Earlier quoted context omitted.
or the other guy could work on his ego skills?
That can be dealt with when they post their side of the story.
True enough.
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
261–270 of 683 posts
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#262At 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…
inverting a binary tree is a pretty basic question though, if you understand recursion. i can understand why google would ask simple algo questions
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what the interview process is like at all. They're more interested in how you approach real world issues (the questions I got asked were conceivably real-life issues a company like Google would face with its products). If you can solve that issue by applying efficient and well understood data structures and algorithms, then that indicates you understand the problem space and solutions that may apply. It's…
> 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.
There are tens of thousands of employees at Google. Most of them interview. People are different.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the tweet is accurate in its implication that he didn't get hired because he couldn't invert a binary tree (honestly, I don't even know what that means) on a whiteboard, then I'd say the tweet is totally justified. On the other hand, if it was a complex and reasoned decision that he's summarizing badly, then yeah, good call on their part. Context is king here, and we have little.
Slightly off-topic but I always found it infuriating to call binary trees "binary" when some vertices have a degree = 3. :P
If you can make a convincing case at the whiteboard, maybe Google will hire you!
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Problem is if your system is actually capable measuring up to the claimed degree of accuracy, or just stabbing in the dark after a certain point.
IQ tests supposedly become inaccurate after 150/160, so you wouldn't really want to put too much emphasis on 180 vs 170 at those levels.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#266A 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…
You do realize you're coming across as a literal psychopath, right?
No, a psychopath would've done something out of revenge.
I was doing something to remind an engineer that the physical world is of paramount importance.
A bit of bleeding and embarassment in 2010 as a reminder that things that are there, are indeed there, is better than being pulped by heavy machinery that "shouldn't be there" but is anyway in 2018.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#267Max should add code in Homebrew to check if hostname contains "corp.google.com", and exit with a message that Homebrew can't run inside Google.
Petty, but fuck em. They don't want him, they shouldn't get the fruit of his work.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#268At 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…
At what point during one's career should one simply be hired at face value and be exempt from interviewing? After 10 years? 20? 30? "I see your resume says you've been writing software for 30 years, and wrote this really well known tool. Wellllll....That's good enough for me. You're hired!"
Background: I worked at Google for 5 years and did a bunch of interviewing for them.
I don't support skipping interviews even for good candidates, but if you were going to it would work the other way around -- you'd value recent accomplishments over more distant ones.
People don't understand that cutting out folks who had their name attached to some big successes but can't solve a toy problem in an interview is usually a really good thing. It's a strength of the system more often than a weakness. You wouldn't believe the number of senior candidates I interviewed who had really impressive resumes but were clearly checked out from doing real technical work -- folks who obviously no longer lived close to the code and either were very rusty or just no longer had the temperament to spend time thinking through a slightly tricky piece of code.
One of the reasons not to skip an interview for a candidate you're confident is good is that a good interview can be a great sales pitch to come work for your company.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#269A 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 think you need to work on your people skills.
I get that a lot. Very occasionally, it's after "thanks for saving my life / my job". There's no shame in being an asshole but there is shame and dishonor in being insincere.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#270Wrote a blog post about exactly this problem: optimizing interviews for fancy algorithm solving, when the position's daily work is nothing like that:
http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/05/why-i-dont-do-codi...