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

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

#321

Post by nbaksalyar »

sp332 wrote: post #33
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…

How do you practice answering whiteboard questions?

You might want to check the latest post on this topic on Eric Lippert's blog: http://ericlippert.com/2015/06/01/writing-code-on-whiteboard...

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

#322

Post by philipwalton »

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…

My main complaint with the tweet is that it's almost certainly speculation.

1) Most companies (for legal reasons) don't tell candidates why they weren't offered a job. Maybe it was because of the binary tree question, but maybe it was for some other reason.

2) Homebrew is a Mac-only product, so the likelihood that 90% of Googlers use homebrew is very low. Moreover, Google does not track the software its employees download onto their laptops, so there's no way they would even know the percentage.

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

#323

Post by skybrian »

seiji wrote: post #249
endtime wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have previously mentioned hallway discussions at Google routinely devolve into bragging about SAT scores and GPAs. I've been at Google for 3.5 years (in the NY office) and have never heard this. I don't think I've ever even seen anyone wear a college t-shirt/sweater.

It's probably a pathological case centered around the mountain view office: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5534904 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473308

I've never seen it in MTV either. But it's a big campus, so who knows?

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

#324

Post by robbrit »

I'd like to present HN with a challenge. Come up with an interview process that matches _all_ of these requirements:

Objective - the process avoids human bias (this guy was in my frat, therefore is awesome).

Inclusive - someone doesn't need extensive past knowledge in a particular area of coding to do well in the interview.

Risk Averse - Avoids false positives.

Relevant - it properly tests the abilities needed for a coding job, and not irrelevant ones (like the ability to write an impressive resume).

Scales - this will be used for tens of thousands of interviews.

Easy-to-do - this will need to be done by hundreds/thousands of engineers, who would probably rather be coding.

It's easy to poke fun at what is perceived to be a flawed process. It's much harder to propose a solution that satisfies the above requirements. Google has done extensive research on this topic and has done remarkably well with it compared to other companies of similar size.

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

#325

Post by hiou »

pan69 wrote: post #294

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 rid…

I've been there as well. I interviewed at a design agency a while back. I nailed all of their puzzles pretty easily only to get there and realize I was going to be doing Wordpress hacking and other CMS work from 2010. I left after a few months because of how trivial I realized the work would be in the long term.

On the exit meeting it was relayed to me that they were having trouble finding people because no one could pass their tests and I was beside myself because I couldn't understand how they would expect someone with that technical ability to want to bang out Wordpress sites all day while there are 100s of people who would love to do that job and be very successful without ever even knowing what basic recursion let along the stuff they had in their test. Bizarre.

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

#327

Post by lawn »

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…

I just don't get it why companies assume you can spend so much time to refresh and memorize topics just to prepare for an interview. Especially when this knowledge will only be used in the interview process and then forgotten about.

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

#328

Post by lavamantis »

aaggarwal wrote: post #98
thethimble wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, exactly, since it's Google, they can afford to have strong filters which will definitely filter out a bad hire, may be at the expense of rejecting a good candidate. Their policy might expect good candidate to get absorbed in Google one way or other, but they definitely want to filter a bad hire. However, in the recent years, I have seen this to be not working as expected. Still, I don't think it matters to Googl…

"filter out a bad hire"

Good teams have a balanced skill sets I've found. You need some uber-algorithm guys who can pass questions like this, but you also need engineers who can fill in all the rest of the tasks that make up a production worthy system. I have not found that the uber-algorithm guys always pay attention to detail, put in good comments, think of all the edge cases, communicate well with outside teams, etc.

Those types of engineers are what you consider a "bad hire", and won't be working at Google.

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

#329

Post by peteretep »

sgeisenh wrote: post #297
peteretep wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I was going to go with Haskell, which would have looked very similar, but thought I would struggle to reason at all about performance.

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

#330

Post by NeutronBoy »

seiji wrote: post #75
kenrikm wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

People have previously mentioned hallway discussions at Google routinely devolve into bragging about SAT scores and GPAs. Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work. Google's basic theme seems to be "you must be low latency ultra smart in our narrow interest areas" to pass an interview…

> Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work.

But if you're Google, why wouldn't you aim for the top 0.0001%? It's not as though you have a shortage of candidates.

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