That's how long people study for the bar and board exams.

And that's after investing years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra schooling.

You also don't get to retake those every couple years.

There is a huge difference between a one time evaluation of an aspiring candidate to become a professional and a routine job interview for an established professional changing jobs in the same profession.

It would be pretty nice if as an industry we could figure out how to apply the DRY principle to interviewing. It's the biggest waste of time for both for candidates and interviewers that we need to establish whether a candidate with 20 years of experience can write a for loop every time they apply for any job.

In my uneducated opinion, Google's hazing interview is not to establish whether one can write a for loop or not but to establish how dedicated one is to working at Google. An anecdote: I interviewed at Google ~10 years ago and failed. They did not ask anything complicated (I don't know if it was because the polices were different or they actually needed someone with my expertise) but I had a complete brain freeze for some reason. Anyways, ever since then a Google recruiter reaches out every year or so. I always tell them to get lost because I already failed and they always respond that most of their employees pass on second or third time only.

Now, recruiters could have been lying about that but on the other hand, they obviously know that I applied before yet want me to apply again. I'd imagine a regular company would have done something about their recruitment process if they had that many false negatives. However, if I wanted to get dedicated employees, that would be exactly how I hired.

This is the real difference between the bar exam and a Google interview, in my eyes. The bar exam is intended to pass everyone who meets the standard: your score on the bar is supposed to be an accurate measurement of you. And conversely, if you know the material, you should pass the bar. California's bar exam is considered infamously difficult because the passing rate is "only" 45%.

None of that is true of the interview. There is no notional standard. Assessments of the same person vary wildly from sample to sample. If you know the material, you are nevertheless expected to fail.

This is very true. Unlike an examination there is neither a well defined set of questions nor even a well defined condition for succeeding! It's not good or bad as an interview should be an informal and subjective evaluation. But it does make comparison to an examination invalid just from the procedural point of view.

You can keep your Google job for 20+ years if you want.

> You also don't get to retake those every couple years.

What? Yes you do.

https://barprephero.com/learn/how-many-times-take-bar-exam/

But once you pass it and are admitted to the bar, you're set (assuming you renew your membership, don't change states, etc).

> you're set

If you mean set in terms of money, lawyer pay is strongly bimodal these days, with most lawyers earning the lower amount: https://www.lawcrossing.com/article/900049851/Is-Law-Still-a...

You're set in the sense that you don't have to take the exam again.

For those you get credentialed once and you're done. Not the same thing at all.

This was my same thought. Bar exam is an exam that leads to holding a professional license, I’m not seeing the comparison either other than “people are committed to the process”. Which...seems flimsy given (among other distinctions) the earning potential over the lifetime of a licensed attorney and the lifetime of someone who interviews for a Google job.

Most of those accreditations exist only as a barrier to join the guild and limiting the supply of people in an industry, driving up costs. They establish some baseline of competency but it's mostly just a way to keep people out of the field.

Perhaps, but it won’t be one or two binary pass/fail questions at random. Because that would be… ridiculous.

I hear this sentiment a lot about FAANG in particular.

Of course their bar to entry is very high, they are the one of highest paying employers in tech. If you want the pay and prestige, you have to play their game.

Where I would agree with you is when non-Google companies use Google tactics for hiring but pay like a mom and pop shop.

As an ex-Googler who did many interviews while there, I've never heard of that expectation.

Well, now you've heard of it.

I've heard of it, and I've heard that they just sort of take their good old time (and yours) with round after round after round of the process.

The interview process often moving way too slow is a well-known, long-standing problem. Expecting you to spend lots of time studying is another thing.

I've heard that people do it, though.

Interviewees are, as I mentioned above, explicitly informed of it. Interviewers may not be. Why would they be?

It’s part of the recruiter correspondence. They recommend books, practice sites, etc.

Google ≠ the industry.

If you're not a fresh graduate, likely you've had much of the preparation as part of your previous job experience.

You get to grind leetcode at your job?

No, but I get to write real code at my job.

They're not the same. I've never used Dijkstra pathfinding at my work, but I and yet, I seem to asked questions about it in interviews pretty consistently.

The goal isn’t to make sure you have memorized a graph algorithm. The goal is to identity people who can convert a scoped problem definition to code and to identify people who can convert a vague problem definition to a scoped one.

This can be beaten by brute force by memorizing a huge amount of material, but that isn’t the goal. It isn’t like the interviewers think you’ll need to implement their question in your day job.

Half the leetcode becomes obvious when you actually solve engineering problems as a part of the job.

That wasn't my experience at a FANG - the joke was that we spent most of our time moving protocol buffers around. Very rarely encountered anything as challenging algorithm wise as leetcode medium.

On the other hand working at FANG encourages developing soft skills (cross team wrangling etc) that no amount of leetcode would teach you.

That's why I don't work for FAANG any more.

What do you consider engineering problems? Many engineering problems aren't about algorithms but rather solving a real world problem.

Algorithms are just more tools to solve real world problems. Algorithm questions might be better if they were geared toward application rather than implementation.

This was a huge realization that I recently had. I didn't study CS in school, so the past couple months I've decided that I should learn the fundamentals in hopes of becoming a better developer. Learning about data structures and algorithms has definitely changed the way that I look at the world. It's nice to have knowledge of different types of problems and how to find solutions to them. Just a couple of hours ago I used a greedy algorithm to choose how to best structure my study time over the next week.

You usually don't need to re-implement an algorithm.

But very often you have to understand which algorithm to choose. Then you can pick an existing implementation.

In interviews I conduct I gladly allow to read the wikipedia page with a reference implementation (say, for the mentioned Dijkstra algorithm), or pick an implementation from a standard library of a language (say, for a priority queue). What I'm looking for is a conscious and reasonable choice of an approach, and understanding its trade-offs.

That's great! The interviews you conduct are atypical because allowing open book is most definitely not the norm for the format that forces candidates to Leetcode in order to practice.