Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but... • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by pkaye » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:24 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #201

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 would agree with what you said if you replaced resume with reputation . Anyone can fill out a nice resume. One of the challenges with Google's interview process [0] is they are very worried about hiring mistakes, and also know that the process is very noisy. As such, they interview a tremendous amount of people for hiring. In addition, they've found it more efficient to just keep a high bar (missing many good hires…

Well I know one mistake they may have made in hiring. Guy I used to work with had a totally unclear design process and couldn't complete his work. He would design flawed algorithms that made no sense to anyway and then he asked for lead a project which he dug himself into a hole and had me pulled in to help him and then abandoned me and left the company. Spent 3 months cleaning up his mess. I wonder how he is working out for them...

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

#222

Post by perfTerm » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:25 PM UTC

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.

Ha, I totally messed up a question for a front end interview today that could have easily been solved with timeouts. I didn't realize timeouts had resets as I haven't used them extensively and bam I'm trying to essentially design a reset for a generic counter. Boy I felt ridiculous. As soon as he said use timeout reset it's immediately obvious what I had to do. I'm not a bad programmer but between brain freeze and whiteboarding, and interviewing day after day for a few weeks, it just didn't occur. Killed me and I hope I don't miss out on an offer from a company I was actually really interested in because of some bullshit brainfart on something I'm not particularly well versed in.

Whatever! They asked me back but it sure is a frustrating feeling even if I tend not to appear flustered until I walk out, introspect, and realize what a doofus I was.

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

#223

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:25 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by Terr_ » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

seiji wrote: post #203

supergirl wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

because I'm not good at other things they need. It's not that you're not _good_ at it, but you're not able to demonstrate under time constraints, lack of references, lack of iterative code/compiler/REPL feedback, and while being stared down by someone whose default mindset is "why am I wasting my time on this person?" It's never 1 reason why you get rejected, it's the total score. That depends on how far down the int…

It's also aggravating when a Google recruiter "reaches out" to you and but won't (or can't) reveal any details at all about what role they're trying to fill.

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

#225

Post by jblow » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #45

bstamour wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's avocado: if they're truly CS fundamentals, then they should be baked into you good and deep during the course of your college education. It shouldn't be painful at all.

I took CS 101 classes almost a decade ago, and since then, I have never once needed to write a binary search tree outside of an interview. I think "CS Fundamentals" are really just "abstract concepts used to teach programming", and calling them fundamentals is disingenuous.

Maybe you're just not doing serious programming. Most people I know implement data structure searches quite often.

If you're writing scripts, or JS code for web pages or something like that, then maybe you don't use CS stuff, but ... are you able to write a web browser if you had to? Are you able to write an operating system or navigational software for a spacecraft? If not, then maybe just see this as revealing sectors of your skill set that could be beefed up, rather than presuming that none of that stuff is important.

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

#226

Post by elif » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:27 PM UTC

I took my google interview as a gift from them to me. It showed me that I was mistakenly interviewing to become a cog in a terry gilliam-esque corporate machine, and that made me think hard about my path in life, and what i really wanted out of a career.

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

#227

Post by DannoHung » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:27 PM UTC

attilaolah wrote: post #210

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, it means to reverse the binary tree, so that you get the largest item by iterating down the left branch to the bottom of the tree. You would do this by breadth-first scanning the tree, swapping the left and right pointers as you go.

Oddly enough, Google shows me interview questions where "inverting a binary tree" means something quite different — for example, flipping it upside down, and making the left leaf the root, the right leaf the left leaf and the root the right leaf. If this was really about "reversing" the tree, as you mention, the question seems more likely to address how the candidate approaches the situation. Like, he should start by…

I was gonna say, who calls reversing a tree's ordering inverting?

> Oddly enough, Google shows me interview questions where "inverting a binary tree" means something quite different — for example, flipping it upside down, and making the left leaf the root, the right leaf the left leaf and the root the right leaf.

Whaaaaa? I can't find this, but it seems like such a weird operation. Got a link?

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

#228

Post by defen » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:28 PM UTC

droidist2 wrote: post #130

defen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Walking through the cafeteria made me feel like I was back in CMU CS again, in a bad way. Really smart people who are really insecure about their intellect?

And that insecurity manifests itself as a facade of arrogance and condescension?

Sometimes, but not necessarily. Sometimes it's people who always have to be "right" - which means every conversation (whether about technical things or what you did last weekend) devolves into a carefully orchestrated dance of definitions that allows everyone to escape with their egos intact - because he conceives of himself as "the smart guy" or "the guy who is always right" - so if he's wrong, he changes the rules[1].

Sometimes it's the reverse - the exhaustion of needing to always be "on" intellectually, because someone will point out the smallest inconsistency or fuzziness (again, in non-technical contexts where it doesn't matter)[2].

Sometimes it's because I'm super bored by conversations that mostly consist of geek-culture or technical references, where I get the reference but don't laugh because it's not that clever or not that funny, and people assume I don't get it (maybe that one's on me, though).

I've never been to a Google campus or event so I don't know what it's like there - I'm just describing my own experience at a place like CMU CS.

[1] An absurd example was the guy who claimed the song "Right Here Waiting" was by Bryan Adams. I told him it was Richard Marx, but he insisted that it was Bryan Adams. I didn't care so I just let it go. Later that day he emailed me a link to a mislabeled Youtube video as "proof" - when really it was just an ego salve for him to prove to me that he was justified in claiming that it was Bryan Adams. I offer this anecdote because it illustrates a common personality flaw of smart people (especially ones who spent their formative years as the smartest person they knew)

[2] Think comic book guy's xylophone comment from The Simpsons

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

#229

Post by omegote » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:28 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #189

emsy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you follow the twitter discussion, it says he applied for iOS tools. I don't know what tools they write but I'd be surprised if someone who manages to write a (pretty good, actually) package manager can't solve the problems in this position.

> If you follow the twitter discussion, it says he applied for iOS tools We cannot just assume that since he applied for iOS something at Google that he's the best fit and what they were looking for. Maybe the tools Google needs built are very CS heavy (hence the "Build us a Binary Tree" question)? Maybe during the interview his arrogant attitude was on full display? Maybe the interview team dug up past episodes of e…

He actually didn't apply, it was Google who contacted him in the first place.

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

#230

Post by fishnchips » Wed, Jun 10, 2015, 10:28 PM UTC

[Ex-Googler here] Truth be told this is a trivial question to be asked during an algo interview and as an interviewer I'd consider this a warm-up. Otherwise it's a rather poor question since either you know how to do it (ie, you have an idea about recursion) or you don't - there aren't too many shades of grey or possible follow-up questions that I can ask to probe the depth of your knowledge.

That being said if I asked this as a warm-up and we'd spend the whole interview trying to get that done then of course my verdict would be No Hire. As an interviewer it is not my job to look at your GitHub profile - instead I am assigned an area to check and I try to come up with the best understanding of the candidate in that area. While failing to reverse a binary tree is a total failure in algo/ds you can still be hired since there are several interviewers (if you make it to onsites, that is), each probing a different area.

My biggest problem with Google style interview process is that it's easily passed by folks who already passed it in a different company. After having interviewed hundreds of Google's candidates I moved to another big company with the same interview type and the experience was really surreal. On my algo/ds interview I got asked slight variations of the same questions I was asking myself - and over time I've seen some totally brilliant, unexpected solutions. Must have been a strange experience for the interviewer who got his questions each answered in 3 minutes tops. I also made it a sport to solve each one in a different language because why not. Not sure though about validity of the signal the company got from this interview.