eta_carinae

> Since the interview process doesn't include any sort of personal question or assessments other than one's ability to memorize algorithms and such, How do you measure "culture fit"?

It's very subjective and falls clearly in the category of "You recognize it when you see it".

Typical example of a hiring committee deliberation at Google: "He didn't find the optimal solution but he looked very excited about the problem when he was trying to solve it".

Enthusiasm, interest, being personable, excitement about solving problems, all these things count when you interview, especially at Google.

> This is true, but it sure would be helpful if they could give qualitative feedback like "the impression was that you were strong in a and b, but weak in x and y." That doesn't seem like too much to ask

Sadly, even this kind of feedback exposes the company on a legal front. There is a lot of precedent coming from rejected candidates who ended up suing the company because of this kind of feedback.

The only sane thing that a company can do from a legal standpoint is say "Sorry, we don't have a position for you at the moment, good luck in your search".

Google employee here. Let me clear something for you: your rejection has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with your education.

As for not giving feedback, like you hinted, it's purely for legal reasons. It sucks, but that's how things work in the US.

> In my experience, Eclipse and other IDEs are not completely reliable when it comes to refactoring and variable renaming. Yes, they are good at it, but at the same time, they all offer preview modes and encourage the user to double-check the IDE's changes. I have seen Eclipse fail in renaming identifiers in Java code.

True, but an IDE will refactor accurately much, much more often on a statically type language than a dynamically one. Refactoring dynamically typed languages is pretty much impossible to do automatically when you don't have type information:

http://beust.com/weblog/2006/10/01/dynamic-language-refactor...

> I don't know if there are any existing refactoring tools for Clojure, but there certainly could be.

Maybe, but they would be imprecise and they would require developer supervision. When the tool doesn't have any types, it can't reason about the code accurately.

Here is an article that explains why in more depth:

http://beust.com/weblog/2006/10/01/dynamic-language-refactor...

> The evidence is that sitting down for hours per day is extraordinarily destructive to various aspects of your body

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Each day, hundreds of thousands of people sit at their desk for hours, and it's been going on for decades. If it was that destructive, the developer population would have been decimated by now.

You also need to do this with closures if you have more than one method.