91–100 of 151 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Difficult math? You just have to multiply 2s until you reach >56mil, and you can just round up (i.e 16k -> 32k -> 64k).
Difficult enough to need some time to think, yes. If it was trivial, there'd be no point in asking.
It's a beginning question to get you warmed up.
It's really easy to read this as "shitty interviewer runs off good candidate". It's also easy to read this as "interviewer hand-held a candidate through a problem".
There's nothing in there about the candidate.
Anyway, I don't think this is the kind of attention the author would want. Nobody even talked about the search engine yet.
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> He continued to ask more questions about numbers of bits. I couldn’t answer any of them without a lot of help. He didn’t ask me about my PhD work building a new theory of natural language semantics. This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my…
On the one hand, yeah, this guy is to some degree complaining on the internet because he was rejected. It’s annoying: No one likes listening to complaining. On the other hand, a) this guy does have a point - it’s very very strange that you can have all sorts of interesting, highly relevant expertise and tech interviews don’t care at all, they just ask you generic stuff that has nothing to do with the job, b) he’s all…
I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know". In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with…
If you do NOT know, then answer that you do NOT know, unless you can speculate. Noone is omniscent. I really dont like when people with no knowledge trying guess the answer or speculate without any background. Im sure I would NOT want to work with such person.
But that's not how problem solving works. You need work your way from what you do know to get to an answer for what you don't. It's not guessing -- it's taking the background knowledge you do have and applying it to the problem at hand (and every engineer should have some background knowledge, even if it's just basic arithmetic).
That's what these kinds of questions are testing. Someone who immediately gives up is probably not going to be resilient in the face of new challenges.
It wasn't google, but last year I had the worst interview experience of my life when I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds. I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right. The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, sayi…
It wasn't google, but last year I had the worst interview experience of my life when I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds. I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right. The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, sayi…
If we start with the assumption that (for the most part) interviews are a useful HR tool to hire people with, supposing we have a skilled manager to give the interviews (haha!), they will ask a series of questions, and otherwise engage in conversation which will elucidate whether or not the candidate should be hired. Presumably they are relying on the answers given, but they might also be relying on non-verbal clues... body language, facial expressions, who knows maybe even pheromones. Whatever the correct "answers" are, what if we train a candidate to give those answers without actually understanding them? What if he rehearses it? What if he can even do the body language and facial expressions?
We've just cheated the process. Candidates are incentivized to cheat the process, and you can vilify them all you like, but if they can manage the trick they can (at least temporarily) receive a paycheck which all of us seem to need. No matter how difficult it is to do this, it's likely some have managed to perfect that trick.
Furthermore, no one gets a bachelor's in "assessing interview performances". There are no degree programs for it. No training bootcamps for it. I've never worked anywhere that they send the hiring managers away to some seminar specifically about this. So even if it were possible to assess the performance, the people doing the assessing likely aren't very good at it.
If magically someone developed some brain scanner that gave perfect, empirically verifiable answers in a "hire/don't hire" format, what are the chances that a hiring manager could do even 60% of what the machine says? Flipping a coin should get 50%, if we limited the candidates to a matched set of hires-don't-hires, right? Would the hiring managers even do as well as random chance? Or are there some personality defects that have some of them do worse even than that?
Interviews are more in the realm of superstition than sound practice. They're polygraphs without the polygraph machines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My answer would have been the same. When asked to work it out, I would have pointed out that I simply wouldn't; not because I don't know how, but because if I need to know the number of bits it takes to store such a specific number, there is probably a reason. That reason could be storage of some form, such as wire protocols or files, and I don't want to fuck it up because I miss a step or misremember something. So,…
It seems like you aren't capable of differientating between an interview and real work. This isn't an exercise to see if you can figure out how many bits it takes to store a number. It is a test to see how you approach a problem, if you can break it down (2^10 = 1024, 2^10*2^10 = 2^20 = 1m), and arrive at a solution. It's a simple problem that doesn't require you to be a math wizard.
I sympathize with some of what the author has to say. That said, Google's choice to do business with Israel does not represent "support for genocide." It is also within their prerogative to dismiss employees who protest company policy. Naive / biased statements such of these cause me to lend less credence to author's other points.
If they are performing their duties adequately, then that's absolutely wrong.
It's also utterly stupid. Employees who think about what they are doing are far, far more valuable than mindless drones.