[hardwaregeek]

A friend said recently, "people want to be employed without becoming employable". These guides really exemplify this obsession. Sure, Google has a nice salary and good perks and whatever. But after you get the job, you have to do the job. I wonder if the people who read these guides and try to study just the right topics to get a job, whether they actually like programming.

These guides act as optimizations, shortening the path you need to take to get the job, shortening the stuff you need to learn, etc. But in the end, the path is all you get. If you don't like programming and if you don't like learning, then are you really gonna like Google?

I suppose there's people who genuinely like programming who just need a manual to teach them how to play the game. Lord knows I've practiced my fair share of whiteboard problems when I'd rather be reading about compilers. But there's something wrong about having to play a game to get the job.

[akdas]

> If you don't like programming and if you don't like learning, then are you really gonna like Google?

There are also many people who are great at programming, wh love it, who are terrible at interviewing. After all, these are two related, but ultimately different skills. You talked about it yourself in your last paragraph, ending with:

> But there's something wrong about having to play a game to get the job.

Sounds like the fault is on the employer that makes you play the game, not on "people want to be employed without becoming employable".

[_hardwaregeek]

Agreed, the fault is with the employer, but the people who are willing to indulge this game by obsessively learning to play it don't help.

[optimize]

I mean, if you want to work at Google and the likes, you need to indulge in the game right? And working at Google isn't just about the pay and the salary - thats quite a shallow thing to say. Engineers there handle data of astronomcial proportions, scale their systems every second to handle the ever-growing traffic, innovate on solutions that are used by millions of people around the world. I'd say, if you truly love programming and computer science, thats a pretty sweet deal.

[_hardwaregeek]

The people who spend their days obsessively networking and practicing interview questions are generally not the people who would find problems about scaling to handle astronomical proportions of data interesting. The people who find that interesting tend to spend their days reading about scalability and performance. I'm not talking about someone putting aside a few weeks to a month to study up on these questions, I'm talking about people who straight up neglect their CS education because they want to pass a technical interview.

[darklajid]

I love programming.

I'm scared shitless of whiteboard exercises (and - probably biased by that - see no point in them). There's no way I'd be able to get through them UNLESS I optimize for .. whiteboard programming interviews w/ resources like this site.

In spite of writing code every day, for 15 years plus, and although I LOVE programming, this just excludes me from the list.

(This hits a bit close to home for me because my employer of 13 years just got bought and I'm in the process of looking for interviews again - for the first time since 2006..)

[Frost1x]

I feel your pain. I started in 2008 and have been running various R&D related development contracts through the same core employer but am in the process of moving locations.

When I interviewed around 2008, there was whiteboarding, but only psuedo code based which I could do just fine. The majority of interviews focused on questions regarding time/space complexity trade offs, design choices, etc. not on-the-fly fully optimized implementation solutions, first pass. The worst thing I ran into was having to write merge sort as the FizzBizz of the time.

Now, it's an absolute circus. Most in the industry really don't know what they're looking for and how to adequately assess abilities. They're far more concerned with trivia and memory recall and filtering any remote risk of a false negative than actually accomplishing the tasks for the position at hand.

The current process is very well designed on multiple fronts to attempt to delegitimize professionals and is quite optimized at grabbing fresh grads desperate for work experience or finding cheaper labor without raising red flags on illegal hiring processes. Why people have put up with this practice boggles my mind.

The vast majority of roles don't need Alan Turing, Donald Knuth, or Jon von Neumann to accomplish some basic business goals so let's be realistic and stop pretending they do.

[ikeyany]

When the system's metric is proficiency at timed whiteboard programming questions, then people in that system will optimize for that metric (i.e. don't hate the player, hate the game).

[Traster]

The flip side of this is that having worked at big companies like this I can comfortably say that our bar for new employees is WAY higher than the quality of our current staff.

No one at Google is going to recommend hiring you if they think you'll be in the bottom 50% of engineers at Google when you join. However, 50% of the people hired by Google end up in the bottom 50% of engineers. And frankly, hell there's plenty of jobs that don't require a rockstar. So in many ways you need to be better to get the job than to do the job.

[dwild]

Learning to be good in interview doesn't make you bad at programming.

Theses are 2 skills totally different and not exclusive at all.

A skill need to be learned and practiced. In the case of interview, for a pretty good reason, it's not a skill that we practice usually and once you need to do it, you lack experience and fail even though you could have what needed to do the job.