g9yuayon

Okay, let's say you don't trust Google's number, then think about this: how many web pages are about politics that are sensitive to Chinese government, and how many web pages are about our everyday life?

Edit: oh you mean quality of Google search compared with Baidu's? Well, for one, Google does not use paid listing, and there are numerous reports that compare Google and Baidu's search quality.

Yup, political ideal certainly is more important than the quality life of billions of real, ordinary people.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

It's just unfortunate that there's so much prepping materials online nowadays that the programming puzzles have become ineffective. It gets worse as many interviewers were not good enough to ask follow-up questions. For instance, addition with big integers is a pretty easy interview question, right? But if a candidate can go as deep as this article: https://bearssl.org/bigint.html, I can be pretty confident that the candidate is really really good.

That said, I personally don't find it necessary to join the rat race. Instead, I'd suggest engineers just take time to thoroughly study just one book on algorithm designs. In fact, an introductory book, such as Kleinberg's Algorithm Design or Udi Manber's Introduction to Algorithms, will be good enough. It may not get you into Google, but it will likely get you into another damn good company. The best part of this approach is that passing interview is really just the byproduct of you trying to become a better engineer.

And the mentioned books, at least some of them, serve different purposes: they aim to inspire, to motivate, and to offer historical context and intuition. The last is especially important, as they show people how abstract concepts emerged from historically concrete endeavors.

When it comes to learning math, you can't take an elite's view. Not everyone is born Bourbaki dudes or Galois or people like them. Ordinary people like me don't just fall in love with maths. I was certainly not interested in number theory as I thought it was too fundamental for me to spend serious time on. And I'm still not. I was certainly puzzled on why my professors introduced the concept of functional in linear algebra or quotient groups in algebra or lattice equations in program analysis or category theory in model checking or probability space in probability. After all, all I wanted was to learn how to model the world to be a better programmer. And I was not able to grasp the abstractions without serious effort. I needed historical context and motivations to plow through those topics and to enjoy math.

Yes, the elites will love and excel at math for no particular reason. Yet it is the middle majority like me who will greatly benefit from the mentioned books and biographies and what not.

Gender bias in STEM? That's a god damn first-world problem.

As a result, it is the ordinary kids, which is the majority middle, who will hurt -- they think they learn something in high school and college, but they really don't.

The end result? The people in the middle ground, aka most children, will be left behind.

So, the logic of this protest is that Chinese people do not deserve even incremental improvement, a huge improvement by the way, in their lives?

I feel sorry to say this, but there is really not much rote learning of STEM subjects in Chinese K-12. How can you rote learn when you need deep and intuitive understanding of fundamentals to excel in your math exams? That's what my teachers tried hard to instill in us every day. On the contrary, there's a lot of rote learning in that of the US. The reason is simple: students resort to rote learning because it works, and it works only because the problem sets they deal with are so simple and mechanical. That's not the case in China.

- For starters, teachers in China are responsible. They care about the subjects they teach, and spend countless hours finding challenging problems for students as well as grading students' solutions with detailed feedbacks. Parents could just leave the education of their kids to school. They didn't have to worry about tutoring at all, because they knew that their kids would be sufficiently challenged in school. This is true equality, isn't it, as financially challenged families did not have to worry about not being able to afford tutoring. In contrast, teachers in Cupertino, a town known for good schools, asked parents to grade students' homework.

- Second, they believe in their students. No no no, I'm not talking about this "every student is unique and therefore it's okay to not doing well in academically" crap. When I grew up, my teachers were tough, but they were tough by being honest, by telling me that I didn't do well in exams because I didn't try hard enough, because I didn't use the right techniques to study, or because I didn't focus on the right things. In other words, we truly believed that I could excel in school work. They didn't give up on me or other kids just because we did poorly in homework or in exams. They were truly happy if their students did well in school, and then they told the students that they could do even better by assigning more challenging problem sets. That is, they believed that their students could grow by keeping themselves in their discomfort zone. In contrast, Why did the US schools keep lowering their standards just to keep students happy?

The K-12 education systems in the US are great for two types of students: those who are really challenged academically, and those who know how to push themselves. For the former, they enjoyed the love from teachers or the policies like "no kids left behind". For the latter, they got excellent resources, such as taking advanced classes in universities, and participating in all kinds of competitions. It is the students in the middle, the majority of the students like me, who will lose, big time. The students in the middle will not be challenged enough, who will falsely believe that they are good at STEM and then get shocked or even defeated by not-really-so-hard courses like calculus or organic chemistry, those who could've had a wonderful career in STEM but bail out because they didn't get enough training in high school. How sad is that?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Chinese K-12 did everything right. I spent way too much time preparing for the national entrance exam. I spent way too much time mastering all kinds of problem-solving skills that are not needed in college. I didn't learn advanced subjects like calculus or stats until college. That said, my teachers truly prepared me, like they did millions of other ordinary students, for advanced STEM subjects. They injected passion and a sense of pride of studying STEMs. I wouldn't be able to do what I do today without my teachers' dedication and caring. That's what matters, isn't it?

On a side node, engineers do sometimes need to function as PMs to build great product.

In addition, engineers have commoditized many technical solutions that used to be challenging in the past 15 years. Scaling used to be a tough challenge, not any more for many companies. In fact, part of my daily job is to prevent passionate engineers from reinventing wheels in the name of achieving scalability. It's not because we don't need to solve scalability problems, but because the infrastructure is good enough for most of companies. Building and operating so called "big data platform" used to be hard, not that hard any more. Building machine learning pipeline used to be hard, not that hard any more for many companies. Of course, it's still challenging to build a highly flexible and automated machine learning pipeline with full support of closed feedback loop, but many companies can get by without that level of maturity.

Fast forward to it today, we have huge amount of prep materials and prep schools, so it becomes hard to tell who's truly talent and who has great memory. Google doubled its workforce in the past three years from 35,000 people or so to 70,000 people. You just can't expect that everyone is passionate and talented about math or engineering. Besides, Google does not need too many of this kind of people either.

However, if a small company is tackling a hard problem that does require tons of math, computer science, or pure ingenuity. Hell ya, brainteasers can be of great help. They don't even need brainteasers, they can just directly ask math problems.

Not true. An H1-B can change job. I did it a number of times without any problem. In addition, good companies do not take advantage of this so called immobility. Netflix certainly does not. Its CEO used to say money shouldn't be an issue to employees, and he certainly means it. In fact, Netflix's culture is so good to ICs, but I digressed.

If we look back, Google made really good decisions in its early days. Founder's bill is a brilliant invention, thanks to Eric Schmidt

Yeah yeah, I understand that it eventually boils down to supply and demand of talent, but just saying...

I did well in my AP calculus, 98/100 or something like that, but I still felt the pressure in all the tests and exams, as there were just so many questions crammed in a single test. I had to keep writing, non stop, and barely had time to double check any of my answers. Contrast to my school experience before I went to Canada, I could usually use way less than half of the exam time to finish and double check every problem.

The same pattern continued in U of T. The class average of courses like algorithms often went below 40/100. I usually had to keep writing until the last minute to finish every single question in an exam. Assignments were usually time consuming and required lots of thinking. I still remember the tremendous satisfaction when I finally proved a theorem about universal hashing (an exercise from CLRS, IIRC). And past success on assignments and tests didn't guarantee good grades in the final exam. I was actually dumbfounded when I did poorly in my AI course, even though I did extremely well except for my final exam.

Looking back though, I am very grateful for the struggles my professors put me through. They made me. What I learned then carried me a long way, even today. Without the high standards imposed by the schools, an ordinary student like me would not be able to do as well. As I kept telling friends, schools MUST keep their students in discomfort zones to help them learn and improve - the very thing that US schools, in particular SF bay area public schools, have been failing miserably.

Either way, the candidates who pass coding interviews meet the minimum hiring bar.

And don't forget the historical context when Microsoft popularized brain teasers and algorithmic puzzles in its haydays. In the 80s and 90s, there were few interview prep books. There was no leetcode or any other pre site. Those so called teasers are cleverly disguised math puzzles. Remember the questions about pirates dividing up gold coins? Classic math problem. Remember the one that asks how many unfaithful husbands there are in an island? Putnam question solvable by mathematical induction. Similarly, the so-called algorithmic puzzles came from classic CS books or from real projects. Those who can solve the puzzles are either super smart or super geeky. Either way, they were likely to be great hires for Microsoft.