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When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. AWS rejected me since I failed to wr

When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions. Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did not hire me back then. Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview at "Giant Search and Advertising Company", but they run a lot of my code in production :P.

paxys 7y ago
Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768. Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  And it reminds me of this one too: https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383 https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383 Brian Acton, rejected by Facebook in 2009. Then in 2014 FB acquired his company for $19B...
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems? I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.
  - peterebailey 7y ago
    Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.
    - danbmil99 7y ago
      How many interviews involve asking the prospective hire if they know how to gather and define requirements?
      - tsukikage 7y ago
        This is implicit in a coding interview, though. I, the interviewer, take a couple of sentences to describe a problem. What next? Way too often, rather than ask more questions - gather and define requirements - a candidate will launch straight into solving a problem different from the one I am describing.
        hanswesterbeek 7y ago
        AKA "rush to keyboard" syndrome.
        adamsea 7y ago
        Requirements gathering in reality can often require more soft skills or political skills, which doesn’t seem to be the primary focus of these interviews. Which isn’t to say the skills you mention aren’t important.
        username90 7y ago
        Most engineers at Google never talk to non-engineers, the requirements gathering comes instead from looking at code, reading design docs and talking to other engineers.
    - phkahler 7y ago
      >> Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google. It's like that everywhere. Nobody comes to you with complete requirements. People/customers come with problems they need solved. Sometimes an outline of a specific solution is specified, but there's always a lot of detail missing.
  - mwest217 7y ago
    Not at all. I've been at Google for a bit over two years, and my experience has been at the far other end of the spectrum: a lot of autonomy, gathering requirements, designing & implementing. Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. If it's less than a day or two of work I can generally just go do it.
    - rekabis 7y ago
      > Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. You’re clearly not working on their military-contract Terminator-drone program… …Unless “better” means “stone cold dead”.
    - alok-g 7y ago
      How much of interview-style coding is involved in your work? More broadly, would you agree to the OP that interviewing for software developers is broken?
  - ddalex 7y ago
    Working at Google. My opinion is my own, etc etc What you get told is What needs to be accomplished, but not How, if that makes sense. E.G. IF you choose to accept this challenge, this platform is running at XX% availability and we need to run it at YY% availability. HOW you get to do that, it's up to you. Some folks don't accept these challenges and they go and find and fix their own interesting problems. But that's harder because you have to get buy-in from managers in order to get resources for that. There is space and need for everyone.
  - smueller1234 7y ago
    Google's big enough that no one person could possibly speak confidently for all of engineering in this regard. For what it's worth, this doesn't match my experience at all. In the area I work in (SRE in technical infrastructure, but the same seems to be true for our dev partners), I see a lot of expectation for bottom up ownership. I could totally understand if somebody with a different mindset and perspective (I'm a manager, so I can see pretty clearly what's valued at evaluation time) arrived at a different conclusion.
- kohtatsu 7y ago
  False; Google wants everyone like them to keep them away from the competition. Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    That’s a lie they tell employees to make them feel good about themselves. If they actually cared about keeping competent engineers away from competitors, their interview process would be tuned to look for engineering skills, not leetcode.
    - crimsonalucard 7y ago
      Straight from the horses mouth I once asked Gayle Lackman on quora: does their exist engineers who no matter how hard they study can NEVER make it through the google interview process? She said yes. She said that this is because Google optimizes their interviews for IQ. Not just raw knowledge.
      - kortilla 7y ago
        That’s incorrect. An interview process with true negatives doesn’t mean it isn’t loaded with tons of other false positives. Being good at leetcode has no relation to engineering skills, despite it being a skill in itself.
        crimsonalucard 7y ago
        Where in my comment do I talk about leetcode or false positives? Not only are you incorrect, but you are completely off topic. I am saying Gayle Lackman, the author of Cracking the coding interview and, in the past, one of the board members who decide on candidates in the google interview literally told me word for word that the interview optimizes for IQ. Meaning that there are tons of engineers who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough. Understand?
- throwaway5283 7y ago
  This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing. Before joining, I had endless enthusiasm for computer science and programming. Now I feel so unenthusiastic that I question my future in this industry.
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    You joined a giant megacorp. They’re all like that. There’s very little difference between Google and Oracle in this regard.
    - AlexCoventry 7y ago
      From what I've read, Google is a much more humane and pleasant environment to develop software in.
      - monoideism 7y ago
        That's what I hear, but then I see comments from folks like User5283 above. I have the impression it may be changing into something much more similar to a typical corporation after years of avoiding that fate.
        hutzlibu 7y ago
        Beware though, that he or she used a throwaway. Comments can be made by anyone, also a marketing company contracted by oracle who still want talent and have to shame competitors with better image. (but the comment did seem legit and it is obvious for posting that anonymous)
        monoideism 7y ago
- Retric 7y ago
  Reading posts like that make the process seem stupid, but it has utility for the interviewers. All of this silliness is creating an artificial talent shortage which drives up salaries at FANG companies. It’s far from universal, but the incentives between managers, workers, and shareholders never really align that well.
- pjdemers 7y ago
  Right. Coding tests are designed to find people who are happy in a job where their only responsibility is: "Here's your coding assignment. Go do it." Technology companies are overfull of engineers who want more responsibility than that. They don't need any more.
- LeftHandPath 7y ago
  > Cynical answer though Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job. And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company. It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).
  - monoideism 7y ago
    > and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company. Eh, there's a lot of us who haven't done great financially but who have written a lot of open source code being run at bigcos. Being an entrepreneur requires another skill set altogether. One that I seem to lack, although I finally have come up with a solid idea in the last year that might get me somewhere whenever I'm ready to make the move. I'm sure if I spent significant time preparing, I could do well at Google's interview process, and other FAANG companies have tried multiple times to get me to interview (oddly, never Google), but I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me. I've been much happier working for smaller companies. The one time I worked for a large corporation years ago, I was miserable. People say Google is different, but I'm not convinced. I would like that sweet compensation, though.
    - danzig13 7y ago
      Don’t forget a lot of entrepreneurs fail until they don’t.
- ampdepolymerase 7y ago
  It is actually pretty well known that the second way into FAANGs is through acquisition.
  - monoideism 7y ago
    I've heard of at least some of the FAANGs do the typical interview process for acquisitions.
    - ampdepolymerase 7y ago
      That sounds terrible, can you elaborate?
      - monoideism 7y ago
        I've read from blog posts and even from conversations that companies require acquihires, particularly non-founder employees, to go through an interview process. It may be shortened, but they still often have to do the typical algorithmic interviews. I'll see if I can find one of the blog posts I've read about the process. Note: to be clear, I'm describing the process for acquihires, not founders just wanting to sell their company and walk away with some cash (which actually seems to be somewhat unusual). Edit: this was discussed in a similar thread on HN just last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943500
        gambiting 7y ago
        Is that a uniquely American thing? I'm 100% certain that even if the company I work for was acquired, my current contract would still apply. So I would need to be given at least 3 months notice, and couldn't be discharged without a good reason - failing some internal interview wouldn't be such a reason.
        hansvm 7y ago
        Perhaps. Most places in the US an employment contract can be terminated at will for almost any reason or without any specific reason.
- neilk 7y ago
  I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all. Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image. Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change? Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change. I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.
  - thewhitetulip 7y ago
    > Unearned privilege? I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code" But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?
    - neilk 7y ago
      I took that part out. I don’t really know what is in other people’s minds.
    - paganel 7y ago
      Now I’m curious why they didn’t use dicts, I love dicts. I’ve been writing Python for a living for almost 15 years now and dictionaries and (reasonable) list comprehensions still attract me like they did the first day I “met” them.
      - thewhitetulip 7y ago
        I don't know. It was bizzare to hear it. To be honest the lady taking the interview didn't understand my code, at least that's what I got. The guy with her definitely didn't understand a line I had written. Maybe that was her way of protecting herself or something else But I've never come across any real reason to not use dicts
  - numpad0 7y ago
- austincheney 7y ago
  You could have saved a lot of space just saying button pressers. This is most large companies and why I am burnt out on writing software professionally. The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play it safe, follow popular trends, and don’t take any risks on product improvements. To think about it another way the idea is to create mediocre software with mediocre developers because the software is thought to cost less than finding, hiring, and retaining top quality people.
  - ozim 7y ago
    Now connect the dots with: How much customers are willing to pay for software developer work? They don't want to pay anything. They don't deserve best software written by best developers. Take for example GIT, which is extraordinary piece of software, saves a lot of problems and time. If it was not free, most software shops would just keep copies of folders with dates or whatever insane ways they had (SVN is for me insane way as well :) and big paid VCS were popular at big co's. not even one became close to "industry standard" as GIT).
- evidencepi 7y ago
  Agree, they want smart workers (well you have to be smart at some degree to do software). And they don't care if they will miss some genius, they just let other companies help the selection process, and if you turn out to be gold, they will pay a big money to get you.
- shaan1 7y ago
  Makes perfect sense. Thats when you know you need to short the stock in the LONG RUN. Because all they know is taking orders from someone and running it. This is the same with all companies. If Mark Zuckerberg steps down from Facebook, you can pretty much know, it's going to go down.
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  > They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. I think the reason is a bit different. Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm. That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anything else. Their code is pretty bad most of the time, they've took beautiful Webkit and turned it into Blink mess. They are all about algorithms, they don't care about code. And that's a pity that people are copying Google's methodology without understanding why Google is doing so. If you are developing an OS, you'd be better copying Microsoft, which had much of a different approach, nearly without any algorithm questions.
  - hanswesterbeek 7y ago
    Indeed! This cultural / historical angle of looking at the issue hits the nail on the head.
EpicEng 7y ago
Wow. I don't have as prolific a tale as that, but I'm in the looking stage right now and the idea of cramming for a test I haven't taken in 12 years annoys the hell out of me. I've done some pretty interesting things in biotech in my career, things that required learning about motion control, digital imaging, signal processing, and biology... but if I want a job as a web dev I apparently need to memorize how to implement every sorting algorithm... on a whiteboard... in ten minutes. The fact that I know which to use when is irrelevant. Bleh.
- Psychlist 7y ago
  This is part of the reason why I've only consulted into big companies, and only briefly. It's not just that I am not that sort of person, it's that I don't like being around that sort of person. Software engineering is also another field where there's no effective upper limit on difficulty. In other words, no matter how good you are you (should) always feel that you're barely capable of understanding what you're supposed to be doing, let alone doing it. That's right from "make a single static web page" to "submit binary fix to close-source compiler" or whatever the high end of your particular field is (Win a technical argument with the C++ standards committee? Shave 0.001% off the load time of the google homepage? Discover a new way to monetise users?).
- wuschel 7y ago
  Hi EpicEng, just out of curiosity to learn more about your project: Where could I contact you? Cheers!
- blaufast 7y ago
  Having worked at cutting edge biotech,startups and FAANG I wholeheartedly defend the interview process, and believe you would too if you ever switched over for a while
  - RobRivera 7y ago
    I think there's a certain breed of people who will pony up the time and resources to levelup for the interview, and the compliment. Ignoring the privilege of resource availability, i think its totally doable and worthwhile. I come from a blue collar family and I think my old man would love to hear I can pull off miraculous study habits for a month to take home the kind of paychecks offered for hitting a keyboard. Granted, if the money were not there, I would not find it worthwhile. I would probably just focus on founding my own company.
fossuser 7y ago
If learning is the naive approach to getting good grades then programming fun projects is the naive approach to passing technical interviews. "If tests truly were tests of learning, things wouldn't be so bad. Getting good grades and learning would converge, just a little late. The problem is that nearly all tests given to students are terribly hackable. Most people who've gotten good grades know this, and know it so well they've ceased even to question it. You'll see when you realize how naive it sounds to act otherwise." http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
dickjocke 7y ago
Also after the Redhat and then IBM acquisition I wonder if you came out in a better position in the end anyway.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gentleman11 7y ago
I spent my time learning instead of drilling too and don’t regret it. My bank balance does though :( I want to work for myself however in the long run and I think the skills are more important for that
courtf 7y ago
I love these anecdotes, thank you! The greatest programmer I've had the privilege of working closely with could easily pass most technical screens, but he's an odd fellow, and I don't think could handle the stress and anxiety of these crazy interviews. Lots of diamonds in the rough out there, but I suppose large companies understand that and just consider it acceptable loss.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  That's what every bitter HN comment on the topic forgets. If Larry Page could sit down and talk to each candidate, I'm sure he'd be able to properly assess these kinds of corner cases. The challenge isn't being able to do that at an individual level; it's being able to do it in a way that's somewhat consistent and scalable across tens of thousands of interviewers and millions of candidates. Any large system is going to have false positives and negatives, and hiring is broken to begin with at most companies (assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard)
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    There must be people who'd want to specialize in that, though, if it's possible. It sounds like a fun job.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      That's still waving away the difficulty of taking an entity's goal and losslessly/consistently distributing it into thousands of individuals. It's just not a possible task.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    > assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard Predicting the future is very difficult, and therefore probably not what interviews are designed to optimise for. Interviews probably optimise for something like: The candidate seemed like a reasonable choice at the time / cover-your-arse scenario.
bilekas 7y ago
One thing to note about coding interviews, they're very simular to somone looking over your shoulder while you're working. Nobody can perform well like that.. One great colleague who I wish I was in the interview for, simple started thinking out loud. Everything he was thinking, he said out loud, and of course, the team loved it. Because thats all it's about. If its not over a video chat/submission, comment your code your thoughts, remember, they want to know you chain of though, not your knowledge of a framework/algorithm (unless its very specific) > Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview If you know how to figure out the problem, forget the technical side and explain how you would go and figure it out. Problem solve. Don't worry.
- karlkatzke 7y ago
  So I had an interview that was like that, but I wasn’t given enough information. I was asked to implement the “inverse square law in code” ... and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college (I looked up all of the interviewers on linkedin, so I had a good idea of their experience and areas of expertise) that my first step as someone who hadn’t been in an academic environment or exposed to this kind of requirement for over a decade would be to research the requirement and asked if I could consult a Wikipedia article. “No, you can’t consult outside sources.” “Ok, can you explain to me the inverse square law?” “No, you should know this.” I didn’t know that. Also, I didn’t have enough information to ask good questions, because I was pretty sure that this was an incomplete specification and I needed to ask informed questions to reach a particular implementation. As a result, the company’s evaluation was that I didn’t know how to code.
  - UncleOxidant 7y ago
    In years past something like this in an interview would've rattled me. But now that I've been in this biz for 30+ years I think I'd just stand up, look the guy in the eye in a really squinty way and say, "Well, then I think we're done here kid" and walked out. You get to a point where you just won't put up with this kind of bullshit after a while.
  - monoideism 7y ago
new_realist 7y ago
Google had the equivalent of etcd a long, long time ago.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  True, but its a very technically sound product. Authoring it as an intern cannot be anything but a sign of prodigious skill. As an amusing anecdote, I didn't drill for internship interviews either and I ended up at a successful startup by sheer luck. I did well there, but I never achieved the level of technical brilliance that OP did. I feel like there were far more opportunities like this 8 years ago when I was doing that, though.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Was it general and polished enough to get traction though? What’s its name?
  - new_realist 7y ago
    etcd didn’t work initially; I wouldn’t call it polished. https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul
    - empath75 7y ago
      It worked, it had a bug.
  - ai_ja_nai 7y ago
    Chubby. It was the product that inspired Zookeeper and all its various incarnations, including etcd.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      Ah, the attempt to claim credit for something that likely wasn’t inspired by Chubby at all. etcd was inspired by a hash-map more so than Chubby.
markbnj 7y ago
> but they run a lot of my code in production :P. We run your code in production too! Thanks!
yahyaheee 7y ago
Lol that’s amazing, you should write an article on this
yodsanklai 7y ago
> When my classmates preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. There are plenty of people who do both. They work on their projects, and when needed, they prepare for coding interviews.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
I'm sure that "Giant Search and Advertising Company" would never hire me. But they did buy patents with my name on them.
reaperducer 7y ago
Google does not want bright, creative people anymore. Google only wants drones now. It's a shift that coincided with its change from a technology company to an advertising company.
huffmsa 7y ago
> Can you regurgitate the answer to this already solved problem? No, but I can write a storage solution that works even when your dummy engineers are actively melting down servers. Ah, the difference between "computer science" and "software engineering".
- arthev 7y ago
  To quote Hamming: """In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.""" It follows that regurgitating answers to already solved problems is good engineering :)
GistNoesis 7y ago
You've got to admire this well lubricated machine, they are getting the milk and didn't have to pay for the cow. They are happy. You are happy. People are jumping higher and higher hoops with a smile. Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Hopefully as a wiser person you have your contingency ready for when the machine come to collect its blood tribute.
blueboo 7y ago
Two questions. How long do you think it would’ve taken you to prepare and ace these kinds of coding interview questions? (I bet less than 100 hours.) But I’m more interested in the following: what interview process do you think would have correctly (and reliably) evaluated someone with your profile?
- Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
  A company that cannot come up with a better more interesting process isn’t somewhere I want to work. How about making the questions broad enough for every candidate to have some input and evaluate them on what they choose to focus on? Something like, “How would you design an ATM?” There should never be a right answer to an interview question, just a candidate that solves problems in a way that fills a gap in your company.
- Redoubts 7y ago
  Personally I appreciate the questions that are 1) open ended design questions 2) here's some broken code, fix everything 3) probe depth of understanding of tools/language I always feel the Algo whiteboard questions feel like a "did you take the same DS class I did" round.
  - jonex 7y ago
    1 is included in at least Google interviews. 3 requires that you hire for a specific tool/language use, most programmers are able to learn new tools and languages in the time time periods that are hired for. I'd like to do more of 2, understanding, debugging, fixing and refactoring code is, in my experience, more of the day to day work than writing entirely new code. I don't know why this is not typically part of interviewing, maybe there's some reason it doesn't work? It would be interesting to see a more comprehensive evaluation of this approach.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
Two things. The google interview process was not made to filter you out. It was made to guarantee that they will not make a mistake on hiring you. People with the capability to do those interview problems have a high chance of being good programmers. There are many people like you who can't do those problems but are still very good programmers. Google doesn't need to hire you, the whole interview process is optimized for preventing a bad hire rather than finding people like you who are good hires but can't interview. Second, traversing a tree in level order is a trivial problem from the interview question perspective. It is more than likely that this question will NOT be given by the interviewer because it is too easy. The interview questions FAANG tends to give are a bit more novel. In fact the method in which you use to solve this problem and the problem itself is often just taught directly in school depending on the class you're in, meaning you don't need to practice interview questions to solve it because it's a basic topic. The solution is called tree traversal using BFS. If you didn't know this, despite working on and creating things like etcd you will appear stupid because the question is just too basic. When I interview I am 100% expecting questions way harder than this... even on phone interviews. Additionally when I'm the interviewer this type of question is the lowest bar, I will fail someone who can't answer this question. This is not to comment on your abilities. Rather it is to give you a dose of truth. I truly believe that there are many people like you who can program an entire kernel but can't even solve fibonacci recursively on a white board. Despite this I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.
- ideal0227 7y ago
  Thanks for educating me about BFS. I am major in computer science, and published paper in top conference. Tree traversal is trivial for me. So I guess I have decent CS background and knowledge? Writing bug free and perfect code is not equal to simply solve the problem. If you have prepared coding interviews (especially for new grad and internship), you should understand it is less about knowledge but more about practicing and memorization for that specific purpose. The time spent on it is almost a waste in the future. If the interview is knowledge based or problem solving oriented, I am all for it. Sadly, it is not today in many places. And that is exactly why website like Leetcode exists.
99_00 7y ago
So everyone got what they wanted? You did the project you wanted. AWS and Google got the code they wanted. Your friends for the jobs they wanted.
- sumedh 7y ago
  > AWS and Google got the code they wanted. Depends, if he was still working in Big Tech Co, they could have potentially not open sourced it, they could have used his secret sauce to get better system performance compared to competitors.
lowbloodsugar 7y ago
I hope the message that people take away from this anecdote is that "even the best people don't always pass an interview at AWS first time". But if someone is interested in the benefits AWS has to offer, try again. I interviewed three times before getting hired there, and I am the happiest I have ever been. I work with great people, on high-stakes, challenging problems that match my strengths, and we work 40 hour weeks, including time for beer. I have enough time outside work to learn new things (this year some basic FPGA programming). And skiing is 90 minutes away.
sha90 7y ago
Getting good signal-to-noise ratio from ANY interview, forget the big cos, is really difficult. I've seen great programmers passed over because they were _not_ given a chance to whiteboard and show their technical skill. At the end of the day, there is a bit of randomness to the process of sizing anyone up in an hour, and people will make bad calls. That said, I'm skeptical about your particular story. As a process rule, AWS doesn't provide interview feedback, so I'm pretty sure you don't _actually_ know why you were rejected, you can only guess. Perhaps if you were rejected in phone screen(s) it can be obvious, but if you made it to an on-site, I can guarantee (based on experience being in the room during hiring decisions at AWS) that they don't almost someone because of one bad whiteboarding result; there are multiple people collecting and reporting on results and only one person, the bar raiser, has veto power, and I've never seen it used for something as banal as not writing perfect code. I also don't know what happened in your interview, but consider it's also possible that you completely bombed it: failed to ask questions, failed to communicate properly, or made more mistakes than you even realize. It's certainly great that you went on to do great things, but maybe at the time you interviewed you weren't yet doing those great things...
rumanator 7y ago
> AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. I hate to break it to you, but Amazon doesn't reject a candidate because he bombed his coding challenge. I know people who received a job offer from Amazon for a developer position although they somewhat bombed their hard skills component. If you were rejected after passing the coding challenge and phone screening interview then odds are you actually bombed their personality and/or soft skills aspect of their interview process.
- anticensorship 7y ago
  [Thinking to themselves:] "Is this serf really the right kind of drone, the type who will fit neatly--much like an unthinking cog--into our organizational machinery?" Maybe he accidentally let it slip that he thought the South should have won and Robert E. Lee had some good ideas.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    Yeah, they do weed out racists and misogynists and people who in general have a problem with minorities even if they can traverse a graph like a champ, but as far as I know the main reason why someone is rejected after passing the online test and phone screening is having serious problems with their personality and soft skills that, as a whole, render the candidate unable to improve to an acceptable level and thus are unsalvageable.

paxys 7y ago

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768. Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago
And it reminds me of this one too: https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383 https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383 Brian Acton, rejected by Facebook in 2009. Then in 2014 FB acquired his company for $19B...
phkahler 7y ago
>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems? I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.
- peterebailey 7y ago
  Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.
  - danbmil99 7y ago
    How many interviews involve asking the prospective hire if they know how to gather and define requirements?
    - tsukikage 7y ago
      This is implicit in a coding interview, though. I, the interviewer, take a couple of sentences to describe a problem. What next? Way too often, rather than ask more questions - gather and define requirements - a candidate will launch straight into solving a problem different from the one I am describing.
      - hanswesterbeek 7y ago
        AKA "rush to keyboard" syndrome.
      - adamsea 7y ago
        Requirements gathering in reality can often require more soft skills or political skills, which doesn’t seem to be the primary focus of these interviews. Which isn’t to say the skills you mention aren’t important.
        username90 7y ago
        Most engineers at Google never talk to non-engineers, the requirements gathering comes instead from looking at code, reading design docs and talking to other engineers.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    >> Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google. It's like that everywhere. Nobody comes to you with complete requirements. People/customers come with problems they need solved. Sometimes an outline of a specific solution is specified, but there's always a lot of detail missing.
- mwest217 7y ago
  Not at all. I've been at Google for a bit over two years, and my experience has been at the far other end of the spectrum: a lot of autonomy, gathering requirements, designing & implementing. Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. If it's less than a day or two of work I can generally just go do it.
  - rekabis 7y ago
    > Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. You’re clearly not working on their military-contract Terminator-drone program… …Unless “better” means “stone cold dead”.
  - alok-g 7y ago
    How much of interview-style coding is involved in your work? More broadly, would you agree to the OP that interviewing for software developers is broken?
- ddalex 7y ago
  Working at Google. My opinion is my own, etc etc What you get told is What needs to be accomplished, but not How, if that makes sense. E.G. IF you choose to accept this challenge, this platform is running at XX% availability and we need to run it at YY% availability. HOW you get to do that, it's up to you. Some folks don't accept these challenges and they go and find and fix their own interesting problems. But that's harder because you have to get buy-in from managers in order to get resources for that. There is space and need for everyone.
- smueller1234 7y ago
  Google's big enough that no one person could possibly speak confidently for all of engineering in this regard. For what it's worth, this doesn't match my experience at all. In the area I work in (SRE in technical infrastructure, but the same seems to be true for our dev partners), I see a lot of expectation for bottom up ownership. I could totally understand if somebody with a different mindset and perspective (I'm a manager, so I can see pretty clearly what's valued at evaluation time) arrived at a different conclusion.
kohtatsu 7y ago
False; Google wants everyone like them to keep them away from the competition. Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.
- kortilla 7y ago
  That’s a lie they tell employees to make them feel good about themselves. If they actually cared about keeping competent engineers away from competitors, their interview process would be tuned to look for engineering skills, not leetcode.
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    Straight from the horses mouth I once asked Gayle Lackman on quora: does their exist engineers who no matter how hard they study can NEVER make it through the google interview process? She said yes. She said that this is because Google optimizes their interviews for IQ. Not just raw knowledge.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      That’s incorrect. An interview process with true negatives doesn’t mean it isn’t loaded with tons of other false positives. Being good at leetcode has no relation to engineering skills, despite it being a skill in itself.
      - crimsonalucard 7y ago
        Where in my comment do I talk about leetcode or false positives? Not only are you incorrect, but you are completely off topic. I am saying Gayle Lackman, the author of Cracking the coding interview and, in the past, one of the board members who decide on candidates in the google interview literally told me word for word that the interview optimizes for IQ. Meaning that there are tons of engineers who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough. Understand?
throwaway5283 7y ago
This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing. Before joining, I had endless enthusiasm for computer science and programming. Now I feel so unenthusiastic that I question my future in this industry.
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  You joined a giant megacorp. They’re all like that. There’s very little difference between Google and Oracle in this regard.
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    From what I've read, Google is a much more humane and pleasant environment to develop software in.
    - monoideism 7y ago
      That's what I hear, but then I see comments from folks like User5283 above. I have the impression it may be changing into something much more similar to a typical corporation after years of avoiding that fate.
      - hutzlibu 7y ago
        Beware though, that he or she used a throwaway. Comments can be made by anyone, also a marketing company contracted by oracle who still want talent and have to shame competitors with better image. (but the comment did seem legit and it is obvious for posting that anonymous)
        monoideism 7y ago
Retric 7y ago
Reading posts like that make the process seem stupid, but it has utility for the interviewers. All of this silliness is creating an artificial talent shortage which drives up salaries at FANG companies. It’s far from universal, but the incentives between managers, workers, and shareholders never really align that well.
pjdemers 7y ago
Right. Coding tests are designed to find people who are happy in a job where their only responsibility is: "Here's your coding assignment. Go do it." Technology companies are overfull of engineers who want more responsibility than that. They don't need any more.
LeftHandPath 7y ago
> Cynical answer though Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job. And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company. It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).
- monoideism 7y ago
  > and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company. Eh, there's a lot of us who haven't done great financially but who have written a lot of open source code being run at bigcos. Being an entrepreneur requires another skill set altogether. One that I seem to lack, although I finally have come up with a solid idea in the last year that might get me somewhere whenever I'm ready to make the move. I'm sure if I spent significant time preparing, I could do well at Google's interview process, and other FAANG companies have tried multiple times to get me to interview (oddly, never Google), but I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me. I've been much happier working for smaller companies. The one time I worked for a large corporation years ago, I was miserable. People say Google is different, but I'm not convinced. I would like that sweet compensation, though.
  - danzig13 7y ago
    Don’t forget a lot of entrepreneurs fail until they don’t.
ampdepolymerase 7y ago
It is actually pretty well known that the second way into FAANGs is through acquisition.
- monoideism 7y ago
  I've heard of at least some of the FAANGs do the typical interview process for acquisitions.
  - ampdepolymerase 7y ago
    That sounds terrible, can you elaborate?
    - monoideism 7y ago
      I've read from blog posts and even from conversations that companies require acquihires, particularly non-founder employees, to go through an interview process. It may be shortened, but they still often have to do the typical algorithmic interviews. I'll see if I can find one of the blog posts I've read about the process. Note: to be clear, I'm describing the process for acquihires, not founders just wanting to sell their company and walk away with some cash (which actually seems to be somewhat unusual). Edit: this was discussed in a similar thread on HN just last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943500
      - gambiting 7y ago
        Is that a uniquely American thing? I'm 100% certain that even if the company I work for was acquired, my current contract would still apply. So I would need to be given at least 3 months notice, and couldn't be discharged without a good reason - failing some internal interview wouldn't be such a reason.
        hansvm 7y ago
        Perhaps. Most places in the US an employment contract can be terminated at will for almost any reason or without any specific reason.
neilk 7y ago
I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all. Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image. Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change? Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change. I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.
- thewhitetulip 7y ago
  > Unearned privilege? I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code" But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?
  - neilk 7y ago
    I took that part out. I don’t really know what is in other people’s minds.
  - paganel 7y ago
    Now I’m curious why they didn’t use dicts, I love dicts. I’ve been writing Python for a living for almost 15 years now and dictionaries and (reasonable) list comprehensions still attract me like they did the first day I “met” them.
    - thewhitetulip 7y ago
      I don't know. It was bizzare to hear it. To be honest the lady taking the interview didn't understand my code, at least that's what I got. The guy with her definitely didn't understand a line I had written. Maybe that was her way of protecting herself or something else But I've never come across any real reason to not use dicts
- numpad0 7y ago
austincheney 7y ago
You could have saved a lot of space just saying button pressers. This is most large companies and why I am burnt out on writing software professionally. The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play it safe, follow popular trends, and don’t take any risks on product improvements. To think about it another way the idea is to create mediocre software with mediocre developers because the software is thought to cost less than finding, hiring, and retaining top quality people.
- ozim 7y ago
  Now connect the dots with: How much customers are willing to pay for software developer work? They don't want to pay anything. They don't deserve best software written by best developers. Take for example GIT, which is extraordinary piece of software, saves a lot of problems and time. If it was not free, most software shops would just keep copies of folders with dates or whatever insane ways they had (SVN is for me insane way as well :) and big paid VCS were popular at big co's. not even one became close to "industry standard" as GIT).
evidencepi 7y ago
Agree, they want smart workers (well you have to be smart at some degree to do software). And they don't care if they will miss some genius, they just let other companies help the selection process, and if you turn out to be gold, they will pay a big money to get you.
shaan1 7y ago
Makes perfect sense. Thats when you know you need to short the stock in the LONG RUN. Because all they know is taking orders from someone and running it. This is the same with all companies. If Mark Zuckerberg steps down from Facebook, you can pretty much know, it's going to go down.
ernst_klim 7y ago
> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. I think the reason is a bit different. Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm. That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anything else. Their code is pretty bad most of the time, they've took beautiful Webkit and turned it into Blink mess. They are all about algorithms, they don't care about code. And that's a pity that people are copying Google's methodology without understanding why Google is doing so. If you are developing an OS, you'd be better copying Microsoft, which had much of a different approach, nearly without any algorithm questions.
- hanswesterbeek 7y ago
  Indeed! This cultural / historical angle of looking at the issue hits the nail on the head.

EpicEng 7y ago

Wow. I don't have as prolific a tale as that, but I'm in the looking stage right now and the idea of cramming for a test I haven't taken in 12 years annoys the hell out of me. I've done some pretty interesting things in biotech in my career, things that required learning about motion control, digital imaging, signal processing, and biology... but if I want a job as a web dev I apparently need to memorize how to implement every sorting algorithm... on a whiteboard... in ten minutes. The fact that I know which to use when is irrelevant. Bleh.

Psychlist 7y ago
This is part of the reason why I've only consulted into big companies, and only briefly. It's not just that I am not that sort of person, it's that I don't like being around that sort of person. Software engineering is also another field where there's no effective upper limit on difficulty. In other words, no matter how good you are you (should) always feel that you're barely capable of understanding what you're supposed to be doing, let alone doing it. That's right from "make a single static web page" to "submit binary fix to close-source compiler" or whatever the high end of your particular field is (Win a technical argument with the C++ standards committee? Shave 0.001% off the load time of the google homepage? Discover a new way to monetise users?).
wuschel 7y ago
Hi EpicEng, just out of curiosity to learn more about your project: Where could I contact you? Cheers!
blaufast 7y ago
Having worked at cutting edge biotech,startups and FAANG I wholeheartedly defend the interview process, and believe you would too if you ever switched over for a while
- RobRivera 7y ago
  I think there's a certain breed of people who will pony up the time and resources to levelup for the interview, and the compliment. Ignoring the privilege of resource availability, i think its totally doable and worthwhile. I come from a blue collar family and I think my old man would love to hear I can pull off miraculous study habits for a month to take home the kind of paychecks offered for hitting a keyboard. Granted, if the money were not there, I would not find it worthwhile. I would probably just focus on founding my own company.

fossuser 7y ago

If learning is the naive approach to getting good grades then programming fun projects is the naive approach to passing technical interviews. "If tests truly were tests of learning, things wouldn't be so bad. Getting good grades and learning would converge, just a little late. The problem is that nearly all tests given to students are terribly hackable. Most people who've gotten good grades know this, and know it so well they've ceased even to question it. You'll see when you realize how naive it sounds to act otherwise." http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

dickjocke 7y ago

Also after the Redhat and then IBM acquisition I wonder if you came out in a better position in the end anyway.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gentleman11 7y ago

I spent my time learning instead of drilling too and don’t regret it. My bank balance does though :( I want to work for myself however in the long run and I think the skills are more important for that

courtf 7y ago

I love these anecdotes, thank you! The greatest programmer I've had the privilege of working closely with could easily pass most technical screens, but he's an odd fellow, and I don't think could handle the stress and anxiety of these crazy interviews. Lots of diamonds in the rough out there, but I suppose large companies understand that and just consider it acceptable loss.

wutbrodo 7y ago
That's what every bitter HN comment on the topic forgets. If Larry Page could sit down and talk to each candidate, I'm sure he'd be able to properly assess these kinds of corner cases. The challenge isn't being able to do that at an individual level; it's being able to do it in a way that's somewhat consistent and scalable across tens of thousands of interviewers and millions of candidates. Any large system is going to have false positives and negatives, and hiring is broken to begin with at most companies (assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard)
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  There must be people who'd want to specialize in that, though, if it's possible. It sounds like a fun job.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    That's still waving away the difficulty of taking an entity's goal and losslessly/consistently distributing it into thousands of individuals. It's just not a possible task.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  > assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard Predicting the future is very difficult, and therefore probably not what interviews are designed to optimise for. Interviews probably optimise for something like: The candidate seemed like a reasonable choice at the time / cover-your-arse scenario.

bilekas 7y ago

One thing to note about coding interviews, they're very simular to somone looking over your shoulder while you're working. Nobody can perform well like that.. One great colleague who I wish I was in the interview for, simple started thinking out loud. Everything he was thinking, he said out loud, and of course, the team loved it. Because thats all it's about. If its not over a video chat/submission, comment your code your thoughts, remember, they want to know you chain of though, not your knowledge of a framework/algorithm (unless its very specific) > Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview If you know how to figure out the problem, forget the technical side and explain how you would go and figure it out. Problem solve. Don't worry.

karlkatzke 7y ago
So I had an interview that was like that, but I wasn’t given enough information. I was asked to implement the “inverse square law in code” ... and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college (I looked up all of the interviewers on linkedin, so I had a good idea of their experience and areas of expertise) that my first step as someone who hadn’t been in an academic environment or exposed to this kind of requirement for over a decade would be to research the requirement and asked if I could consult a Wikipedia article. “No, you can’t consult outside sources.” “Ok, can you explain to me the inverse square law?” “No, you should know this.” I didn’t know that. Also, I didn’t have enough information to ask good questions, because I was pretty sure that this was an incomplete specification and I needed to ask informed questions to reach a particular implementation. As a result, the company’s evaluation was that I didn’t know how to code.
- UncleOxidant 7y ago
  In years past something like this in an interview would've rattled me. But now that I've been in this biz for 30+ years I think I'd just stand up, look the guy in the eye in a really squinty way and say, "Well, then I think we're done here kid" and walked out. You get to a point where you just won't put up with this kind of bullshit after a while.
- monoideism 7y ago

new_realist 7y ago

Google had the equivalent of etcd a long, long time ago.

scarejunba 7y ago
True, but its a very technically sound product. Authoring it as an intern cannot be anything but a sign of prodigious skill. As an amusing anecdote, I didn't drill for internship interviews either and I ended up at a successful startup by sheer luck. I did well there, but I never achieved the level of technical brilliance that OP did. I feel like there were far more opportunities like this 8 years ago when I was doing that, though.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Was it general and polished enough to get traction though? What’s its name?
- new_realist 7y ago
  etcd didn’t work initially; I wouldn’t call it polished. https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul
  - empath75 7y ago
    It worked, it had a bug.
- ai_ja_nai 7y ago
  Chubby. It was the product that inspired Zookeeper and all its various incarnations, including etcd.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Ah, the attempt to claim credit for something that likely wasn’t inspired by Chubby at all. etcd was inspired by a hash-map more so than Chubby.

markbnj 7y ago

> but they run a lot of my code in production :P. We run your code in production too! Thanks!

yahyaheee 7y ago

Lol that’s amazing, you should write an article on this

yodsanklai 7y ago

> When my classmates preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. There are plenty of people who do both. They work on their projects, and when needed, they prepare for coding interviews.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

I'm sure that "Giant Search and Advertising Company" would never hire me. But they did buy patents with my name on them.

reaperducer 7y ago

Google does not want bright, creative people anymore. Google only wants drones now. It's a shift that coincided with its change from a technology company to an advertising company.

huffmsa 7y ago

> Can you regurgitate the answer to this already solved problem? No, but I can write a storage solution that works even when your dummy engineers are actively melting down servers. Ah, the difference between "computer science" and "software engineering".

arthev 7y ago
To quote Hamming: """In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.""" It follows that regurgitating answers to already solved problems is good engineering :)

GistNoesis 7y ago

You've got to admire this well lubricated machine, they are getting the milk and didn't have to pay for the cow. They are happy. You are happy. People are jumping higher and higher hoops with a smile. Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Hopefully as a wiser person you have your contingency ready for when the machine come to collect its blood tribute.

blueboo 7y ago

Two questions. How long do you think it would’ve taken you to prepare and ace these kinds of coding interview questions? (I bet less than 100 hours.) But I’m more interested in the following: what interview process do you think would have correctly (and reliably) evaluated someone with your profile?

Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
A company that cannot come up with a better more interesting process isn’t somewhere I want to work. How about making the questions broad enough for every candidate to have some input and evaluate them on what they choose to focus on? Something like, “How would you design an ATM?” There should never be a right answer to an interview question, just a candidate that solves problems in a way that fills a gap in your company.
Redoubts 7y ago
Personally I appreciate the questions that are 1) open ended design questions 2) here's some broken code, fix everything 3) probe depth of understanding of tools/language I always feel the Algo whiteboard questions feel like a "did you take the same DS class I did" round.
- jonex 7y ago
  1 is included in at least Google interviews. 3 requires that you hire for a specific tool/language use, most programmers are able to learn new tools and languages in the time time periods that are hired for. I'd like to do more of 2, understanding, debugging, fixing and refactoring code is, in my experience, more of the day to day work than writing entirely new code. I don't know why this is not typically part of interviewing, maybe there's some reason it doesn't work? It would be interesting to see a more comprehensive evaluation of this approach.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

Two things. The google interview process was not made to filter you out. It was made to guarantee that they will not make a mistake on hiring you. People with the capability to do those interview problems have a high chance of being good programmers. There are many people like you who can't do those problems but are still very good programmers. Google doesn't need to hire you, the whole interview process is optimized for preventing a bad hire rather than finding people like you who are good hires but can't interview. Second, traversing a tree in level order is a trivial problem from the interview question perspective. It is more than likely that this question will NOT be given by the interviewer because it is too easy. The interview questions FAANG tends to give are a bit more novel. In fact the method in which you use to solve this problem and the problem itself is often just taught directly in school depending on the class you're in, meaning you don't need to practice interview questions to solve it because it's a basic topic. The solution is called tree traversal using BFS. If you didn't know this, despite working on and creating things like etcd you will appear stupid because the question is just too basic. When I interview I am 100% expecting questions way harder than this... even on phone interviews. Additionally when I'm the interviewer this type of question is the lowest bar, I will fail someone who can't answer this question. This is not to comment on your abilities. Rather it is to give you a dose of truth. I truly believe that there are many people like you who can program an entire kernel but can't even solve fibonacci recursively on a white board. Despite this I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.

ideal0227 7y ago
Thanks for educating me about BFS. I am major in computer science, and published paper in top conference. Tree traversal is trivial for me. So I guess I have decent CS background and knowledge? Writing bug free and perfect code is not equal to simply solve the problem. If you have prepared coding interviews (especially for new grad and internship), you should understand it is less about knowledge but more about practicing and memorization for that specific purpose. The time spent on it is almost a waste in the future. If the interview is knowledge based or problem solving oriented, I am all for it. Sadly, it is not today in many places. And that is exactly why website like Leetcode exists.

99_00 7y ago

So everyone got what they wanted? You did the project you wanted. AWS and Google got the code they wanted. Your friends for the jobs they wanted.

sumedh 7y ago
> AWS and Google got the code they wanted. Depends, if he was still working in Big Tech Co, they could have potentially not open sourced it, they could have used his secret sauce to get better system performance compared to competitors.

lowbloodsugar 7y ago

I hope the message that people take away from this anecdote is that "even the best people don't always pass an interview at AWS first time". But if someone is interested in the benefits AWS has to offer, try again. I interviewed three times before getting hired there, and I am the happiest I have ever been. I work with great people, on high-stakes, challenging problems that match my strengths, and we work 40 hour weeks, including time for beer. I have enough time outside work to learn new things (this year some basic FPGA programming). And skiing is 90 minutes away.

sha90 7y ago

Getting good signal-to-noise ratio from ANY interview, forget the big cos, is really difficult. I've seen great programmers passed over because they were _not_ given a chance to whiteboard and show their technical skill. At the end of the day, there is a bit of randomness to the process of sizing anyone up in an hour, and people will make bad calls. That said, I'm skeptical about your particular story. As a process rule, AWS doesn't provide interview feedback, so I'm pretty sure you don't _actually_ know why you were rejected, you can only guess. Perhaps if you were rejected in phone screen(s) it can be obvious, but if you made it to an on-site, I can guarantee (based on experience being in the room during hiring decisions at AWS) that they don't almost someone because of one bad whiteboarding result; there are multiple people collecting and reporting on results and only one person, the bar raiser, has veto power, and I've never seen it used for something as banal as not writing perfect code. I also don't know what happened in your interview, but consider it's also possible that you completely bombed it: failed to ask questions, failed to communicate properly, or made more mistakes than you even realize. It's certainly great that you went on to do great things, but maybe at the time you interviewed you weren't yet doing those great things...

rumanator 7y ago

> AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. I hate to break it to you, but Amazon doesn't reject a candidate because he bombed his coding challenge. I know people who received a job offer from Amazon for a developer position although they somewhat bombed their hard skills component. If you were rejected after passing the coding challenge and phone screening interview then odds are you actually bombed their personality and/or soft skills aspect of their interview process.

anticensorship 7y ago
[Thinking to themselves:] "Is this serf really the right kind of drone, the type who will fit neatly--much like an unthinking cog--into our organizational machinery?" Maybe he accidentally let it slip that he thought the South should have won and Robert E. Lee had some good ideas.
- rumanator 7y ago
  Yeah, they do weed out racists and misogynists and people who in general have a problem with minorities even if they can traverse a graph like a champ, but as far as I know the main reason why someone is rejected after passing the online test and phone screening is having serious problems with their personality and soft skills that, as a whole, render the candidate unable to improve to an acceptable level and thus are unsalvageable.