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Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by snorkel on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @01:38PM (#15492905)
I found Google's dev interview to be especially difficult, I personally hate doing hours of whiteboard coding (sorry, I tend to code on computers instead, silly me) ... So I wasn't hired, but those who worked as devs there told me that's a blessing because after all the rigorous interviewing bluster they'll assign devs to remedial code refactoring anyway. I'm not a rockstar coder above doing the housekeeping work but doesn't sound fun either. Why hire top coders then assign them intern busy work? I wonder if the strategy was to just drain the local talent pool of top coders so competitors had less of a candidate pool. Just odd to set the interview bar so high, and for what purpose?
Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by nradov on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @01:53PM (#15493057)
I don't work at Google, but code refactoring is critically important in the real world. It's not intern work.
Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by away2017throw on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @02:38PM (#15493525)
Why not, like, test refactoring skills? Mind blown!
Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by alexasmyths on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @02:35PM (#15493498)
Re-factoring is probably 80% of the job.

New projects are rare, so very few are writing a lot of code from scratch.

Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by foota on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @01:51PM (#15493032)
You leave your interns to do code quality refactors? Seems like something more experienced engineers should do.
Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by nishs on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @06:14PM (#15495416)
FWIW, interns on the team I interned on had the chance to work on experimental, new features that required little to no refactoring. Maintaining existing code was done by developers who knew the code well and were capable of making measured engineering decisions.
Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by balls187 on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @05:21PM (#15495087)
> Just odd to set the interview bar so high, and for what purpose?

Check Google's stock price.

Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by throwayit on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @04:45PM (#15494765)
I actually find refactoring legacy code to be one of the most challenging things I do at work.

While I definitely wouldn't want to do that for all 40 hours of work I wouldn't classify refactoring as "remedial".

Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless by cycrutchfield on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @02:01PM (#15493134)
If that's the attitude you brought to the interview, then perhaps that's why you were not hired?

What percent of software engineers' time do you think is spent doing green-field development with no refactoring, writing tests, documentation, etc.?