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Do we know that their approach isn't working? Like yes there are people who can be very productive programmers who can't do those puzzles. But maybe google isn'
by jackmott 10y ago
Do we know that their approach isn't working?
Like yes there are people who can be very productive programmers who can't do those puzzles. But maybe google isn't interested in those people. They have plenty of people who can do very good work already. Maybe the puzzles actually weed out the real geniuses, which is what they need?
Or maybe it is totally failing at that, I have no idea. But I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
- vonmoltke 10y agoThe problem isn't Google per se. They have have a really deep hiring pipeline and could probably succeed in spite of severe deficiencies in the process. The problem is the numerous companies without Google's deep pipeline that have cargo-culted the process without understanding the context, then whine about not being able to hire anyone.
- Noseshine 10y agoI think we - and by that I mean "most programmers, on average" - have a pretty good idea how common or uncommon it is in real life programming in a variety of programming jobs to encounter an actual algorithmic problem. One that you are better off solving yourself instead of just googling or asking (yes, on horrible SO). The last sentence does not advocate copy&paste programming, I myself in particular actually have hardly any external dependencies because I try hard to avoid them, and when I do I actually do look through the source code, mostly because I need to adapt it to my needs. Even if I were to do something like machine learning I'm much better off just using something made by others, simply because developing the actual algorithms requires people completely immersed in just that and a big love of math (and the Ph.D. to go with it) much more so than programming.