| I'll take any excuse to talk about myself ;) Thank you for being curious - I just absolutely do not buy that I took ~5 CS classes and did a great job on the interview questions. I don't think I did a great job -- but, I was a deeply specialized self-taught iOS engineer who had built a point of sale. When you're at Google, work is more episodic and less in-depth, so I had a seemingly unusually wide and in-depth knowledge base. And iOS devs were considered hard to get. And Google had a special focus internally on getting iOS-specific interviewers who, at least in 2016, usually did a lot of work with non-iOS specialists. So you have these sort of inherent biases towards me seeming relatively impressive to their day-to-day experience with other Googlers. Then, I'm fairly convinced the leetcode problems we do add a significant "luck" portion. I spent about 6 hours a day, 6 weeks before interviews, in Cracking the Coding Interview and was still missing problems in the 1st chapter towards the end. I'm selling myself short, probably. But looking back, I see it as luck, structural factors, and what pushed it over the top was focusing on communication / thinking out loud in the interviews. As long as you're intelligent, familiar with the material, and your interlocutor is having an okay day, you'll come off well. |