3 ms·

You may have designed it, but can you tell me how many ping pong balls it would take to fill up one of the rooms? We are only interested if you can answer trivi

You may have designed it, but can you tell me how many ping pong balls it would take to fill up one of the rooms? We are only interested if you can answer trivialities. (/s of course) (And I’m assuming you could, too!)

dekhn 3y ago
Google typically didn't ask fermi problems like that. Although, actually, sphere packing problems are pretty interesting, mathematically... A common classic era Google question would be roughly "find an O(n) or O(logn) solution to a problem that most people would solve quadratically, and write pseudocode for your solution, handling important edge cases, while also intuiting the special details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD)". So many people I knew at google were great math and science folks who ended up writing CRUD apps. Really depressing for them.
- samstave 3y ago
  My final question after 3-month panel interviews: "How do you do a global replace in vi?" -- I blanked and said "I'd google it" They said "thats the best answer" (they also asked me what a type of comapny Google was... I said "Most think youre a search company, but really, you're an advertising company" 2008. When I interviewed at Twitter in 2009-ish, they asked what type of company I thought Twitter was; "You're a global sentiment engine" -- Go ghosted by both after saying I ranked super high on their metrics... (goog actually stated they were going to give me an offer, then called the next morning telling me they were rescinding offer)
  - dekhn 3y ago
    my muscle memory says ":%s/foo/bar/g" but honestly, I wish it didn't.
    - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
      Yoy can replace slash with any character as long as the parser can figure it out.
      - dekhn 3y ago
        riiiiight in fact I usually use something else because I'm editing a path with / IIRC this dates back to at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)
- aoki 3y ago
  > details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD) Haha, that was my third interviewer! Some random computational geometry problem. But it worked out for me as I happened to have read Preparata & Shamos as an undergrad.

dekhn 3y ago

Google typically didn't ask fermi problems like that. Although, actually, sphere packing problems are pretty interesting, mathematically... A common classic era Google question would be roughly "find an O(n) or O(logn) solution to a problem that most people would solve quadratically, and write pseudocode for your solution, handling important edge cases, while also intuiting the special details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD)". So many people I knew at google were great math and science folks who ended up writing CRUD apps. Really depressing for them.

samstave 3y ago
My final question after 3-month panel interviews: "How do you do a global replace in vi?" -- I blanked and said "I'd google it" They said "thats the best answer" (they also asked me what a type of comapny Google was... I said "Most think youre a search company, but really, you're an advertising company" 2008. When I interviewed at Twitter in 2009-ish, they asked what type of company I thought Twitter was; "You're a global sentiment engine" -- Go ghosted by both after saying I ranked super high on their metrics... (goog actually stated they were going to give me an offer, then called the next morning telling me they were rescinding offer)
- dekhn 3y ago
  my muscle memory says ":%s/foo/bar/g" but honestly, I wish it didn't.
  - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
    Yoy can replace slash with any character as long as the parser can figure it out.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      riiiiight in fact I usually use something else because I'm editing a path with / IIRC this dates back to at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)
aoki 3y ago
> details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD) Haha, that was my third interviewer! Some random computational geometry problem. But it worked out for me as I happened to have read Preparata & Shamos as an undergrad.