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>There's nothing wrong with straightforwardly engineered apps, screens, forms, databases. Most of the world subsists on this. Most of Google subsists on this.

>There's nothing wrong with straightforwardly engineered apps, screens, forms, databases. Most of the world subsists on this. Most of Google subsists on this. Interviewing everyone for skills that only come up when you are pushing the boundaries of CS is pointless. 99% of engineers at Google fling protos and do menial translations on them. Have a separate "CS" group if you want and apply the CS questions to them. For the rest, interview instead on their ability to write maintainable, testable, scalable software. Google would be worlds better off for it. It's shocking how incompetent the org is as a whole at delivering and maintaining quality software.

cromwellian 8y ago
I don’t think product excellence is a function of the interview process, it’s mainly a function of what you are promoted for, and rightly or wrongly, launching new things tends to give you a better career trajectory than fixing or maintaining old stuff.
- kamaal 8y ago
  That's an unfortunate consequence of the OKR process. If the company has to be chasing near moonshot projects all the time. Then they also align resources towards it. That means money is chasing those projects. There is a huge incentive to keep launching new things. To keep doing something big. Its the classic throw-pizza-at-wall-see-what-sticks approach except the experiment is run among a huge group of people. So eventually some Pizza sticks. But even in that case. I hear '20% time projects' culture have long been dead for now. So that means the projects have to come some one from the top to get some resources.
jrochkind1 8y ago
This is a "Google Tech Dev Guide: Grow Your Technical Skills…", not a "how to interview" guide. Particularly a "foundations of programming" section, in this case. I don't know if it's a good interview question or not, but that doesn't mean it's not part of learning programming. There's more to learning to program than learning to do well in interviews, just like there's more to learning in general than doing well on standardized tests. I think it's odd that so many immediately jumped to discussing the _interview process_. Google's, or anyone's, interview process may or may not be effective at finding talent or being fair. (I have no particular opinion on Google's, but there's LOTS written on the difficulty of creating a successful interview process for programmers, and various different opinions and approaches). But why do we in this discussion seem to assume the only point of this Google site is helping people _pass interviews_? It doesn't say that's what it's for at all. I think it's actually a pretty marvelous free site for learning CS and programming of various sorts, for people of various levels and domains.

cromwellian 8y ago

I don’t think product excellence is a function of the interview process, it’s mainly a function of what you are promoted for, and rightly or wrongly, launching new things tends to give you a better career trajectory than fixing or maintaining old stuff.

kamaal 8y ago
That's an unfortunate consequence of the OKR process. If the company has to be chasing near moonshot projects all the time. Then they also align resources towards it. That means money is chasing those projects. There is a huge incentive to keep launching new things. To keep doing something big. Its the classic throw-pizza-at-wall-see-what-sticks approach except the experiment is run among a huge group of people. So eventually some Pizza sticks. But even in that case. I hear '20% time projects' culture have long been dead for now. So that means the projects have to come some one from the top to get some resources.

jrochkind1 8y ago

This is a "Google Tech Dev Guide: Grow Your Technical Skills…", not a "how to interview" guide. Particularly a "foundations of programming" section, in this case. I don't know if it's a good interview question or not, but that doesn't mean it's not part of learning programming. There's more to learning to program than learning to do well in interviews, just like there's more to learning in general than doing well on standardized tests. I think it's odd that so many immediately jumped to discussing the _interview process_. Google's, or anyone's, interview process may or may not be effective at finding talent or being fair. (I have no particular opinion on Google's, but there's LOTS written on the difficulty of creating a successful interview process for programmers, and various different opinions and approaches). But why do we in this discussion seem to assume the only point of this Google site is helping people _pass interviews_? It doesn't say that's what it's for at all. I think it's actually a pretty marvelous free site for learning CS and programming of various sorts, for people of various levels and domains.