[integraton]

Is this a serious article?

Iterating over a hash slightly wrong when writing code in a google doc during an interview is such a stupid, trivial thing to be judged on, whether it's you or someone else doing the judging. It's clear from the "My lame attempt" example that the basic concepts are understood, and if he's written a series of articles about the Enumerable module then he probably knows it better than the majority of professional developers working with the language.

If this is a serious article, then it really highlights everything that's wrong with tech interviewing.

[AccordionGuy]

Yup, it's serious. I'm don't know for certain that I've been ruled out of a follow-up interview, but I got that vibe by the end.

[mortdeus]

Do you have any open source projects? The first thing i'm looking for as a developer when I visit your websites is a link to any code you have written. Which as far as I can tell doesnt exist?

A programmer without a portfolio of source code is like a painter without a portfolio paintings.

I assume Google scouts are usually looking to hook the exceptionally rare "Monet" and "Picaso" software engineers swimming around in an ocean overcrowded by "PC techs".

There is a quote by Linus Torvalds that is fairly relevant here. "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

Your resume is nice... Cute even. But without the code to back it up, there is nothing to critique your actual skills.

[yongjik]

As a Google Engineer, I can assure you that nobody who interviews you will give a damn about your code in github. Unless you're James Gosling or someone at that level. (But then again I don't think they interviewed James Gosling in the same way they interviewed me, so the point is moot.)

Google interviewers are interested in how well you can code (or design a solution) in a whiteboard for 45 minutes. I'm not claiming that it's the best way, and who knows, it might be the absolutely horrible way to interview candidates, but that's the way it is here.

[microtonal]

As a Google Engineer, I can assure you that nobody who interviews you will give a damn about your code in github. [...] it might be the absolutely horrible way to interview candidates

It works as long as majority of the CS population dreams of a Google job. There are so many candidates that having a high false negative rate really doesn't matter. However, as Google slowly becomes less popular, it's current interviewing procedure might not work anymore.

I think that having high-quality open source project is a reasonable indicator of a person's technical abilities. For companies with a smaller stream of candidates, it would be silly to ignore such sources of information.

By the way, I am always surprised how obsessed people are trying to get into Google. After some persistent bugging, I went through a phone interview. I was invited for a follow-up interview, but decided that they could not offer the kind of position I was interested in. (No, I don't want to work 18 months in site reliability engineering when my interest lies with natural language processing.)

[peferron]

I'm glad to know that. I tend to spend my extra time doing company work, which cannot always be open-sourced; for example, a few months ago I wrote a small Go project, which is going to end up on the company intranet and wouldn't make much sense on Github. Look at my Github profile and it's empty; but put me in front of a whiteboard and ask me to write something in Go and now we can talk.

I'll start doing stuff on Github when I genuinely feel like it (probably soon, I have a few pending personal projects that would make sense there), but recently it feels too much like you should do stuff on Github because it's going to impact your future. Similar to how you should get a college degree, should nurture your LinkedIn profile (not sure anyone cares about that anymore), and so on. Bleh.

[toomuchtodo]

(Non snark ahead) Could this be why working at Google is no longer the prize it once was? And why developers would rather go to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, et al?

[yongjik]

(Completely idiotic response ahead) Umm, really? Every day I see thousands of developers who would rather work in Google than Facebook... :)

(Non snarky response) I dunno. I joined Google in 2008, and as far as I know Google was always like that. So, unless you claim developers have preferred Facebook etc. to Google for more than 5 years now, it's probably not related to the interview process.

[toomuchtodo]

From Glassdoor's data, it appears Facebook employees rate their experience better than Google employees from 2009-2012:

http://www.glassdoor.com/press/wp-content/files_mf/133228554...

Also base rate is higher at Facebook, and interview difficulty is rated lower at Facebook.

Somewhat disappointing, as I'm a huge fan of Google.

[alexgartrell]

I chose Facebook over Google two years ago (despite a more lucrative offer from Google), because I wanted to go where I could have more of an impact. The interview processes are nearly identical. One of my go-to questions was a question I got asked at Google, actually.

[AccordionGuy]

The position is for a developer advocate, so the best thing for me to show is my work along those lines, which is quite well-documented in the Global Nerdy blog. Whether at Tucows, Microsoft, b5media, Shopify and even the consultancy I recently left, my work is shown there.

[hackinthebochs]

Everyone loves to say this, but this is just not how it goes in the real world. It is just bad advice for people to focus so much on this one aspect when in reality it will only help you land interviews with people that regularly read HN.

[elnate]

What would your advice be?

[hackinthebochs]

I'm certainly no expert at hiring or getting hired so don't take my opinion at face value, but since my opinion seems to be somewhat unique around here I think it has value for that reason.

But advice really depends on the context of the person: what they've done, what degrees they have, what type of job they're looking for, etc. But to address the type of people the "show me the code" response is geared towards: instead of a github profile I would say build actual products.

Code in isolation is hard to understand, even to the point where its nearly useless. But having a couple of full blown web applications that do something useful shows all an employer needs to know (even if they have 0 users). Everyone can understand actual sites that look polished and professional, and shows that this person will bring value to the company (whether from a business perspective or from being a competent programmer). Good coding practices can be taught or enforced through process, but being able to construct an actual non trivial product is what employers really want.

How the code actually looks is less important than what it does. Of course, feel free to put the code on github if you want, there are some interviewers that might consider that a bonus. But for most people its too much effort to make any practical sense out of what they're seeing. Just a repository of code without any context doesn't help.

[elnate]

Thanks

[eterm]

This is his take on what went wrong with the interview, it's just one side.

Perhaps another side is that he didn't seem to be guided to the correct solution during the interview process, which would concern me more than not getting it right first time if I were hiring.

[nerfhammer]

Even if he got it slightly wrong, the more fundamental problem is sample size.

CRUMB : BREAD :: (A) ounce : unit (B) splinter : wood

How much confidence would you have in a version of the SAT that was reduced to just one question which determined the entire score?

It's exactly analogous to tech interviewing. It's like saying, oh he couldn't even get that analogy right! He can't do analogies. Same thing with giving people one programming question. Much less nitpicking that one question...

So we are forced to go on lots of interviews and just hope that we happen to quickly grok the one or two problems they give us -- so we'll look "perfect" in that short period of time. which is eventually almost certain given enough interviews. but you can't be super confident to pass any particular interview you might have had your hopes on.