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.
agreed, i would love to hear both sides of this one.
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
301–310 of 683 posts
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#302What 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?
In this case, it means to reverse the binary tree, so that you get the largest item by iterating down the left branch to the bottom of the tree. You would do this by breadth-first scanning the tree, swapping the left and right pointers as you go.
Depth-first would consume less memory for balanced trees.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#303I had a big comment here, but I erased it. I think one story proves my point. When talking to google engineers one thing I noticed was that they considered youtube to basically be a joke. The reason why is that youtube has a messy python codebase. I asked them what they worked on while they were at google. They had rewritten an internal web portal for a support tool. From everything I can tell it was literally a mysql crud app.
If this is how success and failure are determined at google, it's no surprise how many of their products that people actually use come from acquisitions.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#304It is pretty well known there are a lot of false negatives in the hiring process since it is so much worse to make a bad hire than it is to not make a good hire. Sounds bad and it is, but no one has a better solution than try again in a year.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only whiteboarding interview processes actually weeded out false positives. 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…
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…
They literally had me do a deterministic finite automaton problem.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#306At 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!"
When they buy your funky startup
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#307Earlier 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.
As far as I'm aware, Mac is just as 'banned' as Windows. Developers have Linux(Goobuntu) desktops and Mac, Linux, Windows or ChromeOS for laptops (which are primarily used as a terminal for your desktop).
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only whiteboarding interview processes actually weeded out false positives. 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…
That's a great point. Infatuation with "coding competitions" and high flux intelligence tasks is often an anti signal. Sure, what they demonstrate looks good at face value, but unless you attach a micromanager over their tasks, they'll constantly deviate to the new-shiny every week instead of staying on task for the long haul. I know even YC has been bitten a few times by accepting people who are top-performers in ve…
Which is why I hate HackerRank being used as a screening tool.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#309The best part is that someone important at Google say this and no matter how they respond it's just funny.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took CS 101 classes almost a decade ago, and since then, I have never once needed to write a binary search tree outside of an interview. I think "CS Fundamentals" are really just "abstract concepts used to teach programming", and calling them fundamentals is disingenuous.
Maybe you're just not doing serious programming. Most people I know implement data structure searches quite often. If you're writing scripts, or JS code for web pages or something like that, then maybe you don't use CS stuff, but ... are you able to write a web browser if you had to? Are you able to write an operating system or navigational software for a spacecraft? If not, then maybe just see this as revealing sect…
> Maybe you're just not doing serious programming. Most people I know implement data structure searches quite often.
Wow. Really? Most serious people I know use other people's implementations that have already been highly optimized and well tested because they have better shit to do than reinvent the wheel.
I suppose if you want to write your own red-black tree from scratch, that's your prerogative. The last time I did was 20 years ago and not only will I never do that again, I will laugh at anyone who does it without a damn good reason.