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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

#111

Post by utlanning »

strlen wrote: post #85
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 diff…

How would a startup measure the effectiveness of an interview practice or calibrate off of candidates' responses if they don't put it into practice based on the experience of other companies/people?

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

#112

Post by sokoloff »

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…

Don't you think that it's possible that becoming a full MD doctor is a qualifications vouching system that programming lacks, and thus it's "every company for themselves" in terms of deciding who is actually qualified/worth hiring?

The amount of sub-par candidates that are nearly constantly looking is absolutely appalling to me, and is probably shocking to most of the non-hiring-managers reading HN.

Why is the interview process so intensive? Same reason gold mining is intensive. There's a lot more dirt than gold in both cases.

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

#113

Post by esrauch »

antoko wrote: post #55
eta_carinae wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow! Did you even read the comment above? The interviewer asked for the source and the candidate responded with stackoverflow. in this instance that is absolutely not cheating.

It is generally considered cheating by Google phone interview standards, the interviewer probably was satisfied by the other answers, plus the fact that the interviewee immediately and casually owned up to it probably indicated that it hadn't been made clear that it was disallowed.

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

#114

Post by snikolov »

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 doubt it's that bad. It might be that he hadn't done any bit hacking in C in a while. If you haven't coded in matlab for a long time and I asked you (during an interview!) to do random bit hacking, you might feel stumped too. You'd probably want to play around with it for a minute and re-figure it out, but you've got an interview waiting for you to produce an answer right away.

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

#115

Post by snikolov »

roguecoder wrote: post #91
alecbenzer wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

6.001 doesn't exist anymore. The new set of intro courses are completely different. It sounded like you thought 6.001 is now taught in some other language.

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

#116

Post by tedunangst »

yzhengyu wrote: post #98
alasdair_young wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java char is c wchar. Java also has byte.

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

#117

Post by nvarsj »

jrockway wrote: post #21
throwaway1979 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Work experience and degrees very much do count. You need those, and you need to prove you know what someone with that experience and degree should know. Nothing wrong with that. (Some programs don't cover algorithms in enough detail. Some people forget them after not using them for five years. Experience does not imply growth in all areas.) I wish enough of us would tell prospective employers that we won't submit to…

I think you're missing his point. Work experience should be proof enough in our industry. A high-stress interview process does not really prove anything.

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

#118

Post by nvarsj »

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 wouldn't worry about it. Any company that requires open source contributions hasn't thought very hard about their hiring process. They would be excluding the vast majority of talented (and especially professional) programmers.

It's probably most useful as a bullet point to attract a recruiter's attention. So commit a line of code somewhere and stick it on your resume.

Not to say you shouldn't work on an open source project. But do it because it's something that interests you, not for your resume.

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

#119

Post by adnam »

b_emery wrote: post #80
adnam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explanation given in wsj for problem 2 is totally wrong. The balloon will do the same as a person in the car (nod backwards), only less pronounced due to air resistance.

I can assure you that the wsj is correct! I've been transporting balloons a bit lately* and having fun watching them 'lean in' to turns, 'leaning back' while braking, and 'leaning forward' while accelerating. *transporting balloons correlates strongly with transporting kids

Good grief, I stand corrected.

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

#120

Post by jrockway »

nvarsj wrote: post #117
jrockway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work experience and degrees very much do count. You need those, and you need to prove you know what someone with that experience and degree should know. Nothing wrong with that. (Some programs don't cover algorithms in enough detail. Some people forget them after not using them for five years. Experience does not imply growth in all areas.) I wish enough of us would tell prospective employers that we won't submit to…

I think you're missing his point. Work experience should be proof enough in our industry. A high-stress interview process does not really prove anything.

Work experience doesn't prove anything either. People can lie about their credentials. People can have very easy jobs. People can be hated by all of their coworkers. "I worked at X company for Y years" means exactly nothing to me.

Hire people solely based on "work experience" and a ten minute chat and let me know how well you company of 10,000 people does. My prediction is that you will be unhappy with the results.

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