Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 683 posts

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

#251

Post by notNow »

jblow wrote: post #211
carc wrote: post #191

To be fair, inverting a binary tree is a pretty easy question. Google also tells you BEFORE you start the interview process that it'll be very data structure/algorithm oriented and asks that you please prepare (and take as much time as you want doing so). They even say that they want you to prepare because they know a bad candidate that prepares can look better than a good candidate that doesn't prepare - then want a…

I am dismayed by the way all the reactions on Twitter are piling on with outrage and/or relating similar experiences. Inverting a binary tree is pretty easy. It is not quite as trivial as FizzBuzz, but it is something any programmer should be able to do. If you can't do it, you probably don't understand recursion, which is a very basic programming concept. This isn't one of those much-maligned trick interview questio…

Can you confirm that actually inverting a BT or solving other similarly probs would have been part of his future job at Google?

If so, they were consistent in disqualifying him in spite of his awesome track record, fame or "street cred" but if not, I can't really justify or defend this type of ceremonial or bureaucratic gotcha interview questions as they are just useless and can be abused by the interviewer to reject applicants they dislike for any reason or whim they might have at that moment.

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

#252

Post by jwecker »

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 interviewed @ google several years ago as part of some due-diligence they were doing to decide if they wanted to acquire the startup I was working at, [redacted].

It was several hours, with many interviewers one at a time, of academic exercises. Some I could see were relevant to some of Google's projects, but that wasn't the emphasis- it was very much a "how much do you remember from CS courses?" (with a few exceptions- one had me explain why a snippet of C would crash- something more what I would expect a senior engineer to know that was more practical-oriented).

I _think_ I did pretty well (again, it was part of a bigger due-diligence-- another story altogether, so I never heard), but in the end I was struck by the fact that (a) not a single interviewer had looked at or asked about any of my publicly available work, and (b) not a single one even asked something along the lines of "what are your strengths / what do you think your contribution would be" (or weaknesses, for that matter, but that seems less important).

Of course, one of the other guys I worked with lucked out and got interviewed by one of the paypal-mafia, and ended up with a reportedly very stimulating hour long discussion about actual work, strengths, and actual situations that one would hypothetically need to handle at google.

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

#253

Post by Alupis »

loopbit wrote: post #237
Alupis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are hiring the Homebrew dev, and your devs currently use Homebrew, why wouldn't you hire him to work on Homebrew for you? Macs account for something like 8% of the total marketplace of all PC's. For developers, they account for something like 20%... another 20% on Linux, and remainder on Windows or other. So even if somehow having a paid Google employee work on Homebrew seemed advantageous, it would only ben…

Except that google 'banned' the use of windows internally a few years ago unless you had a really, really good reason for it. Not sure what's the status of that ban (nor I care), but will skew the numbers enough to invalidate your point.

> enough to invalidate your point.

It might except ex-googlers in this thread of stated Google "banned" use of Homebrew internally. So the net benefit to the company and/or employees remains small to zero.

This is off topic though, since he was not being interviewed for homebrew development.

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

#254

Post by exacube »

Firstly, you're not entitled to any job you want just because you wrote Homebrew. If you accepted an interview with Google, then you accepted the fact that Google will judge you based on your problem solving skills, just like every other person was asked.

Secondly, I don't think this is a hard interview question; it's certainly fair. Did you expect to be asked knowledge-based questions that Google knows you're already good at? Questions specifically geared towards you? Or questions where Google can watch you solve a problem and be comfortable with the fact that you are able to solve coding problems? Did you think Google would hire you to write Homebrew? Or solve problems on teams Google has?

I think this person is just being unreasonable.

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

#255

Post by pbhjpbhj »

coldcode wrote: post #126

I've always wondered if during an interview with Google you answered a question with "I'd Google it" what the reaction would be.

>you answered a question with "I'd Google it" what the reaction would be //

"We don't look kindly on trademark genericization."??

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

#256

Post by notacoward »

fweespeech wrote: post #25
westernmostcoy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically are you objecting to? That specific question? Writing code on a whiteboard? How would you interview software engineering candidates?

Why not just take a chunk of code the candidate has written that was interesting and talk about it? The main problem with interviews [imo] is it grabs stuff the interviewer is familiar with and throws it at the person in the more stressful position of being the interviewee . Its also [often] a very non-standard way of communicating. I don't know about you but all of my communication is via text or graphic, not whiteb…

The point about interviewer vs. interviewee familiarity with the problem is important. It's hard to avoid comparing the interviewee's off-the-cuff solution to one that was researched at leisure and refined over multiple previous interviews. Really damn hard. Psychologists and teachers are trained in avoiding that kind of bias, and still struggle. Very few engineers are equipped to see through the "fog" and interpret a candidate's performance in a useful way. I've only encountered one - a recently former CS prof - and I've been in the business a long time.

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

#257

Post by JamesBarney »

supergirl wrote: post #169
leetNightshade wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that day they might've interviewed 10 people better than him who just didn't make a popular tool" Are you judging this on their ability to invert a binary tree? People here are ranting about having a problem with interview practices not representing whether or not you are good at your job. That's presumably (IMO) why the tweet was posted.

the tweet is made to trigger that discussion. but you can rephrase the tweet to something like: even though I made a popular tool, I didn't get a job at Google because I'm not good at other things they need. Google probably has a lot of factors counted into the final decision, including algorithm skills, other software engineering skills, human skills, contributions to open source projects. It's never 1 reason why yo…

Why do you think white boarding over the course of an several hours would be a better predictor of these traits than years of making very meaningful contributions to software?

It seems to me like creating and managing a repository of more than 4800 contributors is a much better signal of a candidates software engineering, communication, and human skills than a couple of people's opinion of a couple of hours of white boarding.

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

#258

Post by falcolas »

chrismsnz wrote: post #250
falcolas wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like they get you in a room and ask you to draw a linked list or a binary tree. And yet the OP was turned down for not being able to invert a binary tree (based on limited information, etc etc.)? What do you feel that is, if not a "whiteboard this algorithm" question? As for many of the other companies who try and emulate Google - this is exactly what they do.

> And yet the OP was turned down for not being able to invert a binary tree Your source is a series of salty tweets.

Well, for what it's worth, it's all we have to go on at the moment.

And in either case, my original comment was directed at the idea that "algorithmic interviews provide false negatives, but not false positives".

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

#259

Post by el_fuser »

CydeWeys wrote: post #173
el_fuser wrote: post #53

Another 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…

>> You're given weeks to refresh your knowledge ahead of a Google interview

Begs the question, doesn't it?

>> Binary trees are MOST ASSUREDLY on that list

Sure they are... and my intro to CS textbook was ~500 pages. I'll bet I could find something to trip up just about anybody, especially when coupled with the pressure of doing it in front of the class ^H^H^H people that have $$$$/power over you.

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

#260

Post by spiritplumber »

pearjuice wrote: post #148
spiritplumber wrote: post #73

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 peop…

I am looking forward to seeing that video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP0wSvw_qKk Here ya go!
Post reply on HN