3 ms·
There are two sides to this. That story from a few months back about the guy who wrote homebrew getting denied a job at Google because he flubbed some particula
by menssen 10y ago
There are two sides to this. That story from a few months back about the guy who wrote homebrew getting denied a job at Google because he flubbed some particular algorithm on a whiteboard is pretty messed up. On the other hand, I agree with you that experience tends not to be a particularly accurate predictor of actual skill, and that white board algorithm implementations are at worst a good faith effort to solve the problem of interviewing for competence.
- beagle3 10y agoI didn't follow the Max Howell / homebrew story when it originally appeared, but reading about it now from a year's distance, this[0] seems like the best summary (the other quora answers are also illuminating, as is the HN discussion from the time). Regardless, assuming Howell's original narrative ("you couldn't invert a binary tree so goodbye") is the truth, I still don't see why this is "pretty messed up". It's not the olympics where the scoring system is repeatable, objective and well known, or court where lives and livelihood are irreversibly changed". It's an employer, one of many, who decided -- for whatever reasons, which might have been the tree inversion failure -- to not hire Mr. Howell. There's Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM if he wants to work for bigcorp. There's thousands of smaller companies. If someone else hires him, fine; If no one does than the narrative is obviously untrue. [0] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Joseph-Janos-1 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...