Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but... • Hacker News Board

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#71

Post by sown » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:16 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #33

mikek wrote: post #15

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?

I found actually using a whiteboard, or pen & paper, is the best.

No computers. Pen only.

For me, rehearsing an answer works out. Then, I try to see how to deconstruct it and apply it to a similar problem I don't know.

I can deliver an answer sounding confident and competent because I practiced an answer. It's a bit of a crap shoot.

What irks me the most is that people are doing the interviews. They can be fooled and persuaded with tones and intonations without them realizing it.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#72

Post by chubot » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

I think there is some validity to the general point, but I'm not commenting on that.

Just quibbling: I don't think anywhere near 90% of engineers use homebrew? Google development is done on Linux, and Homebrew is a Mac thing AFAIK. I have never used Homebrew.

Android development can be done on Macs but I doubt they use Homebrew. Certainly not for anything important.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#73

Post by spiritplumber » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

A project manager at Google was upset that my 'bot literally ran circles around theirs (it was 2010, Android based robots were just starting) and told me that I was just a hobbyist and my project did not exist.

So I gave him one of the spare logic boards (open design anyway). And wrapped my hand around his. And squeezed. And asked him, if it doesn't exist, why is it making you bleed?

He watched impotently as the people who had been invited for the presentation played with my robots and ignored his as two of his guys tried to get it to work.

I finished the two projects I was doing with Google and did not call them again.

(Before you downvote: Yes, there is some video, and I consider the small amount of pain I inflicted that day a kindness compared to the much greater amount of pain that an engineer is in danger of enduring if he says things like "This thing that is in front of me, it does not exist", especially if he works with big machines).

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#74

Post by thethimble » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

kenrikm wrote: post #43

mikek wrote: post #15

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.

Think of the problem from Google's perspective though. At some point, you have tens of thousands of candidates and you need a system to quantify how good they are. Further, it's reasonable to have false negatives (people you don't hire that should have been hired) but really bad to have false positives (people that you hire that you should not have). Together, these boil down into the de facto whiteboarding interview process.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#75

Post by seiji » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

kenrikm wrote: post #43

mikek wrote: post #15

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.

People have previously mentioned hallway discussions at Google routinely devolve into bragging about SAT scores and GPAs.

Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work.

Google's basic theme seems to be "you must be low latency ultra smart in our narrow interest areas" to pass an interview (or well-connected in other ways to lower scrutiny), but Google's main problem these days isn't lack of smart people — it's lack of projects with meaning and lack of how to organize smart people into anything resembling a coherent world-moving force.

In The Plex is great read for insight into their entire process. Basically, Google is run by people who have never been told "no" to anything in their lives, so they continue to think they are the best at everything until reality forces them to reconsider their delusional assumptions ("montessori naivety").

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#76

Post by Zikes » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

apendleton wrote: post #63

nostrademons wrote: post #22

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…

That may well be, but if you're considering hiring a guy who's an expert at writing package management tools, don't you put him on one of the specific subteams that needs that skillset? Surely it's something Google deals with?

Sure would've been nice to have a package management expert working on Go.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#77

Post by rgbrenner » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

sown wrote: post #55

mikek wrote: post #15

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…

I wonder how much of it is legacy. Google said early on they want to hire the best and brightest and that was the most important. We got the mantra that passing over a good person is better than hiring a bad one. And they were right. But they're a huge company now. They, and other gigantic tech companies are always complaining they can't find 'good people'. But how do you make this philosophy scale? Do you say, "This…

Smart people will learn what they need to to do a job if they're interested in it.

Google has decided that the only way to tell if someone is smart is by asking academic questions.

Even though anyone with half a brain knows that there are other ways to gauge how smart a person is... such as experience.

Does anyone really think Max can't look up how to invert a binary tree if he needs to do that? He obviously knows how to read and learn. So why is that a reason to reject someone?

Google is filled with smart people.. but their interview process is pretty stupid.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#78

Post by JamesBarney » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

bla2 wrote: post #3

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.

That is a pretty liberal use of the word flame.

And I'm pretty sure this is EXACTLY the type of guy you want to hire, I would strongly suspect writing mild mannered complaints about not getting hired on twitter has very little correlation with job success.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#79

Post by to3m » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

seccess wrote: post #47

What does it mean to invert a binary tree? I'm not familiar with this operation on binary trees. Does it mean to swap parents with child nodes? Or to swap siblings?

I wondered this as well! As far as I can tell - I asked google and looked at what it came up with :) - it means swapping children.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#80

Post by aaggarwal » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

mikek wrote: post #15

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…

Google interviewers are strictly told to ask these data structures and algorithms questions, it doesn't matter to them if they are relevant for future work. I have even read reviews by PhD candidates where even they were asked these questions in the interviews. When I interviewed with Google last year, I remember that the interviewers had a blueprint of the type of questions they were allowed to ask. They hardly concentrate on your resume during the interviews.