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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...

#381
When I used to interview people (I wasn't a manager, but I was senior enough to be entrusted to the role), I'd just ask about projects they had placed on their resume (to get a feel for their contributions) and then the rest of the interview would be focused on what the job was and how that matched with their career goals, why they thought they'd want the job, that sort of thing. The latter part was a bit harder because people are naturally defensive during an interview, so they can't be like "well I want an entry level web developer job so I can parlay this into something better in two years" (which is, IMO, totally an acceptable answer), but you can generally politely get the idea. Maybe I'm weird, but I just sort of think interviews should be more about determining fit than giving someone a lie detector test.

I get the puzzlers or whatever for a phone screens (quickly weed out people that are obviously unqualified), or if you're hiring someone junior who doesn't have work experience, but if you're at the point where you're bringing someone in you probably think they're minimally qualified, so it should really be about determining if goals are aligned IMO.

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

#382

As goes the recruitment, so goes the employment. If you wanted to work for an organization where everyone likes to show off their skills to one another in the interviews, you'd have gotten the job, and you'd be one of them. The best interviews I find are like a first day of work (but unpaid). Your experience and skills are established by resume and portfolio. The interview shows whether you can work with the team and…

> Much like FB, it's an org whose coding needs are really pretty trivial

I was with you till riiiiiight there. Google isn't just a search company anymore they're working on lots of very interesting non-trivial things all around the company.

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

#383

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…

Xoogler here. I can't meet your challenge. IMO the very premise of a company-wide unified interview process for all software engineers is wrongheaded.

How can you make the interview relevant without knowing what the position is? I was asked the typical CS-type questions in my interview, but the team I ended up on required no theory.

How do you define false positives before you know what the candidate will work on? A superstar in one team will be a dud in others.

And let me add another bullet point to your process wish-list: gives the candidate a sense of whether they want the job. This is impossible when the interviewer is a random engineer from an unrelated team, unable to speak to what the candidate's work life will be like. A Google style process gives candidate very little information.

I would instead propose something very old-fashioned: teams hire for themselves. The usual reply is that this results in an "inconsistent hiring bar", but so what? Teams have different requirements and need engineers with different skills, so why shouldn't the hiring process reflect that? We are not fungible engineering units.

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

#384
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 except…

> not a single interviewer had looked at or asked about any of my publicly available work

It could be dangerous. Let's say you explain some interesting techniques you used on your GPL'd software and a Google product starts doing something suspiciously like what you showed them. You may even sue and end up making their source public after some litigation.

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

#385
post #271
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have no idea what the job was. But my point is this is not a bureaucratic gotcha question. If you can't do this task, you don't really know how to program well. Sorry but that's just how it is. It's like failing FizzBuzz. There is this culture of crappy software that has happened lately, especially in the Web world, and it is really quite lamentable. I believe that a very large positive impact would be made on the…

Note that "invert" in this context is fairly ambiguous. I suspect the interviewer meant reverse, which is, I agree, utterly trivial.

I, and apparently many others in this thread, spent some time trying to ferret out an answer to what it would mean to invert a binary tree: at first thought it would imply a collection of nodes all pointing at their parents, which seems not very useful (and would require more than 10 lines of code to whiteboard reasonably).

Much of the discussion is about whether or not the problem was described in sufficient detail or not.

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

#386

[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…

A lot of people require a github to get an interview. But nobody wants to look at what's on the github. I've interviewed hires before, and if I ask for a github, I'm going to take the time to review some of the code, otherwise why would I ask?

This is about Google, which does not require a github.

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

#387
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

Yeah...that is memorization. I've had questions like that before and the problem isn't adapting. Its the fact I don't have everything memorized. I have no problems taking an algorithm off a book/Google and implementing it in 45 minutes, even with some kind of twist.

The problem is I can't remember things I haven't used in 10 years so expecting me to do anything with them in an interview is kinda pointless. Sure, I'll remember the purpose of the algorithm, but I'm not going to remember the algorithm implementation details.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, Google shows me interview questions where "inverting a binary tree" means something quite different — for example, flipping it upside down, and making the left leaf the root, the right leaf the left leaf and the root the right leaf. If this was really about "reversing" the tree, as you mention, the question seems more likely to address how the candidate approaches the situation. Like, he should start by…

I was gonna say, who calls reversing a tree's ordering inverting? > Oddly enough, Google shows me interview questions where "inverting a binary tree" means something quite different — for example, flipping it upside down, and making the left leaf the root, the right leaf the left leaf and the root the right leaf. Whaaaaa? I can't find this, but it seems like such a weird operation. Got a link?

>I was gonna say, who calls reversing a tree's ordering inverting?

The guy writing the tweet (not necessarily the interviewer).

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

#389

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 dow…

To your second point, there is an official Linux fork called Linuxbrew. http://brew.sh/linuxbrew/

Granted Linuxbrew isn't nearly as prevalent as Homebrew, but Macs are prevalent at Google.

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

#390

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 dow…

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