[nostrademons]

This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic. In my experience, the pet topics you list - parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc. - are needed quite frequently for those jobs at AmaGooFaceSoft. In other words, those candidates would be poor fits for those jobs, which is exactly what an interview is trying to test.

I think the Google hiring process is fucked up in a lot of ways, but I don't think reliance on whiteboarding or the selection of interview questions are two of them.

[PlaceFan]

> This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic

Well sure, but you only have so much time to study for these interviews.

So, you make sure you review your basic data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis. The things that will most likely show up.

Then you have to consider the more advanced topics. Realistically, you're not going to have an expert-level understanding of all of them. None of them are extremely difficult concepts to understand necessarily, but you need the kind of mastery to understand such a problem quickly and under pressure (since it's a short, timed interview).

The most effective way to study, then, is to simply run through a battery of dynamic programming questions and hope you get lucky and the interviewer asks you a variation on one you studied.

I've had more than a few AmaGooFaceSoft interviews ask me slight variations on the change counting question. They're really testing my ability to recall the solution to that problem, not any sort of deep understanding of dynamic programming.

On the flip side, the interviews I've failed almost always involved some pet topic that I wouldn't dream of studying. I once (no joke, and not THAT long ago) had an interviewer at AmaGooFaceSoft ask me do a bunch of calculus questions involving power series (turn a function into a power series, determine the radius of convergence, etc.). Why would I study that for an interview?

[FT_intern]

> Well sure, but you only have so much time to study for these interviews.

Considering the payoff (potentially a $40,000 to $100,000 raise on a 40 hour work week), I think that the amount of time to study for these types of interviews is very trivial. Interviewing skills can be used for interviews at many well paying companies because this type of interview has been standardized, so it's not like you're only studying specific knowledge for one company.

[ZanyProgrammer]

Are those topics really needed for (what you're implying) is the majority of jobs at those companies? I'm not sure if there's any way to really test this.

[nostrademons]

Yes. This is the reality of distributed computing: most of the problems you want to solve do not have off-the-shelf libraries. Rather, you need to know an algorithm, and various algorithmic-design techniques, well enough that you can decompose it into steps and then recompose steps so that they can be partitioned among many different computers, with appropriate failure modes if machines or network connections go down. That requires intimate knowledge of both the algorithm and of the types of problems you run into in a distributed setting.

MapReduce, Pregel, Bigtable, Flume, etc. are building blocks: they solve some of the distribution problems, but you still need to understand how the algorithms that run on top of them work, on a step-by-step level, to implement on top of them.

[mquander]

Is that actually a majority of jobs at Google? I know something about the work that several of my friends working as SREs and SWEs do and it doesn't sound like it involves a lot of distributed systems programming.

Let's say you work on some part of Android. Obviously you need to interact with things like Google's build system which are distributed, but are you really implementing some distributed computation in the course of your every week, or even every month?

I get that Google wants to test during the interview for suitability over a large space of possible specific roles, but I seriously doubt that "distributed systems stuff" would be in the list of top 10 programmer domain knowledges that are useful in those roles. Is it more useful than knowing how to work with version control well? Everyone at Google has to do that, but they don't test it during the interview. Is it more useful than being able to read and write idiomatic and readable Java? They don't really substantially test that during the interview either.

(On the other hand, the things that spawned this conversation were "dynamic programming, parallelism, and networking" and the latter two are much more obviously generally important things.)

[nostrademons]

It was at the time I was there (2009-2014). There's another Googler above who says it's not like that anymore, which is possible, but these were things you needed to know across Search, GMail, YouTube, Plus, Docs, and Infrastructure while I was there.

[joshuamorton]

It entirely depends on what project you work on. When I interned, I had to deal with a lot of custom datastructures, but since I started full time, I haven't (although my next project might?)