Ugh. The worst step of interview process. Remember that guy who wrote a post about Google's hiring process, where they outsourced the asking of technical questions to untrained call-centre staff.
"Standard way to allocate memory in C?"
"malloc"
"Incorrect. Actually there's this cool library that does it for you with additional checks. Sorry, you have failed the interview"
"Wut?"
I've always found that those kind of interview processes put far too much stress on being correct to their "ideals" rather than be consistent with your own and your team's. I.e. I don't care if you name your column "domain_id", but for christ's sake name the other column "account_id".
> Remember that guy who wrote a post about Google's hiring process, where they outsourced the asking of technical questions to untrained call-centre staff.
Hey, I had this experience with Amazon when applying for a software related position based in Europe. For the entry screening I got a call from Indian phone number and a person with Indian accent was clearly going through a list of various quirks an features of a programming language. Wasn't so bad though... the second round with MBA product managers was much worse:)
FWIW, my experience of Google's hiring process wasn't like that at all. Sure, it was hard, and they did do whiteboarding problems in the interviews (all seven of them), which is in its own way terrible, but it was all done with people who really did know the stuff they were asking me about.
I didn't get the job, but it was an interesting experience. Certainly selects for a certain kind of engineer, and would not be my preference for how to hire people if I was setting up my own operation.
Ugh. The worst step of interview process. Remember that guy who wrote a post about Google's hiring process, where they outsourced the asking of technical questions to untrained call-centre staff.
"Standard way to allocate memory in C?"
"malloc"
"Incorrect. Actually there's this cool library that does it for you with additional checks. Sorry, you have failed the interview"
"Wut?"
I've always found that those kind of interview processes put far too much stress on being correct to their "ideals" rather than be consistent with your own and your team's. I.e. I don't care if you name your column "domain_id", but for christ's sake name the other column "account_id".