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>Finally, would you have reacted anything like this if the page had been spat out by your favorite Ruby super hacker wizard greybeard man? If it'd been an artis

>Finally, would you have reacted anything like this if the page had been spat out by your favorite Ruby super hacker wizard greybeard man? If it'd been an artisan webpage hand-crafted in the hipsterest coffee shop in oregon? If it's been on microsoft's recruiting page? You work for Google and you want to defend the org, we get it. Get over yourself. This really detracts from the rest of your post so I would consider removing it if you can still edit. The entire point was that testing for these low-level fundamentals really has nothing to do with software engineering. It would be like hiring civil engineers based on being able to do some equations from memory that they would normally reference a book (or the Internet) for in real life. Not only is it not measuring their ability to engineer so it lets terrible engineers in, but it also rejects amazing engineers who don't have optimal solutions to things memorized that you would almost never be using in day-to-day engineering.

saulrh 8y ago
I got pissed off at the "Google this, Google that" sentence because it's bad faith debate technique. The point could have been made just as well with a comment about company towns or cyberpunk megacorporations. The hysterical repetition contributes nothing to the part of the argument that matters in real life and serves solely to incite unthinking, involuntary anger. And, yeah, the complaint probably should have gone in its own post, and had some more explanation. Double-posting still feels wrong somehow. > The entire point was that testing for these low-level fundamentals really has nothing to do with software engineering. It would be like hiring civil engineers based on being able to do some equations from memory that they would normally reference a book (or the Internet) for in real life. You don't ask those questions when interviewing a civil engineer because a licensed civil engineer has passed the FE and PE, eight-hour open-note tests that permit only basic scientific calculators. So not only are civil engineers tested on their ability to handle the basics from memory - you know as well as I do that writing the notes for a serious-business open-notes test is half the difficulty all by itself - they're tested in conditions which impose far more constraints and pressure. I don't think I've done a single interview where I didn't go back and forth with the interviewer to get hints and clarify requirements. Eight hours locked in a room with pencil and paper, fuck that. I agree that Google's interview is stupid, but I've gotten into this argument dozens of times over the last decade and every time I try to think of an alternative I come up with something that has its own weaknesses. For example, one of the reasons I went for a CS degree instead of a software engineering degree is that it's absurdly difficult to pick up formal CS theory on the job but you'll be learning software engineering every day. Take-home tests are unscalable and derided as insulting wastes of applicants' time. Contract-to-hire is too easy for employers to abuse. I can't even imagine how badly a licensing test for CS/software engineering would go. The best I can come up with is to do the same style of interview but on a computer. Which I think Google might even do these days, but I went with the whiteboard one because I don't want that much riding on my laptop working that day and I run at a greater disadvantage coding on a loaner laptop than I do on the whiteboard.

saulrh 8y ago

I got pissed off at the "Google this, Google that" sentence because it's bad faith debate technique. The point could have been made just as well with a comment about company towns or cyberpunk megacorporations. The hysterical repetition contributes nothing to the part of the argument that matters in real life and serves solely to incite unthinking, involuntary anger. And, yeah, the complaint probably should have gone in its own post, and had some more explanation. Double-posting still feels wrong somehow. > The entire point was that testing for these low-level fundamentals really has nothing to do with software engineering. It would be like hiring civil engineers based on being able to do some equations from memory that they would normally reference a book (or the Internet) for in real life. You don't ask those questions when interviewing a civil engineer because a licensed civil engineer has passed the FE and PE, eight-hour open-note tests that permit only basic scientific calculators. So not only are civil engineers tested on their ability to handle the basics from memory - you know as well as I do that writing the notes for a serious-business open-notes test is half the difficulty all by itself - they're tested in conditions which impose far more constraints and pressure. I don't think I've done a single interview where I didn't go back and forth with the interviewer to get hints and clarify requirements. Eight hours locked in a room with pencil and paper, fuck that. I agree that Google's interview is stupid, but I've gotten into this argument dozens of times over the last decade and every time I try to think of an alternative I come up with something that has its own weaknesses. For example, one of the reasons I went for a CS degree instead of a software engineering degree is that it's absurdly difficult to pick up formal CS theory on the job but you'll be learning software engineering every day. Take-home tests are unscalable and derided as insulting wastes of applicants' time. Contract-to-hire is too easy for employers to abuse. I can't even imagine how badly a licensing test for CS/software engineering would go. The best I can come up with is to do the same style of interview but on a computer. Which I think Google might even do these days, but I went with the whiteboard one because I don't want that much riding on my laptop working that day and I run at a greater disadvantage coding on a loaner laptop than I do on the whiteboard.