A pair of good articles on just this kind of thing:
http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/12/can-you-solve-this-p...
http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
171–180 of 683 posts
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#172Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#173Another instance where silicon valley favors the young... he probably would've nailed this question if he'd been only a couple of years removed from school. He also would've nailed it had he been given 10 minutes to do some research to refresh. Silicon valley (and the numerous companies that mock the interview style) are testing for the wrong thing when they hire, then complaining about not being able to find good en…
You're given weeks to refresh your knowledge ahead of a Google interview. They tell you the basic CS fundamentals that are going to be covered. Binary trees are MOST ASSUREDLY on that list. They just don't have time during 45 minute interviews to let the candidate go on the Internet to look things up they should already have come prepared for.
Anecdotally, at a previous company, we tried an "open book" (i.e. you can use the web) interview policy for a few interviews. It was a train wreck.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#174"I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book." Albert Einstein
It seems like this tests a) how much you want to work at Google and b) how good you are at memorize things.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#175I like the spirit of this, but he may well have not been hired for a variety of other reasons besides this -- including how he attempted to solve the problem or how he handled not being able to solve it on a whiteboard in an interview.
I hate whiteboard programming questions and I don't give them when I interview someone - I give them a laptop with 10 different languages on it, and some data to munge -- I think it's a pretty decent thing for both parties.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#176We're trying a different approach at Sourcegraph. In addition to looking at a candidate's prior work in open source if available, we ask them to complete tasks that approximate the job as closely as possible (i.e., coding on a computer): https://sourcegraph.com/blog/programming-interview Would love to hear people's thoughts and feedback!
I would never do a take home test for an interview. I did that once and it was such a waste of time.
i've done three over the years, complete and utter waste of time.
i also had some wierd binary tree questions when i interviewed at yahoo, was a total turn off as i was interviewing for web/front end related job. which probably would not have used any of this type of logic, ever.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
so for you "best in the world" is not someone good at CS. similarly, for Google it appears best in the world is not someone that made a popular tool.
And so Google can continue to lose talent to competitors, or have potential hires go off to start their own startups they can then pay a premium for, while keeping "good enough" talent for existing initiatives. I'm starting to realize why Google is absolutely terrible at any sort of customer-facing product.
talent.. what is talent? they have a set of skills they look for. this guy doesn't have what they need. for you talent means to be the author of a popular tool, but for Google means more; means also boring stuff like being good at communicating, being good in a team, etc. who knows how many of these this guy failed
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#178Sorta 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…
Very good point. It's like, why do you want to work for Google if you aren't into algorithms?
I failed my third google interview. My problem wasn't that I couldn't solve the problems. I just wasn't fast enough because I didn't spend 3 weeks beforehand training speed in programming brainteasers.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which is fine and dandy until you get that one person that cheats by getting help from someone else.
As if people who interview for Google don't just look up the most common interview questions and memorize answers before the interview...
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think like a Google interviewer.
> You think like a Google interviewer. The OP is the type of person that, six months from now would be demanding special treatment because "he wrote Homebrew". Writing a package manager (been done before, a lot of times) is far different from writing machine learning algorithms (new field, blazing the trail for the industry). One requires an engineer, one requires a scientist. The OP flamed out because Google was loo…
I wouldn't want to work with you or him.