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Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

daoudclarke.net

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Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#41

Post by keiferski »

EGG_CREAM wrote: post #24
keiferski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you want to work with people that say, "I don't know, but I think X is true, and here's how I'd find out if that's a correct assumption..."

I really don’t, not when the question is something as simple as something I can type into a calculator.

The purpose of that kind of question is not to get a piece of information, it's to evaluate how you go about solving problems that you don't know the answer to and/or don't have immediately obvious ways (like using a calculator) to find the solution.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#42

Post by bowsamic »

harles wrote: post #21

> He continued to ask more questions about numbers of bits. I couldn’t answer any of them without a lot of help. He didn’t ask me about my PhD work building a new theory of natural language semantics. This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my…

Yeah I agree, it's not hard to see why he was rejected from his attitude here

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#44

Post by sowut »

crazygringo wrote: post #6

This user already submitted this same article yesterday and it was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40850725 Rather than this clickbaity "Google rejected me" story about something that happened 15 years ago, here's a link to the actual project: https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl

[flagged]

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#45

Post by Imnimo »

I like this interview question. It's perfectly solvable without a calculator as the interviewer said. It doesn't rely on having memorized some weird binary tree inversion algorithm. It tests the ability to take facts that you already know (e.g. 2^8 or 2^10) and use them to solve a problem that might appear out of reach at first glance.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#46

Post by bowsamic »

Borg3 wrote: post #27
kevmo314 wrote: post #5

I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know". In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with…

If you do NOT know, then answer that you do NOT know, unless you can speculate. Noone is omniscent. I really dont like when people with no knowledge trying guess the answer or speculate without any background. Im sure I would NOT want to work with such person.

> Im sure I would NOT want to work with such person.

Well that's the opposite of what the interviewers are looking for. They DO want to work with such people.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#47

Post by robofanatic »

kevmo314 wrote: post #5

I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know". In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with…

Its subjective. I think "I don't know" is a honest and better answer than to pretend that you know and waste interviewer's time.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#48

Post by danogentili »

actionfromafar wrote: post #32
harles wrote: post #21

> He continued to ask more questions about numbers of bits. I couldn’t answer any of them without a lot of help. He didn’t ask me about my PhD work building a new theory of natural language semantics. This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my…

Well we got Mono and eventually open source .NET from that, so it can work sometimes.

And you call that a success story? :D

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#49

Post by nine_zeros »

eterm wrote: post #9

It wasn't google, but last year I had the worst interview experience of my life when I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds. I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right. The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, sayi…

You have just described in plain words why tech interview processes are beyond f-ed up.

Not every programmer is skilled to be an interviewer. Not every manager is skilled to be a hiring manager.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#50

Post by superb_dev »

bentobean wrote: post #15

I sympathize with some of what the author has to say. That said, Google's choice to do business with Israel does not represent "support for genocide." It is also within their prerogative to dismiss employees who protest company policy. Naive / biased statements such of these cause me to lend less credence to author's other points.

Israel is actively committing a genocide right now. How is doing business with them not support for that?
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