31–40 of 43 posts
"Note that finding the median of an array is a special case of this where k = n/2."
I'm pretty sure it should be k = (n+1) / 2. (If there are 5 numbers, you want the 3rd one, if there are 6 numbers you want the average of 3 and 4.)
I have actually tried but could not find any scientific evidence that these type of technical interviews actually result in the best hiring decisions.
I have actually tried but could not find any scientific evidence that these type of technical interviews actually result in the best hiring decisions.
They seem to get finding the median slightly wrong: "Note that finding the median of an array is a special case of this where k = n/2." I'm pretty sure it should be k = (n+1) / 2. (If there are 5 numbers, you want the 3rd one, if there are 6 numbers you want the average of 3 and 4.)
For arrays whose length is even, I think it's also acceptable to take either one of the two values (instead of the mean of the two) as the median value. Wikipedia is fairly ambiguous on this as it only states "one often takes the mean" and "sometimes one takes the average of the two median numbers".
I believe that for a large enough sample size the discrepancy shouldn't even matter all that much.
I've done the Google interview thing (had 5 interviews, got asked to do more, declined due to my wife taking another job), and I can confirm I had some (I think 4 or 5) of these questions. In my interviews I generally started with a naive answer, got the good answer on my own and got to the best answer with some hints from the interviewer. They didn't seem to regard this as a bad thing. At one point when I started wo…
While these are good questions, in my experience they're so widely known from books/websites that I'd be amazed if a company like Google was using them for anything other than early screening of candidates.
They get the definition of polymorphism wrong, because their definition ("ability of one method to have different behavior depending on the type of object it is being called on / object passed by parameter) is also met by compile time function overloading. Their example, where you have a customer integer class that is capable of dealing with both other integer arguments and floats is pretty poor. Any definition of po…
That doesn't make the definition incorrect; there are many types of polymorphism.
Function overloading is an example of ad-hoc polymorphism; generics is an example of parametric polymorphism; and inheritance is an example of inclusion polymorphism.
The article is totally fine for HN. However, I don't think it's "hacking" a test if I study for it, so why "Hacking a Google Interview"? Is "hack" the new "pwn" or something?
Actually I think that advice is misguided, as in my experience when you tell an interviewer you're already familiar with their favorite brainteaser they're just as impressed as if you solved it yourself, and you don't feel dishonest.
Instead of giving a Boyer-Moore style solution (with sub-linear complexity), it gives the naive approach (with quadratic complexity).
I've done the Google interview thing (had 5 interviews, got asked to do more, declined due to my wife taking another job), and I can confirm I had some (I think 4 or 5) of these questions. In my interviews I generally started with a naive answer, got the good answer on my own and got to the best answer with some hints from the interviewer. They didn't seem to regard this as a bad thing. At one point when I started wo…
Can I ask what interview stage you were asked these in, and what level the position was for? While these are good questions, in my experience they're so widely known from books/websites that I'd be amazed if a company like Google was using them for anything other than early screening of candidates.
I was going for an overseas position, which complicated the process, because they had to fly me to another city for a combination of onsite and video interviews.
Obviously they asked other questions, too.
My impression was that they hadn't planned on doing another round of interviews, but the mixed feed back I got confused them (I did very well on at least on question, but totally bombed on another). Who knows, though - the whole interviewing process was a bit of a mess to be honest.