At Google we have an internal forum and bank of interview questions. People make docs where they write their own interview questions then share them around. Here is what I hate: - The people writing the hardest interview questions are always the people with like 1 year at Google and working on something irrelevant like Google Wear and pushing protos. It’s not the Dean / Sanjay types working in Research or Ads or distributed computing or anything actually hard or interesting. I would understand asking hard interview questions if your day to day involved writing LSM trees from scratch or merging giant postings lists, but your entire year here has been writing 40 line CLs changing a few textprotos and Java UI. Why are you asking interview questions that require space partitioning trees or 4d dynamic programming? - These morons who write hard interview questions don’t even come up with the right answer or asymptotic bounds themselves. I’ve seen on two occasions now these people will say “Oh, I think an O(n^2) DP should suffice” when it is clearly an NP hard problem, and 3 weeks later the doc will be revised with a note about how the problem is much harder than they originally thought (after asking it in interviews, lmfao!). It’s common for there to be weeks of discussion around the best solution, or improving already existing solutions, and these are so called “Googlers” yet they expect the candidate to do this in an hour. - There is a high chance you get an interviewer that is just plain wrong. I saw someone on this forum who did not understand asymptotic notation. They insisted that Fib heaps are always the fastest and did not understand constant factors. This person is interviewing people and probably deducting points when the candidate says something they mistakenly believe to be completely wrong. Worse, these people will have a “know it all” attitude and will become visibly annoyed with you if you try to convince them that theyre wrong, guaranteeing an instant failure. I’m writing this so that outsiders can have some perspective. No, not everyone here is smart. There are interviewers who ask questions that they themselves can not figure out after days of thought. Your chance of passing the interview is inversely correlated to the chance you get one of these fragile ego’d interviewers. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Going to tell myself this was why I got rejectex
Damn if there’s that much questions on what the right answer should be then it’s prob better left in competitive programming and not in google interview questions
Then again if you wanted to somehow “force” a limit on number of ppl getting in then I guess this is a way
It’s the embodiment of what’s wrong with Google culture.
Ahem.
Ahem. Ahem.
Thanks for sharing. I didn’t experience “wrong” questions but I did feel a sense of high self entitlement from 2 of my 5 interviewers. Not the best interview experience I’ve had.
I did. With a fella who didn't speak very good English and couldn't really tell me the question correctly. This was 8 years ago (time flies).
Can you share lmaoo. That would be great
The most insecure people are the ones asking gotcha questions. It’s always been that way.
Everyone thinks they are computer scientists when they end up at G.
If you got a degree in computer science you’re a computer scientist
I'm a .. what?!?
You are absolutely thinking the same as me! When I see ppl post towards the eng interview thread with hard questions I feel like they are simply trying to make themselves knowledgeable by talking about something they spent days to understand but expect TC to tackle in 40mins. Completely non sense
I have seen many Googlers defend this expectation of solving in 40mins with "Ohh we actually dont expect perfect solution in interview, we just want to know how they approach towards problem solving" And that ain't always true as well.
@Birst exactly. When writing feedback you usually don’t give a H for TC who did not finish even a non optimal solution at high level. This is the truth
The docs I’ve read with complex questions were usually from people with 5+ y in G . Second the Jeff and Sanjay types have more work than to write up interview questions. You should comment and question about the issues you have on the doc rather than ranting here. Also since you haven’t listed your tc, your opinions are wrong per blind criteria
The title is click bait. Looks like you have >1 yoe and are working on complex things, #AI, #ML. Then you might also know that blind posts should include a TC.
Have you corrected your doc?
What doc? What meta?