Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

globalnerdy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–58 of 58 posts

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#51

Post by microtonal »

yongjik wrote: post #23
mortdeus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any open source projects? The first thing i'm looking for as a developer when I visit your websites is a link to any code you have written. Which as far as I can tell doesnt exist? A programmer without a portfolio of source code is like a painter without a portfolio paintings. I assume Google scouts are usually looking to hook the exceptionally rare "Monet" and "Picaso" software engineers swimming around…

As a Google Engineer, I can assure you that nobody who interviews you will give a damn about your code in github. Unless you're James Gosling or someone at that level. (But then again I don't think they interviewed James Gosling in the same way they interviewed me, so the point is moot.) Google interviewers are interested in how well you can code (or design a solution) in a whiteboard for 45 minutes. I'm not claiming…

As a Google Engineer, I can assure you that nobody who interviews you will give a damn about your code in github. [...] it might be the absolutely horrible way to interview candidates

It works as long as majority of the CS population dreams of a Google job. There are so many candidates that having a high false negative rate really doesn't matter. However, as Google slowly becomes less popular, it's current interviewing procedure might not work anymore.

I think that having high-quality open source project is a reasonable indicator of a person's technical abilities. For companies with a smaller stream of candidates, it would be silly to ignore such sources of information.

By the way, I am always surprised how obsessed people are trying to get into Google. After some persistent bugging, I went through a phone interview. I was invited for a follow-up interview, but decided that they could not offer the kind of position I was interested in. (No, I don't want to work 18 months in site reliability engineering when my interest lies with natural language processing.)

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#52

Post by elnate »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #49
elnate wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would your advice be?

I'm certainly no expert at hiring or getting hired so don't take my opinion at face value, but since my opinion seems to be somewhat unique around here I think it has value for that reason. But advice really depends on the context of the person: what they've done, what degrees they have, what type of job they're looking for, etc. But to address the type of people the "show me the code" response is geared towards: ins…

Thanks

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#53

Post by rmrfrmrf »

spiritplumber wrote: post #30

True story: I sort-of-interviewed at Google. The interview ended because the interviewer, after having been told that I had already completed the project they were trying to recruit for, became agitated and told me that I was just a hobbyist and my product did not exist -- this while he was being shown it in motion. I put a spare PCB for my product in his hand and asked him if it didn't exist, why was it making him b…

I'm sure they're upset that they didn't hire you.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#54

Post by rmrfrmrf »

swanson wrote: post #12

Don't sweat it. I find those Google interviews to be very discouraging and I felt dumb after not doing great on one when I was in school. Looking back, the whole interview was a mess. I got the call from the engineer 45 minutes late, I couldn't access the Google Doc because he was trying to send it to my university email address, and the coding portion started off with him writing "!(x & (x - 1)) && x" at the top of…

...did they at least tell you beforehand that they were coding in JavaScript? In pretty much any other language, that wouldn't compile, but those logical and bitwise operators are used in multiple languages from C to Ruby.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#55

Post by goatslacker »

enscr wrote: post #38
goatslacker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're not expected to be an encyclopedia of knowledge about any particular language, framework, or API; having the frequent need to look things up is a red flag because if you're always looking things up you may not move fast enough. Also, having the "this is not a problem" attitude is a red flag; what else would this person not consider a problem when I hire them?

you might miss out on a lot of bright bulbs if you keep red-flagging them because you think they won't move fast enough.

I may; hiring is tough. You only have a few minutes to gauge whether you'll work well with that person or not and bad signals are bad signals. I can't green light all candidates just in case.

It all depends on the tone and the body language and if they're able to continue with guidance.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#56

Post by spiritplumber »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #53
spiritplumber wrote: post #30

True story: I sort-of-interviewed at Google. The interview ended because the interviewer, after having been told that I had already completed the project they were trying to recruit for, became agitated and told me that I was just a hobbyist and my product did not exist -- this while he was being shown it in motion. I put a spare PCB for my product in his hand and asked him if it didn't exist, why was it making him b…

I'm sure they're upset that they didn't hire you.

That particular guy eventually was, enough to want to make amends. I believe that there is more luster in having "scooped Google" than "worked at Google" on a resume, though.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#57

Post by tptacek »

tzs wrote: post #35
mortdeus wrote: post #18

If im ever being interviewed by Google, i'm going to say "hold up let me google the solution to that real quick." A good engineer spends about 95% of their time discovering new things to learn about their craft. An even better engineer uses what other engineers have already discovered and shared with the world to further their understanding. If the world only consisted of the "even better" engineers things like this…

> If im ever being interviewed by Google, i'm going to say "hold up let me google the solution to that real quick." If Google just wanted people to take existing publicly known parts and hook them together, they would be recruiting people fresh out of community college instead of fresh out of masters and PhD programs, and they'd be offering around $50k/year salary. Google is trying to find people who can create the p…

I can't hire IT in Chicago for $50k/yr.

Re: How I Embarrassed Myself in My Interview With Google

#58

Post by [deleted] »

swanson wrote: post #14
natch wrote: post #13

So your plan for your mini Google was to iterate through every entry in the index? (Setting aside the ludicrous idea of iterating through a hash when you can just ask it for a value by key... or am I missing something? Please enlighten me if I am.)

I think you misunderstood the problem statement. The hash is keyed by the URL and the value is the body of the HTML page. The input to `search` is a term, so you would need to check all of the items to see which one contained the term in the HTML. The subject could not just index directly into the hash.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN