

How to Ace a Google Interview - tokenadult
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204552304577112522982505222.html

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kls
_Google's quirky interviewing works for Google. But other companies need to
understand why it works at the tech giant_

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that it is not working for Google
the proof is in the lack of marketable products coming out of Google. While
the people that work at Google are brilliant the hiring practice filters for a
certain type of prejudiced brilliance. In fact by it design it favors left
brained individuals with analytical minds. Put simply Google filters out the
very people that could turn cool tech into cool products.

Their is no doubt in my mind that a person like Miyamoto, Land, or Jobs would
be filtered out of Google's hiring process by it's very bias towards a
particular preconceived notion of brilliance. Put simply it's the hubris of
brilliant people making the assumption that the definition of brilliance is
the characteristics that make them brilliant. The reality is that yes, there
are tough problems to solve, but not every day is filled with complex riddles.
Sometimes less tangible brilliance is required and these practices leave a
company devoid of those individuals.

For me personally I ask two questions when I hire and they have served me
well, I ask show me something that you have built and show me the routine that
you are most proud of in that code base. Passion and creativity as well as
other less tangible brilliance will be displayed in talking with someone about
what they have built.

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googoobaby
Bravo!

My encounter with the Google hiring process involved being asked to
regurgitate from memory constants from C standard headers. That was
enlightening as to the sort of skills valued by the ubermenchen.

~~~
kls
Right there are people that just don't solve problems by memorization, for me
personally, I don't answer questions on the spot. I reflect, I have to
understand the need for the problem in the first place before I can even begin
to solve it. Due to this I also lock up when someone asks me a memorization
question. You can ask me something as simple as "hey what was that guys name?"
I can know the person for a decade and by the very nature of being asked to
recall it on the spot will cause me to blank. It's not the way my mind works.
As such I generally decline to do quizzes for interviews, because I don't
think they increase the the odds of hiring talent and worse they can cause a
company to damage itself via a bias for a particular personality type.

If a person brings in a working application and shows me that they have
delivered and can walk me through logic that they have created, then I can get
a feel for a variate of traits that that person posses, further, they can't BS
their way through it, they can't grab code off the net and show it and
competently tell me what they did. A person that walks through my door and
shows me that they have delivered to production a working application
instantly scores much higher than an individual that knows obscure language
nuances that we all know on this board are hardly ever uses and if you do you
a) look it up and b) wrap it behind an API so that future programmers are not
having to deal with the obscurity. Many times developers, especially younger
developers mistake cleverness for elegance, testing for cleverness does not
guarantee that you will have elegant solutions.

On a related note to this subject, there is a quote from Einstein that I
really like:

 _Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a
tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid._

The premise is that most everybody does have something that they excel at, but
that we as humans judge intelligence and productivity in our own image. As
such we discount the intelligence of others due to the fact that it is alien
to our own. For some that discounting can have a profound effect on those
individuals ability to excel.

