A Wretched Google Interview Experience • Hacker News Board

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#301

Post by bubbleRefuge » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 11:43 PM UTC

RogerL wrote: post #292

jrockway wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

managing a bunch of programmers The OP says his friend was interviewing for "product manager", which is not that. Product management is basically coming up with ideas for new products and seeing them through to the end. That includes helping design the actual computer program, which is why they ask software engineering questions. (There are a ton of jobs called "PM", but they're all very different. None of them manag…

Which requires calculus how?

Sorry to barge in, my guess is that Google looks for the best of the best with a slant toward academia. So maybe a PM from a top notch b-school knows his calculus?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#302

Post by abalone » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 12:10 AM UTC

hughlomas wrote: post #296

abalone wrote: post #256

Ok, the RealTimeCounter problem got me thinking. It's a great question. It seems very simple, but as the author notes even PhD's are stumped by it. Here my solution. One very important purpose it serves is to see how well you can identify problems in algorithms. Probably I'm guessing it's not even important that you get it perfect, just that you can recognize and talk through the challenges. One challenge relates to…

A few hours ago when reading the article I was also intrigued by the question and journeyed down a similar path regarding the moving window and the trade-offs. After toying with a couple of improper solutions I came to a very similar conclusion. The basic idea being that each time increment() is called, you store the difference since the last increment, and to count you simply add up the offsets until you reach your…

Your array will grow indefinitely. Not a viable solution, it seems to me.

Incidentally someone else posted a round robin database solution. It's probably the way to go. That's more or less where I was headed with quantizing offsets.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#303

Post by abalone » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 12:18 AM UTC

informatimago wrote: post #278

stinkypete wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about an official answer but using a simple variation on a round-robin database (RRD) ought to do the trick. Basically: day count = [last 23 hour buckets] + hour count hour count = [last 59 minute buckets] + minute count minute count = [last 59 second buckets] + second count second count = You end up losing a small amount of accuracy, the worst being for keeping track of the second counts. You can avoid…

The last hour now goes back from 22:45:03.435123897 (remember, nanosecond timer, but now it is from 22:46:07.223981453. Unless you can round the time when the last second, the last minute, etc start, you have to keep the full history of increment events up to the nanosecond for the last 24 hours. That's O(24 60 60*1e9).

But if you do round the time to an acceptable degree of accuracy (say, to within 1ms of the second count and 1m of the day count) then it does work within a fixed amount of memory. It's probably the best solution.

It's a lovely exercise in algorithm tradeoffs. In this case it's mainly accuracy vs. memory, with lots of opportunity to explore implementation optimizations.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#304

Post by RogerL » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 12:18 AM UTC

AnIrishDuck wrote: post #262

mason55 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You shouldn't be expected to know Floyd's algorithm And yet it's a somewhat common interview question

Yes, but some interview questions are more important than others. I was asked this question before. I didn't know the answer. I still got the job. A year later, I'm asking the question. I obviously don't hold it against interviewees if they don't know the answer. I see it is a "bonus points" question, not one that will make/break my opinion of a candidate. Asking about cycle detection in linked lists can be informati…

Why do you ask questions that don't influence your hiring decision? I find these kinds of questions quite annoying because I suspect the interviewer is not trying to measure me appropriately - and I have turned down job offers where I thought the interview questions were poor.

Why ask a question when you have empirical evidence that you can perform quite well (I'm assuming you are a good engineer) without being able to answer the question? It makes no sense to me.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#305

Post by bane » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 12:21 AM UTC

Before anybody goes to try and get hired at a "hot" company, please please please check out glassdoor's interview experiences and ratings. You'd be surprised at how shitty some companies treat people during the hiring process. I've experienced it myself a couple of times.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#306

Post by yapcguy » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 12:32 AM UTC

anon1385 wrote: post #216

jrockway wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read my reply below. I'm personally not OK with screwing over candidates, but I can understand why fuckups happen from time to time. If you're having problems with the process, never hesitate to send me an email. jrockway AT google.com.

This is not just a few fuckups though is it? Interviewers not being on site I can see yes, that can happen and I agree we can attribute that to 'flakiness' if it's a one off. (Although I have to say I can't imagine it ever happening at anywhere I have ever worked, and I've worked in local government, a bumbling bureaucracy if ever there was one). But failing to return calls just about every single time? Waiting month…

Bravo. Agree 100%.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#307

Post by rpwilcox » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 12:38 AM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #250

deong wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's recruiting seems like it must be at least partially the responsibility of short-tenure contractors. Every time I've dealt with people from their recruiting department, even the very nice ones seemed forgetful, inattentive and poor at communication. I had a Google recruiter contact me once when I was actively looking for a job. Her initial email was just the basic, "we saw your CV and thought your skills in…

Is this something that may be unique to the bay area though? I went through several rounds of interviews with a couple different startups, and two of them were non-responsive to the point it was annoying. I can understand startups being less "professional", but some of them treat you more like a number than some of the bigger corporates I've worked for.

> Is this something that may be unique to the bay area though?

Yes. In the NYC/DC tech scene usually available engineers are snapped up in half a week, tops.

Not in those scenes myself, but have seen/heard enough stories.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#308

Post by yapcguy » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 12:50 AM UTC

smackfu wrote: post #7

jff wrote: post #6

So, did you not sign the NDA where you agree not to discuss the content of the interviews, or are you just throwing caution to the wind here?

Practically speaking, Google isn't going to do anything besides blacklisting. Can you imagine the stories in the tech press if they sued someone for breaking an interview NDA?

Better to be blacklisted then get Google recruiters spamming you every few months!

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#309

Post by smsm42 » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 1:00 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #209

jrockway wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories. I'm not defending this practice at all, but I think I can understand it. It sounds like the typical problems involved in scheduling 10 people to all perform together at once. Nobody can prevent people from getting sick. Going out of t…

Actually, no, it doesn't just happen that people go out of town and miss an interview. Not in normal places. Now, let's say there was some royal but completely understandable cockup where this guy completely spaced that this day was the interview or whatever. Fine. Where was the recruiter in this? Who was in charge of the process, and why didn't they realize that an interviewer was unavailable sometime in advance? If…

Exactly. The job of the recruiter is to send - days in advance - invites to everybody involved, ensure they are not busy and they affirmatively accepted the invite. Even if somebody doesn't keep one's calendar up to date - if invite wasn't confirmed the recruiter should have known and should have done something about it. Looks like serious quality problems in that department in Google.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#310

Post by RogerL » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 1:03 AM UTC

bubbleRefuge wrote: post #301

RogerL wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which requires calculus how?

Sorry to barge in, my guess is that Google looks for the best of the best with a slant toward academia. So maybe a PM from a top notch b-school knows his calculus?

That does seem to be their line of thought in most things, but in what universe is calculus in any way a measure of your ability to manage a product, even as a proxy? It's barking mad. I could be great at calculus but terrible as a PM, I could be a great PM yet terrible at math, and so on. I can see the point if I was applying to be PM for Mathcad or the like, but otherwise....

Working in this industry is just distressing. There are so many really clever people in this industry that cannot reason in any practical way (absolutely not calling you out, bubbleRefuge!!!) I work with a team that cannot figure source control out. People ask interview questions which a seconds introspection reveals will not measure real world performance. It goes on and on.

Sorry. I think I just realized I need a vacation. I deleted a much longer string of absurdities at the end of the paragraph above. My non-ranty point is that clever!=smart, and clever != job performance. Google has admitted in the press that their recommendations from interviews perform no better than chance. I don't get why that was hard to forsee. If you aren't measuring what you are trying to assess, chances are your results will be noise. "I wonder if this person is creative and can think up new product ideas. How will I determine that? Think, Roger, think. I know, I guess I'll ask him the math behind Cauchy distributions, and follow up with a problem in Hilbert space. That makes sense!" ;)