1. This is Guido van Rossum. If I were him and asked to solve puzzles, I'd tell the hiring company to fuck off.
2. These quizzes aren't so bad, but the pressure and stakes make it incredibly stressful. There's no standard, and often times the interviewer is the one that sucks.
> We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process?
I'm pretty sure your opinion here is not that of your employer.
When I was leaving Google the first time, I asked my skip lead (who was employee #48 there, ended up running all of Search, and was previously a core HotSpot engineer at Sun) why he chose to work at a small startup when, coming off of HotSpot in 1999, he could work anywhere. He replied "Aside from them being one of very few companies with an engineer-centric culture, they were the only company that required I interview. Everybody else was willing to hire me on the spot."
For some personality types - and particularly the ones likely to do world-class work - being challenged is a positive sign. It means that the employer does their due diligence, and they will mostly be working with other people who react positively to a challenge.
To me, due diligence would be more like using software that someone has created. If it feels snappy then they're good enough at algorithms for the kind of software that they create, if it doesn't then maybe it's worth looking into whether or not there's a good reason for that.
Like if you apply for a job at the NYT, I doubt they make you do a timed writing test with people staring at you and asking you questions in the middle. They probably just read some of the previous work you've done.
I do not want to work with anyone who finds that getting their hands dirty is beneath them. It is very, very rarely going to be a good use of their time to do those problems. It will often be a good use of their time to teach those problems. A senior engineer, even one who’s unlikely to work with junior engineers on a regular basis, will need to explain their thinking. They need to show humility and compassion. Those are practiced attributes. This precise situation is the best practice you can get - New and Unknown person, some amount of challenge and complexity involved.
Thinking that whiteboarding problems are a bad use of time is a very strong signal for a senior person who is out of touch.
When you are considering hiring a nobody, this is acceptable. You will interview multiple people, and they will interview at multiple places, so the randomness isn't that important.
But if you want to hire one specific guy as a strategic hire, suddenly the randomness may no longer be acceptable.
It's really scary to go to company that is willing to hire you without ever talking to you.
(Unfortunately this happened in a small Eastern-European country, so the company was an investment bank, not Google.)
That would be amusing, but he'd have to be disguised, as he's rather recognizable, having done a lot of 'State of the Python' talks and the like.
He doesn't look as much like Rick Moranis as he used to, though, so that helps: https://gvanrossum.github.io/images/[email protected]
![https://gvanrossum.github.io/images/[email protected]](https://gvanrossum.github.io/images/Guido@200dpi.jpg){kind=link}
Not sure what you're trying to get at:
MacOS homebrew creator is an effin nobody compared to Guido, therefore he should "know his place", "get in line" and invert a binary tree on the whiteboard and act like an obedient tech interview candidate that he really is?
OR
MacOS homebrew creator should've told Google to fuck off?
"The US constitution is like an overgrown enlightenment dissertation. The founding fathers did a good job at growing the United States, and this is a great achievement! It requires certain personal traits not everyone has. But at a technical level, they made many beginner's mistakes when drafting the constitution, which the country tried to fix later, but not always successfully."
:-P
You'd certainly be wrong to assume that Americans are all in favor of our foreign policy, to say the least. Aside from that, some of the downsides to the US constitution that inspired my comment include the way the founding fathers totally failed to anticipate that the nation would be completely polarized by a two party system, and that this polarization would happen along geographic lines.
Admittedly, this compromise whereby rural states with lower populations enjoy disproportionate political representation is baked into the constitution being agreed to in the first place (the 3/5ths compromise being relevant here as well). As we've moved to more direct democracy, with things like the electoral college being bound to the (local) popular vote and the direct election of senators, the original intentions of having a federation of mostly autonomous states becomes more and more anachronistic, while still fueling an increasingly polarized electorate that pits high-tax revenue and high population centers like SF and NY against low-tax revenue and low population centers that make up most of the country.
The United States is large geographic region with a heterogeneous economy. I don't know if a parliamentary form of government would have served this kind of country well, but certainly most friends from abroad who have spoken to me on the subject have implied that proportional representation is far more sensible than FPTP voting, and that parliamentary forms of government avoid the gridlock and polarization that our de facto two-party system engenders.
Please find me another "Masters Project" that has 8 Million+ Users and drives the backend for thousands of tech companies worldwide. Good Luck.
If you think a single function is equivalent to an entire Language you should get your head checked.
And I'm willing to bet when Google hired Guido in 2005, they didn't put him through a coding challenge humiliation clown show day.
Yes, that's exactly what he should have done.
I really just want to thank you for putting this useless mentality on display.
Almost 30 years of BDFL of Python, sorry don't care, go do 200 leetcode before talking to us. And if you don't spit out the answer a few seconds faster than that fresh graduate, clearly you're a lesser engineer and should be rejected.
I think it's my favorite example of how crazy some interview processes can get, lol.
The real question is why Larry Summers is going to a quant interview? Did he apply for a quant role?
I had a Nobel Prize winner as a physics professor in college who got three successive different wrong answers when attempting a freshman physics problem in office hours. That doesn't mean that physics isn't the right place for him to work.
not going to debate that, but I'm curious, what do you rank as #1 and #2?
That list is ranking languages by current popularity, though, rather than 'importance'.
I'd define 'importance' as more along the lines of "amount of havoc created if all software written using that language were broken/deleted at once".
We should not give too much importance to this, but the fact is that Python is now ranked consistently #1, #2 or #3 in sufficiently many rankings to consider it seriously.
Google or Wikipedia can tell you who Guido van Rossum is.
(that said, my path to being hired did involve writing a sudoku solver, but that wasn't in an interview for a position at Microsoft)
My story likely isn't replicable, but everyone has to find their way
I interviewed for Citus a couple weeks before they announced being acquired. I found out about the acquisition on Hacker News before having received an offer. They were able to get me in without going through the hiring process again
Initially I'd be moving to San Francisco but I wasn't eligible for any visas as I don't have a post secondary education. Staying in Canada's worked out
Some examples of things working out here: I was asked to implement some parsing, & well that's not so hard when you've written a Lua parser a year beforehand: https://github.com/serprex/luwa/blob/master/rt/astgen.lua (an astute reader will notice I don't handle precedence here, which is pretty important for arithmetic parsing. That's because I opted to implement shunting yard during codegen phase)
What value does this story give a reader? I only think it'd serve to continue an argument about how not everyone is so lucky, which isn't the original argument of "unless you're VP/Distinguished Engineer, not even Guido van Rossum gets to skip whiteboarding"
Keep telling yourself that as you fix mindless bugs in some Advertising platform lol.
Oh so that's why the Azure Portal UI is such garbage. Their frontend developers are just busy solving knapsack problems...
""" Python's BDFL-emeritus, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, Computer History Fellow. Opinions are my own. He/him. """
Lol! I'd bet my year salary they didn't.
That being said, ability to solve coding problems efficiently (not necessarily spit A* graph algo in sleep), but a decent close to real life coding challenge is fair game.
Programmer here. It's true. I deal with NP completeness every day.
It works here on HN too, many of my comments are upvoted jokes and I liked yours. It's sad it attracted animosity though.
I like browsing HN mostly for the interesting discussions, but I enthusiastically take the occasional jokes that come with them.
(I might have been upvoted by people taking my jokes seriously now that I think about it. I don't know if this is a terrifying or a funny thought!)
No way they even considered doing it... That's for people out of college...
If you are applying for a principal or higher engineer role and your job involves coding, you are asked coding questions. May be not just focused on a complex bookish algorithm only, but rather more close to a real life distributed programming / synchronization problem etc. for example.
The problem is rewarding rote memorization in a whiteboard interview, at the expense of actual understanding, and ability to research the problem.
If the profession being discussed is "academic work in Computer Science", sure.
If it is "software development", those things absolutely are not really "table stakes".
If it is "software engineering", then I don't think there is broad consensus on what that profession even is, much less what table stakes in it are.
No, nor do I think he was he hired for the other thing I discussed, academic computer science. The post I was responding to made a general comment about "CS graduates" and "our profession"; I was responding to that. Whether that post itself was material to, or merely tangential to, the discussion of GvR's hiring at Microsoft is an argument that, while perhaps interesting to some, was not the focus or concern of my response.
I would have thought that if you actually needed people to perform under pressure, you would design your test explicitly around that, instead of using “comfort with the whiteboard” as a proxy...
Do you mean it should be used as an actual speed test?
Table stakes for what exactly?
And to be clear: If you are unable to solve these common algorithmic questions that companies like Microsoft ask, then that's not the right place for you to work. This is a tangent, but there are literally thousands of companies that won't require you to solve these problems. The thing is, at Microsoft & co. you don't just do this in an interview. You do it at your job too. We do foundational work in many teams and we need to solve algorithmic problems practically every week. If you are unable to code yourself out of a DP problem or scared of NP completeness and approximation algorithms, then maybe find a different job instead of complaining about the interview process?