Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

Most of the recruiters I've talked to work for one and only one company.

> But the real value is in being able to analyze an application's performance and deal with concepts like recursion.

Implementing a delete on a binary search tree or traversing one has nothing to do with analyzing performance. If you want to ask questions that require recursion don't make them dependent on algorithms that require rote memorization. Or at least have a alternative recursion question if the candidate says - "Sorry, I don't remember all the rules for this algorithm". Or even be ready as a interviewer to go over how said algorithm works and see if the candidate picks up quickly. If you wanted to really talk about performance then you can talk about WHEN to use a given algorithm and WHY. You don't want to ask questions that there literally is ONE (maybe two) answer that are correct. You don't want to ask questions that when asked WHY the answer "is because that is how the algorithm dictates it." You want to ask questions that are open for interpretation that you then can ask the candidate why they chose that solution. This gives you much more information.

> Some important concepts aren't the kind of thing that you "look up" then read a one paragraph blurb for 3 seconds. The pitfalls of concurrency and the pitfalls that ACID transactions are supposed to protect against are two more examples.

Let's not conflate algorithm implementation from rote memory with not wanting to answer any technical questions. You can't just come in and start talking about ACID transactions and concurrency as if that is what people have been objecting to. Those are valid topics and I doubt most people would have any qualms talking about them. As those are concepts, not rote memorization. You have to have a good understanding of the problems to know where the pitfalls are and know how to spot them. Implementing a algorithm rally covers higher level concepts other than simply regurgitating something like "traverse the left subtree of the root node, accessing the node itself, then recursively traverse the right subtree of the node ....".

I think what most people are suggesting is that there is too high of a penalty on not being exposed to a given algorithm. It is not that these people incapable understanding the algorithm or even implementing one. They simply don't remember. I think this is because a large number of people working at google are fresh out of school. They literally have no experience other than the rote memory required to pass their classes (yes, I simplified that a bit).

I will say that I did find a correlation to the age of the interviewer and the type of question asked. The older 30+ and 50+ guys that interviewed me asked practical questions not related to a specific algorithm. The youngest interviewer I had was a complete hothead and started out the interview saying "he was not your normal interviewer so he was going to ask the hard questions" Then proceeded to ask me a rote memory question about a algorithm. Either I had knew it and memorize it or not. That is not a hard question. The hard question have nothing to do with a defined algorithm. They are often open ended and leave lots of rope for you to hang yourself.

At a location 3000 miles away.

There's a well known analysis that shows they're asymptotically equivalent to B-trees. You can tune a B-tree to better exploit cache locality. Other kinds of ordered binary trees are far less complicated to code and have similar performance characteristics.

>The fact that you entertain this thought is an indication that something is not quite right with our field.

Agreed. But try as I might, I can't come up with a solution that I'd actually support the implementation of.

If you have any ideas about we can get from where we are to where we should be, I'd be interested in hearing them. Having IEEE license developers at varying levels of skill sounds like a start, and requiring Internet-visible software to be written by developers with certifications sounds nice...until you think about open source projects, which thrive in large part from free effort. And until you think about the fact that software traverses borders fluidly. And what about entrepreneurship? Should we tell people they can't write apps unless they have the certification? Or that they need to pay an expert to audit their apps?

And the fact that big companies will do whatever they can to cut costs, including hiring developers in countries without certification requirements if you don't motivate them otherwise. (Maybe a DMCA-style safe-harbor, where ONLY if they use a development team with sufficient certifications can they be proof against lawsuits for defects; otherwise people can sue them for exploits that result from their software?)

I have lots of ideas, as you can see above. I just don't like any of them. There probably needs to be a constellation of rules in place, set by a professional organization and ensconced as legal requirements... But half of the rules I imagine wanting I also, under other circumstances, would despise.