9 ms·
Hacking a Google Interview (2009)
- informatimago 9y agoGiven the turn-over at Google is barely 2 years, what's the point? (And it's the largest of most companies too, so, you see what I mean).
- godelmachine 9y agoPardon me when I ask what do you mean by turn-over? My guess is the average amount of time an engineer stays with the company.
- throw_away 9y agoExcept, usually, when these stats are published, they don't calculate, say, the average tenure of everyone who left in the past year. Instead, it calculates, how long has everyone who is currently there been there for. This results in ridiculously large numbers for companies like Kodak and GM, but incredibly low numbers for companies that are growing fast.
- godelmachine 9y agoDo you know what kind of bias could we call that?
- rdiddly 9y agoSurvivorship bias, if I'm not mistaken
- CamelCaseName 9y agoYes that's what he means. You'll find that Google actually seems to rank pretty well in turnover (longer time spent at a single company is good) compared to other countries companies in it's industry. http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-top-tech-companies-2017-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-top-t...
- freyir 9y agoWhy do you think that is?
- noncoml 9y agoHow does the turn-over matter?(genuinely asking)
- askafriend 9y agoThat's because whatever statistic you pulled doesn't account and adjust for Google's growth which is massive in the past couple of years. If a majority of employees are new hires, then they haven't been there for 2 years and that drags down the average.... We need to stop repeating these statistics with no context. It's incredibly misleading.
- corporateguy5 9y agoNah the tenure is actually just short. Big tech company employees are in high demand.
- polishTar 9y agoYep. The attrition rate is not even remotely close to 50%. My recollection was that this turnover rumor started with a stat that at one point in Google's recent growth, the median tenure of the employees was only 2 years. This stat then got interpreted (and then reported) by some as Google having an obscenely high turnover. Of course, you can't get turnover rate from median tenure, they're completely different things. If the size of a company doubles in a year, the median tenure will be <=1yr. If the most junior employees of another company start quitting en mass, the median tenure for the remaining employees will actually increase. Median tenure is a completely useless in determining how many people are leaving a company.
- solarkraft 9y ago1. The stat is misleading 2. For the experience, money and prestige (looks good on a CV).
- boulos 9y agoSource?
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Given the turn-over at Google is barely 2 years,..." What is the source of this statistic? Do you have a citation?
- sreeprasad 9y agoThis is 9 year old course. Still good for practicing. "The class is held in room 32-124 from 5:00-6:30 PM on January 12 - 15, 2009"
- solarkraft 9y agoI'm rarely this late ...
- dweekly 9y agoGood SWE interview tips. For those interested in product management interviews at Google I wrote some guidance at https://hackernoon.com/acing-your-product-manager-interview-e4f163408cef https://hackernoon.com/acing-your-product-manager-interview-... Context: I'm on the Google PM Hiring Committee and help craft our hiring rubrics.
- solarkraft 9y agoThanks for sharing. You just got me interested in product management as well.
- oil7abibi 9y agoWhat are your thoughts on doing PM right out of school? I interned at Msft as a PM and SWE. Now I’m trying to decide between the two rolls.
- dweekly 9y agoCongrats on having good options! Several companies (including Google) have very good associate PM (APM) programs that offer recent grads rotations through a few different roles, mentorship, and a strong peer group. Several APMs end up with rapid upward trajectories at the company and many decide to jump into starting their own companies but it is rare to come across people who did this and regret it. Some people go into industry or consulting for a bit, get an MBA, and then join directly as a PM. Another popular route (the one I took) is to be a startup founder and learn what works and doesn't on your own terms directly from your own customers. SWE and PM have very different lifestyles - a PM's day is slammed with meetings and most of your output is email, presentations, spreadsheets, PRDs, dashboards...a SWE's day is more focused on code, ops, design docs - fewer interrupts and more focused. But you likely know this as you've lived both realities already! My advice would be to think about which path suits your disposition and to solve for joy, learning, and impact.
- rishsharma 9y agoUnless you are a TL. A lot of overlap with PM work but more eng execution focused.
- csnewb 9y agoAll I do at work is fix bugs by changing a few lines of code and glue together API's to send data from A to B. I don't regularly search BST's using DFS/BFS algorithms or find the kth shortest string in a merged unsorted linked list or some shit like that. Preparing for these technical interviews is like a part-time job after my full-time job.
- andrewprock 9y agoFor the most part these interviews are not meant to evaluate the quality of a candidate, rather they are meant to evaluate candidate interest.
- csnewb 9y agoI'm EXTREMELY interested in finding a new job at literally any company outside of my own. Maybe interviewers don't think I'm interested enough when I can't crank out a 100% correct and optimized algorithm in 15 minutes? /s
- busterarm 9y agoAre you in NY, perhaps? I have a couple of leads for you if so.
- rainbow_12 9y agoI am in NY, can you send me your contact info?
- gknoy 9y agoYou'll need to put your contact info in your HN profile's About field, as the email field is hidden to normal users.
- aphextron 9y ago>evaluate candidate interest. As well as screening for social class/culture/values fit. FAANG companies don't want nonconformist people outside of the kool-aid bubble regardless of their abilities.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rajathagasthya 9y agoThese are useful tips, although the example questions are extremely outdated. I found one tip "interesting" though. > If you already know the answer, don't just blurt it out! They will suspect that you already knew the answer and didn't tell them you've seen the question before. At least pretend to be thinking though the problem before you give the answer! Most interview questions are taken from sites like Leetcode. So you would have come across some of them if you work through those problems. Is it really that bad if you give the solution quickly? Some problems have specific "techniques" to solve them which you would likely only know if you solved it before. Are you expected to come up with a completely new algorithm to solve a problem?
- maxyme 9y agoShort answer, yes. They don't expect a perfect answer but do expect something better than brute force (with presumably higher expectations depending on the level role). The better the answer is optimized the more impressive. Another part of it is the interviewers want to see at least some thought process. So if you stall giving the answer away you show alleged thought process and an excellent solution allegedly come up with on the spot.
- badlucklottery 9y ago>Most interview questions are taken from sites like Leetcode For phone screens: sure. Frankly, a lot of people will bomb a fizzbuzz-level question at the phone screen so why bother spending time thinking of a good question that they might leak onto the internet, forcing you to take the time to make up another? Interviewers tend to take the on-site a bit more seriously and will at least add an unusual wrinkle to a leetcode question to stump anyone who just has a great memory but very little actual ability.
- irl_zebra 9y agoI dealt with this recently. Was asked to implement a LRU cache. I knew the trick, use two data structures to keep things sorted and accessible in constant time. Could do it in my sleep. Had to pretend I had never seen it before, started with a non optimize d solution and added the correct pieces to make it optimal. Interviewer seemed miffed, kept adding tests to see if my algorithm would get the wrong answer and seemed upset that I got it right. It was bizarre. Didn't get the job, didn't remember the answers to a few of the other questions, though I found them post interview.
- partycoder 9y agoI suggest this book the Competitive Programmer's Handbook https://cses.fi/book.html https://cses.fi/book.html
- lalwanivikas 9y agoHave you read it? If yes, how does it compare to other books specifically meant for interview prep like CTCI, PIE etc.
- partycoder 9y agoCTCI puts an emphasis on interviews whereas this book is only about competitive programming. CTCI tries to make interviews about competitive programming, this book is about competitive programming itself. CTCI offers some high level problem solving advice, and a list of exercises. This book elaborates provides a framework for understanding the exercises and elaborates on techniques for each type of data structure.
- Apocryphon 9y agoCan any interviewers at Google or any of these large corporations share about how the interviewing process has changed in the last few years as now Cracking the Coding Interview, HackerRank/CodeWars/LeetCode, Glassdoor, mock interview sites, and even interview-prep bootcamps have become part of the curriculum for potential candidates to prepare for interviews? Do the companies find it as absurd as the candidates do?
- baseethrowaway 9y agoNot an interviewer in Google, but have been in Google. I've read CtCI, used the mentioned and/or other websites for problem solving and have had 10+ interviews on pramp.com and interviewing.io, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Due to my experiences and experiences of other people that I know, my conclusion is that the interviewing process has not changed. Google has a pool of thousands of questions, so you likely did not hear the questions that they'll ask you before coming there, unless it's the question to establish whether you're a programmer at all or not (phone screen). Like learning to drive -- you don't go out and memorize every road by heart, but learn how to act on the road and interpret situations, signals and signs. Those resources shouldn't teach you the questions, but teach you how to really be you in an interview and perform at your nominal level. After going through the above resources, my impression is that they have helped me type faster, make less mistakes in boilerplate and think more about the problem when it's given, before diving into it. Certainly, I do remember a few "tricks" more than I used before going through them, but overall, I think they've helped me very little with the problems in interviews and more with my behavior in interviews. The pattern that I've always seen is that intelligent people who code well pass the interview more often than not and that less intelligent people and/or those who don't code well don't pass ever.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Jach 9y agoMy employer (albeit not so large on the engineering side) seems to have doubled down and are mandating teams use HackerRank to give remote tests, whereas before teams had more flexibility to do better/worse with the process or do the standard thing. I find it absurd, and am glad intern interviews are still flexible for now...
- lawrencewu 9y agoI run a (paid) newsletter that sends fun coding interview puzzles every day. If you're interviewing around (or if you just enjoy programming problems), check out Daily Coding Problem: https://dailycodingproblem.com/ https://dailycodingproblem.com/!
- blinkingled 9y agoYou should've mentioned that email address is required and solutions are $25 a month. But other than that good idea if the actual puzzles and solutions are valuable.
- lawrencewu 9y agoYou're right, I updated it to reflect that it's paid. I think email address is implied by the newsletter though. I'm obviously biased but I think the problems are fun and the solutions are valuable. Here are some blog posts I wrote that hopefully give you an idea of our questions: Given a table of currency exchange rates, determine whether there is a possible arbitrage: https://dailycodingproblem.com/blog/2018/01/02/find-an-arbitrage.html https://dailycodingproblem.com/blog/2018/01/02/find-an-arbit... Picking a random element from an infinite stream: https://dailycodingproblem.com/blog/2017/11/30/random-element.html https://dailycodingproblem.com/blog/2017/11/30/random-elemen... Merging k sorted lists: https://dailycodingproblem.com/blog/2017/11/29/how-to-solve-coding-interview-problem.html https://dailycodingproblem.com/blog/2017/11/29/how-to-solve-...
- sanj 9y agoI taught the class for several years; I'm happy to answer questions. Or point folks to some notes from an updated version of the class.
- lalwanivikas 9y ago> Or point folks to some notes from an updated version of the class. I would love to get updated version of notes.
- bogomipz 9y agoCould you provide a link to some notes and updated version of the class?
- meaydinli 9y agoCan you post links to any updated materials?
- dominotw 9y agoI get really nervous with timed interviews, ticking clock freezes my mind. Wondering if you have any tips for that. I code in java at my day job but its not really well suited for whiteboard interviews where I have write all this code on the board. Google interviewer was noting down what I was writing on whitboard and said that he will compile the code after the interview. Wondering if you have any thoughts about it, maybe choose something more consise like ruby?
- sigjuice 9y agoWhy not compile and run the code during the interview? IMHO it should be way faster than writing stuff on the whiteboard and will save the interviewer the trouble later.
- wcr3 9y agoFun stuff! I especially enjoyed classic question #5 (in Handout 2).