61–70 of 683 posts
Interviewing is stressful and all, but if the guy's reaction to not getting hired is to flame on twitter, not hiring might've been the right call.
just playing devil's advocate, but how do we know the reason for the no-hire was the reason the OP thinks it was?
Edit: as pointed out by others, the hiring decision probably does not take a few hours, but under an hour. Still, the point is valid.
Sorta ironic, but remember that the point of an interview is to determine how well you'd do in the environment that's hiring you , not how good a developer you are . Because Google tends to reinvent the wheel for basically everything, algorithmic knowledge really does matter. Package management only matters within a few very specific subteams. If you're interviewing for a general SWE position, you could be Mark Zucke…
Was it really because he couldn't do the problem, or was it that he didn't handle himself well in the interview? At two different interviews I was given logic puzzles just so they could watch how I went about trying to solve them.
This just gets back to the question of whether you are hiring based on interview skills or coding skills. If someone has shipped code that shows high coding skills, why would you reject them based on interview skills, if it's a coding job?
Interviewing is stressful and all, but if the guy's reaction to not getting hired is to flame on twitter, not hiring might've been the right call.
Playing devil's advocate here (because I, personally, wouldn't have done something like that), but I can see the insult. Here's someone with a very public proven track record (that they're fully aware of, if 90% of their engineers use his software), and they're asking questions like this. They're the wrong questions to ask in this case, surely? It's fair enough to ask them, but I can understand this person's frustrat…
Walking through the cafeteria made me feel like I was back in CMU CS again, in a bad way.
At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Succeeding at these whiteboard questions requires weeks of preparation. You need to practice, practice, practice. After enough practice, you are pretty likely to pass. So ultimately, it is more of a test of "how…
How do you practice answering whiteboard questions?
You spot patterns but there's so many different ways they can ask things and things that you just remember from studying it, that I imagine I'd do worse now unless it was close to what I've done since. On the spot I couldn't invert a BST right now.
I suspect you could probably pass a whiteboard interview a few weeks after taking a mooc on data structures/algorithms with enough depth for example.
At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Succeeding at these whiteboard questions requires weeks of preparation. You need to practice, practice, practice. After enough practice, you are pretty likely to pass. So ultimately, it is more of a test of "how…
These types of interviews work really well for the "I got 1600 on my SATs and went to {insert high profile school here} crowd" There are books out there just to prep you for Google interviews I see these as very similar to SAT test prep books. I'm not so sure Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer.
I think you made an excellent point. It seems that outside a tiny minority of world-class experts, Google is more interested in hiring interchangeable workers.
At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Succeeding at these whiteboard questions requires weeks of preparation. You need to practice, practice, practice. After enough practice, you are pretty likely to pass. So ultimately, it is more of a test of "how…
The OP has written some great apps, sure, but there is a huge difference between writing a package manager for Mac (among other Mac/iOS apps and utilities) and writing incredibly complex, highly performant algorithms for say search indexing, machine learning, ai, etc...
In that context, knowing CompSci basics like Binary Trees (usually taught to pre-major CompSci students) has a lot of relevance. It's clear Google was looking for a Computer Scientist here, not just another developer.
I am also put off by the extreme display of non-professionalism here. It's like the OP took this personally as an insult. "I've written popular things, how dare you not hire me if I want to work for you!". That's not a professional I'd like to work on a team with. Rather, that's a throw-back to the "Rockstar" programmer that nobody wants to work with.
This boils down to a person who was personally offended a company did not hire them at a drop of a hat, as-if he was "blessing" Google with his presence.
I'd say, Google (and other companies) are better off without this type of ego.
They made the proper choice to weed this individual out.