How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#131

Post by jensvdh » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:28 AM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #78

dominotw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a coderpad facebook phone screen last week, interviewer said " that code the won't compile, can you see why?" .. It was missing a semicolon. on a related note, I write scala on daily basis but scala is not that well suited for coding interviews, I found.

Facebook likes their interview nonsense, but stores passwords in plaintext. I think the credibility of the system is in question

They didn't store pw in plain text. Pw were accidentally captured in logs and those logs were stored in an internal DB. This happens often.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#132

Post by shaftway » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:28 AM UTC

vips7L wrote: post #122

robocat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and candidate wasn't able to realize that even with hints. He said why. Why did you misquote?

That is why they were "dinged". Not why those things matter in whiteboard coding.

The standard solution to my problem is on the order of 12 lines of code. I don't expect it to be perfect or "production ready", but the infinite loop should stick out like a sore thumb. I do expect candidates to demonstrate that they recognized that problem, and to at least make some attempt to check that they didn't overrun the bounds of an array in the 30 minutes they have.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#133

Post by geofft » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:30 AM UTC

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #37

matmann2001 wrote: post #21

This is getting ridiculous. These guides to interviewing at specific companies are starting to sound like the video game cheat code books of old. If the process is so nuanced that there's an entire industry around these types of guides (and Google even highly recommends you buy them!), then the process is fundamentally flawed. But we already knew that, and as long as others are still playing the game, we are forced t…

I completely agree. Even Google suggest to "practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard". This is clearly a useless skill as a software engineers except in getting a job at companies that do whiteboard interviews. Did you try to refactor code on a whiteboard? How are they able to find people that are able to efficiently debug problems? When I interview people I tell them, "Bring your own laptop set up…

I agree with your comment in general, but, I worry about the bias of "Bring your own laptop set up to be able to code and debug" - some perfectly qualified candidates don't have laptops. Some perfectly qualified candidates do have a laptop but don't code much at home, and the setup they're used to is their work machine or a school lab computer. We already have too much bias in favor of code-all-day-code-all-night candidates (e.g., looking for GitHub profiles) and I think requiring someone to bring their workspace might push this to the point where good candidates who happen not to code outside business hours wouldn't stand a chance. (There are lots of reasons for this that wouldn't impact how qualified you are, from "I have a family" to "My workplace is real stingy about open source, so I haven't bothered to set anything up for non-work coding".)

I'd be a lot more comfortable with "We have a machine set up for you, but you can also bring your laptop," as long as the machine is actually well set up and you don't fall into the implicit expectation that passing candidates will bring their laptop anyway. (Most of them will, in the end.)

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#134

Post by sk5t » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:31 AM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #126

sk5t wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Scala doesn't have nearly enough semicolons. Kidding aside, why do you feel Scala is unsuited to coding interviews, assuming the interviewer well-understands the language?

hard to write heap sort in functional style with immutable collections. I guess you could write imperative style code.

Well, ah... unless you're applying at Amalgamated SortCo Industries, asking for on-the-spot sorting implementation is pretty high on the list of absurd interview questions.

Anyway I'd think one might use an array and not some other list/collection.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#135

Post by bm1362 » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:34 AM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #126

sk5t wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Scala doesn't have nearly enough semicolons. Kidding aside, why do you feel Scala is unsuited to coding interviews, assuming the interviewer well-understands the language?

hard to write heap sort in functional style with immutable collections. I guess you could write imperative style code.

I used clojure once during an interview and bombed, passed again 2 years later at the same company with Python. Would’ve made a big difference in my equity had I just started then!

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#136

Post by YjSe2GMQ » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:41 AM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #90

matmann2001 wrote: post #21

This is getting ridiculous. These guides to interviewing at specific companies are starting to sound like the video game cheat code books of old. If the process is so nuanced that there's an entire industry around these types of guides (and Google even highly recommends you buy them!), then the process is fundamentally flawed. But we already knew that, and as long as others are still playing the game, we are forced t…

Or it means the process is well defined enough that you can create a level field by telling everyone how it works through guides like this instead of giving connected people a leg up due to inside knowledge of a poorly defined process.

Yup. It's in th same spirit as SATs - people also practice for that.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#137

Post by blackflame7000 » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:43 AM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #81

ahelwer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Doing competitive-style programming and learning all sorts of weird algorithms has not made me a better engineer. I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that I have had to design or use an "interesting" algorithm - and no, not in the "not knowing what you don't know" sense where I could have used one if only I'd known about it.

I'm very critical of this approach to interviewing in general, but it also isn't the same as competitive programming and it isn't focused on "interesting" algorithms. It is far more focused on understanding how to use data structures and the trade offs between them. Chapter 3 of "The Algorithm Design Manual" (which is fittingly titled "Data Structures") is really the most useful reference for the majority of these in…

Most algorithms focus on:

1) binary trees for which theres usually a STL

2) some sort of odd string / array manipulation that never comes up in real life

3) some sort of linked list manipulation where again there is an STL for that and/or wouldn’t come up in real life

4) some optimized algorithm that literally took the first person years to discover prims vs kruskals MST for example, but now is expected to “figure out” on the fly.

5) Expects you to solve all these tasks with an insane time pressure that again is not a simulation of real life, it just makes it stressful almost as a rite of passage

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#138

Post by skookumchuck » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #133

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Even Google suggest to "practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard". This is clearly a useless skill as a software engineers except in getting a job at companies that do whiteboard interviews. Did you try to refactor code on a whiteboard? How are they able to find people that are able to efficiently debug problems? When I interview people I tell them, "Bring your own laptop set up…

I agree with your comment in general, but, I worry about the bias of "Bring your own laptop set up to be able to code and debug" - some perfectly qualified candidates don't have laptops. Some perfectly qualified candidates do have a laptop but don't code much at home, and the setup they're used to is their work machine or a school lab computer. We already have too much bias in favor of code-all-day-code-all-night can…

> some perfectly qualified candidates don't have laptops

So get one. You can get a good one from the pawn shop for $200. You can afford that if you're interviewing for a 6 figure job.

Edit: I'm not kidding. I've bought $200 laptops from the thrift store, usually for travel purposes so I don't worry about losing/breaking it.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#139

Post by perturbation » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:50 AM UTC

justrudd wrote: post #64

CodeMage wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I've had candidates that try to make up language features, and that doesn't fly with me. This piqued my curiosity. Can you give an example?

I'm still floored by how many candidates I've talked to that assert with great confidence that the local variables they declare will still be there with the same values when they call the function recursively. And most recently, when iterating over a string's characters the underlying string methods KNOW that the string is being iterated and will pick up at the current iteration point. For example, you've got the str…

https://github.com/yuki24/did_you_mean#installation :

    Ruby 2.3 and later ships with this gem and it will automatically be required when a Ruby process starts up. No special setup is required.

It doesn't call the method for you, but it does do the did-you-mean automatically if you misspell and it's close enough.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#140

Post by ilikehurdles » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 4:55 AM UTC

skookumchuck wrote: post #138

geofft wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your comment in general, but, I worry about the bias of "Bring your own laptop set up to be able to code and debug" - some perfectly qualified candidates don't have laptops. Some perfectly qualified candidates do have a laptop but don't code much at home, and the setup they're used to is their work machine or a school lab computer. We already have too much bias in favor of code-all-day-code-all-night can…

> some perfectly qualified candidates don't have laptops So get one. You can get a good one from the pawn shop for $200. You can afford that if you're interviewing for a 6 figure job. Edit: I'm not kidding. I've bought $200 laptops from the thrift store, usually for travel purposes so I don't worry about losing/breaking it.

When I was looking for work, my laptops setup was embarrassing. MacBook Pro with both a broken keyboard and misbehaving trackpad. I had to bring with me an external mechanical keyboard and trackpad. It worked out in the end but that could leave a bad impression with interviewers.