Here’s an Xoogler talking about how he was given his own hiring packet to review (without knowing it was his) and rejected it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=r8RxkpUvxK0&t...
The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
801–810 of 851 posts
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that I made it clear that I don't work on this anymore. Advertising isn't an inherent evil. You find your mechanic, doctor, lawyer, etc because they advertise. I advertised for one specific company. I worked in an industry that was pretty grey. Some parts of the business were vaguely predatory and others served a great public social need. More importantly, you had to have an actual reason to fill out our fo…
> You find your mechanic, doctor, lawyer, etc because they advertise. It’s funny you say that, because I found all three literally by looking at reviews and not advertisements. Those 3 categories are perfect examples of industries where referrals are far more reliable than choosing which one had the best ad budget.
A lot of reviews are just forms of advertisements.
Companies pay third parties lots of money to curate their reviews and put them in contact with the reviewer to smooth things over.
I know that because that's the business I work in now.
Companies still have a problem of getting their reviews surfaced to the top of your search. They also have a need to give people the lowest-friction way possible to leave them a positive score when it's the best time in the interaction to do so. There are many large enterprises competing in this space specifically.
The best performing adverts today are ones where you don't even realize you've been marketed to.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#803I have done multiple hiring and interviews in tech industry and find it quite baffling what has s/w engineering interviewing process degenerated into. I hear many sad interviewing stories these days. Some my conclusions: Interviewing is an art and it takes a very good interviewer to identify good candidates, this algo/prog interview in 45 mins can not do justice. Problem solving is what is really should be checked and extremely difficult to check, dont ignore the attitude of the candidate. Einstein with a bad attitude should be avoided.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 . Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.
This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing. Before joining,…
Fake that smile, save up, move on to places where you will really enjoy your work in a meaningful way.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all data points are useful. Different pools have different profitability advertised in different ways. Some highly useful data is hard to get directly or requires significant and/or stealthy spend.
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Hahahaha! Indeed. That's basically what it all boils down to.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#806Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to be mean. Claiming that algorithmic interviews is a proxy for IQ is also probably something that the powers that be at Google "pulled out of their ass". I don't see any data that says it's correlated with standard IQ test scores. I'm skeptical that it is a good proxy since you can specifically study for these interviews. The IQ tests, at least in theory, should be attempted without preparation so as…
Not trying to be mean but the fact he made that up out of thin air is not only something that isn't backed with data but something that is intuitively not true. With the reputation and amount of comp google offers there is no reason why intelligent people or less intelligent people would just avoid google. You're assuming only less intelligent people want higher salaries while intelligent people don't which isn't tru…
Real Talk tho: Whats the range?
Im ~low 90 percentile and I wonder if I bang my head against the LeetCode wall for a few months, then I too, can get $200K+ and free lunch 4 lyfe.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not trying to be mean but the fact he made that up out of thin air is not only something that isn't backed with data but something that is intuitively not true. With the reputation and amount of comp google offers there is no reason why intelligent people or less intelligent people would just avoid google. You're assuming only less intelligent people want higher salaries while intelligent people don't which isn't tru…
Real Talk tho: Whats the range? Im ~low 90 percentile and I wonder if I bang my head against the LeetCode wall for a few months, then I too, can get $200K+ and free lunch 4 lyfe.
Maybe? I'm guessing googlers are more in the 97-98 percentiles.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#808When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions. Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did n…
Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 . Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.
> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.
I think the reason is a bit different.
Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm.
That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anything else.
Their code is pretty bad most of the time, they've took beautiful Webkit and turned it into Blink mess. They are all about algorithms, they don't care about code.
And that's a pity that people are copying Google's methodology without understanding why Google is doing so. If you are developing an OS, you'd be better copying Microsoft, which had much of a different approach, nearly without any algorithm questions.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#809Earlier quoted context omitted.
My (somewhat charitable) interpretation was that either: - The position had already been filled and they didn't want to bother fully informing me - Both my contact and the person who "reviewed" my submission just really didn't care at all about the process and/or felt their time was better spent writing code than doing hiring (both people were technical) For what it's worth, this was actually the second time I'd inte…
You need to be considered for sainthood, with how charitable you’re being here. It’s also possible for interviewers to just be wrong and incapable of seeing it, like the one who misjudged the runtime of code that I wrote and didn’t even have the toolbox to resolve such a disagreement. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1ilh7o/w...
Technically, your code runs in O(n^2), as O(n) is a part of O(n^2). Still, he should have accepted the more precise answer O(n).
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're talking about something different now though: initially you were mentioning functions that are 1-3 lines in size , but now you're describing functions which do one thing , without talking about the size at all. I was very specifically criticizing tiny functions. There are two big issues with such functions: * the overhead in LoC of declaring and defining the function is between 30-100% of the function body! *…
I had literally said "that do only one thing" in the section that you'd quoted. I've always been talking about that. LoC aren't a metric. We're not getting paid per line and we're not playing code golf either. It works, it passes tests and most importantly, it's easy to change. As for the comment about loops, both the languages I mentioned have powerful map functions. The goal of keeping the functions small is to avo…
You said you broke your code in functions of 1-3 lines, I offered an explanation why that may have not been well received in your interview. I understand that you don't agree with that and that's fine with me.