How to: Work at Google — Example Coding/Engineering Interview

Whether or not 'everyone' wants to work there is not hugely material. They, and others that do the white-boarding, are 'the best'. They have loads of talent, operational efficiency, ship tons of great products with great innovations. White-boarding done appropriately is an excellent means to develop an understanding of people's aptitudes in a short period of time. Here is an example of a Google white boarding interview, it's excellent in many ways: link to this video

'Ask clarifying questions' and 'think out loud' are also two of the suggestions in this excellent video from Google showing an example of a great technical interview: link to this video

Very good points, agree with it. However - I don't think this is about 'ego' or even 'humility' - I think those are not the right words. It's a lack of contextual understanding both in 'self awareness' and also the interviewers plight. I think the premise can be taught. Also, I think interviews can be structured to find qualities independant of background. + Questions that don't measure a person's ability to 'memorize algorithms' are a good start. + Allowing devs to pick their language of expression, i.e. sometimes they are more comfortable in one lang than another. + Don't get syntax/code structure confused with the abstract problem if that's what one is going for. Google has a nice intervi…

"I personally don't recommend those kinds of companies " You wouldn't recommend Google, Microsoft, Facebook and a host of the best companies in the world because they do 'white board interviews'? You're not only working against the data here, you're working against reason: asking people to solve problems that they may encounter on the job is an excellent means of measuring a number of things, even beyond their ability to solve this problem. There are still quite a lot of 'senior engineers' who actually might be valuable in some specific circumstances, who can't walk through problems or write decent code at all. This example 1 from Google is really quite good. If you watch carefully you'll…

…and Facebook both put out content that walk you through how to solve problems like this. When you get an interview, you can delay it as long as you want, they can tell you the sort of problems to study: go read "Cracking the Coding Interview". Facebook sends you a link to it and a video of the author working a problem. Google sends you stuff like link to this video . There are thousands of toy questions, and it's not feasible to memorize them all. The correct _and expected_ thing to do is study up for the category. Now that your candidates have in theory studied, you'll get a studied, "best" performance for each candidate, and interview outcomes can be compared in a very low-bias, apples-to-apples way…