7 ms·

From anecdotal but first-hand experience (went through a couple of interview rounds), Google interviewers indeed don't ask the questions on that list. But the q

From anecdotal but first-hand experience (went through a couple of interview rounds), Google interviewers indeed don't ask the questions on that list. But the questions they do ask are hard and often academic - as in, you have likely never run into them in a real-world scenario before and you likely never will. At first I was like 'wow, Google must be populated with demi-gods'. Then I spoke to some Googlers off the record and it turns out that those interview questions have little to do with the reality within Google. Not that Google isn't a company lousy with smart people. They are. And it's not that Google doesn't work on hard problems. They do. It's just that the interviews are an extremely efficient dud filter, probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all).

moultano 16y ago
probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all). In any highly skilled profession, 95% of the time someone with very little of your skill could do your job. The valuable part is that you can also be counted on for that 5% as well. Most of my time at Google hasn't involved any substantial theoretical work. One time though, I did have to come up with a algorithm for computing connected components that could run in reasonable parallel-time in mapreduce. The resulting algorithm ran in log n parallel time passing n log n messages over its lifetime. (This probably is in the literature somewhere considering that a coworker and I had to solve it for unrelated reasons and independently came up with the same thing.) I'd like to expect my coworkers to be able to do that sort of work in a domain that they're familiar with, because it takes certain problems and moves them across the boundary from impossible to possible. Working at Google scale means that you'll inevitably have to solve some problems that have never been solved before, at least until a lot of universities find it worthwhile to build a thousand node cluster for research purposes.
- wallflower 16y ago
  I'd like to believe this story (haven't found an authoritative source yet) that I heard once from a professional speaker of the FedEx main processing facility in Memphis. One day it completely stopped dead - usually it is controlled mayhem with the packages and machines running - the silence was deafening - thousands of dollars lost every minute. They brought in the best expert they could find. He investigated and went to a single box in the plant, opened a door, and turned one bolt with a wrench and everything restarted. The plant came back to life. He sent them a bill for $10,000. When FedEx protested the bill - "You just turned a single bolt! Anyone could have done that" - he itemized it and sent it back. They paid him. Turning a bolt $ 1 Knowing which bolt to turn $9,999
  - gyardley 16y ago
    Unfortunately, this is likely just a modified version of a (almost certainly also fictional) anecdote about Picasso. I've heard this one from several different places: A woman walks up to Picasso, later in life, as he sits at a cafe table. "Could you draw me a sketch?" she asks, thinking she'll make a quick buck. "I can pay you for it." Picasso shrugs, says "sure", and quickly scratches out a little something on a napkin. "That'll be $10,000," he says. "$10,000! But it only took you a few seconds!" "Just the drawing of it took a few seconds," Picasso replies. "Learning how took my entire life."
    - util 16y ago
      That sounds like a paraphrase of a quote from Whistler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#Ruskin_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#R...
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I've heard about 17 different versions of this story, which are probably all bullshit. Here's a few: http://pinds.com/2007/05/27/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/ http://pinds.com/2007/05/27/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/ http://www.guidancechannel.com/default.aspx?M=a&index=658&cat=16 http://www.guidancechannel.com/default.aspx?M=a&index=65... http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/agile/sessions/session27.html http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/agile/sessions/sess... http://pocky.tumblr.com/post/49520543/knowing-which-screw-to-turn http://pocky.tumblr.com/post/49520543/knowing-which-screw-to...
  - zb 16y ago
    Apocryphal. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
  - Evgeny 16y ago
    I'd like to believe this story In the russian versions of the story the expert usually hits the object (server, or the machine that stopped working) with a huge hammer in the carefully identified spot. The result is the same though - the system resumes working as intended. But, well, that's just the cultural differences in the ways the things are usually being fixed.
brown9-2 16y ago
I'd call it more of a "people we are really, really, really sure are what we consider smart" filter rather than a "dud filter", considering they want to find the top M% rather than remove the bottom N%.
- omaranto 16y ago
  Those are the same if M N
ssp 16y ago
I think part of having the academic background is that it gives you the confidence to be casual about certain problems. When Google first demonstrated search suggestions, someone I know who is definitely a good programmer was very amazed that that it was possible to make something like that run fast enough, across the internet, no less. But, if you have learned a little about indexing and data structures, you'll think "Yeah, you can probably generate k suggestions in something like O(k log n), and you can probably predict the next few characters that will be typed in, so that a lot of data could be cached on the client. This doesn't seem impossible", even if you can't come up with the exact algorithm right then and there. That means you can design something like suggest or instant without getting stuck on whether it would run fast enough. Or, conversely if the problem calls for solving an NP-hard problem, then you should get stuck on whether it can run fast enough and whether there is some way to approximate the answer instead. (Did anyone else check to see if you could get Google Maps to solve Traveling Salesman when they first added intermediate destinations?)

moultano 16y ago

probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all). In any highly skilled profession, 95% of the time someone with very little of your skill could do your job. The valuable part is that you can also be counted on for that 5% as well. Most of my time at Google hasn't involved any substantial theoretical work. One time though, I did have to come up with a algorithm for computing connected components that could run in reasonable parallel-time in mapreduce. The resulting algorithm ran in log n parallel time passing n log n messages over its lifetime. (This probably is in the literature somewhere considering that a coworker and I had to solve it for unrelated reasons and independently came up with the same thing.) I'd like to expect my coworkers to be able to do that sort of work in a domain that they're familiar with, because it takes certain problems and moves them across the boundary from impossible to possible. Working at Google scale means that you'll inevitably have to solve some problems that have never been solved before, at least until a lot of universities find it worthwhile to build a thousand node cluster for research purposes.

wallflower 16y ago
I'd like to believe this story (haven't found an authoritative source yet) that I heard once from a professional speaker of the FedEx main processing facility in Memphis. One day it completely stopped dead - usually it is controlled mayhem with the packages and machines running - the silence was deafening - thousands of dollars lost every minute. They brought in the best expert they could find. He investigated and went to a single box in the plant, opened a door, and turned one bolt with a wrench and everything restarted. The plant came back to life. He sent them a bill for $10,000. When FedEx protested the bill - "You just turned a single bolt! Anyone could have done that" - he itemized it and sent it back. They paid him. Turning a bolt $ 1 Knowing which bolt to turn $9,999
- gyardley 16y ago
  Unfortunately, this is likely just a modified version of a (almost certainly also fictional) anecdote about Picasso. I've heard this one from several different places: A woman walks up to Picasso, later in life, as he sits at a cafe table. "Could you draw me a sketch?" she asks, thinking she'll make a quick buck. "I can pay you for it." Picasso shrugs, says "sure", and quickly scratches out a little something on a napkin. "That'll be $10,000," he says. "$10,000! But it only took you a few seconds!" "Just the drawing of it took a few seconds," Picasso replies. "Learning how took my entire life."
  - util 16y ago
    That sounds like a paraphrase of a quote from Whistler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#Ruskin_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#R...
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I've heard about 17 different versions of this story, which are probably all bullshit. Here's a few: http://pinds.com/2007/05/27/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/ http://pinds.com/2007/05/27/knowing-which-screw-to-turn/ http://www.guidancechannel.com/default.aspx?M=a&index=658&cat=16 http://www.guidancechannel.com/default.aspx?M=a&index=65... http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/agile/sessions/session27.html http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/agile/sessions/sess... http://pocky.tumblr.com/post/49520543/knowing-which-screw-to-turn http://pocky.tumblr.com/post/49520543/knowing-which-screw-to...
- zb 16y ago
  Apocryphal. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
- Evgeny 16y ago
  I'd like to believe this story In the russian versions of the story the expert usually hits the object (server, or the machine that stopped working) with a huge hammer in the carefully identified spot. The result is the same though - the system resumes working as intended. But, well, that's just the cultural differences in the ways the things are usually being fixed.

brown9-2 16y ago

I'd call it more of a "people we are really, really, really sure are what we consider smart" filter rather than a "dud filter", considering they want to find the top M% rather than remove the bottom N%.

omaranto 16y ago
Those are the same if M N

ssp 16y ago

I think part of having the academic background is that it gives you the confidence to be casual about certain problems. When Google first demonstrated search suggestions, someone I know who is definitely a good programmer was very amazed that that it was possible to make something like that run fast enough, across the internet, no less. But, if you have learned a little about indexing and data structures, you'll think "Yeah, you can probably generate k suggestions in something like O(k log n), and you can probably predict the next few characters that will be typed in, so that a lot of data could be cached on the client. This doesn't seem impossible", even if you can't come up with the exact algorithm right then and there. That means you can design something like suggest or instant without getting stuck on whether it would run fast enough. Or, conversely if the problem calls for solving an NP-hard problem, then you should get stuck on whether it can run fast enough and whether there is some way to approximate the answer instead. (Did anyone else check to see if you could get Google Maps to solve Traveling Salesman when they first added intermediate destinations?)