoint requirements as papers. In my case, I didn't need to choose a topic - the topic was my educational background and research I had done.
Being required to scramble around for a presentation sucks