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...

#291

Post by rifung » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:18 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…

I'll disagree that these questions require weeks of preparation. I think it's more just unfair because they favor a certain type of person: those whose interests align more strongly with the theory and algorithms and less with building things.

Of course, the irony is that for vast majority of the people they hire, most of the work they do will be building and not much algorithms work. So then what will happen is either you have people who are great at building things and force them to suffer through the interviews or you have people who are great at algorithms but not that interested in programming.

Of course, you might also have people who are great at both, but I wonder how many of them there are..

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

#292

Post by sciencesama » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:18 PM UTC

i didnt understand can some one explain TLDR ?

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

#293

Post by sethherr » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:18 PM UTC

fishnchips wrote: post #230

[Ex-Googler here] Truth be told this is a trivial question to be asked during an algo interview and as an interviewer I'd consider this a warm-up. Otherwise it's a rather poor question since either you know how to do it (ie, you have an idea about recursion) or you don't - there aren't too many shades of grey or possible follow-up questions that I can ask to probe the depth of your knowledge. That being said if I ask…

Exactly. This style interview doesn't find the people I think are valuable - people who ship code. Instead, it validates people who spend time thinking about interview questions.

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

#294

Post by pan69 » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:19 PM UTC

Personally I don't really care about Google's hiring process. It's unlikely I'd ever want to work there anyway.

What does bother me is that other companies, who are not even in the same league as Google, start to copy their hiring process.

I remember interviewing with a digital ad agency a few years back and I swear, these guys thought they were Google. The number of academic trivia questions that came up, it was ridiculous.

In a way, I think Google has done a lot of harm to the industry in general by making others believe that everyone should have a hiring process like Google's.

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

#295

Post by georgemcbay » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:20 PM UTC

supergirl wrote: post #59

joshstrange wrote: post #36

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…

maybe Homebrew is amazing, but Google can hire the best people in the world. that day they might've interviewed 10 people better than him who just didn't make a popular tool

Well how do you define "better"?

Esteemed schools of music probably produce dozens of guitarists "better" (in any way you would measure it academically) than Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix per year who go on to a life of producing nothing of lasting worth.

I'll take the guy/girl who has actually proved they can produce something useful every time over someone who is "better" but hasn't.

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

#296

Post by geebee » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:21 PM UTC

fweespeech wrote: post #50

sp332 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you practice answering whiteboard questions?

Get a couple books on algorithms, memorize like its CS 101 basically.

I interviewed (unsuccessfully) at google. If you want to be prepped, yes, I would recommend going over the algorithm books, and make sure that you can do all the basics in your sleep.

That said, memorization, in my limited experience, won't be that helpful, because the questions will likely come with a twist that requires that you understand the algorithms and are good at adapting and applying them - and you need to be able to do it in 45 minutes on a whiteboard. It is very difficult.

I did find "cracking the coding interview" to be helpful prep, and really, the hard problems are fair game. Again, memorizing won't really help you, instead, view these as the kinds of problems you need to be able to solve in 45 min at the whiteboard.

I am kind of blown away that people can do this. I went home and did one of the questions I remembered from my interview with a compiler, and it took me several hours (though I didn't look up a solution, I did use the compiler constantly to check logic, and so forth, something that isn't available of course if you write on paper or a whiteboard). I suppose might be able to get this down to 45 min at a whiteboard, but it would take me a lot of time to get that sharp, months or more of study and practice.

None of this is mean to comment on whether this is or isn't a good interview process, it's just advice on how to prepare.

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

#297

Post by sgeisenh » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:22 PM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #215

flebron wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, is reversing a binary tree something you need to memorize? I assume that's what he/she means by "invert".

Rambling weirdness stream of consciousness, but, yeah you might well be right... how hard can it be to reverse a binary tree? Isn't the "real" solution to sound out the solution as you go, and let the interviewer know what you're thinking? I've never attempted to do this before, and my compsci is real weak, to the point where I'm going to make an educated guess about what a binary tree even _IS_ so... Let's start wit…

If you instead use a language with algebraic datatypes, you can get a nice concise implementation. Let's try OCaml:

  type 'a tree =
    | Node of 'a tree * 'a * 'a tree
    | Leaf
  
  let rec reverse = function
    | Node (L, x, R) -> Node (reverse R, x, reverse L)
    | Leaf           -> Leaf

Isn't that nice? And it is even easy to reason about! Unfortunately, OCaml tends to chew up stack space so we're likely to seg fault, but that's okay!

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

#298

Post by hyperpape » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:23 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #258

chrismsnz wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

It's something that trips me up constantly, but we don't have to say anything. If there's not enough to go on, we can just be quiet.

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

#299

Post by rconti » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

He sure has an awful lot of his self-worth wrapped up in whether he gets a job offer from one specific company. It reminds me of being interested in a particular girl in high school.

At a certain point, you learn that there are other jobs out there, and maybe the one with the biggest name isn't the best one. I certainly wouldn't be the least bit offended. Not when the market is flush with high-paying-jobs-a-plenty, particularly for someone with his background.

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

#300

Post by MikeKusold » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

squiguy7 wrote: post #9

Interviewing seems broken to me too. I have spent the last few months trying to get a job out of college and everyone seems to be interested in how well you can regurgitate CS fundamentals. They are seemingly less interested in seeing how you solve problems and work through the process of software. I would be more than happy to see this process change, I am just not sure what it entails.

If you are trying to get a job straight out of college and you didn't have many relevant internships, there really isn't much to judge you on other than what you learned in college. This isn't a fault with the interview process.

Some companies give take-home assignments (small projects that can gauge how well you learn). I tend to find that these are smaller companies. You can always try there.

Also, the most important thing that they don't teach you in school is that getting a job is all about connections. Email some people that you've interacted with to see if they know of anything that might be suited for you.