
Google Foobar: A Post Mortem - ot
http://jacquerie.github.io/google-foobar-post-mortem/?
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wbhart
This is the first post mortem I found online relating to Google Foobar. I just
ran out of problems today, in the middle of level 8.

The questions were certainly interesting, and I agree with the summary of the
person who wrote the blog post at the link. This is not a cryptanalyst
recruiting tool, has nothing to do with a movie, and it doesn't really lead
anywhere. It's just a fun set of problems to solve.

They do send your details to a recruiter at the end of level 3 (the hard
problems are at levels 5 and 6). And you get a chance to look at some
interesting articles written by Googlers on problems they solved within the
company.

The challenge was very well done, on the whole, and it is clear some very
intelligent people work at Google.

I did encounter a number of errors in problem statements, and found a bug in
the online Python editor that is used for the challenge. I also managed to
submit an incorrect solution that passed all the tests, which I only
recognised after I submitted. The test cases were not very thorough. And for
some of the problems you could simply precompute a table of all the answers
and include it in the solution, though I personally chose not to do that.

As far as I can tell, for those who are curious, there is no secret pot of
gold at the end of this rainbow. I had been hoping for at least an ascii
graphic of rabbits escaping the clutches of the evil Doctor Boolean, and a
link to share "I finished Google Foobar" on social media or something. But
unfortunately, one simply exhausts the problem pool and it just stops mid....

