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No, they hire Competitive Programmers - this is a separate specialty, but Google assumes such programmers should be able jump into real world software engineeri

by zerr 7y ago

No, they hire Competitive Programmers - this is a separate specialty, but Google assumes such programmers should be able jump into real world software engineering. They recognize the flaw but so far can't come up with a different way.

umvi 7y ago
> No, they hire Competitive Programmers More specifically, programmers who spend a lot of time learning how to solve algorithm puzzles. This heavily favors single people who have lots of time to devote to studying such things and disadvantages time-constrained people such as developers with a family life at home.
- deleted 7y ago
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- p_l 7y ago
  Having gone through some of their algorithmic questions, about the only thing consistent between competition programming and their questions was that N was large, often larger than resources of single machine. A very practical issue, compared to many competition problems. The first stage of the question might be very competition-like, though.
- deleted 7y ago
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- zerr 7y ago
  Yes, ageism is one of the consequences (or reason) of such interview practice.
  - username90 7y ago
    Is there any evidence that older engineers are worse at these interviews than younger ones?
    - umvi 7y ago
      It's not that older engineers are worse at them (from an intelligence standpoint), it's that younger engineers have more time to study for them. Take a standardized test like the LSAT. Young single people can spend 4-5 hours a day taking practice LSAT exams. Older married people with small children barely have 2 spare hours after work let alone 4 (without neglecting their spouse/kids). Assuming both the older and younger devs in this scenario have identical IQs, who is likely to do better come LSAT test day? It's a war of time attrition.
username90 7y ago
Front end, back end, games, data science, embedded etc are all very similar if you ignore the frameworks existing in each domain. So you can become a decent generalist in all of them if you do it bottom-up and become fluent at relevant algorithms first, while if you go top-down and learn each framework then you will never become good at all of them at once since there is just too much complexity in each domains frameworks. For example, a person who only knows react, angular, vue and node is a specialist and will unlikely be successfully to transfer to a different kind of team. A person who built their own javascript frameworks on the other hand had to build and learn a lot of fundamental concepts which are transferable to any domain, I could use such a person. So personally I strongly favor algorithmic interviews over more specialized ones. I don't care if you learned how to use library X to solve narrow problem Y, no matter how many times you did it.

by zerr 7y ago

umvi 7y ago

> No, they hire Competitive Programmers More specifically, programmers who spend a lot of time learning how to solve algorithm puzzles. This heavily favors single people who have lots of time to devote to studying such things and disadvantages time-constrained people such as developers with a family life at home.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
p_l 7y ago
Having gone through some of their algorithmic questions, about the only thing consistent between competition programming and their questions was that N was large, often larger than resources of single machine. A very practical issue, compared to many competition problems. The first stage of the question might be very competition-like, though.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zerr 7y ago
Yes, ageism is one of the consequences (or reason) of such interview practice.
- username90 7y ago
  Is there any evidence that older engineers are worse at these interviews than younger ones?
  - umvi 7y ago
    It's not that older engineers are worse at them (from an intelligence standpoint), it's that younger engineers have more time to study for them. Take a standardized test like the LSAT. Young single people can spend 4-5 hours a day taking practice LSAT exams. Older married people with small children barely have 2 spare hours after work let alone 4 (without neglecting their spouse/kids). Assuming both the older and younger devs in this scenario have identical IQs, who is likely to do better come LSAT test day? It's a war of time attrition.

username90 7y ago

Front end, back end, games, data science, embedded etc are all very similar if you ignore the frameworks existing in each domain. So you can become a decent generalist in all of them if you do it bottom-up and become fluent at relevant algorithms first, while if you go top-down and learn each framework then you will never become good at all of them at once since there is just too much complexity in each domains frameworks. For example, a person who only knows react, angular, vue and node is a specialist and will unlikely be successfully to transfer to a different kind of team. A person who built their own javascript frameworks on the other hand had to build and learn a lot of fundamental concepts which are transferable to any domain, I could use such a person. So personally I strongly favor algorithmic interviews over more specialized ones. I don't care if you learned how to use library X to solve narrow problem Y, no matter how many times you did it.