[echelon]

I wholeheartedly disagree.

1. This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to solve puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off.

2. These quizzes aren't so bad, but the pressure and stakes make it incredibly stressful. There's no standard, and often times the interviewer is the one that sucks.

> We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process?

I'm pretty sure your opinion here is not that of your employer.

[nostrademons]

Counterpoint:

When I was leaving Google the first time, I asked my skip lead (who was employee #48 there, ended up running all of Search, and was previously a core HotSpot engineer at Sun) why he chose to work at a small startup when, coming off of HotSpot in 1999, he could work anywhere. He replied "Aside from them being one of very few companies with an engineer-centric culture, they were the only company that required I interview. Everybody else was willing to hire me on the spot."

For some personality types - and particularly the ones likely to do world-class work - being challenged is a positive sign. It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge.

[Alex3917]

> It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge.

To me, due diligence would be more like using software that someone has created. If it feels snappy then they're good enough at algorithms for the kind of software that they create, if it doesn't then maybe it's worth looking into whether or not there's a good reason for that.

Like if you apply for a job at the NYT, I doubt they make you do a timed writing test with people staring at you and asking you questions in the middle. They probably just read some of the previous work you've done.

[bregma]

Are you kidding? They'd make Ansel Adams do a timed test on how to use Elements to do colour correction.

[pavel_lishin]

Sure, but due diligence doesn't mean asking Guido van Rossum - who's got bona fides coming out the wazzoo - to solve a whiteboarding problem.

[GauntletWizard]

How he solves the problem doesn’t matter. You don’t care in the interview if he had the answer memorized or if he fumbles through it.

I do not want to work with anyone who finds that getting their hands dirty is beneath them. It is very, very rarely going to be a good use of their time to do those problems. It will often be a good use of their time to teach those problems. A senior engineer, even one who’s unlikely to work with junior engineers on a regular basis, will need to explain their thinking. They need to show humility and compassion. Those are practiced attributes. This precise situation is the best practice you can get - New and Unknown person, some amount of challenge and complexity involved.

Thinking that whiteboarding problems are a bad use of time is a very strong signal for a senior person who is out of touch.

[JackFr]

At an old job, my boss was moving desks and he came across an extra copy of CLR "Introduction to Algorithms" and he asked if anyone wanted it. As he was my direct supervisor, he said he'd give it to me only if I promised never to open it, and only to use it as a monitor stand.

[allenu]

I can see that. When I interview, I often compare the difficulty of the questions that different companies. I have noticed that I feel a little more respect to the companies that ask the more challenging technical questions (not puzzles) vs. the ones that ask the super basic ones. It does make me think that the ones asking the simpler questions are likely getting lower quality candidates and that I would be joining them.

[im3w1l]

Counter-counter-point. An engineering interview has a non-neglible amount of randomness. Maybe you get a grumpy interviewer or a noob interview, or your brain freezes over.

When you are considering hiring a nobody, this is acceptable. You will interview multiple people, and they will interview at multiple places, so the randomness isn't that important.

But if you want to hire one specific guy as a strategic hire, suddenly the randomness may no longer be acceptable.

[user5994461]

Well, he wanted to meet the team and have an idea who/what he would be working with.

It's really scary to go to company that is willing to hire you without ever talking to you.

[sz4kerto]

When I left uni, I got around 15 job offers. I went with the one with the lowest pay, because that's where I had go to through the most difficult interview process.

(Unfortunately this happened in a small Eastern-European country, so the company was an investment bank, not Google.)

[TuringNYC]

I think the best experiment would have been to have him apply blind where the interviewers did not know he was Guido -- and see how he fared on the technical interviews.

[webmaven]

> I think the best experiment would have been to have him apply blind where the interviewers did not know he was Guido -- and see how he fared on the technical interviews.

That would be amusing, but he'd have to be disguised, as he's rather recognizable, having done a lot of 'State of the Python' talks and the like.

He doesn't look as much like Rick Moranis as he used to, though, so that helps: https://gvanrossum.github.io/images/[e-mail]

[fizixer]

> This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to solve puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off.

Not sure what you're trying to get at:

MacOS homebrew creator is an effin nobody compared to Guido, therefore he should "know his place", "get in line" and invert a binary tree on the whiteboard and act like an obedient tech interview candidate that he really is?

OR

MacOS homebrew creator should've told Google to fuck off?

[deeeeplearning]

Imagine a University asking a Physics Nobel Laureate to solve QM Problems from an undergrad textbook in order to get hired as a Professor. It would the height of lunacy and incredibly insulting.

[a-nikolaev]

Guido is not a Physics Nobel Laureate. Going with the Physics analogy, Python is more like an overgrown masters level project, not a Nobel prize level by far. He did a good job at growing the Python community, and this is a great achievement! It requires certain personal traits not everyone has. But at the technical level, he made many beginners mistakes when designing Python, which he tried to fix later, but not always successfully.

[nicklaf]

An overgrown masters level project, eh? You could probably say the same thing about the founding of the United States!

"The US constitution is like an overgrown enlightenment dissertation. The founding fathers did a good job at growing the United States, and this is a great achievement! It requires certain personal traits not everyone has. But at a technical level, they made many beginner's mistakes when drafting the constitution, which the country tried to fix later, but not always successfully."

:-P

[gdy]

It may come to you as a surprise, but for an outside observer, who hasn't been indoctrinated at school by the religion of American exceptionalism, the US might not be a very good example. Think of American military-industrial complex that apparently defines the country's foreign policy.

[nicklaf]

My analogy was meant to cut both ways, and serves as much as a criticism of the US constitution as it does a compliment!

You'd certainly be wrong to assume that Americans are all in favor of our foreign policy, to say the least. Aside from that, some of the downsides to the US constitution that inspired my comment include the way the founding fathers totally failed to anticipate that the nation would be completely polarized by a two party system, and that this polarization would happen along geographic lines.

Admittedly, this compromise whereby rural states with lower populations enjoy disproportionate political representation is baked into the constitution being agreed to in the first place (the 3/5ths compromise being relevant here as well). As we've moved to more direct democracy, with things like the electoral college being bound to the (local) popular vote and the direct election of senators, the original intentions of having a federation of mostly autonomous states becomes more and more anachronistic, while still fueling an increasingly polarized electorate that pits high-tax revenue and high population centers like SF and NY against low-tax revenue and low population centers that make up most of the country.

The United States is large geographic region with a heterogeneous economy. I don't know if a parliamentary form of government would have served this kind of country well, but certainly most friends from abroad who have spoken to me on the subject have implied that proportional representation is far more sensible than FPTP voting, and that parliamentary forms of government avoid the gridlock and polarization that our de facto two-party system engenders.

[a-nikolaev]

Maybe.

[deeeeplearning]

>Python is more like an overgrown masters level project, not a Nobel prize level by far.

Please find me another "Masters Project" that has 8 Million+ Users and drives the backend for thousands of tech companies worldwide. Good Luck.

[a-nikolaev]

oh friend, say no more, how about left-pad? https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad

[deeeeplearning]

Funny guy.

If you think a single function is equivalent to an entire Language you should get your head checked.

[Twixes]

I love Homebrew – but it really isn't that much of an achievement compared to damn Python, and I also have no idea who is its creator.

[fizixer]

Homebrew is 11 years old. I'm willing to bet there are as many people (likely fewer) people who knew Guido in 2002, when Python was 11 years old, or even 2005, when Google hired Guido.

And I'm willing to bet when Google hired Guido in 2005, they didn't put him through a coding challenge humiliation clown show day.

[driverdan]

> MacOS homebrew creator should've told Google to fuck off?

Yes, that's exactly what he should have done.