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by swanson 4630 days ago
Don't sweat it. I find those Google interviews to be very discouraging and I felt dumb after not doing great on one when I was in school. Looking back, the whole interview was a mess. I got the call from the engineer 45 minutes late, I couldn't access the Google Doc because he was trying to send it to my university email address, and the coding portion started off with him writing "!(x & (x - 1)) && x" at the top of the empty document and asking "What does this do?".

Looking back, it was pretty silly but man did it really kill the confidence of 19 year-old me when it took me 10 minutes to work out that it detected numbers that were powers of 2. It really gave me a negative impression of Google's interview process (that and the complete radio silence afterwards), which I still think about when they send me their bi-annual recruiter emails. Funnily enough, the last email I got specifically mentioned that I had "done really well in the recruiting process in the past".

1 comments

...did they at least tell you beforehand that they were coding in JavaScript? In pretty much any other language, that wouldn't compile, but those logical and bitwise operators are used in multiple languages from C to Ruby.