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How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

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Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#11

Post by bsaul »

I don't think anyone could succeed in a coding test without rehearsing before taking it, just like any kind of live performance.

Programming languages are powerful things with which you can do a lot of very different things and tackle very different issues. Sometimes it's database querying, sometimes complex data structures, sometimes parallelism, genericity, business data modeling, etc. etc.

There should be a list of "warm up" exercises somewhere to help people prepare for general tests and make sure they've touched at least every subject once before going live.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#12

Post by swanson »

Don't sweat it. I find those Google interviews to be very discouraging and I felt dumb after not doing great on one when I was in school. Looking back, the whole interview was a mess. I got the call from the engineer 45 minutes late, I couldn't access the Google Doc because he was trying to send it to my university email address, and the coding portion started off with him writing "!(x & (x - 1)) && x" at the top of the empty document and asking "What does this do?".

Looking back, it was pretty silly but man did it really kill the confidence of 19 year-old me when it took me 10 minutes to work out that it detected numbers that were powers of 2. It really gave me a negative impression of Google's interview process (that and the complete radio silence afterwards), which I still think about when they send me their bi-annual recruiter emails. Funnily enough, the last email I got specifically mentioned that I had "done really well in the recruiting process in the past".

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#14

Post by swanson »

natch wrote: post #13

So your plan for your mini Google was to iterate through every entry in the index? (Setting aside the ludicrous idea of iterating through a hash when you can just ask it for a value by key... or am I missing something? Please enlighten me if I am.)

I think you misunderstood the problem statement. The hash is keyed by the URL and the value is the body of the HTML page. The input to `search` is a term, so you would need to check all of the items to see which one contained the term in the HTML. The subject could not just index directly into the hash.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#15

Post by mortdeus »

AccordionGuy wrote: post #6
integraton wrote: post #4

Is this a serious article? Iterating over a hash slightly wrong when writing code in a google doc during an interview is such a stupid, trivial thing to be judged on, whether it's you or someone else doing the judging. It's clear from the "My lame attempt" example that the basic concepts are understood, and if he's written a series of articles about the Enumerable module then he probably knows it better than the majo…

Yup, it's serious. I'm don't know for certain that I've been ruled out of a follow-up interview, but I got that vibe by the end.

Do you have any open source projects? The first thing i'm looking for as a developer when I visit your websites is a link to any code you have written. Which as far as I can tell doesnt exist?

A programmer without a portfolio of source code is like a painter without a portfolio paintings.

I assume Google scouts are usually looking to hook the exceptionally rare "Monet" and "Picaso" software engineers swimming around in an ocean overcrowded by "PC techs".

There is a quote by Linus Torvalds that is fairly relevant here. "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

Your resume is nice... Cute even. But without the code to back it up, there is nothing to critique your actual skills.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#16

Post by dannypgh »

swanson wrote: post #14
natch wrote: post #13

So your plan for your mini Google was to iterate through every entry in the index? (Setting aside the ludicrous idea of iterating through a hash when you can just ask it for a value by key... or am I missing something? Please enlighten me if I am.)

I think you misunderstood the problem statement. The hash is keyed by the URL and the value is the body of the HTML page. The input to `search` is a term, so you would need to check all of the items to see which one contained the term in the HTML. The subject could not just index directly into the hash.

If you're just doing keyword matching, you're best off building one of these first:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index

As for the interview, I really wouldn't sweat it. Even if you didn't do well in the eyes of your interviewer, 1. there are several interviews that they are looking at, not just one, 2. people understand that folks get nervous and can screw things up sometimes, and that whiteboard (or google document) coding isn't the best measure of intelligence. Because of this, they're usually more interested in how you respond to feedback than the merits of your first attempt, and 3. there's a lot of luck to any interview process - what questions get picked, etc. and even if you don't do well I wouldn't discourage you from trying again in the future.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#17

Post by eterm »

integraton wrote: post #4

Is this a serious article? Iterating over a hash slightly wrong when writing code in a google doc during an interview is such a stupid, trivial thing to be judged on, whether it's you or someone else doing the judging. It's clear from the "My lame attempt" example that the basic concepts are understood, and if he's written a series of articles about the Enumerable module then he probably knows it better than the majo…

This is his take on what went wrong with the interview, it's just one side.

Perhaps another side is that he didn't seem to be guided to the correct solution during the interview process, which would concern me more than not getting it right first time if I were hiring.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#18

Post by mortdeus »

If im ever being interviewed by Google, i'm going to say "hold up let me google the solution to that real quick."

A good engineer spends about 95% of their time discovering new things to learn about their craft. An even better engineer uses what other engineers have already discovered and shared with the world to further their understanding.

If the world only consisted of the "even better" engineers things like this wouldnt ever exist. http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

When I hear, "I want you to develop a mini google.", I feel that the only right answer to the question is, "No thats not a problem that needs to be fixed anymore. Lets actually fix a real world problem that affects real world people."

There are very few new generation software engineers that are truly hackers at heart. Its really sad when a company like Google doesnt even know how to look for them anymore.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#19

Post by yongjik »

> When your bread and butter is crunching through large amounts of data with MapReduce, it only makes sense that you tend to take a more functional approach and think in terms of single-operation mapping, filtering, folding, and sorting.

Umm, sorry, no. You wouldn't believe what kind of 5-level-nested-if C++ statements you could find in Google's codebase. Google might be known for its technical abilities, but "affinity to functional programming ideas" is generally not one of them.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#20

Post by hackinthebochs »

mortdeus wrote: post #15
AccordionGuy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it's serious. I'm don't know for certain that I've been ruled out of a follow-up interview, but I got that vibe by the end.

Do you have any open source projects? The first thing i'm looking for as a developer when I visit your websites is a link to any code you have written. Which as far as I can tell doesnt exist? A programmer without a portfolio of source code is like a painter without a portfolio paintings. I assume Google scouts are usually looking to hook the exceptionally rare "Monet" and "Picaso" software engineers swimming around…

Everyone loves to say this, but this is just not how it goes in the real world. It is just bad advice for people to focus so much on this one aspect when in reality it will only help you land interviews with people that regularly read HN.
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