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How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

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Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#191

Post by retiredcoder »

vkou wrote: post #141
dominotw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to write code exclusively on white board last month. Only laptop in the room was interviewers which he was using it exclusively to furiously copy the code i was writing in the whiteboard. He said it will compile it and submit report when he gets back to his desk. :/

I've done nearly 100 interviews at Google, at least half of them with me copying code from a whiteboard, and I have never tried to compile a line of code that a candidate wrote. I also go out of my way, to make it clear that I don't care about every hanging parenthesis, indentation, or typo. I care about whether or not the candidate asks for clarification, or bulls ahead with assumptions, whether the overall algorith…

I have to ask this, do you see yourself as the norm at Google throughout your whole employment time there?

In my experience as both interviewee and interviewer, there is a lot of power struggles involved. Just like any other interaction betweeen engs like code reviews.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#192

Post by retiredcoder »

dilyevsky wrote: post #51
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…

Google used to run “how to interview with Google” multiple day bootcamps where they’d train you to pass its interviews. I’ve gotten couple of those candidates and thought it was just ridiculous.

I think it is sad, it comes from your own employer (I understand you work for Google, correctly if I am wrong).

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#193

Post by retiredcoder »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #104

Is it fair to assume "professional google interviewee" is a thing nowadays?

Yes, I have a few close friends hopping jobs every 1-2 years. Part of their secret is be involved with interviews to keep all this crap fresh in their minds and also be part of this sub-industry of tech interviews.

Good for them financially maybe. Professionally, I didn’t see they go beyond the average senior dev. But that just me being sour.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#194

Post by retiredcoder »

skookumchuck wrote: post #142

I've never seen an interview process that HN (and Reddit and Slashdot and ...) didn't trash as "deeply flawed", "biased", "unfair", "unreasonable", etc. At some point, though, a company has to have some sort of process, and by and large what they use works for them.

Yes, there are decent hiring practices out there but first it is hard to make the news here in HN without some degree of popularity..

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#195

Post by retiredcoder »

bitL wrote: post #60

You can bypass the whole charade by knowing 2-3 people within Google that can provide "assurance" you are good enough. Whiteboard testing is for grunts/unknowns without network. Another way is to be a significant contributor to some popular open source project.

Sorry, but I’ll call BS here.

I have a very solid network inside google (ex-coworkers from another FAANG job) and also from xooglers, at IC and management track.

Even in my last interview failure (see my post here), the recruiter told me I had more than enough to support my application. Yet, an exec made the no-go call.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#196

Post by chopin »

jensvdh wrote: post #131
jammygit wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's storing passwords in plain text. "Happens often" is no valid excuse, on the contrary. If it happens often you should know about it if you are a qualified engineer.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#197

Post by oksurewhynot »

dmoy wrote: post #29
oksurewhynot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't really a choice when I interviewed there. All but one interviewer had me write code in the chromebook, which was my least favorite part of the interview process. The trackpad didn't respond to my slightly dry erase covered fingers, the keyboard was weird, and the quasi hangout software it was running crashed a few times, one of which required a full restart. That might not sound like a big deal but in a hig…

Tell your recruiter, interviewers are not supposed to force candidates to use chromebooks.

I thought about it, but the chromebook hang ups were not the deciding factor in my performance (I did extremely meh and am fine with that because I'm entirely self taught and to even get that far was really cool). There were other larger problems with the process that google should be fixing instead of dinking around with chromebooks (I'm assuming they were there so code could be reviewed afterwards, which makes sense).

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#198

Post by mattkrause »

bitL wrote: post #129
mattkrause wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m having a hard time believing this is true.... If nothing else, Logo? In 2019?

I think the term "Logo" stands on a perfect abstraction level that in reality could have meant "using turtle.py you programmed last week with turn, move etc. commands", don't you think? Do we need to be super-precise down to minutiae when discussing informal stuff? Moreover, it's on paper, so who cares what syntax is the pseudocode, it could be even Logo itself.

> Do we need to be super-precise down to minutiae?

No, but we also don’t need to make up ridiculous lies, especially ones that aren’t particularly funny.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#199

Post by retiredcoder »

ereyes01 wrote: post #175
travbrack wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the function syntax thing is one of those things that's so basic that someone who gets that wrong probably doesn't code very much.

If you put someone in a fight vs. flight situation, and add in the task saturation of the coding interview, a competent person can react adversely and make basic mistakes. A week ago in a conference, I watched an SRE who I knew was very competent have a panic attack when a demo didn't work as expected. I never learned what exactly happened, but apparently it was simple enough that a colleague was able to quickly fix…

Quite interesting.

Unfortunately, it seems that we are just now starting to realize the human aspects of software eng. Still, even if there could be a massive amount of data to show in which interviews, or more generically, how human judging or predicting personalities/traits/etc are intrinsically flawed

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#200

Post by Frost1x »

darklajid wrote: post #177
hardwaregeek wrote: post #94

A friend said recently, "people want to be employed without becoming employable". These guides really exemplify this obsession. Sure, Google has a nice salary and good perks and whatever. But after you get the job, you have to do the job. I wonder if the people who read these guides and try to study just the right topics to get a job, whether they actually like programming. These guides act as optimizations, shorteni…

I love programming. I'm scared shitless of whiteboard exercises (and - probably biased by that - see no point in them). There's no way I'd be able to get through them UNLESS I optimize for .. whiteboard programming interviews w/ resources like this site. In spite of writing code every day, for 15 years plus, and although I LOVE programming, this just excludes me from the list. (This hits a bit close to home for me be…

I feel your pain. I started in 2008 and have been running various R&D related development contracts through the same core employer but am in the process of moving locations.

When I interviewed around 2008, there was whiteboarding, but only psuedo code based which I could do just fine. The majority of interviews focused on questions regarding time/space complexity trade offs, design choices, etc. not on-the-fly fully optimized implementation solutions, first pass. The worst thing I ran into was having to write merge sort as the FizzBizz of the time.

Now, it's an absolute circus. Most in the industry really don't know what they're looking for and how to adequately assess abilities. They're far more concerned with trivia and memory recall and filtering any remote risk of a false negative than actually accomplishing the tasks for the position at hand.

The current process is very well designed on multiple fronts to attempt to delegitimize professionals and is quite optimized at grabbing fresh grads desperate for work experience or finding cheaper labor without raising red flags on illegal hiring processes. Why people have put up with this practice boggles my mind.

The vast majority of roles don't need Alan Turing, Donald Knuth, or Jon von Neumann to accomplish some basic business goals so let's be realistic and stop pretending they do.

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