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Comment by drblast | Hacker News Reader

Google recruiters call me a lot. I think I'd do a good if not stellar job working there. I've passed multiple FAANG interviews and been very successful as a senior developer.

In my email I have an "interview prep packet" from them that essentially tells me to brush up on algorithms and read Cracking the Coding Interview to prepare for their interview process.

I'm fairly happy in my job. If they offered more money or a really interesting project I'd consider working for them. But I'm pretty lazy about redo-ing college algorithms class during my free time at home to go work there, so I probably won't.

There's an opportunity cost with interviews like this where an M.S. and long career of getting shit done counts for very little and memorization of undergrad level topics that you can look up in two minutes in Knuth if you have a problem that requires it can make or break an interview.

I've made a career fixing a ton of horribly shitty, inefficient code that's been produced exclusively by people who pass these interviews.

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You wouldn't be a good fit for Google. With their algorithmic interviews that require college-grad level of studying, they filter for people that are ready to follow orders without complaining.

That's who they want to hire at the end of the day: some coders that don't get too critical about their job and do what they are asked to do, even if it is repetitive, stupid and doesn't really make sense (such as re-studying algorithms implementation details for two weeks before an interview when it can be looked up super-easily online).

I was a naval officer in a prior life, and my current manager loves that I get the job done, whatever it is, without complaint.

I'm pretty much the opposite of what you think, so if my desire to study for the algorithm interview is your litmus test for that, kinda proves my point.

Not everyone that would be good for Google has a burning desire to work for Google. Google might want to consider that.

To make it clear, I absolutely hate coding interviews that makes candidate lose so much time restudying. I think having some critical-thinking is absolutely needed and way too many engineers lack some (especially those swallowed into FANGs)

What I described on my previous post is a credible explanation that my group of engineer friends came up with on why all the FANG companies pursue those heavy memorization algorithmic interviews.

To my mind, the more likely explanation is that they would simply get too many false positives if they didn't use the algorithm stuff to filter potential hires. You lose a lot of potentially good hires that way, but the pool you're left with are all of a certain intelligence level. Whereas, if you don't use the algorithm stuff to filter, it's really hard to figure out who is even intelligent enough to do the job.

I'm not following, how does memorizing algorithms correlate with intelligence and skill in the engineering discipline of the job?

There's a correlation between the belief that memorizing algorithms correlates with intelligence and the application of algorithm questions in interviews.

Not so much intelligence but applied diligence on top of intelligence is my sense. If you want what they’re offering and don’t want to jump through their hoops for it then they don’t want you. For those that ball at the hoop jumping as being beneath them, there’s probably additional characteristics that comes with that that they’re trying to filter out.

Given that many job applicants apparently can't write a Fizz-Buzz implementation, I'd say that being able to implement an algorithm is probably a reasonable way to cull the herd by a hefty margin.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

It's made me angry how many people I've interviewed who can't manage Fizz Buzz with only 2 conditions or at all.

I'm kind of angry that I've never been asked to do it.

I'm curious to find out what people define as fizzbuzz, do you have a good example of something you've asked in the past?

Print numbers from 1 to 100, except print Fizz for numbers evenly divisible by 3, print Buzz for numbers evenly divisible by 5, and print FizzBuzz for numbers divisible by both 3 and 5.

If they cared about intelligence they would just give IQ tests.

Which is illegal to do, hence proxy IQ tests.

It is not illegal. Here’s Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/#tab-opi.... Go read it and see for yourself what it says.

Right at the top of that link:

> Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.

IQ tests are not directly related to the job, and so are illegal according to that ruling. Coding tests are directly related, which is why they get a pass.

You didn’t read the opinion and you added the word “directly” to the summary.

Do you scan source code and draw firm conclusions about what it does based on skim reading the first comment you see?

Perhaps my old contracts prof could have a second career as a google interviewer. (He was notorious for cold calling people that hadn’t briefed their cases and eating them alive.)

The purpose of the "Primary Holding" section is to summarize the result, so that you don't have to dig through the whole thing.

IQ tests are a form of convergent preferential bias and they don’t test for abstraction or creativity which is more than half the definition of intelligence.

What is convergent preferential bias?

It means a bias of coming together toward a tester's preferences. Do people excel on the few narrow performance meausures you find most correlated with intelligence?

There are divergent aptitude tests measure quantity and diversity of answers to a given question opposed to the one desired answer. Divergent tests are rarely performed, but at a stronger measure of creativity and problem solving which is typically what people actually want when they say intelligence. The reason why convergent testing is preferred over divergent test is because it is easier to measure and those simplified measures are easier to compare.

Can you provide a link for divergent aptitude tests? I'm afraid my search results all have to do with some young-adult fiction novel (called Divergent).

How much do such tests correlate with things like (for example) creative achievement?

They don't test for creativity (though seeing a correlation between IQ and creativity would be interesting) but they almost certainly test the ability to deal with abstractions. That's pretty much what an I test is! What reason do you have for thinking otherwise?

They test for puzzles that appear as visual shape complexities which require use of the visual cortex. That is something a person might refer to as a visual abstraction. That isn't a practical abstraction, such as requiring a person to form an answer from the absent of acceptable criteria (to abstract or form something new to solve a problem).

It's not readily apparent to my that those two abilities should be distinct. It seems plenty likely that they would be at least highly correlated. While you're point about the visual cortex may be relevant, I don't think that's the whole story.

My understanding is that different IQ tests will rely on different kinds of questions (i.e. not all involve visual shapes; some involve word/logic puzzles). The point the scores for all IQ tests correlate very highly (and thus suggest that there exists some common factor).

If you have two great engineers in a kitchen, discussing a relevant problem, you want there to be synergy. That synergy is broken when one of the engineers has to Google how to reverse a binary tree.

It is also a safe place to work for the really exceptional engineers. They can talk freely about complex computer science, without getting blank stares or having to dumb it down. Otherwise it gets frustrating fast.

CS is way too big for any individual to know it all in depth. If it really is a “safe place” because the employees can talk about complex topics without ever losing anyone, that would imply that they’re all specialized in roughly the same topics and severely lack organizational breadth. I kind of doubt that’s really true.

You can have organizational breath with smaller teams. You pair a great programmer with an exceptional programmer and it helps if they are specialized in roughly the same topics.

How does that give you breadth?

The teams specialize.

The other commenter was describing it as a “safe place” where you can talk about complex CS topics without confusing people. Unless your teams never talk to other teams, that doesn’t fit.

One of the most valuable skills for any engineer is to be able to frankly admit the need to look something up.

Admit it to yourself. Then come prepared (to the job interview or inception meeting).

Do you work for google? This seems naive and inaccurate to my work experience, both in Tech and in Medical devices

The article says that making the problems too hard results in a _worse_ selection, and not just more false negatives.

> my group of engineer friends came up with on why all the FANG companies pursue those heavy memorization algorithmic interviews

I think the most likely explanation is that "elite" of CS grads usually do competitions like ACM ICPC and olympiads, which are full of problems like those watered-down interview questions. As there is no real authority on what makes a developer good, but there was a measurable outcome of those programming competitions, leading to high status and pride displayed by winners/participants, it was simply taken from there and dumbed down to fit into interviews. Some top colleges even have special prep courses for those competitions and comparing to them FANG interviews are super trivial.

I think the original point of these interviews was to see how much the candidate actually learned or retained out of university.

What happened was that the interview questions inevitably got leaked and accumulated (this is the result of a post-highly-super-indexed and centralized internet) and it became a race to the bottom for candidates.

Imho the test may have worked in year 1-4 of google but it no longer flies since college kids spend an eternity studying them at home. It’s like the SATs all over again for these kids.

I still think these tests are generally good for testing how good somebody is. If you somehow got through cs without knowing how to 3 color a map vaguely (not talking perfect answer here, just vaguely correct intuitive explanation) even if after 15 years of work, something isn’t right. These sorts of questions definitely will weed out your local web-dev baddy or even dev-bootcamp baddy, which Silicon Valley is starting to be flooded with now.

> With their algorithmic interviews that require college-grad level of studying, they filter for people that are ready to follow orders without complaining.

Spot on. Certain companies ask silly question and to perform tedious exercises and, in the debrief, investigate if the candidate complained.

(disclaimer: I worked for Amazon and never seen this pattern in the company)

  some coders that don't get too critical about their job

Couldn't be farther from the truth.

As someone who works there I've noticed this general trend of animosity towards Google, it seems to be fueled by the fact that people feel a sort of inferiority complex when they don't clear an interview or they feel they wouldn't be able to crack it if they ever gave it a shot, this leads to an overcompensation of attitude in the other direction, a sort of "sour grapes" narrative where there is an effort to downplay the prospects of working at Google or ridicule the people working there like you did just now.

I have no idea whether I could study hard enough to work at Google. What I do know is that I don’t like large companies and I have no desire to move to the west coast.

> What I do know is that I don’t like large companies

I think this is a key thing to learn about oneself. Very large companies often have a lot of cachet and can provide opportunities that small companies cannot (scale is scale, after all).

But small companies (not even start-ups, just companies with < 100 employees) can provide a different kind of opportunities:

* Interaction with different parts of the business

* Opportunity to wear multiple hats

* Less likely to be in the Bay area

* Nowhere to hide incompetence

Of course this isn't every small company, but I have worked in a few that were like this.

It is all of that and while after 20+ years developing professionally and developing as a hobbyist since middle school, I’ve never felt burnt out from continuously learning. But,I was burned out by big company politics and bureaucracy after only three when I was worked at a large Fortune 10 (non tech) company.

My comment wasn't trying to ridicule anyone, but explain that big companies with an extremely large amount of coders need a very specific type of heads down personalities. As can be seen in this whole thread, plenty of people simply don't have a desire to work at big FANG companies, and even less desire to study multiple days//weeks for an interview that doesn't really help their day to day job.

A lot of people are sour at FB/Google simply because how the companies represent themselves to the users. I can't look at Google/FB without bringing up gmail, maps, search etc. and their utmost desire to track every nanosecond of my life, and understand me better than I do... just to earn money from me. I couldn't care less about hiring processes there, since where I live they don't pay more than other businesses, and everybody knows how 'great' their hiring experience is.

With ie banks, they are at least honest about how they earn from customers like me and I don't have any unreasonable moral expectations.

I think it's possible for both things to be true at the same time. Yes it's a selective meritocracy, and it's also true that the process unnecessarily alienates people. It comes down to recruiters being given the very difficult task of finding candidates for a process with such a high rejection rate, and the added stress of being given very specific rules about the things you can't be transparent about. The overwhelming majority of job seekers are mature adults who can handle rejection and constructive negative feedback. It's the sense of having wasted one's time that generates the "sour grapes" feeling.

There is also the general attitude of Googlers//Facebookers that brag a bit too much about working at Google//Facebook as if it was the dream that everyone was looking for.

There is nothing more annoying than discussing with a Googler that tries to convince you that you should apply and work for Google.

>it seems to be fueled by the fact that people feel a sort of inferiority complex when they don't clear an interview or they feel they wouldn't be able to crack it if they ever gave it a shot

Some of the most talented people I've ever met have failed Google interviews. As in far, far more talented than the majority of folks I know who do work at google. No amount of bullshitting is going to convince me that Google's False Negative interviewing system is the correct one. It simply bypasses too many talented candidates even beyond the reasons generally mentioned above.

One guy in particular I know is now a CEO of a company which, ironically enough, employs several former googlers. Yes, I know Google doesn't give a shit they missed on this individual. But to mis-characterize the anti-Google-interview narrative as "sour grapes" sounds a bit like you're drinking their champagne.

I've met my share of Googlers who are lazy, don't know how to solve problems (as opposed to write code itself), or still need help with basic tasks after several years on the job.

You just can't test for some qualities like focused, persistent problem solving and the desire to find ways to speed up your work.

> they filter for people that are ready to follow orders without complaining.

Well, if that was the goal, boy did we ever fail to deliver on that one ;-)

You just described practically any corporate job, ie in banking (which especially are tuned to 11 due to massive bureaucracy, over-processing and very high pyramidal management structures)

I'm in your boat. I get hit up by Google 3-4 times a year. I was interested once and did the pre-screening. When I got their prep packet I looked it over and then promptly canceled my interview. I wasn't going to review stuff I've never used throughout my 10+ year career.

I'm a big fan of not wasting time, which I why I get stuff done at work and have been promoted twice at my current company in the past 3 years. As a sibling commenter suggests, if Google wants employees who blindly do what they're told, then I wouldn't be a good culture fit. I was taught critical thinking skills in school. Respectfully questioning my superiors' plans from time to time has been a valuable skill.

I have a technical phone screen with Google this week and I have the same attitude as you. So i'll probably fail the interview, but I'm doing it just in case they ask a real world problem, which I'm pretty good at.

If they ask you any CS101 or algo questions end the interview and explain why.

Google is certainly not looking for "employees who blindly do what they're told", at least not for engineering roles.

No, but they certainly have no use for SWEs thinking outside the box in ways beyond engineering work. Such as recognizing that interviews don't work well to predict ability and success. We engineers are supposed to shut up and conduct interviews and build interview tools, not wonder if the whole thing is a case of the emperor has no clothes.

That isn't really unprecedent through out the history of work. There are, have been, and will be many fads where the emperor was eventually found to be wearing no clothes. This particular interviewing style is just one of many, and is already on the way out as people learn they aren't getting very far by cargo culting Google (e.g. see Stripe and Microsoft's new interview process).

What I find weird is why does anybody want to work at Google? I use their tools all the time at work. If you go to console.cloud.google.com... I mean... Wow. Just yesterday I was trying to find the logging for our cloud endpoints on Stackdriver. They should use that as their interview question ;-)

And this is the big thing I've noticed about many Google apps (especially dev tools): they are all incredibly (for want of a better word) hacky. And the documentation... while I can very much appreciate that they are serious about it and work very hard, it's a huge mishmash of marketing speak ("It washes your socks and makes dinner for you!") with the crucial information you need hidden away in secret corners. I literally have to use Google the search engine to navigate any of the documentation.

I don't mean to be so negative. It's not that it's so terrible in reality, it's just that it's not anything particularly great. I literally can't think of a single offering they have that I would aspire towards. There are lots of smaller, hungrier companies making much better products. And by extension, I think if you work at those smaller, hungrier companies you have a better chance of learning more, becoming a better developer and even being happier with your job.

So the thing is, unless I'm alone in my assessment, I think the main things people are looking for from a job at Google are status and money. Additionally, I think a lot of young people believe that talented developers mostly work at famous companies. In my experience, this is the opposite. Back when Microsoft was the powerhouse, I knew a lot of MS developers. Some were amazing. Most were average (as you might expect when a company is hiring thousands upon thousands of developers). However, you had a much better chance of actually working with someone amazing if you got a job at a small shop. I still think this is true.

Personally, I don't complain about the "You have to be this clever to ride" interviews. Yes, they self select for people who are not like me (bulldogs that work away obsessively at problems until they are solved without using any particular magic insight). Yes, it means that I'm unlikely to get paid at the very, very top of the payscale (heck, if I wanted to get paid more, I would have been a lawyer -- I want to write code). It just means that it's that much easier for me to find companies that are a good fit for me. I don't really see a problems with that.

Simple answer: Money + Prestige + Job security + Resume

Kinda the BBC of Silicon Valley then.

> What I find weird is why does anybody want to work at Google? I use their tools all the time at work. If you go to console.cloud.google.com... I mean... Wow. Just yesterday I was trying to find the logging for our cloud endpoints on Stackdriver. They should use that as their interview question ;-)

Working for Google is the only way to get bugs in Google products fixed, or your feedback even listened to. ;)

I'll be honest, I complained about my total lack of ability to find anything in the documentation and they emailed me back to ask for suggestions on what to fix. I never got back to them. I really should find time.

It was funny because in my frustration, I left a comment on the last page I looked at and they responded with the completely reasonable question, "Why were you looking at that page? It doesn't contain any of the information you were looking for." It was such a great summation of what my problems was that I felt difficulty in finding an appropriate response :-). Possibly this is too unfair, but I felt like the question, "How should I have found the information I was looking for?" was something that had never occurred to them. It's pretty applicable to virtually everything I've used from Google. It has that feel of, "If you don't already know, then you don't deserve to know".

> why does anybody want to work at Google

with all the android privacy issues researchers keep uncovering, i feel like Google has really driven a certain fraction of the labor pool which cares about protecting user privacy directly away from itself

> they are all incredibly (for want of a better word) hacky.

yeah, i haven't seen much of anything to feel inspired by either (although I do think Google Maps team has put out a really solid product). but i have to deal with the Android SDK and other google libraries for android, and "hacky" seems like the best single word description for that stuff, IMHO, too.

what makes me laugh about the android documentation is that even though Google's mission is to organize the world's information, the best android documentation and guidance i can find is organized by Stack Overflow.

Maybe google employees aren’t incentivized to fix things as much as they are for making new things?

I'm probably responding more to this thread than I should, but I'm an a chatty mood today :-) I think there are a lot of factors and this is almost certainly one of them. Having worked in a couple big, wealthy and famous companies before, one of the biggest problems is that they are always making acquisitions. One day you're building X and then upper management thinks, "Woah... X + Y would be awesome. But we don't want to spend time to build the Y part. Let's acquire a company and glue it onto X." Usually that happens with great grumbling from the programmers who complain that X and Y were never meant to work together and it would actually take more time to get them to work well than it would have to build Y in the first place. Upper management doesn't believe this and says, "Stop grumbling". And, well, the programmers do what they have to do. So it ends up being super hacky... because it is super hacky :-)

But I think it's more than that. You know how certain things are obviously built by committees? You can see it because everything is consistent, but it's often got a lot of compromises. On the other hand some things are obviously built by individual contributors. It's got some things that are really great, but other things that are horrible because the developer just has blinders on. Many Google apps give me the latter experience. Also, when they have a suite of tools, although they are tied in together, they have wildly different UI, naming conventions, placement and layout of information, etc. Usually there are some really cool bits, but these bits are often not the point of the project and look a bit out of place.

I think teams in Google often have people who are confident and smart and the tools reflect that. It's a kind of "This is the way to do X", shouted 500 different ways. One of the biggest things I find frustrating is the mountain of trivia that I have to commit to memory in order to use their tools fluently. I really do think it reflects the type of people that Google chooses when they hire people. While they may be good at the things that Google screens them for, they may not be the best people overall when it comes to building finished products.

Your experiences closely reflect mine for GCP. Some of the tools, although amazing in and of itself, often have some minor flaw that makes the user experience extremely inconvenient when you encounter it many times. The simplicity of the inconvenience only exaggerates the frustration.

I've interviewed with Google and the interviews I got didn't really require having memorized algorithms. Maybe on the level of breadth first and binary search which are pretty basic. But I don't think most interviews used any algorithms from a book at all. I think their interview prep packet overstates the amount of knowledge expected.

We ... had different experiences. It was a day of implementing algorithms on a whiteboard. I was supposed to be interviewing for a management position so I didn’t get the study packet either.

I also interviewed at google, in the in-person all of the algos I got were very fair in my opinion, in that it took a little bit of thought to figure out what I needed to do, and then after that, most of the work was just turning that idea into an algorithm. It was all on the whiteboard but I thought it was fair. They were fine with little errors and we talked through them.

On the phone interview I was asked how to something I had no idea how to do. I have no idea how I passed the phone interview.

Seems like a mixed bag, the question as far as I know is completely up to the interviewer, which makes the interview very subjective when they don't use a normal question.

Interesting. My interview process was one of the most negative interviewing experiences of my life. Two of the people interviewing me were mostly silent except when they were combative. One algorithm I implemented was essentially the internals of a popular vi clone and was dismissively told the algorithm wouldn’t work in practice. I also argued Big O with a another interviewer who said nothing except my value was wrong (it wasn’t).

My interviews with Google last year did have a BFS and a system question, but they also asked me a problem that required dynamic programming and one that required fast exponentiation. I'd say that Google ranks 8 of 10 or so in how algorithm-heavy their interviews are.

"I've made a career fixing a ton of horribly shitty, inefficient code that's been produced exclusively by people who pass these interviews."

Well, the interviews are marginally effective at identifying new CS grads (who also are cheap and have few outside commitments - companies love this!) but not much else. You're exactly right to view it as an algorithms final exam or an algorithm puzzle contest, but Cracking the Coding Interview is an embarrassingly bad book, in spite of (?) its ostensible purpose of helping people study for algorithm puzzle interviews at Google, Facebook, etc..

>but Cracking the Coding Interview is an embarrassingly bad book

I like how you made this bold claim with zero justification as to why.

I've realized I can still have a great career, make a very respectable wage, and work on interesting, novel problems all without working for a FAANG. Moreover, I don't have to directly contribute to the proliferation of corporate surveillance as a societal norm.

> I've made a career fixing a ton of horribly shitty, inefficient code that's been produced exclusively by people who pass these interviews.

I love this comment.

Give them benefit of a doubt, you have no prior knowledge of the time/pressure constraint's and organization structure at the time they wrote the code.

I would say they probably made the decision like we all do when development work, that solving this n+1 or bubble sort, or api package doesn't have time in the budget.

Getting to market sometimes is more important to managers than optimal `correct` code, when the market isn't willing to pay for the services of `correct`.

Similar profile, would not considering working for them. My first and only interview with FB a few years ago I nailed the initial hoop jumping about IPC and other *nix things but overall just got a really bad taste in my mouth. Also went for dinner, which was nice but still, something is creepy about them. They are looking for some kind of desperation that I just don’t have. Sounds like some fun problem solving though.

Haven’t had a chance to hire any ex-FAANGers yet, do they compare well to the general market?

Having recently gotten an offer after interviewing at Google, I can testify that those preparation packets are a sufficient but not necessary condition for doing well on an interview, and seem to be primarily targeted at making sure people who want to prepare don't do so badly. I spent about an hour on the plane reading through some example questions online, and did fine. I suspect that a lot of questions I "figured out" a clever solution to could actually have been solved with some obscure algorithm, but by treating them as puzzles rather than memorization tasks I was better able to demonstrate my skills as a candidate.

In short, I think the exact same question is interpreted as a cool algorithm challenge or a recall check, and the interviewer will be fine with you rederiving the answer on the spot if you are quick thinking enough to do so.

What an eloquent way to summarize the silly elitism of Google interviews.

They seem to have no lack of talent and it certainly doesn't seem to be negatively affecting them. I wonder if this will change eventually, and Google will become IBM v2.0 (that is, a respected and profitable company which is mostly boring/unexciting).

I don't work in California and it took me a while to figure out what FAANG stands for. Have you guys ever thought that you're just in a bubble that's not representative of the industry as a whole?

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