[ideal0227]

When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel.

AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions.

Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did not hire me back then.

Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview at "Giant Search and Advertising Company", but they run a lot of my code in production :P.

[paxys]

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768.

Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

[throwaway5283]

This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing.

Before joining, I had endless enthusiasm for computer science and programming. Now I feel so unenthusiastic that I question my future in this industry.

[igetspam]

I worked there in the early 2000s. It was fun. Then it wasn't any more. I was much earlier in my career and when I left, having it on my resume meant a lot. Now I've done more and more interesting things. I told the FAANGs, in no unclear terms, I'm not interested. They seem to have gotten the message eventually. I like small companies. You work harder and have a lot more impact. The compensation is good too.

Leave. The grass is greener.

[bradlys]

> I like small companies. You work harder and have a lot more impact. The compensation is good too. Leave. The grass is greener.

What small company is regularly paying over $300k+/yr for senior software engineers and paying over $500k/yr for staff+?

The only people I see leaving the big companies are those who already got their riches and/or bought real estate earlier. The rest of us are either tied to them or trying to get in because the real estate market dictates you must earn that income to stick around the bay.

[probably_wrong]

> the real estate market dictates you must earn that income to stick around the bay.

Well, there's your problem right there.

There are plenty of smaller tech hubs around the world.

[khalilravanna]

Big +1. Leave the Bay Area. Heck, you could even get a Bay Area job that allows remote and then leave the Bay Area. I worked remote from ATX for 2 years for an SF startup and it was great!

[eropple]

Many of them don't feel particularly smaller, either. I've had literally no desire to move to San Francisco; senior+ jobs here in Boston pay more than enough to comfortably pay a mortgage somewhere nice.

[throwaway582]

That sucks that you've had that experience, I'm sorry. I hope it's the exception and not the rule. I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising, and my experience has been pretty great—indeed, working on interesting problems with a high degree of autonomy. I do need to persuade others of my ideas sometimes, or let them persuade me against them, but this seems like a good thing, and doesn't feel political. Throughout my team and the other teams we work closely with, I find my co-workers and superiors to be thoughtful, smart, open-minded, and really nice to work with.

[whatevah5982]

Some years ago I was unsatisfied with my pay and I accepted the interview of a Giant Search corp, getting to the on-site interview. The lunch with random employees was perhaps the best part of the experience for me, as it became abundantly clear that a good chunk of devs that I had some conversation with outlined in very generic terms the same basic stuff everybody else needs to do in software: maintenance, basic infrastructure, scripts, and so on. Which is, you know, totally expected.

I'm pretty sure that everything is at scale and so on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that up to that point the stuff I would be working on was not on the table and I could be switching from a place where I like what I'm doing [biotech] to just a highly paid but plainly boring SE job.

This curbed my enthusiasm instantly. Up to that point in my career I always considered available positions based on the actual function I would be doing in the company, never vice-versa.

The afternoon sessions didn't work as well, and although I could still have some extra interviews through phone calls I cancelled them a few days afterwards.

I cannot say for sure what did I miss, but I am certainly totally disillusioned for Big Search as a company today due to it's consumer attitude that I no longer wish for a position there.

[pansa2]

> I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising [...] on interesting problems

Genuine question - what do you consider to be interesting problems in advertising?

[busterarm]

Having worked on the spend side of things and at high stakes (9 figure budgets), targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating. More than anything else I've done in my career, even. This is especially true when you have constraints, like being in a regulated industry such as legal marketing.

The only problem is that it's hard to command a salary commensurate with how good you are at it unless you're in business for yourself AND the one spending the money.

[blub]

"targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating"

I thought the answer to that was a rather bland "by gobbling up even more information about everyone"?

[throwaway582]

I work on infrastructure. Security, privacy, speed, reliability—all of these are complex challenges, especially at our scale.

And it's a reasonable question. Thanks for asking.

[Ygg2]

The only interesting problem in advertising - How to part people from their money :P

[toohotatopic]

Move? You got in without preparing. You can make it anywhere. Nothing is more precious than your enthusiasm.

[cbHXBY1D]

Similar experience and similar feelings here :/

[jonathankoren]

You joined a giant megacorp. They’re all like that. There’s very little difference between Google and Oracle in this regard.

[AlexCoventry]

From what I've read, Google is a much more humane and pleasant environment to develop software in.

[monoideism]

That's what I hear, but then I see comments from folks like User5283 above. I have the impression it may be changing into something much more similar to a typical corporation after years of avoiding that fate.

[hutzlibu]

Beware though, that he or she used a throwaway. Comments can be made by anyone, also a marketing company contracted by oracle who still want talent and have to shame competitors with better image.

(but the comment did seem legit and it is obvious for posting that anonymous)

[notyourday]

Much higher pay has a tendency to color the everything better

[jfkebwjsbx]

That was a decade ago.

[neilk]

I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all.

Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image.

Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?

Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.

I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.

[cmrdporcupine]

Google gets so many applicants it's irrelevant how counterproductive the interview process is. It selects for people similar to the interviewers, but that matters little, since they can afford to say No to 99% of candidates because thousands will still apply.

What boggles my mind is to see the same type of "skill testing" whiteboard coding interviews at smaller companies and startups that pay far less and don't have golden handcuffs to offer.

I've been at Google for 8 years. If I went to one of these smaller companies to interview and they asked me to whiteboard a data structure or algorithm problem I'd just walk out. I'm not the best programmer in the world or particularly shit-hot, but I'm sure there are many that are that would do the same.

Companies copying this process are doing themselves a disservice.

[pandaman]

>Google gets so many applicants it's irrelevant how counterproductive the interview process is.

It still may be relevant when you are looking for a specific domain knowledge instead of a generic "programmer". A great example is Amazon Game Studios. They employ the general Amazon hiring process from what I understand yet, as a game studio, it's a complete and utter failure. There are just few thousand experienced game programmers in the whole world and only a fraction of them wants to apply at Amazon at all for different reasons. You cull 99% of them and you are left with inexperienced people who will not be able to learn anything since there is nobody to learn from. Even if few experienced people got through or went around hiring process (e.g. celebrity programmers hired without whiteboarding) they will be in a minority and unable to mentor the rest of the studio. Google and Facebook are spinning up their own game studios and I expect the same result from them.

[numpad0]

One thing I wasn't aware as a nerdy teenager was how everything is valued IRL in its guaranteed minimum performance, not conditional maxima.

No one is interested in your peak performance, all it matters is consistency, predictability, stability, those robustness metrics. Say interview questions kinda sucks, but you show some competency still, means predictable most of what they have to throw at you will at least partially stick, minimizing factors.

You could argue that a workplace that prefers a trait like that doesn't sound like a place for artists' dream place we all desire, but more towards a "software manufacturing factory" envisioned by electric companies like Hitachi in the '80s, if you do I think maybe it is and maybe they were right to a certain extent.

[thewhitetulip]

> Unearned privilege?

I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code"

But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?

[paganel]

Now I’m curious why they didn’t use dicts, I love dicts. I’ve been writing Python for a living for almost 15 years now and dictionaries and (reasonable) list comprehensions still attract me like they did the first day I “met” them.

[thewhitetulip]

I don't know. It was bizzare to hear it.

To be honest the lady taking the interview didn't understand my code, at least that's what I got. The guy with her definitely didn't understand a line I had written.

Maybe that was her way of protecting herself or something else

But I've never come across any real reason to not use dicts

[neilk]

I took that part out. I don’t really know what is in other people’s minds.

[Rury]

Steve Jobs had a theory about why this type of stuff becomes prevalent in the lifecycle of companies: https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation...

Sounds a lot like google here.

Frankly though, I think there's something more fundamental about large organization as to why this sort of stuff happens (not just at companies). Perhaps it's the iron law of oligarchy, but corruption seems inevitable at scale. Very few innovative people seem able to reap or retain the most value of their work.

[ddalex]

> Very few innovative people seem able to reap or retain the most value of their work.

Once a company pays you, it's not your work, it's their work. They paid you fair and square.

IMHO a developer need to produce about 10x what's his paid as to cover for the company costs and profits. If one thinks that they can cover those 9 tenths in marketing, office space, infrastructure, admin and legal costs in a more efficient manner, they should quit and start their own company.

[TheOtherHobbes]

They don't own your innovation outright unless that's in your work contract and you haven't negotiated a fairer deal.

And I have no idea where you get your 10X figure from. In fact it's very hard to estimate the specific business value of specific dev work in very large companies, over any time period.

From a high enough level the job becomes "Pay devs to keep the engines running." Unless you're innovating new products/services at a senior level, it's hard to break it down further.

Which is partly why the interview process has become homogenised. Realistically most developers are engine components, not engine designers - although it's easy to be fooled when your component value is process optimisation - and FAANGs have optimised the funnel to select good components.

You need to be senior++ and/or in startup land to be an engine designer - which differs from being a component because it allows independent agency for strategic goal setting, instead of optimisation of tactical implementation.

[hinkley]

most groups don’t change until it is obvious to most of them that what is going on is not working.

When most people stop returning Google’s phone calls, so that positions go infilled, then they’ll start talking about change. Right now there’s still enough supply that they don’t have to do anything,

[LeftHandPath]

> Cynical answer though

Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job.

And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).

[monoideism]

> and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

Eh, there's a lot of us who haven't done great financially but who have written a lot of open source code being run at bigcos. Being an entrepreneur requires another skill set altogether. One that I seem to lack, although I finally have come up with a solid idea in the last year that might get me somewhere whenever I'm ready to make the move.

I'm sure if I spent significant time preparing, I could do well at Google's interview process, and other FAANG companies have tried multiple times to get me to interview (oddly, never Google), but I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me. I've been much happier working for smaller companies. The one time I worked for a large corporation years ago, I was miserable. People say Google is different, but I'm not convinced.

I would like that sweet compensation, though.

[danzig13]

Don’t forget a lot of entrepreneurs fail until they don’t.

[ernst_klim]

> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

I think the reason is a bit different.

Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm.

That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anything else.

Their code is pretty bad most of the time, they've took beautiful Webkit and turned it into Blink mess. They are all about algorithms, they don't care about code.

And that's a pity that people are copying Google's methodology without understanding why Google is doing so. If you are developing an OS, you'd be better copying Microsoft, which had much of a different approach, nearly without any algorithm questions.

[hanswesterbeek]

Indeed! This cultural / historical angle of looking at the issue hits the nail on the head.

[phkahler]

>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems?

I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.

[peterebailey]

Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

[danbmil99]

How many interviews involve asking the prospective hire if they know how to gather and define requirements?

[tsukikage]

This is implicit in a coding interview, though. I, the interviewer, take a couple of sentences to describe a problem. What next? Way too often, rather than ask more questions - gather and define requirements - a candidate will launch straight into solving a problem different from the one I am describing.

[adamsea]

Requirements gathering in reality can often require more soft skills or political skills, which doesn’t seem to be the primary focus of these interviews. Which isn’t to say the skills you mention aren’t important.

[hanswesterbeek]

AKA "rush to keyboard" syndrome.

[phkahler]

>> Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

It's like that everywhere. Nobody comes to you with complete requirements. People/customers come with problems they need solved. Sometimes an outline of a specific solution is specified, but there's always a lot of detail missing.

[mwest217]

Not at all. I've been at Google for a bit over two years, and my experience has been at the far other end of the spectrum: a lot of autonomy, gathering requirements, designing & implementing. Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. If it's less than a day or two of work I can generally just go do it.

[alok-g]

How much of interview-style coding is involved in your work? More broadly, would you agree to the OP that interviewing for software developers is broken?

[rekabis]

> Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on.

You’re clearly not working on their military-contract Terminator-drone program…

…Unless “better” means “stone cold dead”.

[ddalex]

Working at Google. My opinion is my own, etc etc

What you get told is What needs to be accomplished, but not How, if that makes sense.

E.G. IF you choose to accept this challenge, this platform is running at XX% availability and we need to run it at YY% availability. HOW you get to do that, it's up to you.

Some folks don't accept these challenges and they go and find and fix their own interesting problems. But that's harder because you have to get buy-in from managers in order to get resources for that.

There is space and need for everyone.

[smueller1234]

Google's big enough that no one person could possibly speak confidently for all of engineering in this regard.

For what it's worth, this doesn't match my experience at all. In the area I work in (SRE in technical infrastructure, but the same seems to be true for our dev partners), I see a lot of expectation for bottom up ownership. I could totally understand if somebody with a different mindset and perspective (I'm a manager, so I can see pretty clearly what's valued at evaluation time) arrived at a different conclusion.

[pjdemers]

Right. Coding tests are designed to find people who are happy in a job where their only responsibility is: "Here's your coding assignment. Go do it." Technology companies are overfull of engineers who want more responsibility than that. They don't need any more.

[simonebrunozzi]

And it reminds me of this one too: https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383

Brian Acton, rejected by Facebook in 2009. Then in 2014 FB acquired his company for $19B...

[evidencepi]

Agree, they want smart workers (well you have to be smart at some degree to do software). And they don't care if they will miss some genius, they just let other companies help the selection process, and if you turn out to be gold, they will pay a big money to get you.

[ampdepolymerase]

It is actually pretty well known that the second way into FAANGs is through acquisition.

[monoideism]

I've heard of at least some of the FAANGs do the typical interview process for acquisitions.

[mikaraento]

I can confirm this from personal experience (at least it was the case 10 years ago).

[ampdepolymerase]

That sounds terrible, can you elaborate?

[monoideism]

I've read from blog posts and even from conversations that companies require acquihires, particularly non-founder employees, to go through an interview process. It may be shortened, but they still often have to do the typical algorithmic interviews.

I'll see if I can find one of the blog posts I've read about the process.

Note: to be clear, I'm describing the process for acquihires, not founders just wanting to sell their company and walk away with some cash (which actually seems to be somewhat unusual).

Edit: this was discussed in a similar thread on HN just last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943500

[gambiting]

Is that a uniquely American thing? I'm 100% certain that even if the company I work for was acquired, my current contract would still apply. So I would need to be given at least 3 months notice, and couldn't be discharged without a good reason - failing some internal interview wouldn't be such a reason.

[tomnj]

Can also confirm from my own experience 3 years ago

[austincheney]

You could have saved a lot of space just saying button pressers. This is most large companies and why I am burnt out on writing software professionally.

The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play it safe, follow popular trends, and don’t take any risks on product improvements.

To think about it another way the idea is to create mediocre software with mediocre developers because the software is thought to cost less than finding, hiring, and retaining top quality people.

[ozim]

Now connect the dots with: How much customers are willing to pay for software developer work?

They don't want to pay anything. They don't deserve best software written by best developers. Take for example GIT, which is extraordinary piece of software, saves a lot of problems and time. If it was not free, most software shops would just keep copies of folders with dates or whatever insane ways they had (SVN is for me insane way as well :) and big paid VCS were popular at big co's. not even one became close to "industry standard" as GIT).

[shaan1]

Makes perfect sense. Thats when you know you need to short the stock in the LONG RUN. Because all they know is taking orders from someone and running it. This is the same with all companies. If Mark Zuckerberg steps down from Facebook, you can pretty much know, it's going to go down.

[kohtatsu]

False; Google wants everyone like them to keep them away from the competition.

Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.

[kortilla]

That’s a lie they tell employees to make them feel good about themselves. If they actually cared about keeping competent engineers away from competitors, their interview process would be tuned to look for engineering skills, not leetcode.

[crimsonalucard]

Straight from the horses mouth I once asked Gayle Lackman on quora: does their exist engineers who no matter how hard they study can NEVER make it through the google interview process? She said yes.

She said that this is because Google optimizes their interviews for IQ. Not just raw knowledge.

[kortilla]

That’s incorrect. An interview process with true negatives doesn’t mean it isn’t loaded with tons of other false positives. Being good at leetcode has no relation to engineering skills, despite it being a skill in itself.

[crimsonalucard]

Where in my comment do I talk about leetcode or false positives?

Not only are you incorrect, but you are completely off topic.

I am saying Gayle Lackman, the author of Cracking the coding interview and, in the past, one of the board members who decide on candidates in the google interview literally told me word for word that the interview optimizes for IQ. Meaning that there are tons of engineers who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough.

Understand?

[Retric]

Reading posts like that make the process seem stupid, but it has utility for the interviewers. All of this silliness is creating an artificial talent shortage which drives up salaries at FANG companies.

It’s far from universal, but the incentives between managers, workers, and shareholders never really align that well.

[EpicEng]

Wow. I don't have as prolific a tale as that, but I'm in the looking stage right now and the idea of cramming for a test I haven't taken in 12 years annoys the hell out of me.

I've done some pretty interesting things in biotech in my career, things that required learning about motion control, digital imaging, signal processing, and biology... but if I want a job as a web dev I apparently need to memorize how to implement every sorting algorithm... on a whiteboard... in ten minutes. The fact that I know which to use when is irrelevant. Bleh.

[Psychlist]

This is part of the reason why I've only consulted into big companies, and only briefly. It's not just that I am not that sort of person, it's that I don't like being around that sort of person.

Software engineering is also another field where there's no effective upper limit on difficulty. In other words, no matter how good you are you (should) always feel that you're barely capable of understanding what you're supposed to be doing, let alone doing it.

That's right from "make a single static web page" to "submit binary fix to close-source compiler" or whatever the high end of your particular field is (Win a technical argument with the C++ standards committee? Shave 0.001% off the load time of the google homepage? Discover a new way to monetise users?).

[wuschel]

Hi EpicEng,

just out of curiosity to learn more about your project: Where could I contact you?

Cheers!

[blaufast]

Having worked at cutting edge biotech,startups and FAANG I wholeheartedly defend the interview process, and believe you would too if you ever switched over for a while

[tybit]

I got a job at a FAANG and still think the interviewing is absurd, and Im forced to work with worse people because of it.

No need to imply the OP doesn’t get it just because they’re on the outside of it.

[RobRivera]

I think there's a certain breed of people who will pony up the time and resources to levelup for the interview, and the compliment. Ignoring the privilege of resource availability, i think its totally doable and worthwhile. I come from a blue collar family and I think my old man would love to hear I can pull off miraculous study habits for a month to take home the kind of paychecks offered for hitting a keyboard.

Granted, if the money were not there, I would not find it worthwhile. I would probably just focus on founding my own company.

[gonehome]

If learning is the naive approach to getting good grades then programming fun projects is the naive approach to passing technical interviews.

"If tests truly were tests of learning, things wouldn't be so bad. Getting good grades and learning would converge, just a little late. The problem is that nearly all tests given to students are terribly hackable. Most people who've gotten good grades know this, and know it so well they've ceased even to question it. You'll see when you realize how naive it sounds to act otherwise."

http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

[courtf]

I love these anecdotes, thank you!

The greatest programmer I've had the privilege of working closely with could easily pass most technical screens, but he's an odd fellow, and I don't think could handle the stress and anxiety of these crazy interviews. Lots of diamonds in the rough out there, but I suppose large companies understand that and just consider it acceptable loss.

[wutbrodo]

That's what every bitter HN comment on the topic forgets. If Larry Page could sit down and talk to each candidate, I'm sure he'd be able to properly assess these kinds of corner cases. The challenge isn't being able to do that at an individual level; it's being able to do it in a way that's somewhat consistent and scalable across tens of thousands of interviewers and millions of candidates. Any large system is going to have false positives and negatives, and hiring is broken to begin with at most companies (assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard)

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard

Predicting the future is very difficult, and therefore probably not what interviews are designed to optimise for.

Interviews probably optimise for something like: The candidate seemed like a reasonable choice at the time / cover-your-arse scenario.

[wutbrodo]

Predicting the future is what you're trying to do when hiring, for which interviews are a specific tool.

[AlexCoventry]

There must be people who'd want to specialize in that, though, if it's possible. It sounds like a fun job.

[wutbrodo]

That's still waving away the difficulty of taking an entity's goal and losslessly/consistently distributing it into thousands of individuals. It's just not a possible task.

[bilekas]

One thing to note about coding interviews, they're very simular to somone looking over your shoulder while you're working.

Nobody can perform well like that.. One great colleague who I wish I was in the interview for, simple started thinking out loud.

Everything he was thinking, he said out loud, and of course, the team loved it. Because thats all it's about.

If its not over a video chat/submission, comment your code your thoughts, remember, they want to know you chain of though, not your knowledge of a framework/algorithm (unless its very specific)

> Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview

If you know how to figure out the problem, forget the technical side and explain how you would go and figure it out.

Problem solve. Don't worry.

[karlkatzke]

So I had an interview that was like that, but I wasn’t given enough information. I was asked to implement the “inverse square law in code” ... and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college (I looked up all of the interviewers on linkedin, so I had a good idea of their experience and areas of expertise) that my first step as someone who hadn’t been in an academic environment or exposed to this kind of requirement for over a decade would be to research the requirement and asked if I could consult a Wikipedia article. “No, you can’t consult outside sources.” “Ok, can you explain to me the inverse square law?” “No, you should know this.”

I didn’t know that. Also, I didn’t have enough information to ask good questions, because I was pretty sure that this was an incomplete specification and I needed to ask informed questions to reach a particular implementation.

As a result, the company’s evaluation was that I didn’t know how to code.

[monoideism]

> and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college

Yeah, that one's easy. Young coder sees a competent, experienced dev and tries to sabotage your interview out of fear you'll show up and make a fool of him. It's possible he was just that arrogant, but it sounds suspicious.

Based on my experience, devs who are 2 years out of college, regardless of how well they understand algos and data structures, are mediocre software engineers. The only exception to that are those devs who have been coding since they were 10 or 12, and who grew up working on actual open source projects (one of my main open source collaborators was like this, and was an excellent dev by age 20). Just growing up coding isn't enough, since you won't have exposure to the actual engineering practices needed for professional developers. And just 4 years of college isn't nearly enough, since you again don't get much exposure to the actual engineering practices needed for professional developers.

[TwoBit]

Naw, I just shadowed a new young interviewer and he asked a similar question that was unreasonable. As a recent grad he legitimately didn't recognize that the interviewee wouldn't necessarily know this one specific thing. We discussed it and he's going to try again next time with a more reasonable question.

[jogjayr]

> “No, you should know this.”

As an active interviewer at Google, I think that person shouldn't be allowed to conduct any more interviews without proper training. That's inexcusable.

What even happened next, did you just end the interview right there? Stare at each other awkwardly till time ran out? How did they expect to learn more about your skills if you weren't doing any coding or talking?

[bilekas]

This sounds like bad company practice of hiring..

If what you're saying all checks out, someone straight out of college (2 years is young) unless he has been working on those kind of things all the time, its an edge case at best.

The fact that he said : "No, you should know this" - Even if he knew it, it shows how they would be work with. Probably dodged a bullet there.

[UncleOxidant]

In years past something like this in an interview would've rattled me. But now that I've been in this biz for 30+ years I think I'd just stand up, look the guy in the eye in a really squinty way and say, "Well, then I think we're done here kid" and walked out. You get to a point where you just won't put up with this kind of bullshit after a while.

[grishka]

> “No, you should know this.”

I'd ask: if I get a job at your company, will I be not allowed to consult outside sources too? I mean, about half of programmer's work on real projects is googling stuff.

[mattrp]

I had a recruiter reach out to me recently about a VP role - when I looked her up on linked in seemed legit. But then in the “people also searched for” section there were all sorts of recruiters that appeared fake. I can’t explain it but just seemed like they weren’t real. In any case this one recruiter told me before they’d talk to me I needed to take a “cognitive” test at a third party site. I get testing... but the whole encounter felt like they were just feeding profiles into a machine.

[blueboo]

No interview process is invulnerable to bad faith interviewers. Refusing to help you past roadblocks just makes for a worse interview signal. Maybe the candidate doesn’t know X but has extraordinary depth on Y, and so on. Bad interview training or negligence!

[htfu]

Though what's a bit silly here is that all the information you need is right there in the two words "inverse square", it's only the word "law" tacked on that made you (presumably) assume there had to be more to the concept.

You'd assume a competent enough interviewer wouldn't be so rigid and at least hint that you shouldn't overthink it...

[hardlianotion]

One needs a little domain knowledge for "inverse square" to be informative. It is a simple-minded interviewer that wouldn't just explain the concept.

Unless you are hiring someone that is supposed to understand some maths, that is.

[gbrown]

What does it mean to implement it in code though? What kind of data should it consume - n-dimensional coordinates, distance matrices, some sort of power level to calculate falloff? If it’s as described, it’s way too vague. Inverse square laws show up all over.

[hardlianotion]

Well, yes - I agree.

[organsnyder]

I did that for an interview for what is now my employer. It was via Skype with a shared code editor. The interviewer asked me to implement a data structure that I had not used (directly—I'm sure plenty of libraries I use utilize it) since college, and I said as much. I told him I was quickly looking it up on Wikipedia, skimmed the article (mumbling to myself, I'm sure), and then proceeded to implement it. My candor and ability to quickly synthesize information on the fly must have reflected well on me, because I ended up getting an offer.

This wasn't at a big name tech company, though. From the sounds of it, most of those places don't give interviewers nearly as much leeway as mine had.

[bilekas]

It's certainly true that larger tech companies will not allow much of the 'workflow' into the interview, but this is usually down to the interviewers not being technically sound on the project(s) and most of the time just given a script with certain criterea, who are usually contracted to do so.

This is no fault of those recruiters, just that sometimes they are given very strict guidelines which can hamper creativity within an interview.

[nostrebored]

Which companies are you seeing this from?

This wasn't my experience at any point with Google, Microsoft or AWS

[ProZsolt]

My problem I can do this when I'm alone or when it's a real pair coding. During an interview when stress and adrenaline kick in. I'll make a silly mistake and after that, because I'm judged by the other person my brain locks up. I'm feeling like a total fraud.

[cmonnow]

Exactly ! See - https://leetcode.com/discuss/career/509258/Social-anxiety-in...

But the issue is that they're not just judging you by the approach, they are also judging you by your results.

Some people, especially those with social anxiety (not some fancy psychological term, just someone who feels uncomfortable when someone is watching over their shoulder), can only achieve results if they are not judged during the journey.

[rumanator]

> AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order.

I hate to break it to you, but Amazon doesn't reject a candidate because he bombed his coding challenge. I know people who received a job offer from Amazon for a developer position although they somewhat bombed their hard skills component. If you were rejected after passing the coding challenge and phone screening interview then odds are you actually bombed their personality and/or soft skills aspect of their interview process.

[anticensorship]

[Thinking to themselves:] "Is this serf really the right kind of drone, the type who will fit neatly--much like an unthinking cog--into our organizational machinery?"

Maybe he accidentally let it slip that he thought the South should have won and Robert E. Lee had some good ideas.

[rumanator]

Yeah, they do weed out racists and misogynists and people who in general have a problem with minorities even if they can traverse a graph like a champ, but as far as I know the main reason why someone is rejected after passing the online test and phone screening is having serious problems with their personality and soft skills that, as a whole, render the candidate unable to improve to an acceptable level and thus are unsalvageable.

[lowbloodsugar]

I hope the message that people take away from this anecdote is that "even the best people don't always pass an interview at AWS first time". But if someone is interested in the benefits AWS has to offer, try again. I interviewed three times before getting hired there, and I am the happiest I have ever been. I work with great people, on high-stakes, challenging problems that match my strengths, and we work 40 hour weeks, including time for beer. I have enough time outside work to learn new things (this year some basic FPGA programming). And skiing is 90 minutes away.

[GistNoesis]

You've got to admire this well lubricated machine, they are getting the milk and didn't have to pay for the cow.

They are happy. You are happy.

People are jumping higher and higher hoops with a smile.

Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Hopefully as a wiser person you have your contingency ready for when the machine come to collect its blood tribute.

[sha90]

Getting good signal-to-noise ratio from ANY interview, forget the big cos, is really difficult. I've seen great programmers passed over because they were _not_ given a chance to whiteboard and show their technical skill. At the end of the day, there is a bit of randomness to the process of sizing anyone up in an hour, and people will make bad calls.

That said, I'm skeptical about your particular story. As a process rule, AWS doesn't provide interview feedback, so I'm pretty sure you don't _actually_ know why you were rejected, you can only guess. Perhaps if you were rejected in phone screen(s) it can be obvious, but if you made it to an on-site, I can guarantee (based on experience being in the room during hiring decisions at AWS) that they don't almost someone because of one bad whiteboarding result; there are multiple people collecting and reporting on results and only one person, the bar raiser, has veto power, and I've never seen it used for something as banal as not writing perfect code.

I also don't know what happened in your interview, but consider it's also possible that you completely bombed it: failed to ask questions, failed to communicate properly, or made more mistakes than you even realize.

It's certainly great that you went on to do great things, but maybe at the time you interviewed you weren't yet doing those great things...

[annoyingnoob]

I'm sure that "Giant Search and Advertising Company" would never hire me. But they did buy patents with my name on them.

[gentleman11]

I spent my time learning instead of drilling too and don’t regret it. My bank balance does though :(

I want to work for myself however in the long run and I think the skills are more important for that

[markbnj]

> but they run a lot of my code in production :P.

We run your code in production too! Thanks!

[huffmsa]

> Can you regurgitate the answer to this already solved problem?

No, but I can write a storage solution that works even when your dummy engineers are actively melting down servers.

Ah, the difference between "computer science" and "software engineering".

[arthev]

To quote Hamming: """In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it."""

It follows that regurgitating answers to already solved problems is good engineering :)

[99_00]

So everyone got what they wanted?

You did the project you wanted.

AWS and Google got the code they wanted.

Your friends for the jobs they wanted.

[sumedh]

> AWS and Google got the code they wanted.

Depends, if he was still working in Big Tech Co, they could have potentially not open sourced it, they could have used his secret sauce to get better system performance compared to competitors.

[reaperducer]

Google does not want bright, creative people anymore. Google only wants drones now. It's a shift that coincided with its change from a technology company to an advertising company.

[new_realist]

Google had the equivalent of etcd a long, long time ago.

[scarejunba]

True, but its a very technically sound product. Authoring it as an intern cannot be anything but a sign of prodigious skill.

As an amusing anecdote, I didn't drill for internship interviews either and I ended up at a successful startup by sheer luck. I did well there, but I never achieved the level of technical brilliance that OP did.

I feel like there were far more opportunities like this 8 years ago when I was doing that, though.

[mixmastamyk]

Was it general and polished enough to get traction though? What’s its name?

[ai_ja_nai]

Chubby. It was the product that inspired Zookeeper and all its various incarnations, including etcd.

[kortilla]

Ah, the attempt to claim credit for something that likely wasn’t inspired by Chubby at all.

etcd was inspired by a hash-map more so than Chubby.

[new_realist]

etcd didn’t work initially; I wouldn’t call it polished.

https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul

[empath75]

It worked, it had a bug.

[blueboo]

Two questions.

How long do you think it would’ve taken you to prepare and ace these kinds of coding interview questions? (I bet less than 100 hours.)

But I’m more interested in the following: what interview process do you think would have correctly (and reliably) evaluated someone with your profile?

[Ill_ban_myself]

A company that cannot come up with a better more interesting process isn’t somewhere I want to work.

How about making the questions broad enough for every candidate to have some input and evaluate them on what they choose to focus on? Something like, “How would you design an ATM?”

There should never be a right answer to an interview question, just a candidate that solves problems in a way that fills a gap in your company.

[Redoubts]

Personally I appreciate the questions that are

1) open ended design questions 2) here's some broken code, fix everything 3) probe depth of understanding of tools/language

I always feel the Algo whiteboard questions feel like a "did you take the same DS class I did" round.

[jonex]

1 is included in at least Google interviews. 3 requires that you hire for a specific tool/language use, most programmers are able to learn new tools and languages in the time time periods that are hired for.

I'd like to do more of 2, understanding, debugging, fixing and refactoring code is, in my experience, more of the day to day work than writing entirely new code. I don't know why this is not typically part of interviewing, maybe there's some reason it doesn't work? It would be interesting to see a more comprehensive evaluation of this approach.

[dickjocke]

Also after the Redhat and then IBM acquisition I wonder if you came out in a better position in the end anyway.

[yodsanklai]

> When my classmates preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel.

There are plenty of people who do both. They work on their projects, and when needed, they prepare for coding interviews.

[crimsonalucard]

Two things.

The google interview process was not made to filter you out. It was made to guarantee that they will not make a mistake on hiring you. People with the capability to do those interview problems have a high chance of being good programmers. There are many people like you who can't do those problems but are still very good programmers. Google doesn't need to hire you, the whole interview process is optimized for preventing a bad hire rather than finding people like you who are good hires but can't interview.

Second, traversing a tree in level order is a trivial problem from the interview question perspective. It is more than likely that this question will NOT be given by the interviewer because it is too easy. The interview questions FAANG tends to give are a bit more novel. In fact the method in which you use to solve this problem and the problem itself is often just taught directly in school depending on the class you're in, meaning you don't need to practice interview questions to solve it because it's a basic topic.

The solution is called tree traversal using BFS. If you didn't know this, despite working on and creating things like etcd you will appear stupid because the question is just too basic. When I interview I am 100% expecting questions way harder than this... even on phone interviews. Additionally when I'm the interviewer this type of question is the lowest bar, I will fail someone who can't answer this question.

This is not to comment on your abilities. Rather it is to give you a dose of truth. I truly believe that there are many people like you who can program an entire kernel but can't even solve fibonacci recursively on a white board. Despite this I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.

[ideal0227]

Thanks for educating me about BFS.

I am major in computer science, and published paper in top conference. Tree traversal is trivial for me. So I guess I have decent CS background and knowledge?

Writing bug free and perfect code is not equal to simply solve the problem. If you have prepared coding interviews (especially for new grad and internship), you should understand it is less about knowledge but more about practicing and memorization for that specific purpose. The time spent on it is almost a waste in the future.

If the interview is knowledge based or problem solving oriented, I am all for it. Sadly, it is not today in many places. And that is exactly why website like Leetcode exists.

[crimsonalucard]

A published paper in a top conference only happens through political connections in undergrad it is not a marker for your IQ which is what a company like google tests for.

The interview is not just about writing bug free code it is 100% about solving a problem you haven't seen before. Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet.

>If the interview is knowledge based or problem solving oriented, I am all for it. Sadly, it is not today in many places. And that is exactly why website like Leetcode exists.

The interview is about both. You are given a problem that they expect you have not seen before and you are expected to solve that problem using raw knowledge and problem solving skills.

Leetcode isn't about memorization. Leetcode is training data used to optimize your neural net to solve problems it hasn't seen before.

[ideal0227]

> Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet.

They did a pretty poor job on this already. And it adds one more requirements, the ability to pretend that you have never practiced a similar question before :P.

> Leetcode isn't about memorization. Leetcode is training data used to optimize your neural net to solve problems it hasn't seen before.

Oh. Thanks. Glad that Human brain does not need that much data like today's neural net.

And there are millions of ways to improve problem solving than repeating BSF/DFS/DP templates on Leetcode questions.

[crimsonalucard]

>They did a pretty poor job on this already. And it adds one more requirements, the ability to pretend that you have never practiced a similar question before :P.

This is solved by throwing multiple interview questions at the person that are all novel and not derived from the internet. The probability of ALL questions being seened before is very low.

>And there are millions of ways to improve problem solving than repeating BSF/DFS/DP templates on Leetcode questions.

So? Doesn't change the effectiveness of leetcode in passing an interview and displaying your ability to learn and solve novel problems. If you have other ways of passing those interviews outside of leetcode, that's great. Use it.

[ideal0227]

> This is solved by throwing multiple interview questions at the person that are all novel and not derived from the internet. The probability of ALL questions being seened before is very low.

This is solved by adding more questions into Leetcode. 1000+ and counting.

> So? Doesn't change the effectiveness of leetcode in passing an interview and displaying your ability to learn and solve novel problems. If you have other ways of passing those interviews outside of leetcode, that's great. Use it.

You missed the point entirely. My argument is that many interviews are not designed for problem solving but practicing and memorization. And this is exactly why Leetcode ensures you to repeat these template 100 times effectively.

I do not plan to pass this kinds of interview, before, now or the future. So why do I bother?

Good luck on your job search anyway. I have no intention on discouraging you to do the practice. I cannot fix anything here.

[anticensorship]

> 'A published paper in a top conference only happens through political connections in undergrad'

Which fact in and of itself ought to show just how rigged the whole system is--when people can get papers published in prestigious journals merely on the strength of "whom they know."

[crimsonalucard]

It also shows how unrigged the whole google interview process is.

A whiteboard interview is a "Political connection agnostic" interview.

[amznthrowaway5]

When interviewing for places like Google and Amazon, your political connections and things like publications/degrees still matter a lot. Good performance on the interviews can be impactful but it's not the only factor. The incredibly biased committees review a lot more than that at google.

[anticensorship]

> 'I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.'

You phrased this as two parts, but in reality these two things are intricately linked. It's because you don't know how to judge person on their true ability--i.e. that you lack this skill--that you resort to useless trivialities like this whiteboard bullshit.

Combine survivorship bias (you were subjected to it and made it, so that validates the process) with heavy hive mind group think (We're All Real Smart People, Much Smarter Than Them Masses(TM))--both of which are always in abundance in intelligence-owned front 'companies' like Google, and of course you end up in your present mindset: arrogantly and naively selecting for people exactly like yourself; people who think just enough into things to think you possess a clue, while in reality, being totally oblivious to larger thoughts and concepts.

There are many in this world who just can't stop judging you based on your shortcomings and limitations. For example: your owners.

[crimsonalucard]

>Combine survivorship bias (you were subjected to it and made it, so that validates the process)

Let me spell it out for you so that we are on the same page and my Bias is utterly clear:

I Do not have the intellectual ability to make it through the google interview process. I consider myself to be a an excellent coder but I cannot pass their process. I also believe that the majority of programmers at google are smarter than me.

There. This is the ultimate form of unbiased judgement, a judgement that marks yourself as inferior. Google creates interviews I cannot pass, do I use bias to disparage the interview process or do I take a neutral viewpoint even when the neutral viewpoint says something about my own abilities?

If you can't score 200 points on an IQ test, is there something wrong with the IQ test or is it you? Which form of judgement are you taking here and which form of judgment am I taking and who is MORE biased?

If anyone is biased here, it is You.

>You phrased this as two parts, but in reality these two things are intricately linked. It's because you don't know how to judge person on their true ability--i.e. that you lack this skill--that you resort to useless trivialities like this whiteboard bullshit.

You assume that if you wrote what I wrote it would be a form of survivorship bias. This is a common mistake. How you interpret other people is a reflection of your own qualities, weaknesses and biases. You would suffer from survivorship bias if you were in my (perceived) situation and you chose to project that quality onto me even though I am possibly one of the least biased people you could meet.

To be unbiased is to have the ability to swallow uncomfortable truths. You'll know if you're such a person because you'll generally be unhappy. Such an ability is rare. I believe I have it, but make no mistake. It is a curse. The world is a dog eat dog shitty place and most people get through it happily by painting illusions around themselves. To see the world in raw untouched form is to wade through a lake of shit everyday. Better to say the google interview process is dumb than to admit to yourself that you just aren't google material.

You inject many assumptions into what I am saying. What you don't realize that I am in complete agreement with your above statement. Nothing was said to the contrary.

I Don't know how to judge a person's true ability because I lack that skill. I admitted this in the original statement but your blindness completely masked this meaning from you. You aren't hearing what I am really saying:

I am saying that No one has the ability to perfectly judge another persons interview ability. We must use unbiased statistics, metrics and methods of measurement to arrive at a good outcome. There are tons of good programmers out there that can program that can't do whiteboards, but there are much much much much less programmers that can do whiteboards but can't program. Thus if you pass an unbiased coding test that means you have a much much higher chance of being a good coder and possessing genetics that make you more intelligent than the person who couldn't pass it.

This makes the whiteboard interview the Best most unbiased process we have to judge other people. Note that when I say "best" I just mean that it is the best we have despite the fact that it's just not a very accurate way of judging people. Whiteboard interviews aren't that great, it's just better than any other method we have.

Using a conversation or a Design discussion to pass a person in an interview is not a measurable metric. It is subject to all kinds of biases. For example, this very conversational thread you assume that I am a survivor of the google interview process. The conversational format and your biases made you blind. Guess what, if you gave me a whiteboard coding interview, you'd know for sure but you made an assumption and instead wrote a response that demonstrated how completely off base and biased such interview processes without whiteboarding can be.

The most unbiased measurable way to detect if someone can program is to do a whiteboard interview. Most other data in an interview gleaned via conversation is subject to bias

[amznthrowaway5]

"This makes the whiteboard interview the Best most unbiased process we have to judge other people."

Nonsense. You can just give an SAT style IQ style test loaded with algorithms questions. Far more fair and objective than the biased human interviews we have right now. From my experience on the interviewer side, a lot of good people are rejected due to bad interviewers and the arbitrariness of the process, and many incompetent people are accepted due to the biases of the interviewers. The average Googler isn't as smart as you think. Of course a written IQ test still wouldn't be perfect, but nothing is.

[crimsonalucard]

True but, there's a pass or fail element to the whiteboard interview.

I'm mostly arguing that some form of quantitative metric is better than a conversation.

The place with the most leakage is architectural interviews.

[yahyaheee]

Lol that’s amazing, you should write an article on this