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And certainly your day-to-day work would involve answering questions about those data structures and algorithms in real time, with your future career depending

And certainly your day-to-day work would involve answering questions about those data structures and algorithms in real time, with your future career depending on it, without external references.

KaeseEs 16y ago
If you know something well, you can reason about it in real time. Pressure is an artifact of the interview process that is controlled primarily by the attitudes of the interviewer and interviewee regardless the subject matter. External references are useful for things you don't know cold. For something basic and fundamental to your job (eg. basic graph traversals, the suitability of a hash or a balanced BST to some lookup task, etc), you shouldn't need them; for something more arcane which is accidental rather than essential to your task, or something relatively advanced (eg. specifics of tries for incremental string operations), a competent interviewer will help you out and supply some information so that he can evaluate your ability to reason, design and code. None of these things have any bearing on whether or not it makes sense for Google to focus on knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science and systems programming in their hiring interviews.
illumin8 16y ago
I think not. Your day to day work involves sitting in front of an editor of your choice and writing code that may or may not compile or interpret properly, may or may not contain bugs, and may or may not have the correct logic. Simply having a computer at your disposal with the Internet handy, a step debugger, or the ability to run a shell or interpreter in an interactive mode puts you light years ahead of someone struggling in front of a white board trying to remember the arguments and proper order for some obscure function they haven't used in months. How many people actually solve problems in their day to day jobs without every looking anything up online? Or at least checking to make sure they are correct. Just having a syntax highlighting editor is light years ahead of a white board and dry erase marker. edit: Sorry, my sarcasm detector doesn't work. I think we're agreeing.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  > I think we're agreeing. Yep. Sorry if my sarcasm broadcaster had a weak signal

And certainly your day-to-day work would involve answering questions about those data structures and algorithms in real time, with your future career depending on it, without external references.

KaeseEs 16y ago

If you know something well, you can reason about it in real time. Pressure is an artifact of the interview process that is controlled primarily by the attitudes of the interviewer and interviewee regardless the subject matter. External references are useful for things you don't know cold. For something basic and fundamental to your job (eg. basic graph traversals, the suitability of a hash or a balanced BST to some lookup task, etc), you shouldn't need them; for something more arcane which is accidental rather than essential to your task, or something relatively advanced (eg. specifics of tries for incremental string operations), a competent interviewer will help you out and supply some information so that he can evaluate your ability to reason, design and code. None of these things have any bearing on whether or not it makes sense for Google to focus on knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science and systems programming in their hiring interviews.

illumin8 16y ago

I think not. Your day to day work involves sitting in front of an editor of your choice and writing code that may or may not compile or interpret properly, may or may not contain bugs, and may or may not have the correct logic. Simply having a computer at your disposal with the Internet handy, a step debugger, or the ability to run a shell or interpreter in an interactive mode puts you light years ahead of someone struggling in front of a white board trying to remember the arguments and proper order for some obscure function they haven't used in months. How many people actually solve problems in their day to day jobs without every looking anything up online? Or at least checking to make sure they are correct. Just having a syntax highlighting editor is light years ahead of a white board and dry erase marker. edit: Sorry, my sarcasm detector doesn't work. I think we're agreeing.

BrandonM 16y ago
> I think we're agreeing. Yep. Sorry if my sarcasm broadcaster had a weak signal