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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...

#161

Post by CydeWeys »

seccess wrote: post #122
to3m wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wondered this as well! As far as I can tell - I asked google and looked at what it came up with :) - it means swapping children.

Yeah I checked Google as well, but swapping children seemed too easy for an interview question. I'm wondering if it means restructuring the tree so a different node is the root. Trees have the property that any node can be the root and it is still a tree. Not sure just wondering if anyone had more info.

It does seem way too easy. Maybe it was the first part in an increasingly difficult several part question, each part building off of the previous part, and the interviewee never made it past the first part in the time allotted?

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#162

Post by PhasmaFelis »

thethimble wrote: post #74
kenrikm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think of the problem from Google's perspective though. At some point, you have tens of thousands of candidates and you need a system to quantify how good they are. Further, it's reasonable to have false negatives (people you don't hire that should have been hired) but really bad to have false positives (people that you hire that you should not have). Together, these boil down into the de facto whiteboarding interview…

It's true that evaluating candidates is a hard problem, but you'd think that at the very least they would try to evaluate them based on skills that will actually be used in the job. Judging programmers based on their whiteboard skills is like judging a ballet dancer based on how eloquently he can describe his training routine.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#163

Post by jtzhou »

sown wrote: post #55
mikek wrote: post #15

At 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…

I wonder how much of it is legacy. Google said early on they want to hire the best and brightest and that was the most important. We got the mantra that passing over a good person is better than hiring a bad one. And they were right. But they're a huge company now. They, and other gigantic tech companies are always complaining they can't find 'good people'. But how do you make this philosophy scale? Do you say, "This…

> The gigantic tech companies are always complaining they can't find 'good people'.

The "can't find good people" argument can usually be solved either 1) raising the pay, or 2) increasing the labor pool (i.e. H1B, etc). Raising the pay is what is done in finance because it's harder to make the argument that the required "skills" are lacking in the labor pool. To enter investment banking, and then private equity, it often only requires a B.A. in French literature and willingness to work 90 hours.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#164

Post by kamaal »

silverlake wrote: post #96
mikek wrote: post #15

At 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…

It's also stressful. To be fair the tree problem he got was easy, but brain freeze can kill you. I flubbed a trivial problem at a FB interview that still haunts me today.

>>To be fair the tree problem he got was easy

They don't just stop at binary trees. Think of it more like memorizing hundreds of magic tricks that could be done using a deck of cards. The tree is more analogous to those deck of cards. The data structure remains constant but the tricks you can do keep changing.

I know of situations where candidates have been grilled whole full hours on tree traversal methods, and then asked to code up perfectly working solutions for them.

Do these people seriously think people who can invent 50 years of CS research by sheer analysis over an hour on the whiteboard, will be ready to work for them to write shell scripts? If not you are only testing memory skills.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#166

Post by eonw »

to3m wrote: post #91
spiritplumber wrote: post #73

A project manager at Google was upset that my 'bot literally ran circles around theirs (it was 2010, Android based robots were just starting) and told me that I was just a hobbyist and my project did not exist. So I gave him one of the spare logic boards (open design anyway). And wrapped my hand around his. And squeezed. And asked him, if it doesn't exist, why is it making you bleed? He watched impotently as the peop…

I think you need to work on your people skills.

or the other guy could work on his ego skills?

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#167

Post by aaggarwal »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #121
aaggarwal wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly, since it's Google, they can afford to have strong filters which will definitely filter out a bad hire, may be at the expense of rejecting a good candidate. Their policy might expect good candidate to get absorbed in Google one way or other, but they definitely want to filter a bad hire. However, in the recent years, I have seen this to be not working as expected. Still, I don't think it matters to Googl…

"they can afford to have strong filters which will definitely filter out a bad hire, may be at the expense of rejecting a good candidate" Can they, though? Obviously they believe they can, but are they correct? Google's not going away any time soon, but they could easily slip a long way down from the top of the heap. There are signs that's started to happen. I don't think they can be nearly as casual about losing top…

In the long run, this could affect Google, but, then again, if they change their hiring policies for better even after long 5 years, the best talent that might had been rejected before would still go to work at Google. So, still I don't think Google really consider it as an issue for them. Though, I have been burned once myself by them.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#168

Post by ruswick »

Alupis wrote: post #70

Has 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…

He applied for an iOS developer role.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#169

Post by supergirl »

leetNightshade wrote: post #109
supergirl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe Homebrew is amazing, but Google can hire the best people in the world. that day they might've interviewed 10 people better than him who just didn't make a popular tool

"that day they might've interviewed 10 people better than him who just didn't make a popular tool" Are you judging this on their ability to invert a binary tree? People here are ranting about having a problem with interview practices not representing whether or not you are good at your job. That's presumably (IMO) why the tweet was posted.

the tweet is made to trigger that discussion. but you can rephrase the tweet to something like: even though I made a popular tool, I didn't get a job at Google because I'm not good at other things they need. Google probably has a lot of factors counted into the final decision, including algorithm skills, other software engineering skills, human skills, contributions to open source projects. It's never 1 reason why you get rejected, it's the total score.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#170

Post by penprogg »

eonw wrote: post #127
smackfu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point. It's like, why do you want to work for Google if you aren't into algorithms?

other then search and maps, how many of their products use algos heavily though? many projects i have worked on over the years required very little knowledge of algos.

Hey man, all that CRUD needed to make all those shovelware google apps requires a ton of algorithmic knowledge. /s
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