Doesn't this contradict an interview with Senior Vice President of People Operations
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...
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devil's avocado: if they're truly CS fundamentals, then they should be baked into you good and deep during the course of your college education. It shouldn't be painful at all.
I graduated this spring and I don't know how to do that. Now, I am not a boy genius but I doubt it is a CS fundamental.
I think it's a pretty easy question. Pretty much all algorithms courses teach you enough to be able to solve this question.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#543At 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…
That's true. However In Google defense, they tell you upfront what kind of interviews you're going to get and their process it's pretty well known anyway (with all its flaws).
I went through the same pain myself a few years ago and I'm not disagreeing that the chap should have just got the job there, but their process is well known and perhaps he just had the wrong expectations.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience pretty much everyone is excellent, apart from the lower level non-engineering managers. These tend to be grads from top schools who have zero previous work experience. I encountered at least three or four in my time at Google who were just out to prove themselves and get promotions and regularly threw their teams under the bus.
This is an antipattern in management and I would be surprised if they got promoted.
Sundar Pinchai got promoted though.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#545An Indian eCommerce company wanted to test my mathematics while interviewing me for a VP of Marketing role. I had to tell them I won't fit into their company culture, let's not waste time further.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#546At 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…
Another way of looking at it is that they do these kinds of interviews particularly because they do want to hire fresh grads (and ideally, the best 5% of those) over experienced programmers. And if that's the case, then it's not really flawed, it's doing what it's supposed to do.
Actually, Max himself said that it "Felt like they would have preferred a fresh comp sci grad."[1]
Investment banks recruit bright young graduates, putting them through a tough selection process (c.f. all those hard-working interns we keep reading about), and select the ones who perform/conform the best. The rationale for bringing in young (as opposed to experienced) people is that they'll work their asses off, can be moulded to fit the culture (i.e. independent thinkers aren't necessarily sought), and (perhaps most importantly) are too junior to present a threat to the incumbents.
If Google's going down the same path, it may be a sign that their corporate culture is solidifying, which would be a bad sign, IMHO.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#547Has no one stopped to question what Google may have been looking for in a candidate? The OP has written some great apps, sure, but there is a huge difference between writing a package manager for Mac (among other Mac/iOS apps and utilities) and writing incredibly complex, highly performant algorithms for say search indexing, machine learning, ai, etc... In that context, knowing CompSci basics like Binary Trees (usual…
They reached out to him - he mentioned it in a tweet, and they've skipped the phone interview . Also, he would not be the one writing the machine learning, search indexing, but rather the app itself. All of those would be handled by other non-ios developers.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#548At 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…
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.
Really? Being able to solve basic CS101 problems requires some sort of privileged upbringing? I grew up poor - my family lived off food stamps for a while. This stuff is easy. I find it disgusting the level of entitlement swept throughout this thread. Oh Google HAD to give you that job, it was yours and they stole it by testing basic skills.
You know, there is something to be said for someone who has a good product sense, but not good developer skills. They sound very valuable, so why are they applying to a developer position? Just because you are unqualified for one job, doesn't mean you deserved that job, or that you're worthless.
Go do what you're good at.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#549Earlier 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.
At my university it's common to call acyclic, connected graph a tree. We distinguish between rooted and unrooted trees. For example, minimal spanning tree doesn't really have to be rooted, it just has no cycles.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#550At 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…
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.
I suspect the issue is that programmers right out of college are strong on testable skills (like how to do X to a linked list) and weak on experience-based skills that are harder to test (like how to keep projects under budget or how to manage technical debt). Whereas veterans naturally tend to be the opposite. And hiring processes naturally tend towards what's easier to test.
As such, the best approach to these interviews might be to say, "Look, I could take a stab at that algo question, but I haven't touched that stuff since school, and if I needed it I'd google it. It might be more productive if we talked about what I've been doing day-to-day for the last ten years to ship successful products, because that's the main value I can bring to your company."