131–140 of 683 posts
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Devil's avocado: if they're truly CS fundamentals, then they should be baked into you good and deep during the course of your college education. It shouldn't be painful at all.
I think the real issue is that most programming jobs aren't computer science jobs, so CS fundamentals are almost totally irrelevant.
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?
Pretending you understand or blindly assuming what the interviewer meant is more of a red flag to me than requiring a few rounds of clarification.
In my opinion, an ideal interviewee would communicate that they don't fully understand the requirements and possibly offer a brief set of possible interpretations. Once the interviewer has clarified, my ideal interviewee would restate the clarification to demonstrate competence and verify their new interpretation of the requirements before proceeding.
What's the due diligence like on the hiring side during an acquihire by Google?
Without discussing too many details, I believe the issue with Google's recruiting process is it was designed when the company was smaller and it follows the philosophy that anyone that goes through the hiring process should be ready to be thrown into any of the many Google projects and be able to function immediately. That's not strictly true anymore.
You have some divisions that are extremely hardcore or require very good knowledge of a particular field (think Google Cloud Platform vs. Android Kernel vs. Chrome vs. Search, all completely disparate projects), but there's also work for people that don't need to hold a PhD from MIT (think front-end development.)
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.
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.
a little bit more info https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608698037100244992 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608687283869503488
That is the killer right there. The 23 year old recruiter responds to your rejection with: "The interviewer thinks you'll be better if you get another 6 months experience. Keep practicing! We'll loop back around to you next year!"
Thanks, I've been doing this for 15 years. I'm sure another 6 months is all I need to meet your delusional standards of ineffable ability.
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?
To all of those saying ranting on twitter is the wrong move I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is often the ONLY tool that the average person can use to communicate and/or call out large companies on their actions. This is BS and should be made known. Homebrew is an amazing tool and I'd be falling over myself getting the offer papers in this guy's hands if he came to me looking for a job. The fact that google turned h…
We don't have all the details. You might not hire the best computer programmer in the world if he was also a psychopath. Heck, you might skip on him even if he wasn't a good culture fit. I'm not saying this person is / was any of those things, but there's more to hiring than just talent.
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What specifically are you objecting to? That specific question? Writing code on a whiteboard? How would you interview software engineering candidates?
I think the best way is to give them access to a code base, give them 48 hours and have them submit a pull request for a feature. That way you can see that they can learn the codebase and implement the feature in their own time. During the interview, you can discuss their code and the reasoning behind the implementation details.
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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…
In practice, they select for people with good memorization skills. If you can remember the details on a ten dozen different algorithms and data structures, you can pass one of these without having a single lick of creativity or skill.
I say this as an employee who has worked alongside many unskilled drones who made it past the algorithmic interview process.