Yeah I remember the Google interview a few years back. I did it mostly for fun, and because their recruiters kept contacting me. So there we were, building a tree out of a forest of existing smaller trees or such. That was after they couldn't find my resume, and used a 5 year old one they found some place. They seemed annoyed and tired. By that time I felt nothing short of me proving P!=NP would have help changed the…
> That was after they couldn't find my resume, and used a 5 year old one they found some place.
Well, searching is not really Google's core competency.
Yeah I remember the Google interview a few years back. I did it mostly for fun, and because their recruiters kept contacting me. So there we were, building a tree out of a forest of existing smaller trees or such. That was after they couldn't find my resume, and used a 5 year old one they found some place. They seemed annoyed and tired. By that time I felt nothing short of me proving P!=NP would have help changed the…
> That was after they couldn't find my resume, and used a 5 year old one they found some place. Well, searching is not really Google's core competency.
Maybe they need help in this department. Who knows a good search algo they could use?
The rules are pretty clear on what the interview will cover. The recruiter tells you months before the interview and they (Google) even send you a list of what books and papers to read before you consider yourself ready. That is more than fair. I just joined a start up. It consists of 3 non-minorities and 3 minorities. All three non-minorities were recruited early on because they all knew someone within the company (…
> The recruiter tells you months before the interview and they (Google) even send you a list of what books and papers to read before you consider yourself ready.
Right, because I have nothing better do in those months than to rehash CS 101 and waste my time inverting trees and reversing strings.
> You are then ushered into a room with the programmer's worst nightmare - a blank whiteboard.
It may be the case for a few, but some people (including me) feel pretty comfortable with a white board. There's nothing hard in using a whiteboard. It's just a big sheet of paper...
Then if people think that they will never have to use a whiteboard to explain the design of their system to someone, maybe it's because they just "design" simple system.
Sure it is bullshit. But it is also highly trainable. If you want a job, spend a month at http://hackerrank.com/ and similar sites and just get better at it.
I think most engineers will pass after that. Oh, and always use a language you are very comfortable in. Just stay safe and boring. I think all companies will let you pick the language as long as they have heard about it.
I'll be the contrarian and claim that inverting a binary tree is a perfectly reasonable interview question. (Although not anymore now that it's famous). It combines basic background knowledge (what is a binary tree and how is it structured?), ability to reason logically (binary tree algorithms are often recursive, "inverting" a tree with no children is a no-op, otherwise you want to swap the children, and the childre…
> I'll be the contrarian and claim that inverting a binary tree is a perfectly reasonable interview question.
The fact that so many people in the previous discussion could not even tell what that means is a very bad sign.
In your daily programming activities, how many times do you have to implement a binary tree? I'm genuinely interested.
I find myself implementing trees fairly often (and manipulating them even more often), but since I'm not using a language that requires lots of pointer juggling and lifetime reasoning, I consider implementing them a pretty basic task.
Interesting. What type of software do you work on? I ask because I write code for robotic control loops and looking to explore any possible angle. Someone who writes trees often could help broaden my horizons.
> That was after they couldn't find my resume, and used a 5 year old one they found some place. Well, searching is not really Google's core competency.
Maybe they need help in this department. Who knows a good search algo they could use?
I heard inverted binary trees are the thing nowadays.
I enjoy the challenge of programming interviews. When I interviewed in Mountain View, I thought it was just super cool to have been invited. It was like the mother ship had summoned me home! I was mega-underwhelmed when I botched the last session, though. And after doing so poorly, no one escorted me out or summed things up. Efficient, I suppose -- I'd met with the recruiter at the beginning of the day and there was…
To fill in one gap - our hiring process has an extra layer of insulation to better control individual biases. Your interviewers all submit feedback and an independent hiring committee makes the decision, on a different day, with all due deliberation. The reason nobody has anything to say to you at the end of the day is because none of that has happened so nobody knows what to say at that point, and I don't think it's…
Yes, "thousands of Google engineers who do interviews haven't figured out that people writing code on a whiteboard under stress aren't the same thing as people sat at their desk grinding out code?"
I am pretty confident they don't know that. I know people way smarter than me who flunked the google interviews and, working in the same building, know even more that got in who are very good but not great. Also, they are ageist and "don't consider experience at all" (and that is from a direct quote from a person in an interview).