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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

More seriously, I was brought in for an iOS app development job interview and I was asked all algorithm questions and nothing about iOS.

I also tried doing the whiteboard questions in my strongest language at the time, Objective-C, which in hindsight was a huge mistake (Objective-C is ridiculously wordy, I kept running out of space on the whiteboard). A couple of the interviewers said they weren't too familiar with Objective-C either, so I clearly wasn't getting interviewed by their iOS teams.

If I were to do it again I'd probably use a much more terse language like Python.

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Google has apparently very recently rolled out Chromebooks as an alternative to the whiteboard format. The devices don't compile anything or run test cases for you, but they've got an editor with syntax highlighting that projects on the screen. (They reportedly care a bit about clear variable names, which I never do on a whiteboard for wordiness, so even in Python I'm inclined to opt for the Chromebook.)

Another thing that surprised me is that the interviewer records your actual whiteboard code (by transcribing it into their notebook by hand) or your Chromebook code (by clicking a button), and the hiring committee sees it and evaluates it. And it seems the hiring committee has the ability to re-evaluate the result of the interview and second-guess the interviewer in the room, if they feel that it's necessary. It's entirely possible that your code was seen by folks who did know Objective-C well, although yeah, it seems like it would have gotten them more signal if they put people who knew Objective-C in the room with you....

That's good to know.

But that wasn't the only reason I wasn't hired, I'm sure. I was only given a week and a half to prepare, while working a stressful job at the same time, where the Google recruiter basically gave me ten links (including a long TopCoder algorithms link I think) and said "Prepare by doing and reading everything on these links")

During the interview, I struggled with a couple of the problems in particular, and I was late to the first interview because I under-estimated just how bad the traffic would be and how lost I'd get on Google's campus.

Google's gotten in touch since, and I basically just have to tell this one recruiter to set me up for another interview if I wanted one, but I've been hesitant to go through that again and I'm no longer sure if I want to move out to SV (I'm from Chicago).

> I was brought in for an iOS app development job interview

> A couple of the interviewers said they weren't too familiar with Objective-C either, so I clearly wasn't getting interviewed by their iOS teams.

Google's onboarding process is such an enigma to me. I went through a few of the remote interviews for SWE a few years back (I didn't commit to an on-site one in mountain view though). It seemed very odd to me that, near as I could tell, they don't really give an indication about what you would be working on until after you are hired and oriented.

I actually prefer the way Google does it. They are really looking for generalists and the process is optimized for that. Once they have determined you have met the hiring bar, then they proceed with a "matching" process which is awesome. You get to list of your interests and get placed on a team in the company that aligns with your preferences and skills.

This is way better IMO to the reverse which is applying to ten different interesting positions at another big tech company and having to speak to individual hiring managers for each position.

Speaking as a generalist (I've worked with quite a few different platforms, paradigms, languages, and frameworks), I don't think algorithm-heavy tests is the most optimized way to find those people.

Generalists tend not to live in algorithm and data structure quiz land most days, and it's probably not their strong suit. It's not mine, at least.

As an iOS engineer who mostly does Swift at a big company (not west coastal) I would never even bother with Google. Might be a nice place to work but not worth the effort.

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