How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

Post by mattkrause » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 1:22 AM UTC

bitL wrote: post #44

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Even Google suggest to "practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard". This is clearly a useless skill as a software engineers except in getting a job at companies that do whiteboard interviews. Did you try to refactor code on a whiteboard? How are they able to find people that are able to efficiently debug problems? When I interview people I tell them, "Bring your own laptop set up…

Elite schools do that in undergrad; e.g. as an initial scored lab exercise, write this recursive fractal shape using Logo, parallel Delaunay triangulation with prefix sums , dynamic programming solving oligopoly problem or single-value Paxos pseudocode on a piece of paper in 10 minutes (I am being serious). If you can cope with it, it immediately shows up in the interview and you are considered a member of the club,…

Post by simmanian » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 1:24 AM UTC

6cd6beb wrote: post #56

simmanian wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps using the crying manager example was a bad idea on my part. What I can stand behind is having an org structure that encourages managers and execs to treat their employees well. It sounds like Google has done a better job than most. I'm sure there are managers and engineers crying in private in every big company out there. What I'm trying to say is even though a lot of people like to assume that people work fo…

There are at least two problems with this: - "I'm sure there are managers and engineers crying in private in every big company out there": You're not excusing google here, just expanding the range of companies whose apparent behavior is mortifying a couple of people in this thread. - "Google probably does some things very well to keep all the talent despite the negative press it gets.": probably. They probably do a l…

Post by hermitdev » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 1:25 AM UTC

  from collections import defaultdict
  def dups(seq):
    d = defaultdict(int)
    for x in seq:
      d[x] += 1
    return [k for k, v in d.items() if v > 1]

Post by zepolen » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 1:40 AM UTC

hermitdev wrote: post #65

They lost me when they got into showing how to make the 'dups' function faster. The author definitely either doesn't understand big-O notation or doesn't understand the complexity. Their O(1) implementation is anything but. Likely O(n×log(n)) at best. Also, their brute force implementation is unnecessarily verbose. Want dups? from collections import defaultdict def dups(seq): d = defaultdict(int) for x in seq: d[x] +…

Post by cliffwarden » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 1:42 AM UTC

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #37

matmann2001 wrote: post #21

This is getting ridiculous. These guides to interviewing at specific companies are starting to sound like the video game cheat code books of old. If the process is so nuanced that there's an entire industry around these types of guides (and Google even highly recommends you buy them!), then the process is fundamentally flawed. But we already knew that, and as long as others are still playing the game, we are forced t…

I completely agree. Even Google suggest to "practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard". This is clearly a useless skill as a software engineers except in getting a job at companies that do whiteboard interviews. Did you try to refactor code on a whiteboard? How are they able to find people that are able to efficiently debug problems? When I interview people I tell them, "Bring your own laptop set up…