Hey Terry,
Great to hear from you. I have tried reaching you several times over the years with no response.
Come join my band of Pirates sailing the seven seas, we plan to pwn the matrix and all the booty that come with it.
Seriously I am just around the block in Alviso, we should do lunch, you can bring some other l33t c0d3rs down too.
We are going to make to exobucks maybe even a googol but you'd have to leave Google.
Shoot me an E-mail john sokol at gmail dot com.
Say it ain't so, the Googletologists got you too.
Novel, Apple and now Google, you've always been part of that group think. (Jesse says Hi, he pointed that out)
> This whole thread has been pretty bogus.
Not at all. It's just a matter of perspective, you just can't see if from inside the Googlesphere.
> Google doesn't use brain teasers in interviews
I have had it and a number of commenters have also, there are numerous articles on the listing these "brain teasers" from Google Interview. So your own search engine will testify to the non bogarity of this thread. Maybe it's not company wide, or has stopped in the past few years.
> tell whether or not you have critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking is overrated. ;)
> learn anything about memory layout or how pointers work, and without understanding that, you have no hope of understanding what it is your compiler is doing to your source code,
Very true, but it's nearly impossible for me to be sociable at an interview and be the introverted super hacker at the same time, it's take some mental preparation for me to change hats. Meditation, etc. When I am in full tilt programming mode, I am unable to communicate with people with little more then gestures and guttural sounds. I am sure it freaks people out. Which is why I am best left to a dark cave or more recently a desolate beach while I am VooDoo'ing like that.
> just to get a warm body to fill a cubicle
Yup 100 watts each, they should use them for powering the servers, like in the Matrix movies.
> are heading back to school to get the paper
And it that papers is going to make then better programmers?
You and I know, either your brain is wired for it or not. Then it's just a matter of the having the data stored in ones biological neural network to be able orient ones self in the problem space. If you can do that you don't need logic, it's more like looking under the sink and seeing "Oh there is your leaky pipe" It's just obvious how how to solve it. Logic has got to be hardwired in to your brain or your hopelessly lost.
> a demonstration of actual problem solving skills
> any good technical interview
Again it's hard to demonstrate the full Monty on demand.
For one I am very used to working in a specific way, on screen and CLI, I am antisocial when in that mindspace.
As soon as an Interviewer makes me nervous it's over for me. Blood sugar goes to hell and room starts spinning. It's one of the reason's we are computer people. Because we suck at human interaction.
You want a fair test of skill then send someone a puzzle to work on over a few days via E-mail. Or have then write up some explanations.
After all in the real situation your testing them for it's long hours alone in a Cubical staring at a screen, E-mail tech docs, and code.
So why test them under an academic classroom setting, with someone breathing down on them and in front of a white board?
Would you test the performance of a server in completely unrealistic scenarios and think that test data provides a good indication of how it will perform in production? Ok, Bad question as we have seen that all too often too.
Let me phrase, if you were interviewing a chef, would you have him write on a whiteboard about technical details pan temperatures and baking temperatures and times for different recipes. Things available in cook books that in a real situation he'd plan and look up before he starts cooking and would never try to memorize.
Because most Internet companies do that including Google do that.
A real Chef does it by feel, a pinch and a dash.
"The proof of the pudding is in the eating" as they say. Wouldn't you want to having him make a few dishes and taste them?
Lets face it, the best programmers all suffer from Aspergers, ADD, ADHD, and other spectrums of psychological and social dysfunctions.
Why else would anyone spend more time working on a computer then any rational intelligent human would ever consider.
> Oh, and for any company where it's possible to get the interview questions ahead of time, well, I have to say they deserve the employees they get.
Wow, You really can't see it, can you. Wow, frightening. Wow...
You said you had 1.8M sockets on a BSD box way way back 99? when I was talking about Afterburner doing 4K sockets at once.
The best I was able to do in a production situation is around 200K sockets on Redhat last year . We'd have to run at 1/2 that because if the load balancers glitched we get hammers with 2x the connections, Old ones still lingering while clients pour in to reconnect. We had massive ram to achive this. Way more then we ever could have dreamed of back then.
John
