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Re:Google Interview University – Plan for studying to become... by partycoder on Thursday October 06, 2016 @11:38AM (#12653348)
Google does have projects that require clear understanding of the things you classify as trivia.

Their search crawler, their distributed computing technology from which projects like Hadoop drew inspiration from, their cloud platform with custom hardware, Tensorflow, their custom Linux kernel and Android, improvements to network protocols like HTTP, v8, Chrome, Project Zero, and user facing apps like Maps, Translate, etc, etc, etc. All those important projects will require you to know your way around the fundamentals from the ground up and think out of the box.

Then, they have lots of applicants. They can be more selective than they need to.

Re:Google Interview University – Plan for studying to become... by pjlegato on Thursday October 06, 2016 @12:06PM (#12653597)
The second factor is far more important than the first.

There are any number of engineers who can simply go read up on the fundamentals as they are needed, or who understand them well enough to work with them but lack a mathematical proof-level command of the material. Google just doesn't need to hire them because they're paying much higher than market rate.

Re:Google Interview University – Plan for studying to become... by partycoder on Friday October 07, 2016 @02:28AM (#12658635)
Trial and error doesn't go that far. Also they have customers and a reputation to maintain, they cannot afford the risk of learning going wrong.