How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
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How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
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Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#2Google does not have just one hiring committee, and anyone can be on hiring committees if they want to and one of the committees has a need of new members (IE it's not invite only).
So this is like saying "ex-Python-dev mailing list member".
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#3You can also crack the toughest coding interviews by being a good coder who has created cool things and completed some challenging coding projects. You could also review the stuff you learned in algorithms right before your interview.
I'm not worried about losing a potential job because I couldn't crack some obscure mind puzzle.
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#4You can also crack the toughest coding interviews by being a good coder who has created cool things and completed some challenging coding projects. You could also review the stuff you learned in algorithms right before your interview. I'm not worried about losing a potential job because I couldn't crack some obscure mind puzzle.
You can be an excellent coder and suck at interviews. This post has nothing to do with hard skills about algorithms, and everything to do with how you present your work. A lot of good coders might miss out on jobs they want because this is an unusual situation they werent prepared for.
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#5Interviews work both ways - what questions do you ask them?
One I used to ask was do you have IS9002/BS5750, but that was 15 years ago and there are better questions to ask. A good question is also sometimes better than a good answear as it shows you understand things from another perspective and have the ability to ask questions instead of blindly accepting what you are told all the time if your unsure.
So what are your favorite questions and not how much TAX did the company pay type questions, the ones that give you lots of wonderous information and yet still puts them on there toes a bit as well if they are weak in some area's of managment/running the company of methodology. I asked what Q&A methodologies do you use in a interview once for a company called RIM; Was not a great answear. My question about IS9002/BS5750 was one which showed how well organised the company was at the job in hand and how well documented the role was. The answear tells you what kind of mess your getting into and also if you should be asking for more money (danger money if its somebodies spagbowl code/system :).
So what questions as a programmer do you ask the company in an interview, that is applying for your service. Anybody have one they care to share?
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#6A few other links for those wishing to get familiar with the process:
From Google:
http://www.google.com/about/jobs/lifeatgoogle/hiringprocess/
From MIT:
http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/materials.php
Steve Yegge's well-known advice:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
Essentially it seems to build down to knowledge of data structures and the ability to use them in concert to develop solutions on a whiteboard. There's more to it than that, but being able to code without an IDE is critical.
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#7Interviews work both ways - what questions do you ask them? One I used to ask was do you have IS9002/BS5750, but that was 15 years ago and there are better questions to ask. A good question is also sometimes better than a good answear as it shows you understand things from another perspective and have the ability to ask questions instead of blindly accepting what you are told all the time if your unsure. So what are…
"What is your company culture like?"
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#8I shared my experience in a blogpost: http://swizec.com/blog/inside-a-google-onsite-interview/swiz...
A few days ago I finally realized why they said I'm not good enough at big-O to play with them (despite saying my coding was excellent). For some reason I had a mental block that day and wanted to implement hash tables as prefix trees every single fucking time.
I have no idea why. Of course I know a hash table is O(1), but for some reason, that day, I kept trying to convince everyone it should be O(N) (N=length of key) because it's implemented as a prefix tree in the background.
Idiot.
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#9Interviews work both ways - what questions do you ask them? One I used to ask was do you have IS9002/BS5750, but that was 15 years ago and there are better questions to ask. A good question is also sometimes better than a good answear as it shows you understand things from another perspective and have the ability to ask questions instead of blindly accepting what you are told all the time if your unsure. So what are…
In order:
Do you use git?
How do you do ticketing?
What's it like working here?
In my experience engineers at big companies will not give you an answer to those, but canned marketing responses. I don't know why.
Re: How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews
#10You can also crack the toughest coding interviews by being a good coder who has created cool things and completed some challenging coding projects. You could also review the stuff you learned in algorithms right before your interview. I'm not worried about losing a potential job because I couldn't crack some obscure mind puzzle.
You can be an excellent coder and suck at interviews. This post has nothing to do with hard skills about algorithms, and everything to do with how you present your work. A lot of good coders might miss out on jobs they want because this is an unusual situation they werent prepared for.
A very fair point about talent at doing a job and talent at explaining the job in interviews. The term interview technique is like exam technique and in that is something that abstracts from doing the actual job. Unless that job entails interviewing people. With that this is probably a better read.
Alot of people who fall into the boat of being good coders with social skills of dead fish often have a hard time. One appraoch is to create some wonderous application and get broaght out, recruitment that way. Or in the process, end up refining there social skills to the stage that not only can they interview ok but are running there own company.
Coding interviews should be done via a shared terminal/IDE screen and chat windows, that approach would be more realistic to some. But I'm one of those people who don't socialise too well at times, interviews/exams, that type of thing.