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

Google outage – resolved

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 870 posts

Re: Google outage – resolved

#851

Post by HappyDreamer »

vacheron wrote: post #825
xtracto wrote: post #790

On reddit thread there are some really good jokes about this [1] related to their asinine interview questions. Like: > Did they try to fix them by inverting a binary tree? >> Yeah maybe implementing a quick LRU cache on the nearest whiteboard will help them out here >> Did they try checking what shape their manhole cover is? >> Dev ops was too busy out counting all the street lights in the United States [1] https://w…

AFAIK (as someone who does not work at Google), "brain teaser" questions have not been asked at Google for almost a decade. Every time I see complaints like this I can't help but think the posters have a chip on their shoulder from being rejected by Google or a similarly selective company. It's never a commentary on any fundamental issues with these types of interview questions and no one ever comes up with a better…

> I can't help but think the posters have a chip on their shoulder from being rejected by Google

I think so too, look at this angry (it says "fucking" 3 times) comment over at Reddit:

> It’s a waste of fucking time. I’m a really talented programmer [...] I’ve been eliminated based solely on messing up some dumbass arbitrary puzzle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kcwqij/every_s...

And the only reply that to me somewhat seems to understand what's going on, getting lots of downvotes, so it got collapsed and you cannot easily find it:

> They just play a numbers game, and are able to discard perfectly capable candidates with this kind of questions, and still get a bunch of great candidates

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kcwqij/every_s...

(although it started in a bit weird way with "Lmao", however the other replies weren't any more polite were they?)

Re: Google outage – resolved

#852

Post by mk89 »

danuker wrote: post #834
mk89 wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know there are companies who build crawlers or health check agents exactly for this purpose, so that they know precisely from when to when the service they pay or they need for their business doesn't work and went out of SLA. I think it's brilliant and the only way to make any company pay. I believe you can sometimes get away with a couple of pingdom checks/jobs.

Like they have any bargaining power against Google.

I don't know how it works in such cases, I mean, this is publicly known that there was an outage.

What I believe is that customers will probably get free GCP credits and that's it, everything is good as before.

Re: Google outage – resolved

#853

Post by mszone »

This is a great and interesting thread. But I believe nobody discussed here the opposite and postivie effects of this kind of golbal outages. There are funny calculations for example of having less spam mail open-clciks or things like that. So think in such massive otuage of millions of users and auatomated process what means in term to generate less CPU, RAM, I/O and as consecuence less Power/Cooling >> less CO2 and pollution... It's huge! and at the Earth's weather impacts is like charge trillions in advance that we''ll have to paid in a future not only with money... (Economy Degrowth)

Re: Google outage – resolved

#854

Post by gizmondo »

psully wrote: post #835
gizmondo wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about FAANG, I don't believe that they really care about "the process of solving the problem". If you don't come up with a close-to-optimal solution in about 5 minutes, you're in trouble - there will be competitors who are better prepared and thus can. Solving algorithmic questions is a very trainable skill, after all.

Funnily enough, this response is exactly what the parent seems to be talking about. FAANG originated as a stock term and not as a grouping of companies with similar hiring processes. i.e. Interviews at Netflix are generally domain specific. Likewise, Amazon isn't the same as Apple isn't the same as Google. > If you don't come up with a close-to-optimal solution in about 5 minutes Disingenuously hyperbolic. I was only…

But their hiring practices are pretty similar (perhaps except Netflix, don't know anything about them).

In one of my interview rounds at google I was under huge time pressure, despite coming up with an optimal solution in seconds. That was an outlier as the interviewer was not aware of this solution, so explaining it took a long time. But still.

The valuable part from the competitive coding background is not the coding, but "inventing" solutions. In quotes because it's mostly a pattern-matching process. And it's a _huge_ advantage.

Personally I'm perfectly happy with the current process, as I took about half a year to become good at it, and the payoff is nice. :) But I'm convinced that's what this process selects for first and foremost - amount of preparation.

Re: Google outage – resolved

#855

Post by monospaced »

andruby wrote: post #740
justkez wrote: post #410

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, they are going to have an immense SLA claim issue. 99.9% SLA on Workspace services, so any business paying for Google for Business (now known as Workspace) is going to have a credit claim (assuming the outage is longer than 43m 49s which feels like it will be). Edit: As I comment it looks like things are coming back! Timing or what...

0.1% of a year is 8h45m. Or did you mean 99.99% SLA?

99.9% but calculated on a monthly basis

Re: Google outage – resolved

#856

Post by mav3rick »

reallydontask wrote: post #850
rococode wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, nothing wrong with not having memorized how to do that - it's certainly not often useful in practice. But if you're given the definitions and a couple minutes to figure it out (which, in an interview, you are), and you actually can't come up with the 10 lines of code to do it, maybe that question is working as intended after all...

> But if you're given the definitions and a couple minutes to figure it out (which, in an interview, you are), and you actually can't come up with the 10 lines of code to do it, maybe that question is working as intended after all... or maybe the person struggles to work things out in an extremely stressful situation I speak as somebody that finds interviews Extremely stressful and if working there is regularly my in…

Don't you think actors audition for parts ? Is that stressful ? Does preparation help ? 300k+ paying jobs will have demand. With that comes pressure.

Re: Google outage – resolved

#858

Post by xtracto »

mav3rick wrote: post #839
vacheron wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story seems like a bad example of a false negative. There were claims by Google insiders that Max was given a particularly easy interview as a formality. I am by no means a brilliant programmer and also rusty with algorithms, but given the structure and question, I would be surprised if most people couldn't figure out how to invert a binary tree within a matter of minutes. Max himself later opened up[0] and admi…

Don't worry they won't reply to this. Doesn't fit their narrative. Learning CS basics just isn't sexy enough for hacker news. Why learn anything over this.setState in React.

I love your response because I have a PhD in Computer Science. I do LeetCode as and CodeWars problems in the mornings for fun (I like coding and helps me avoid getting rusty) and I have been a hiring manager for over 10 years.

But yeah, other than the "sexiness" of CS concepts it's only because of the "narrative" we want to push.

Re: Google outage – resolved

#859

Post by BaiRado »

psully wrote: post #842
BaiRado wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, this response is exactly what someone who succeeded under this model would say. This all seems like nonsense coming from individuals who are (understandably or not) frustrated that others would suggest that their success was only due to an interview process that aligned with their strengths, rather than their obviously superior skill and intellect.

I don't think I would be considered a "success" under this model as I never passed a tough interview and currently work at company you will never hear of. I simply have no desire to justify my skills by talking others down and pretending I'm too good for companies that reject me. I'm not sure how this is a valid rebuttal to my comment since it addresses none of the point I made. Do you really think the secret sauce t…

I just took your first and last sentences and had some fun with it.

That way of interviewing is good, because it weeds out people who don't prepare and thus might be lazy or just looking for an easy paycheck. But it also tends to confuse good memory of technical and abstract questions as competence, and if you're not careful you'll end up with a lot of copy pasted humans that are really good at inverting binary trees, but suck at everything else. Also people who have already passed it tend to hold on to it as pride, and might fail an otherwise amazing candidate, just because of a failure on a question that has no practical use outside of a textbook. Those are my thoughts on it, and I'd wager the thoughts of many others who are critical of the model.

> Do you really think the secret sauce to getting into highly competitive jobs is by incoherently speed running through algorithm questions?

No, the real secret sauce is having a friend or relative on the inside. If you don't have that it's a gamble most of the time imo.

Re: Google outage – resolved

#860

Post by BaiRado »

esyir wrote: post #841
BaiRado wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, this response is exactly what someone who succeeded under this model would say. This all seems like nonsense coming from individuals who are (understandably or not) frustrated that others would suggest that their success was only due to an interview process that aligned with their strengths, rather than their obviously superior skill and intellect.

On the flipside, you can say something similar about your response regardless of your actual position. What you've basically told him is: "Your experience is false, you're just biased and whatever your success was is a lie."

Yes. Thank you for explaining my comment to me, and you're completely right, but you missed the part where my comment was based on his first and last sentences only going the other way around. It did seem a bit dismissive and condescending at the time so I had some fun with it.
Post reply on HN