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The grind you have to go through in a "google style" interview has nothing to do with the actual work you normally do. It's done to show 1) you will do large am
by x86x87 4y ago
The grind you have to go through in a "google style" interview has nothing to do with the actual work you normally do. It's done to show 1) you will do large amounts of boring work without questioning the need for it 2) you got the fundamentals and you know what's there / when using something you can grok what's going on under the covers. Nobody needs to implement a sorting algorithm until they do - the risk of NIH and reinventing the wheel is high. When you do you need to have a good understanding of why
- josephg 4y agoNobody at Google wants you to do boring work without questioning the need for it. That would be a waste of money and time. Hard interview questions are asked for the same reason hard questions are asked in SAT tests. The assumption is that if you can do a hard thing in the interview (implement a mutex using a semaphore or whatever) then you can probably write simple code too. A few years ago I was working somewhere that had a low hiring bar. We were using an opensource graphql library to interact with some service. The graphql library didn’t expose some queries we needed, so I forked the library and added those queries. After I left I heard through the grapevine that they were very unhappy with my work. They didn’t have anyone on the team who was skilled enough to maintain the code I wrote, so I left them in a bad place. In retrospect I’m still not sure what else I could have done to solve the team’s graphql problems. Not that, but what?
- x86x87 4y agoI'm going respectfully disagree with you on the first point. Do you really need a Phd to maintain an internal javascript framework with a handful of users? (True story). A lot of the hires are made to starve the competition of good people. The low hiring bar is relative. If all you do is put together crud apps and it's mostly stitching things together you might not even need a formal CS education. In fact a lot of people I know are wildly successful because they found their niche. They would have an exceptional bad time in a whiteboard setting.
- codeflo 4y agoI’ve seen many instances where a low-skill programming place either lives with a bug, or alternatively, adopts a solution that involves meticulously copy&pasting a workaround into 300 places. Having said that, I know great, intelligent programmers, sone of who worked on compilers, who are simply bad in a whiteboard setting. Having a filter is necessary, I’m just not convinced a Google-style interview filters exactly the right thing.
- argiope 4y agoThe google-style interviews are certainly filtering for something though. An unfounded theory of mine is that the unfortunate eagerness of Google to sunset their products [1] might be a side effect of hiring for people that rather want to solve exciting coding problems and furthering their career by using X new language/framework, than maintaining legacy systems and keeping backwards compatibility, which might not sound so exciting. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- danielbln 4y agoAren't all FAANG using these style of coding interviews? And if you look at Amazon, they have almost the opposite problem of pushing out too many (AWS) products.
- x86x87 4y agoThey do build a lot of stuff. And don't have the muscle to keep it around and maintain it. That's not whay softwarr developers do, right?