I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by legohead on Thursday May 16, 2019 @11:33AM (#19929932)

> They presented three design challenge options to pick from, with a weeks notice and advised that we should spend no more that 3–5 hours on the task (wink, wink)

I guess as a programmer I'm too logical. You tell me X hours, that's all I'm going to spend. For one of my past interviews I was given a task to make a multiplayer battleship game using whatever I wanted, and was told to spend 2 hours total and they didn't expect me to finish.

I got some rudimentary client/server communication going and that was it. No game logic at all.

Didn't get the job: "However, we would have liked to have seen you get further on the project in the same amount of time."

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Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by nkohari on Thursday May 16, 2019 @12:15PM (#19930310)

I think we interviewed for the same job. I did the same thing, and got the same response.

It was such a short timespan that I assumed it was a trick question, and they wanted to see if I could come up with a creative solution that technically met the requirements but was extremely simple. I implemented a board which you could put pins on, and a text-based chat system using websockets. The idea was that it would work like a table-top simulator.

Nope, turns out they wanted a real solution. I wonder how many companies who use these examples actually attempt them before using them to hire people. My guess is they might be more realistic if they did.

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Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by ryandrake on Thursday May 16, 2019 @12:38PM (#19930512)

I’d like to code review an example of what a successful hire finished in the allotted time. My guess is the code is bananas.

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Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by projektfu on Thursday May 16, 2019 @03:57PM (#19932468)

I bet it wouldn't be hard to knock something out in Squeak or Pharo. They'd probably give you 0 marks for that alone.

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Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by projektfu on Thursday May 16, 2019 @11:37AM (#19929968)

Sets up vagrant, python, pip, reads requirements.

Oops, 2 hours.

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Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by retiredcoder on Thursday May 16, 2019 @11:42AM (#19930012)

Yeah, 2 hrs barely touch anything new in my current job, where we have a lot of boilerplater and in-house infrastructure built by the devprod team. Some companies either take those for granted or just deliberately make the bar extra high for arbitrary reasons.

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Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by gregd on Thursday May 16, 2019 @11:50AM (#19930087)

It takes me almost 2 hrs to recover (i.e.: reengage) after meetings...totally unrelated to coding or whatever project I'm working on.

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Re:I turned my interview task for Google into a startup by retiredcoder on Thursday May 16, 2019 @02:37PM (#19931625)

I hope one day, well I actually hope to be alive to see, that one day humanity will have enough understand of the brain to teach us our cognitive limitations and how to effective work around/out them. Not long ago I quit one of my jobs because I simply couldn’t learn to be effective due to meetings and all the interruptions commonly seen in an open office/agile/start-up company. Seriously, I can’t be a better engineer in such environment.

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