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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...

#511

Post by johnx123-up »

aaggarwal wrote: post #500
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…

This is something I could agree over, Thoughts on technical interviewing. http://ericlippert.com/2015/06/08/interviewing-candidates/

Thanks for the link. My personal favorite http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-to-interview-ca...

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

#512

Post by fishnchips »

Aloisius wrote: post #470
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…

> [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. It is a terrible quest…

> if they actually meant for you to recurse down and swap

While only the person asking this question knows for sure I'd assume that was the intention.

It's not a _terrible_ question - it's just a recursive equivalent of FizzBuzz. You would treat this as a way of making a (good) candidate gain some confidence. And that alone is extremely important since the more at ease the candidate is the better the signal that you're getting. What I was trying to say there was that if I asked that as a warm-up and didn't get a satisfactory response very very soon I'd realise that your man has no clue about recursion and would move to the main question, choosing one that does not involve it. It would be something easier than I'd ask otherwise and would be closer to real-life scenarios - like first solving a simple problem, then parallelising the solution and correctly managing concurrent access.

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

#513

Post by lukaslalinsky »

I strongly believe that the best kind of technical interview is to talk with the person about things they have done in the past, go into details and see if they are telling you bullshit. If the things are interesting, at least somehow relevant to what the company is doing and the person knows what they are talking about, it's a good hire.

One problem is that only experienced developers can do these kind of interviews, because you need wide experience, be able to talk about various technical topics and tell whether the other person is telling you stories from their own experience or some quickly learned facts.

It's funny, but the best experience I had interviewing at Google and Amazon was talking with the managers.

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

#514

Post by colinmegill »

supergirl wrote: post #312
georgemcbay wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well then I guess it's because Page/Hendrix were much more than expert guitarists. They were also good at composition, lyrics, showmanship, marketing, business. Those academic guitarists will make contributions to the guitar field but seems that you wouldn't value that alone and it's OK. You are free to have your opinion about whom to hire just as Google is. For the sake of the argument, you could imagine 100 reasons…

I think this is spot on. I have seen 30 person teams composed of 30 one dimensional people, and 3 person teams composed of 10 dimensional people. With few communication barriers and everyone thinking about everything all the time, I take the small tight team. It does depend on the project, though, because a) sometimes the problems can be parallelized and many people working is good and b) 10 dimensional people don't typically like boring problems.

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

#515

Post by fishnchips »

gaustin wrote: post #510
Aloisius wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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. It is a terrible quest…

Would a multiply-rooted tree still be a tree? I thought a single root was part of the definition of a tree. Would it instead be a graph? Sorry for the elementary questions. I'm bad at algorithms and just trying to get a grasp here.

Yes, it's not a tree any more. Which is why I believe this was not the question.

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

#516

Post by visarga »

Aloisius wrote: post #470
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…

> [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. It is a terrible quest…

If they said "swap left & right at each node" it would have been easy. But they used a term that doesn't even yield an example in google searches - what kind of "inversion" do they have in mind? It's as if everyone is on the same page but me.

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

#517

Post by jblow »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #379
jblow wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've never inverted a binary tree (I'm not familiar with the concept). You claim that makes me a bad programmer. Be careful there: just because somebody hasn't been exposed to something doesn't mean they aren't smart enough to figure it out. Fizz buzz is also flawed in this way: it doesn't test if you know how to program, it merely tests "have you been exposed to the modulo operator yet".

FizzBuzz is not about the modulo operator. You can write it pretty easily without it, in several different ways. If you can't figure out how pretty quickly, you're not a good programmer. Sorry.

It is even kind of reasonable to just substitute a call to some black-box is_divisible_by() if you can't figure out how to do that test ...

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

#518

Post by reagency »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #337
chrismsnz wrote: post #209

Earlier 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…

My experience wasn't a real life type one more academic instead. My interviewer was really late and refused to let me finish my data structure implementation to optimize a single method instead. When we finished it was time for him to go. He wouldn't let me go back to finish my data structure as he didn't have the time. I was later declined. Had a couple of friends at google ask the interviewer. He said I was decline…

Your story can't be true because interviewers do not make hiring decisions at Google.

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

#519

Post by fishnchips »

michaelchisari wrote: post #277
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…

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?

The link between the content of your GitHub and your ability to ship code is unclear at best. I knew a guy who had a really awesome GitHub profile but turned out to be a mediocre contributor to the codebase. He claimed that coding style guides we used were hurting his creativity to the point that he did not enjoy coding and would avoid it if possible. He'd fix bugs and make small-ish contributions but would never ship major features or libraries "because of the style guide". While I understand the sentiment I always found his attitude juvenile.

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

#520

Post by fishnchips »

visarga wrote: post #516
Aloisius wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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. It is a terrible quest…

If they said "swap left & right at each node" it would have been easy. But they used a term that doesn't even yield an example in google searches - what kind of "inversion" do they have in mind? It's as if everyone is on the same page but me.

You're allowed to ask your interviewer for clarification. You'll even get brownie points for asking smart questions.
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