Re:The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
by lomnakkus on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @09:29PM
(#14103348)
It "comes up all the time"... and these ballpark guesses are probably(!) completely useless for anything remotely practical. At the scale Google's operating you want a Statistician, not a Guesstimator.
So, no, still not useful questions.
To be fair to Google (in regard to this one filter question only), they actually are up front about expecting a significantly higher baseline of general mathematical awareness (even for non-mathy roles) than most other shops. At any rate, this kind of estimation comes up in capacity planning (both in architecture planning, and for algorithms on a single box) all the time. Which after all is what Google does, at nearly every level of their stack, (nearly) all the time.