A Wretched Google Interview Experience

Re:A Wretched Google Interview Experience by paganel on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @04:58PM (#6246513)

> As for the calculus interview, that sounds like fair game. PMs are supposed to have some PM interviews and some SWE interviews, and math is a perfectly acceptable area to ask SWE candidates

I upvoted you because it's not fair to down-vote people who are on topic, but you're not correct when you assume that of all things calculus (!?) should have anything to do with hiring a PM.

I honestly fail to see how solving some Cauchy sequence-related stuff 10+ years after you finished your studies has anything to do with managing a bunch of programmers. And I'm not saying this as an I-hate-maths guy, in fact the only A+ I got in college was in calculus, but were I to be given such a question during an interview I would have just left.

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Re:A Wretched Google Interview Experience by jrockway on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @05:29PM (#6246705)

managing a bunch of programmers

The OP says his friend was interviewing for "product manager", which is not that. Product management is basically coming up with ideas for new products and seeing them through to the end. That includes helping design the actual computer program, which is why they ask software engineering questions.

(There are a ton of jobs called "PM", but they're all very different. None of them manage engineers, though, that's just "Manager" or "TLM".)

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Re:A Wretched Google Interview Experience by RogerL on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @06:50PM (#6247111)

Which requires calculus how?

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Re:A Wretched Google Interview Experience by bubbleRefuge on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @07:43PM (#6247335)

Sorry to barge in, my guess is that Google looks for the best of the best with a slant toward academia. So maybe a PM from a top notch b-school knows his calculus?

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Re:A Wretched Google Interview Experience by RogerL on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @09:03PM (#6247577)

That does seem to be their line of thought in most things, but in what universe is calculus in any way a measure of your ability to manage a product, even as a proxy? It's barking mad. I could be great at calculus but terrible as a PM, I could be a great PM yet terrible at math, and so on. I can see the point if I was applying to be PM for Mathcad or the like, but otherwise....

Working in this industry is just distressing. There are so many really clever people in this industry that cannot reason in any practical way (absolutely not calling you out, bubbleRefuge!!!) I work with a team that cannot figure source control out. People ask interview questions which a seconds introspection reveals will not measure real world performance. It goes on and on.

Sorry. I think I just realized I need a vacation. I deleted a much longer string of absurdities at the end of the paragraph above. My non-ranty point is that clever!=smart, and clever != job performance. Google has admitted in the press that their recommendations from interviews perform no better than chance. I don't get why that was hard to forsee. If you aren't measuring what you are trying to assess, chances are your results will be noise. "I wonder if this person is creative and can think up new product ideas. How will I determine that? Think, Roger, think. I know, I guess I'll ask him the math behind Cauchy distributions, and follow up with a problem in Hilbert space. That makes sense!" ;)

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Re:A Wretched Google Interview Experience by bubbleRefuge on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @01:37PM (#6251987)

Roge, you are a 100% right. It all begs the question, why are we so obsessed with working at big box companies? The reason this inefficiency in hiring exists is because Google can get away with it. If the short-term survival of G's business depended on hiring, they would have to do a better job.

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