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Who do you want to work with? A person who can regurgitate CS trivia or a person who has interest and track record in solving interesting problems?
by NTDF9 10y ago
Who do you want to work with? A person who can regurgitate CS trivia or a person who has interest and track record in solving interesting problems?
- SamReidHughes 10y agoLike I said, it's not regurgitation. There's a reason companies try to keep their questions secret.
- NTDF9 10y agoIt's all a variation of the 500 questions listed. Nobody memorizes code line by line. But there are enough hires at Google and FB who memorized algorithms and solutions and got in. Do you want to work with people who memorize solutions or do you want people who are innovative, genuine problem solvers who've solved interesting problems?
- SamReidHughes 10y agoIt's hard to imagine an innovative problem solver being unable to tackle Google's interview questions. You gave the example of optimizing an SQL query. That's a data structures problem itself. Google apparently has an NDA for the interview questions they ask, so they're trying to avoid quizzing people on stuff that they've memorized. I know any place I worked at always tried to ask "fresh" questions to people. There's just no point if they already know the answer.
- collyw 10y agoI had a phone interview with Google a few years ago. I was asked to implement a Soduko solver. I didn't manage it during the interview, but half an hour later a solution came to me when walking down the road. Should I have been a hire or a no hire?
- notyourloops 10y agoI'm someone who cycles over my thoughts for long periods of time. Interviews really don't capture this at all, but it's one of my strongest intellectual assets.
- SamReidHughes 10y agoWhat is your point? They've got limited time and don't want to waste candidates' time. There is some variance in the process, which they try to minimize by asking lots of questions.
- collyw 10y agoPoint is that it is a very poor way of assessing someone.
- NTDF9 10y ago>> It's hard to imagine an innovative problem solver being unable to tackle Google's interview questions. You gave the example of optimizing an SQL query. That's a data structures problem itself. Dude, is your definition of problem solving limited only to Algos and datastructs? Because I can imagine sql optimization in the following ways: 1. Compiler modification to use different instructions 2. Hinting branch predictors 3. Modifying the database environment to use different operations under the hood 4. Use a different hardware 5. Use a different language 6. Allocate different memory configs 7. Use SSD Do you even realize that CS is not algos and datastructs only?
- sjg007 10y agoThe big optimization would be avoiding full table scans or full table joins. That would be at the query level.
- NTDF9 10y ago>> The big optimization would be avoiding full table scans or full table joins. That would be at the query level. An insight that can only come from experience and to someone who is actually interested in this. I want to work with people like you, not with the person who can solve some stupid dynamic programming puzzle but can't do any real interesting stuff in the real world.
- sjg007 10y agoWell, I meant that the biggest optimization you can do is algorithmic in nature.