4 ms·
You have a perfectly valid point. After a PhD and 10 years of industry experience I interviewed at Google, mostly out of curiosity and because a former colleagu
by r_c_a_d 8y ago
You have a perfectly valid point. After a PhD and 10 years of industry experience I interviewed at Google, mostly out of curiosity and because a former colleague recommended me.
I had never done an "algorithms" type interview before, had done no specific preparation, and was a bit baffled by being asked to do a coding exercise in a text editor whilst talking on the phone.
Since I was an "internal recommend" they gave me a second chance. Presumably because they were surprised at how badly I did. But the second interview was worse than the first.
I came away feeling quite humiliated.
- wolfgke 8y agoJust out of curiosity: Are these kind of questions relevant/representative for the type of work that one does at Google?
- r_c_a_d 8y agoWell, my reasoning at the time (2007) was that since my areas of expertise were machine learning and parallel processing, then if they wanted to hire people who knew low-level sorting and searching algorithms by heart, it wasn't the place for me. I was surprised how one dimensional their process was. And I believe it may have changed since then. My former colleague did apologise when I related my experience and admitted that Google knew they had a problem with the process.