7 ms·

How I Gamified the Google Interview

84 points by nireyal 14y ago

adnam 14y ago
This is just sad.
- mkenyon 14y ago
  Can you expound on why you feel this way? Personally, I prefer the strength of intrinsic rewards. Gamification seems to devalue my effort. But I'm not denying that it works for people. It might not be a perfect solution, but an 80% solution is better than not preparing for an interview or not being active (FitBit). Why dismiss this outright?
  - chubot 14y ago
    I think it's less about the gamification than about the disturbing trend of "tasteless nerds who want to work at Google at all cost". It seems people just want to get in the door and they don't even care about what they're working on or whether it's the right job for them. I guess the fantastic Google PR team from 2004 did a number on the psyche. It becomes implanted in people's heads that if they work for Google, that means they're automatically successful. (note: I work there and don't think that) I guess it is true, outside the Bay Area, that if you tell someone you work at Google, you will get your ego flattered. In the Bay Area this was true until 2007-2008 or so.
    - eshvk 14y ago
      There is a good reason for someone young in their career to work at Google: Studying how large systems were designed, built and how they handle cruft. Sure there are hot Startups where you get to reinvent the wheel but those opportunities come once in a while. These statements probably apply to any big company but Google is one of the most palatable ones in the bay area.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      I resonate with this, its fine to say "I am passionate about productizing a self driving car, and Google is the only place I can realistically see doing that." It is another to just want to "work at Google." So now that he's checked the box (do they still do slotting? If so the box isn't actually checked yet) what is his motivation, eat at all the cafes? Get a months worth of t-shirts? Hope he is wildly successful, and sad that the interview would be such a barrier.
      - zem 14y ago
        one of my primary motivations for joining google was because i really wanted to be in (what i felt, from talking to my friends that worked there, was) a place that was passionate about the quality and health of their codebase, and that was constantly striving not just for better things to do but for better ways to do those things. so far (18 months in), it has pretty much been everything i expected it to be. it's not true that i "don't care what i'm working on", but the basic engineering culture of google is such that i'm pretty sure i'd have been happy here even if i hadn't got my first choice of product area. i notice an overemphasis on hacker news about how there should be one Problem You're Passionate About Solving, and that that should be what drives you, but that's very much a psychology-of-the-individual thing.
    - Apocryphon 14y ago
      Why "tasteless"?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dude_abides 14y ago
Great post on the gamification aspect. But as an aside: is it really typical for someone to prepare this hard for an interview, even if it is for a dream company? If so, then something seems to be clearly broken with the interview process. My idea of a superstar candidate is not someone who memorizes possible questions and answers, but simply someone who is really really good at what he does.
- rhizome 14y ago
  Is is, but the fact is that people who work at these companies don't really work on problems like those posed at interviews. Once you're in, you're in, and you can relax, more or less. The sense I've developed over the years is that hiring processes like these are engineered to find overqualified employees.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  Yeah, this is just stupid. I have a friend at Amazon who said I'd have no trouble getting through their interview process, but these Google interviews are absurd to me. Why try so hard to get a job at a company that everyone is applying to when you can instead much more easily get a position at a lower profile company, like Amazon or Microsoft, that will still give you challenging and rewarding work? Do I respect and like Google's creations more than Amazon's or Microsoft's? Sure, but that's far from the only factor when choosing a job, even though people act like it is. I'll never bother applying to Google. It's a simple matter of leveraging the principles of supply and demand in your favor.
  - larsberg 14y ago
    > when you can instead much more easily get a position at a > lower profile company, like Amazon or Microsoft It's not quite comparable. When I was a hiring manager at Microsoft, I regularly saw candidate who already had offers from Amazon and Google that didn't even make it through a half-day of interviews. I assume the same is for candidate that we made offers to who went to Google. The companies are all both looking for slightly different things - culture fit is a HUGE part - and there's some random luck of the draw. (e.g., did your first interviewer just come to work after a fight with their husband?)
ianstallings 14y ago
Laughs and just closes browser. I've had enough guys.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
ender7 14y ago
I'm all for finding ways to motivate yourself, but there's no need to spend this much time on interview prep. Google is a great company to work for, but there are many other good ones out there, and any application process is always a roll of the dice. Google turns away plenty of extremely qualified people (as do every other large tech company) and they also occasionally hire some incompetent ones. Pinning your hopes on a single company is a recipe for disappointment.
charlieflowers 14y ago
I was surprised to see no positive comments here at all (at the time I posted this comment). So let me say: thank you for an excellent article. Yes, intrinsic motivation is great, and yes, cramming is not the most effective long-term learning approach. However, there are always going to be short-term challenges to overcome that require something like cramming. That's just part of life. And this is a novel, intriguing approach to it that worked for someone in the real world. Thought-provoking and enlightening. Exactly the kind of thing I hope to find on Hacker News.
- jacalata 14y ago
  Agreed.I particularly liked the 'reward feint' idea, and now I might even watch the linked video talk. (Possibly the article title could have been tweaked to avoid some of the piling-on: How I hacked my interview preparation process?).
  - rlu 14y ago
    Wouldn't you catch on to your own trick after a while?
incision 14y ago
Lots negativity here. The guy appears to have enjoyed himself while exploring a fairly unique skill in the process of working towards a major personal goal. Seems like a multiple win to me.
jmillikin 14y ago
As someone who works at Google, this seems like a grossly excessive amount of effort to get past interviews which just aren't that hard. It would have been much easier to browse through the first few chapters of an algorithms textbook, set up a simple network between two linux VMs, and (optionally) brush up on C++/Java/Python syntax if those aren't languages you use often. The reason Google has a reputation for hard interview problems is that before they came around, the standard technical interview was "So, $NAME, tell me about what you did at your last job". They were one of the first silicon-valley companies to have technical interviews, and so it frightened all the unqualified candidates who couldn't just coast in on good conversation skills. Before Google, the company with a reputation for impossible interviews was Microsoft. Like Google, I strongly doubt that their questions are anywhere near as difficult as the rumor stream claims.
- strlen 14y ago
  You are correct, but the author doesn't seem to be either from the US or a software engineer (his LinkedIn profile indicates a non-technical role). That said, there's also little harm for a programmer brushing up a bit further than needed on algorithms: skip list, for example, is a great example of a data structure that is less known (perhaps less so after ConcurrentSkipListMap in JDK 6), is commonly used for interviews (as it's easy to explain the general concept in the scope of an interview), and is also practical (used in BigTable/HBase amongst many other places).
- dabent 14y ago
  Unlike Microsoft, it seem that Google changed the interviewing process for many companies and I am grateful for it. My interviews pre-Google were primarily trivia contests about the language used for the position I was interviewing for. I was never asked to actually write code or break down a problem. Phone screens were mostly used to verify a candidate had a pulse. Now I've noticed that almost all phone screens require some type of shared-document coding exercise, and some knowledge of algorithms, followed up by a series of whiteboard coding or problem solving face-to-face interviews. Some companies will ask for a homework problem or code sample as well. It was quite a shift for me as a developer, but a welcome one. The up side is that preparing for interviews now has actually improved my skills as a developer where before I'd learn about aspects of software languages that were often never used (such as details about EJBs when interviewing with companies that never used EJBs) and didn't translate into a hire actually being able to do the job they were hired to do.
tankbot 14y ago
The floating Social Media Integration Station covers the words of the piece on Safari.
rtkwe 14y ago
Anyone else get an annoying social share floating toolbar making the bottom third or so of the page unreadable? Firefox 17.
sonabinu 14y ago
What is wrong with preparing hard. I love how he gamified the interview and used the right tools for motivation. Imagine applying this to other facets like project completion, study etc ...
angryasian 14y ago
theres nothing wrong with proper preparation, but the whole idea of gamifying the process seems incredibly unnecessary. As an employer I look for people that are very self motivated, and don't require any external motivations like an ipad to do something. If someone told me they needed this type of effort to get something done that as in his words "is a dream of mine", then he already failed my test.
- anjc 14y ago
  That's a silly test then. Everybody needs to be motivated to work, whether their motivation is supporting a family, making money, enjoying a task etc etc. There's no inherent enjoyment to making money for somebody else.
  - angryasian 14y ago
    in the context of work yes. But in the context of learning or bettering your skills and yourself... this type of motivation is best from people that want to do it because they want to make themselves better.
- bstriddy 14y ago
  Yeah, clearly this guy's problem is a lack of self-motivation. Good thing you're here to tell him he's having too much fun.
- eshvk 14y ago
  He generated his own motivation: His external motivations were bought with his own money. Why is this a problem as long as he gets the job done? Everyone gets motivated by something: After all, as an employer, surely you do pay your employees, don't you? That does act as some sort of motivation. Otherwise, they would be all working for you for free just driven by all that "self-motivation".
  - angryasian 14y ago
    in the context of work yes. But in the context of learning or bettering your skills and yourself... this type of motivation is best from people that want to do it because they want to make themselves better. So if everytime I expect him to learn something new that will help him in his career path, I have to give him a bonus or a raise it doesn't scale.
rizzom5000 14y ago
It's an interesting article, but I doubt the gamification stuff would work for me at all. It does nothing for me to create some artificial reward unrelated to the goal I'm trying to accomplish. If accomplishing the goal isn't reward enough on its own, then why should I do it? That's especially true if the reward is something I can I have anyway. There is no net gain by depriving myself of an energy drink in my refrigerator for another hour. The energy drink was already mine; and was mine to have when I decided to have it. The gamification idea seems trite to me.
intended 14y ago
Wow, thats a lot of negativity here. There were some neat tricks to use here: 1) The reward feint - people are statistically terrible prognosticators of what would make them happy. Setting a stretch reward which actually uses this aspect of to create a positive outcome is really neat. 2) The variable reward schedule? just 2 coin flips is a really stupidly obvious solution, and variable reward schedules are like crack for the brain. 3) How he dealt with high energy requirement prep, during low energy periods. That's something I've faced and I used to just say "man I've just got to work through it." These were some obvious things executed nicely. For people who are facing trouble with intrinsic motivation, this is something that can be set up and launched and will helps you get through the hump. edit: flow/redundant bits removed.
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
The problem is this is a little disturbing and honestly pretty unhealthy; i.e. I think this would lead to some kind of burnout or breakdown either mentally or physically. Sure, it seems like an awful lot of work for the ultimate reward of working at Google, not exactly like winning the Nobel prize or something. Earning energy drinks for performing tasks that seem to almost require energy drinks in the first place seems to be a scary feedback loop. I think the other major issue with this is your treating yourself like some kind of machine or simple animal that performs tricks or that runs toward dangling carrots. If you have the discipline, which I wouldn't, to stick this burnout game, it seems like you should have the discipline to take a more reasonable and measured approach to doing an appropriate level of study/preparation without all this stuff. And all this business of mechanistically surrendering yourself to progress bars ... I think people that go to this extreme need to study more humanities and learn more big picture kind of things; this is like describing behavior one would find in characters in some dystopian novel.
zapfmann 14y ago
Man, the whole story is quite sad. Dream company? Hope you love working there for ... ever!
zigzagzug 14y ago
I was expecting to read something about what he read, trained, etc. for the interview. "Gamification"? Ridiculous.
- taloft 14y ago
  Agreed. This is a simple case of doing good preparation. Gamification has zero to do with it. Sadly, he spent the entire article talking about the wrong thing, because gamification is his SEO soapbox. "Must make square peg fit in round hole."

84 points by nireyal 14y ago

adnam 14y ago

This is just sad.

mkenyon 14y ago
Can you expound on why you feel this way? Personally, I prefer the strength of intrinsic rewards. Gamification seems to devalue my effort. But I'm not denying that it works for people. It might not be a perfect solution, but an 80% solution is better than not preparing for an interview or not being active (FitBit). Why dismiss this outright?
- chubot 14y ago
  I think it's less about the gamification than about the disturbing trend of "tasteless nerds who want to work at Google at all cost". It seems people just want to get in the door and they don't even care about what they're working on or whether it's the right job for them. I guess the fantastic Google PR team from 2004 did a number on the psyche. It becomes implanted in people's heads that if they work for Google, that means they're automatically successful. (note: I work there and don't think that) I guess it is true, outside the Bay Area, that if you tell someone you work at Google, you will get your ego flattered. In the Bay Area this was true until 2007-2008 or so.
  - eshvk 14y ago
    There is a good reason for someone young in their career to work at Google: Studying how large systems were designed, built and how they handle cruft. Sure there are hot Startups where you get to reinvent the wheel but those opportunities come once in a while. These statements probably apply to any big company but Google is one of the most palatable ones in the bay area.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I resonate with this, its fine to say "I am passionate about productizing a self driving car, and Google is the only place I can realistically see doing that." It is another to just want to "work at Google." So now that he's checked the box (do they still do slotting? If so the box isn't actually checked yet) what is his motivation, eat at all the cafes? Get a months worth of t-shirts? Hope he is wildly successful, and sad that the interview would be such a barrier.
    - zem 14y ago
      one of my primary motivations for joining google was because i really wanted to be in (what i felt, from talking to my friends that worked there, was) a place that was passionate about the quality and health of their codebase, and that was constantly striving not just for better things to do but for better ways to do those things. so far (18 months in), it has pretty much been everything i expected it to be. it's not true that i "don't care what i'm working on", but the basic engineering culture of google is such that i'm pretty sure i'd have been happy here even if i hadn't got my first choice of product area. i notice an overemphasis on hacker news about how there should be one Problem You're Passionate About Solving, and that that should be what drives you, but that's very much a psychology-of-the-individual thing.
  - Apocryphon 14y ago
    Why "tasteless"?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

dude_abides 14y ago

Great post on the gamification aspect. But as an aside: is it really typical for someone to prepare this hard for an interview, even if it is for a dream company? If so, then something seems to be clearly broken with the interview process. My idea of a superstar candidate is not someone who memorizes possible questions and answers, but simply someone who is really really good at what he does.

rhizome 14y ago
Is is, but the fact is that people who work at these companies don't really work on problems like those posed at interviews. Once you're in, you're in, and you can relax, more or less. The sense I've developed over the years is that hiring processes like these are engineered to find overqualified employees.
w1ntermute 14y ago
Yeah, this is just stupid. I have a friend at Amazon who said I'd have no trouble getting through their interview process, but these Google interviews are absurd to me. Why try so hard to get a job at a company that everyone is applying to when you can instead much more easily get a position at a lower profile company, like Amazon or Microsoft, that will still give you challenging and rewarding work? Do I respect and like Google's creations more than Amazon's or Microsoft's? Sure, but that's far from the only factor when choosing a job, even though people act like it is. I'll never bother applying to Google. It's a simple matter of leveraging the principles of supply and demand in your favor.
- larsberg 14y ago
  > when you can instead much more easily get a position at a > lower profile company, like Amazon or Microsoft It's not quite comparable. When I was a hiring manager at Microsoft, I regularly saw candidate who already had offers from Amazon and Google that didn't even make it through a half-day of interviews. I assume the same is for candidate that we made offers to who went to Google. The companies are all both looking for slightly different things - culture fit is a HUGE part - and there's some random luck of the draw. (e.g., did your first interviewer just come to work after a fight with their husband?)

ianstallings 14y ago

Laughs and just closes browser. I've had enough guys.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

ender7 14y ago

I'm all for finding ways to motivate yourself, but there's no need to spend this much time on interview prep. Google is a great company to work for, but there are many other good ones out there, and any application process is always a roll of the dice. Google turns away plenty of extremely qualified people (as do every other large tech company) and they also occasionally hire some incompetent ones. Pinning your hopes on a single company is a recipe for disappointment.

charlieflowers 14y ago

I was surprised to see no positive comments here at all (at the time I posted this comment). So let me say: thank you for an excellent article. Yes, intrinsic motivation is great, and yes, cramming is not the most effective long-term learning approach. However, there are always going to be short-term challenges to overcome that require something like cramming. That's just part of life. And this is a novel, intriguing approach to it that worked for someone in the real world. Thought-provoking and enlightening. Exactly the kind of thing I hope to find on Hacker News.

jacalata 14y ago
Agreed.I particularly liked the 'reward feint' idea, and now I might even watch the linked video talk. (Possibly the article title could have been tweaked to avoid some of the piling-on: How I hacked my interview preparation process?).
- rlu 14y ago
  Wouldn't you catch on to your own trick after a while?

incision 14y ago

Lots negativity here. The guy appears to have enjoyed himself while exploring a fairly unique skill in the process of working towards a major personal goal. Seems like a multiple win to me.

jmillikin 14y ago

As someone who works at Google, this seems like a grossly excessive amount of effort to get past interviews which just aren't that hard. It would have been much easier to browse through the first few chapters of an algorithms textbook, set up a simple network between two linux VMs, and (optionally) brush up on C++/Java/Python syntax if those aren't languages you use often. The reason Google has a reputation for hard interview problems is that before they came around, the standard technical interview was "So, $NAME, tell me about what you did at your last job". They were one of the first silicon-valley companies to have technical interviews, and so it frightened all the unqualified candidates who couldn't just coast in on good conversation skills. Before Google, the company with a reputation for impossible interviews was Microsoft. Like Google, I strongly doubt that their questions are anywhere near as difficult as the rumor stream claims.

strlen 14y ago
You are correct, but the author doesn't seem to be either from the US or a software engineer (his LinkedIn profile indicates a non-technical role). That said, there's also little harm for a programmer brushing up a bit further than needed on algorithms: skip list, for example, is a great example of a data structure that is less known (perhaps less so after ConcurrentSkipListMap in JDK 6), is commonly used for interviews (as it's easy to explain the general concept in the scope of an interview), and is also practical (used in BigTable/HBase amongst many other places).
dabent 14y ago
Unlike Microsoft, it seem that Google changed the interviewing process for many companies and I am grateful for it. My interviews pre-Google were primarily trivia contests about the language used for the position I was interviewing for. I was never asked to actually write code or break down a problem. Phone screens were mostly used to verify a candidate had a pulse. Now I've noticed that almost all phone screens require some type of shared-document coding exercise, and some knowledge of algorithms, followed up by a series of whiteboard coding or problem solving face-to-face interviews. Some companies will ask for a homework problem or code sample as well. It was quite a shift for me as a developer, but a welcome one. The up side is that preparing for interviews now has actually improved my skills as a developer where before I'd learn about aspects of software languages that were often never used (such as details about EJBs when interviewing with companies that never used EJBs) and didn't translate into a hire actually being able to do the job they were hired to do.

tankbot 14y ago

The floating Social Media Integration Station covers the words of the piece on Safari.

rtkwe 14y ago

Anyone else get an annoying social share floating toolbar making the bottom third or so of the page unreadable? Firefox 17.

sonabinu 14y ago

What is wrong with preparing hard. I love how he gamified the interview and used the right tools for motivation. Imagine applying this to other facets like project completion, study etc ...

angryasian 14y ago

theres nothing wrong with proper preparation, but the whole idea of gamifying the process seems incredibly unnecessary. As an employer I look for people that are very self motivated, and don't require any external motivations like an ipad to do something. If someone told me they needed this type of effort to get something done that as in his words "is a dream of mine", then he already failed my test.

anjc 14y ago
That's a silly test then. Everybody needs to be motivated to work, whether their motivation is supporting a family, making money, enjoying a task etc etc. There's no inherent enjoyment to making money for somebody else.
- angryasian 14y ago
  in the context of work yes. But in the context of learning or bettering your skills and yourself... this type of motivation is best from people that want to do it because they want to make themselves better.
bstriddy 14y ago
Yeah, clearly this guy's problem is a lack of self-motivation. Good thing you're here to tell him he's having too much fun.
eshvk 14y ago
He generated his own motivation: His external motivations were bought with his own money. Why is this a problem as long as he gets the job done? Everyone gets motivated by something: After all, as an employer, surely you do pay your employees, don't you? That does act as some sort of motivation. Otherwise, they would be all working for you for free just driven by all that "self-motivation".
- angryasian 14y ago
  in the context of work yes. But in the context of learning or bettering your skills and yourself... this type of motivation is best from people that want to do it because they want to make themselves better. So if everytime I expect him to learn something new that will help him in his career path, I have to give him a bonus or a raise it doesn't scale.

rizzom5000 14y ago

It's an interesting article, but I doubt the gamification stuff would work for me at all. It does nothing for me to create some artificial reward unrelated to the goal I'm trying to accomplish. If accomplishing the goal isn't reward enough on its own, then why should I do it? That's especially true if the reward is something I can I have anyway. There is no net gain by depriving myself of an energy drink in my refrigerator for another hour. The energy drink was already mine; and was mine to have when I decided to have it. The gamification idea seems trite to me.

intended 14y ago

Wow, thats a lot of negativity here. There were some neat tricks to use here: 1) The reward feint - people are statistically terrible prognosticators of what would make them happy. Setting a stretch reward which actually uses this aspect of to create a positive outcome is really neat. 2) The variable reward schedule? just 2 coin flips is a really stupidly obvious solution, and variable reward schedules are like crack for the brain. 3) How he dealt with high energy requirement prep, during low energy periods. That's something I've faced and I used to just say "man I've just got to work through it." These were some obvious things executed nicely. For people who are facing trouble with intrinsic motivation, this is something that can be set up and launched and will helps you get through the hump. edit: flow/redundant bits removed.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

The problem is this is a little disturbing and honestly pretty unhealthy; i.e. I think this would lead to some kind of burnout or breakdown either mentally or physically. Sure, it seems like an awful lot of work for the ultimate reward of working at Google, not exactly like winning the Nobel prize or something. Earning energy drinks for performing tasks that seem to almost require energy drinks in the first place seems to be a scary feedback loop. I think the other major issue with this is your treating yourself like some kind of machine or simple animal that performs tricks or that runs toward dangling carrots. If you have the discipline, which I wouldn't, to stick this burnout game, it seems like you should have the discipline to take a more reasonable and measured approach to doing an appropriate level of study/preparation without all this stuff. And all this business of mechanistically surrendering yourself to progress bars ... I think people that go to this extreme need to study more humanities and learn more big picture kind of things; this is like describing behavior one would find in characters in some dystopian novel.

zapfmann 14y ago

Man, the whole story is quite sad. Dream company? Hope you love working there for ... ever!

zigzagzug 14y ago

I was expecting to read something about what he read, trained, etc. for the interview. "Gamification"? Ridiculous.

taloft 14y ago
Agreed. This is a simple case of doing good preparation. Gamification has zero to do with it. Sadly, he spent the entire article talking about the wrong thing, because gamification is his SEO soapbox. "Must make square peg fit in round hole."