[swingbridge]

The very fact that "preparing for 8 months for a Google interview" is a thing highlights all the things that have gone wrong at Google and their widely panned bad recruitment practices.

The process has become about recruiting people that are good at the silly process and not about recruiting the best people. Probably OK if Google is in 'megacorp looking to feed more skillled cogs into the machine' mode (which it mostly is), but unlikely the process finds the person that builds the next Google.

[digler999]

I still remember reading the article about one of google's (?) early recruitment campaigns, circa 2001: an ad in the train station that said www.e^(5,000,000 digits ).com, so you would only know the URL if you were nerdy enough to know how to calculate the non-repeating non-terminating decimal. The webpage then solicited them for hiring. I still think that was a cool idea.

Edit: it wasn't e^ of anything, it was like the [5million, 5millionth + 10]-digit-of-e.com

[blatant]

Do you mean this one: https://blog.beamery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Googles-...

?

[digler999]

that's funny because I dont remember it that way, but it definitely could have been that one. Or maybe it was part of a campaign of many.

[sowbug]

He studied C++, Unix, algorithms, data structures, and system design. Is learning that stuff a "silly process"?

[Volt]

For the express purpose of working at Google? Yes.

[xytop]

Just enough for junior dev