6 ms·

Companies like Google hire hundreds (thousands?) of developers per year, hiring policies at 37Signals are bound to be different from those at Google. If you ha

Companies like Google hire hundreds (thousands?) of developers per year, hiring policies at 37Signals are bound to be different from those at Google. If you have to weed out thousands of candidates, trying brainteasers to estimate their problem-solving capabilities doesn't seem to be a bad strategy. If a candidate is not familiar with a particular problem, his/her solution may be suboptimal, but the process of getting to that (suboptimal) solution may be a good indicator of the candidate's problem solving skills. Obviously, syntax-checking a candidate's on-paper Javascript code isn't going to help anyone.

spot 15y ago
google does not use "brainteasers" and in fact has a specific policy against that kind of question. they ask substantive technical questions that often involving coding on the whiteboard.
- hack_edu 15y ago
  If I were applying, I'd still consider this a "brainteaser." It serves the same purpose and is likely equally abstracted from the tasks of the real job.
- ChrisLTD 15y ago
  This was a few years ago, but I was given a brain teaser/game where I had to find the differences between two sets of Google doodles. It was supposed to prove I had attention to detail.
  - brown9-2 15y ago
    What type of position did you apply for? Questions for software engineers and positions like product manager are likely vastly different.
    - ChrisLTD 15y ago
      It was for a front-end design/programming position.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  I applied for a developer job at Google once and eventually had two phone interviews. I was asked to come up with a sorting algorithm that would run on 4 computers with more data than could fit on any one computer. I was then asked to do a complexity analysis on my algorithm. The only thing I think that really tested was how long it had been since I took an algorithms course in college.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    I had a similar one. Actually interviewing for a management position with no coding involved. The worst part was that a lot of the questions were imprecise and/or I could tell he expected an answer to a different question that "normal people" would look up rather than remember by rote. One question that annoyed me in particular was "what is stored in an inode?". First problem: Lots of file systems don't have inodes, and those that do store different information in them. Ok, explained that and asked for clarification. He wants the inodes in UFS. I told him I have no idea - I've never had any reason to look into the on-disk structure of UFS. Why would I? BSD is specifically not on my resume, though I've used it now and again. I offered up the description of ext2fs instead, since I happen to roughly remember that, and talked around differences with other filesystems. But he was clearly not happy. This was one of a series of similar The recruiter was annoyed to no end, and managed to get the interview result thrown out, but by then I'd gotten so annoyed about the whole process (which had dragged out for weeks) that I just wasn't interested any more.
  - shasta 15y ago
    Sorry, but that's a reasonable question for assessing a particular type of skill. That you seem to think they're looking for you to remember some particular parallel sorting algorithm from college tells me that this probably isn't your strongest skill. That doesn't mean you're a bad programmer.
  - strlen 15y ago
    It's been seven years since I've taken an algorithm course, but I have a generic (assuming nothing about the input data other than it doesn't fit in a single machine's main memory and is uniformly distributed) solution in my head as well as a complexity time for it. That said, I work on distributed systems for a living and have actually had to do similar things (manipulate data sets larger than a single machine's main memory across a cluster of machines). On the other hand, that's not a skill 37signals needs. It's insane to think that Google, 37signals, and a random startup could and should use the same interview process.

spot 15y ago

google does not use "brainteasers" and in fact has a specific policy against that kind of question. they ask substantive technical questions that often involving coding on the whiteboard.

hack_edu 15y ago
If I were applying, I'd still consider this a "brainteaser." It serves the same purpose and is likely equally abstracted from the tasks of the real job.
ChrisLTD 15y ago
This was a few years ago, but I was given a brain teaser/game where I had to find the differences between two sets of Google doodles. It was supposed to prove I had attention to detail.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  What type of position did you apply for? Questions for software engineers and positions like product manager are likely vastly different.
  - ChrisLTD 15y ago
    It was for a front-end design/programming position.
dangrossman 15y ago
I applied for a developer job at Google once and eventually had two phone interviews. I was asked to come up with a sorting algorithm that would run on 4 computers with more data than could fit on any one computer. I was then asked to do a complexity analysis on my algorithm. The only thing I think that really tested was how long it had been since I took an algorithms course in college.
- vidarh 15y ago
  I had a similar one. Actually interviewing for a management position with no coding involved. The worst part was that a lot of the questions were imprecise and/or I could tell he expected an answer to a different question that "normal people" would look up rather than remember by rote. One question that annoyed me in particular was "what is stored in an inode?". First problem: Lots of file systems don't have inodes, and those that do store different information in them. Ok, explained that and asked for clarification. He wants the inodes in UFS. I told him I have no idea - I've never had any reason to look into the on-disk structure of UFS. Why would I? BSD is specifically not on my resume, though I've used it now and again. I offered up the description of ext2fs instead, since I happen to roughly remember that, and talked around differences with other filesystems. But he was clearly not happy. This was one of a series of similar The recruiter was annoyed to no end, and managed to get the interview result thrown out, but by then I'd gotten so annoyed about the whole process (which had dragged out for weeks) that I just wasn't interested any more.
- shasta 15y ago
  Sorry, but that's a reasonable question for assessing a particular type of skill. That you seem to think they're looking for you to remember some particular parallel sorting algorithm from college tells me that this probably isn't your strongest skill. That doesn't mean you're a bad programmer.
- strlen 15y ago
  It's been seven years since I've taken an algorithm course, but I have a generic (assuming nothing about the input data other than it doesn't fit in a single machine's main memory and is uniformly distributed) solution in my head as well as a complexity time for it. That said, I work on distributed systems for a living and have actually had to do similar things (manipulate data sets larger than a single machine's main memory across a cluster of machines). On the other hand, that's not a skill 37signals needs. It's insane to think that Google, 37signals, and a random startup could and should use the same interview process.