[gaius]

It's a covert form of ageism. The more questions you ask that are like undergraduate puzzles and less like real world situations, the more likely it is that your "objective" recruitment process will filter for recent graduates.

[meisterbrendan]

Is this true? It seems, from the comments from the SREs in this thread, that these puzzles are highly relevant to this functional role.

[Cookingboy]

Saying it's agism is ridiculous. Google SDEs here, the amount of time I spend on whiteboards solving design problems with my teammates very often out weights my coding time. Whiteboards are incredibly powerful tool.

You don't hand a car engineer manufacturing tools on day one of making a car, you need him to produce a design/blueprint first.

[gergles]

The amount of time you spend writing code on a whiteboard outweighs 'coding time'?

Really?

Let's be clear: whiteboards are a fine tool for design, problem analysis, architecture, etc. etc. People take issue with "write me bubble sort up here on this whiteboard."

[Cookingboy]

The amount of time we spend "designing" on the whiteboard very often outweights coding, yes.

The implementation part of "software engineer" very often is much easier and sometimes even trivial when compare to the design/architecture of the entire system. Implementation is also very easy to improve upon and refactor out, if you have a good design to begin with.

[vonmoltke]

Companies rarely ever hand automotive engineers, or other types of engineers for that matter, manufacturing tools. Software is fairly unique in that the engineers are actually creating or modifying the actual production products.

[Cookingboy]

When you work on a large scale problem you WANT to get a consensus of the large picture first, and that's why whiteboard is so handy. We don't jump straight into implementation since it's very often trivial and it's always much easier to improve and refactor implementation than the design/interface of a system itself.

[vonmoltke]

Yes, I agree with you. My point was that software engineering is unique in that they are the ones who end up building the implementation. Automotive engineers never touch the implementation. Their only product is the design, schematics, and blueprints.

[mark_l_watson]

I don't think there is any real doubt that Google's application process favors bright young people right out of (usually very good) schools, rather than people with 20+ years of experience. And, that is fine because they are a business and have found that this process works well for them.