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From my personal experience (and that of many friends of mine) who interviewed at Google, you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question unless you s

From my personal experience (and that of many friends of mine) who interviewed at Google, you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question unless you stated you were proficient in C and picked C as your interviewing language. Knowing this context might actually explain the situation that the parent comment describes a bit better. It is absolutely possible, as you described, to be perfectly capable within your CS niche without ever bothering with memset. But in that case, you probably won't pick C as your interviewing language and won't state that you are proficient in it. Which is what, I suspect, might have happened in that scenario the parent comment is describing.

steelframe 6y ago
> you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question unless you stated you were proficient in C and picked C as your interviewing language I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google.
- filoleg 6y ago
  >I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google I know quite a few engineers who passed Google interviews and work there, and they wouldn't know how to do this off the top of their head. I also interviewed with Google a few times, and not once was I asked a question like this. Also seems weird you would say that they have "no business being an SWE at Google", given that this problem is pretty trivial, and any competent engineer would be able to figure it out after some quick googling. It isn't some difficult algorithmic problem, it is a very specific and small piece of trivia.
  - Nebasuke 6y ago
    Having performed interviews at Google for about 5 years, I don't think the needing to "know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes" is representative indeed. Many of current junior candidates use Java/Python in which it seems too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee, particularly if it's for general SWE. Either you've dealt with this problem before and you know it, or you'll struggle.
    - steelframe 6y ago
      > too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, but this thread is definitely derailed at this point, so... I don't hesitate to take a hard stance on this. If you don't know off the top of your head how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you are an incompetent programmer and are unfit for the profession. That is indeed a VERY strong signal to a hiring committee. It's like interviewing to be an IP lawyer and now knowing what the types of intellectual property are, or interviewing for a copy editor and now knowing basic sentence structure. There's a baseline of knowledge that anyone ordinarily skilled in the art needs to have, and trivial operations on sequences of values is without question one of them.

steelframe 6y ago

> you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question unless you stated you were proficient in C and picked C as your interviewing language I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google.

filoleg 6y ago
>I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google I know quite a few engineers who passed Google interviews and work there, and they wouldn't know how to do this off the top of their head. I also interviewed with Google a few times, and not once was I asked a question like this. Also seems weird you would say that they have "no business being an SWE at Google", given that this problem is pretty trivial, and any competent engineer would be able to figure it out after some quick googling. It isn't some difficult algorithmic problem, it is a very specific and small piece of trivia.
- Nebasuke 6y ago
  Having performed interviews at Google for about 5 years, I don't think the needing to "know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes" is representative indeed. Many of current junior candidates use Java/Python in which it seems too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee, particularly if it's for general SWE. Either you've dealt with this problem before and you know it, or you'll struggle.
  - steelframe 6y ago
    > too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, but this thread is definitely derailed at this point, so... I don't hesitate to take a hard stance on this. If you don't know off the top of your head how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you are an incompetent programmer and are unfit for the profession. That is indeed a VERY strong signal to a hiring committee. It's like interviewing to be an IP lawyer and now knowing what the types of intellectual property are, or interviewing for a copy editor and now knowing basic sentence structure. There's a baseline of knowledge that anyone ordinarily skilled in the art needs to have, and trivial operations on sequences of values is without question one of them.