At least he didn't get put off because his CV had the wrong font. It was actually a technical question. They probably have binary trees that needs to be reversed everywhere in Google :P
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
551–560 of 683 posts
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has got to be the biggest hiring fallacy I've ever heard. "It's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad candidate." That's completely false, and anyone who says that is completely ignorant of Bayesian logic. Here are some simple numbers. Suppose that a "good" candidate is a 1-in-100 find. Suppose that a "bad" candidate has a 1% chance of tricking you into hiring them anyway. Every time you pass on a "g…
Not really. The population is large enough that you're treating each potential hire as a random variable. Given the amount of possible good new hires the effect of passing on one actual good hire has negligible effect on the next potential hire. The theory behind the "raise the bar" argument is that obviously good hires are easy to spot (this is the part most people reasonably take issue with), so people who do not p…
> The population is large enough that you're treating each potential hire as a random variable.
This is only true for new grads. The population of engineers with ten years of appropriate corporate experience (that match the technology survivor bias) and at the ~12 locations google can use is tiny.
When I look at my old corporation, only 3 people (of 500+ I would be aware of) were hired by google. One of them is genuinely great, but I doubt he passed the current process as a blind hire. The other two I wouldn't want to work with, but I bet they passed this process precisely because the right kind of focus. (I.e. everything people around them didn't know was their priority and since we normally focus on what's important to completing our project, none of that was so important..)
I was very interested in google when I was under the impression that (without experiencing menlo park on a daily basis,) I could either walk away with over $500k (gross) in 2- years, enjoy working there for 5 years, and/or work with the best >experiencedThe hiring market is already NP Hard for both sides when you are genuinely trying to get a good enough fit for yourself rather than the best deal on the market. If you try to misuse the other side they will see less ethical constraints in using the resources you'll have to put in.
How many developers genuinely want a job they can't do that they will have to be awkwardly fired from in six months and explain at every future interview?
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#553Earlier 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…
I agree. I recently interviewed for a security engineering position at a startup, and while I got offered the job, the interview was quite silly. The first thing I was asked to do was to write a lisp interpreter. It was a pretty trivial task, but it left me scratching my head since not only did it not tell them about whether I would be qualified at all, but I had explicitly avoided writing parsing code since I found…
That last sentence is telling. Would you even consider working there if they had no idea what to do? I have worked at established companies where there is clearly nobody at the helm and it is frustrating.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#554Earlier 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…
One of my interviewers at Google asked me to implement a balanced tree insert on the whiteboard in C. After doing so he immediately told me it wouldn't work. I searched futilely for a minute or two to find the problem before he condescendingly pointed out I had left out a semicolon on one of my statements... Another in the same interview got in my face (this should be easy) when he thought it was taking me too long t…
Perhaps it is an ego trip for the interviewers?
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>But 1 bad hire is easily correctable - you fire the person. Not sure if you have ever been a manager, because firing someone is NEVER easy. It hurts everyone emotionally. The person getting fired feels awful. The person doing the firing feels awful (unless they are a real sociopath). And team morale tends to take a big hit. Here is my stance: if you hire someone who isn't a good fit, unless they actively deceived y…
"it is your god damn job to find a way to make it work" That attitude is how bloat happens. There is a middle ground here. Not firing bad employees also hurts many people emotionally as does an underperforming, overbloated company. Employees are as replaceable as employers. To use a sports analogy, it's the big leagues and you may not make the team and often times it is hard to know whether someone can make the team…
If Google didn't apply the equivalent of the Hogwarts Hat to placing its employees, I'd agree with you. But in doing so, they remove the ability of the potential Googler to meet their potential teammates and decide whether it's a good fit.
Ergo they own the problem, not so much the Noogler. Also generalists == mediocre code in my experience because there's no passion for such work in a lot of people who are fantastic with other in-demand skills, but I digress.
And when I joined, Google wasn't so much bloating as it was metastasizing. Most of the people I knew who joined around the same time have long since left. In contrast, I've been at the same gig ever since I left Google. The Google experience was the outlier.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#556Earlier 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.
Tree is a graph without any cycles, hence the definition still holds. And yes, you can have multiple roots in a tree,
ex:
a --> c <---b ^ d-----|
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#557change the license, add a clause saying google can't use it, and sue them tomorrow
I know this was supposed to be a joke, but he can't retroactively change the license for the current released version. Any license changes will only apply to future releases.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 worked in one of the Mountain View offices for a year and a half with people who had never even been to college, and never heard that. Doesn't mean it never happened but the idea that it's even close to common is just laughable. I do wear my college t-shirt though. My graduating CS class was three people, so have to have a little pride there!
Ah yes but you were one of the three right? So you could brag about being best of the three :-)
I jest.
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo, unfortunately, this does happen. Happened to me at Google interview with one of the rather trivial question.
Happened to me at Twilio. The answer was transactions (database). You never forget that sort of mistake.
...unless you forget to commit that mistake to memory and rollback instead...?
Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
#560I wonder what an interview process at Google with Linus Torvalds or Theo de Raadt would be. I take for granted that the interviewer would not had a clue about their accomplishments.
Would they manage to pass the process?