Re:Google Interview University – Plan for studying to become...
by bmay on Thursday October 06, 2016 @01:32PM
(#12654342)
1) If you know what a DAG is and how to use it, you can most likely implement and traverse one in way less than an hour.
2) I've never heard of anyone being asked to implement a red-black tree during a Google interview.
Re:Google Interview University – Plan for studying to become...
by vonmoltke on Thursday October 06, 2016 @02:49PM
(#12654981)
> 1) If you know what a DAG is and how to use it, you can most likely implement and traverse one in way less than an hour.
I know what it is and how to use it. I can implement and traverse one. I seriously doubt I could do it in an hour, especially if I don't have at least standard library documentation available.
Re:Google Interview University – Plan for studying to become...
by Ar-Curunir on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:01PM
(#12655608)
Whiteboard code interviews don't require you to flesh out such things in any great detail; they're intended as proxies for your thinking process.
Re:Google Interview University – Plan for studying to become...
by vonmoltke on Friday October 07, 2016 @10:09AM
(#12660738)
You should tell that to some of my whiteboard coding interviewers, then. Plus, I feel that many of the interviewers who claim to be interested in though process still have a "right" way in mind and will dock interviewees for not approaching a problem the way they would.
Anyway, the post I was replying to said, " you can most likely implement and traverse one in way less than an hour" (emphasis mine). That statement has nothing to do with thought processes. To me, that requires "flesh[ing] out such things in any great detail".
If you can drive, you probably have a pretty good idea of whether a car or a truck or a motorcycle or a tank is the best vehicle for a particular transport application, and you can probably actually drive all of those with minimal practice. That doesn't require you to know how to build a car, a truck, a motorcycle, and a tank from scratch. That's a different skillset.
Google pays far above market rate, so they have the luxury of hiring petrochemists to work a gas pump. Even at Google, once all the shiny is stripped away, most of the projects are simple CRUD.