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How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

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Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#91

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

I'm totally sympathetic to how stupid these interviews feel.

Syntax is probably something that without fail novices screw up. I saw this in my own subordinates who simply would not see on their own laptops, even with the red squiggle underline, syntax errors in their own code. Also, I'm sure Google has data on its interviewing process and found in some important, measurable way that there's a problem with hires who screwed up the syntax. Correspondingly, none of my decent subordinates ever screwed up syntax once. I think this is the least controversial part of their process because it is dumbfoundingly easy and low cost.

Engineering interviews are overall a mature process and I honestly doubt there's that much innovation in terms of raw skills discovery. TripleByte, for example, doubled its multiple choice question count from 18 to 36, introducing design questions, and now has a brief 45 minute free programming problem. Hardly a huge innovation.

Clearly what's immature is the feedback and communication to candidates that fail. At Google specifically communications problems don't just crop up in threads full of rejects. Bad communications affect people working there, like product managers, admins and designers, who lack the skills they test for despite the tests themselves not obviously corresponding to anything the engineer actually does day-to-day.

It's bad for morale to test for stuff that doesn't matter. That may explain why smart people report the engineering org is not welcoming to people of different backgrounds. The empathy (or savvy) needed to throw out stupid tests is the same kind you need to understand people who don't share the same culture or values as you.

Google doesn't really know that because the company only knows the things it measures. It takes insight too to know what to measure and how things are related, especially when dealing with human beings and not software.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#92

Post by tropo »

seattle_spring wrote: post #79
bitL wrote: post #60

You can bypass the whole charade by knowing 2-3 people within Google that can provide "assurance" you are good enough. Whiteboard testing is for grunts/unknowns without network. Another way is to be a significant contributor to some popular open source project.

> You can bypass the whole charade by knowing 2-3 people within Google that can provide "assurance" you are good enough. This is not a thing. Everyone goes through the same level-adjusted loop. > Another way is to be a significant contributor to some popular open source project. LOL no. Google is literally famous for rejecting major open source contributors for not knowing how to reverse a binary tree.

Is there something special about reversing a binary tree?

AFAIK, you could swap the child pointers and do that recursively for the child nodes. You could also do things O(1) by just changing the comparison function, perhaps by wrapping it to negate the comparison.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#93

Post by doctorpangloss »

ummonk wrote: post #90
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…

Or it means the process is well defined enough that you can create a level field by telling everyone how it works through guides like this instead of giving connected people a leg up due to inside knowledge of a poorly defined process.

I can guarantee you that more than 90% of people working in highly compensated positions at the world's most famous corporations have had a lot of "leg up" benefits in their lives.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#94

Post by hardwaregeek »

A friend said recently, "people want to be employed without becoming employable". These guides really exemplify this obsession. Sure, Google has a nice salary and good perks and whatever. But after you get the job, you have to do the job. I wonder if the people who read these guides and try to study just the right topics to get a job, whether they actually like programming.

These guides act as optimizations, shortening the path you need to take to get the job, shortening the stuff you need to learn, etc. But in the end, the path is all you get. If you don't like programming and if you don't like learning, then are you really gonna like Google?

I suppose there's people who genuinely like programming who just need a manual to teach them how to play the game. Lord knows I've practiced my fair share of whiteboard problems when I'd rather be reading about compilers. But there's something wrong about having to play a game to get the job.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#95

Post by ummonk »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #93
ummonk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it means the process is well defined enough that you can create a level field by telling everyone how it works through guides like this instead of giving connected people a leg up due to inside knowledge of a poorly defined process.

I can guarantee you that more than 90% of people working in highly compensated positions at the world's most famous corporations have had a lot of "leg up" benefits in their lives.

Leg ups that have helped them become better at software engineering? Sure. Leg ups in the form of insider connections / elites? Less so, particularly for talent they're hiring today.

This is a significantly more meritocratic industry than most, and within the industry, the FANGs are relatively more meritocratic than smaller startups.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#96

Post by adtac »

quarkral wrote: post #86

Strange, I have yet to meet a single Google interviewer who was looking for perfect syntax during the interview. Last year I forgot the syntax for a data structure, told my interviewer "something like this," and he just said "that's fine." Got the internship later on. I even had one interviewer who was ok with me writing out matrix algebra mathematically instead of using np.matmul and all that.

I can confirm. In one of my interviews, when writing Python, I used arr.push instead of arr.append (I don't usually write JS, but idk what happened), and I realised the mistake only half-way through. The interviewer noticed it apparently, and he said he didn't care. I imagine he didn't want to throw me off my thought train, which was nice. Got the offer too, so it really must not have mattered.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#97

Post by ummonk »

shaftway wrote: post #20
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A perfect job interview could be defined as an interview for which the best study technique is to become a better choice for the role. Studying skills that would not directly contribute to job performance would not change the result of a perfect job interview in any way. In that sense, it's probably a good indicator for Google that the interview advice includes "practice writing code", "make it a habit to validate in…

I'm in the interviewer pool @ Google. > practice writing syntactically correct code on a whiteboard This probably differs from interviewer to interviewer as to how strictly it's adhered to, but it's not really a hard and fast rule. I'm sure there are some interviewers that will ding you on a forgotten semicolon, but I suspect that most would not. Personally I look for code that isn't so far from syntactically correct…

>Nine times out of ten a candidate scores low because they overlooked an infinite loop or code would crash on boundary conditions and candidate wasn't able to realize that even with hints.

I guess this depends on how you run the interview but one of the things that frustrates me about whiteboard interviews that focus on the coding rather than the design is that I have to step through test cases (especially edge cases) like this manually, which is tedious and not at all how you do things in real life, where you just run the test cases and see what happens instead of having to run your own code on a whiteboard.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#98

Post by Techonomicon »

ummonk wrote: post #95
doctorpangloss wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can guarantee you that more than 90% of people working in highly compensated positions at the world's most famous corporations have had a lot of "leg up" benefits in their lives.

Leg ups that have helped them become better at software engineering? Sure. Leg ups in the form of insider connections / elites? Less so, particularly for talent they're hiring today. This is a significantly more meritocratic industry than most, and within the industry, the FANGs are relatively more meritocratic than smaller startups.

Meritocratic in the most boring uninteresting sense of the term where you literally only work on things in a way which Google tells you will help advance you up their ladders while not actually working on anything in a way you would find interesting in general.

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#99

Post by [deleted] »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #93
ummonk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it means the process is well defined enough that you can create a level field by telling everyone how it works through guides like this instead of giving connected people a leg up due to inside knowledge of a poorly defined process.

I can guarantee you that more than 90% of people working in highly compensated positions at the world's most famous corporations have had a lot of "leg up" benefits in their lives.

[deleted]

Re: How to Ace the Google Interview: Ultimate Guide

#100

Post by sk5t »

dominotw wrote: post #70
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 had a coderpad facebook phone screen last week, interviewer said " that code the won't compile, can you see why?" .. It was missing a semicolon. on a related note, I write scala on daily basis but scala is not that well suited for coding interviews, I found.

That's because Scala doesn't have nearly enough semicolons.

Kidding aside, why do you feel Scala is unsuited to coding interviews, assuming the interviewer well-understands the language?

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