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Wow - this kinda blew up. 1. Obviously you have a lot of experience with this but I just can't see how a week is anywhere near accurate judging from my person

Wow - this kinda blew up. 1. Obviously you have a lot of experience with this but I just can't see how a week is anywhere near accurate judging from my personal experience, people I've talked to, and the numerous online stories of people's personal experience. 2. To be honest, I kinda expect the world's smartest organization to find some better way to evaluate talent. Google says they want diversity but requiring a month of studying isn't going to allow for that. Their process throws false negatives on a lot of people that could otherwise be great engineers (which they largely admit to). 3. They're different skillsets. One is about knowledge, the other is about memorizing question patterns and practicing implementation speed. 4. Does Google have data here? My experience is a lot of candidates shut down at a whiteboard because it's not what they're used to. They're afraid to experiment or erase or use longer clearer variable names because of the overhead of writing by hand and dealing with space limitations. It's a lot more messy to modify and extend code you've already written. 5. No, it's really bad. It's like this weird mix of cursive and small caps. I'm not sure what is going on.

gaylemcd 9y ago
1. I'm not saying a week for preparation overall. I'm saying a week to learn the core algorithms and data structures. Frankly, that's probably much less than a week to learn. 2. Yes, it does throw false negatives. Lots of people get hired with zero prep though. I generally say about a month of prep is where you hit pretty low returns from more time. But that doesn't mean that you need a month, or that a month will be enough for you. 3. I'm not sure I see your point here. If coding interview prep is a different skillset from coding competitions, then you wouldn't do coding competitions in order to do interview preps. 4. Some candidates do shut down because it's not what they're used to. A well-trained interviewer can mitigate this to some extent (not always). Some people will also shut down at a computer. Interviews will always be an artificial environment and people can freeze for different reasons. At a whiteboard, it's often a bit easier to unfreeze candidates and create a happier atmosphere. 5. That's fine. As long as I can read it, it's fine. And if I can't read it and you can explain to me what you're writing, that will also work.

gaylemcd 9y ago

1. I'm not saying a week for preparation overall. I'm saying a week to learn the core algorithms and data structures. Frankly, that's probably much less than a week to learn. 2. Yes, it does throw false negatives. Lots of people get hired with zero prep though. I generally say about a month of prep is where you hit pretty low returns from more time. But that doesn't mean that you need a month, or that a month will be enough for you. 3. I'm not sure I see your point here. If coding interview prep is a different skillset from coding competitions, then you wouldn't do coding competitions in order to do interview preps. 4. Some candidates do shut down because it's not what they're used to. A well-trained interviewer can mitigate this to some extent (not always). Some people will also shut down at a computer. Interviews will always be an artificial environment and people can freeze for different reasons. At a whiteboard, it's often a bit easier to unfreeze candidates and create a happier atmosphere. 5. That's fine. As long as I can read it, it's fine. And if I can't read it and you can explain to me what you're writing, that will also work.