That’s incorrect. An interview process with true negatives doesn’t mean it isn’t loaded with tons of other false positives. Being good at leetcode has no relation to engineering skills, despite it being a skill in itself.
Where in my comment do I talk about leetcode or false positives?
Not only are you incorrect, but you are completely off topic.
I am saying Gayle Lackman, the author of Cracking the coding interview and, in the past, one of the board members who decide on candidates in the google interview literally told me word for word that the interview optimizes for IQ. Meaning that there are tons of engineers who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough.
I’m telling you that Gayle is full of shit. They have deluded themselves into thinking they are measuring IQ when they aren’t.
> who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough.
Cool story, but a test that has some true negatives says nothing about its false positive and false negative rate.
Gayle has to convince you that an entire life’s work impacting hundreds of thousands of people’s careers isn’t deeply flawed (because that would reflect pretty poorly on Gayle).
Gayle is the last person you would want to ask if the Google interview process is good. Understand?
Would you ask Donald Trump if his presidential administration is doing well?
>Would you ask Donald Trump if his presidential administration is doing well?
You're absolutely insane if you compare google engineers with the trump administration. Nobody thinks of google engineers like this. Check yourself. Being a google engineer is like getting into stanford or berkeley the prestige is high and I've even asked engineers who've worked in both scrappy startups and google.
The difference to them is night and day; working outside of a google-like company is like dealing with people at a community college... the level of intelligence, work and projects are on a whole different level.
The google interview process is absolutely stellar at creating teams of raw intellectual power. What it is not stellar at is catching all the people who are incredible programmers but bad at whiteboard interviewing... that's it.
> You're absolutely insane if you compare google engineers with the trump administration. Nobody thinks of google engineers like this.
whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump. You never ask someone who is responsible for creating a whole process/team/product for honestly critical info about it. Unless they are willfully malicious (which I doubt Gayle is), they are certainly convinced they’ve been doing the right thing (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it).
> working outside of a google-like company is like dealing with people at a community college...
Sorry, but whoever you talked to took you for a ride. Most Google engineers are writing glue code and glorified ETL processes. I used to work there, I left because it got way to big an deteriorated quickly and now work at a startup with several employees I personally know took 50% pay cuts by turning town Google offers.
> The google interview process is absolutely stellar at creating teams of raw intellectual power
Not from what I saw from 2012 going forward. It was filled with mediocre devs that wrote lots of bad code, including ones that would slip in quadratic runtime behavior. The only thing Google had going for it is that early on it did attract some brilliant people that believed in the mission and created the stellar infrastructure supporting the masses today.
Do you have any reasonable way to convince me and everyone reading your responses that your opinions are more valid than other people who offer contrary opinions?
Why would someone take a 50% pay cut and turn down a google offer? There has to be a bigger reason than the one you mentioned.
>whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump.
I assumed your analogy was used to state that people at google are incompetent and that those who are incompetent can't recognize their own incompetence. The later part may be true in the context of google but I disagreed with the former. Your reply indicates to me that you in fact don't think much of google engineers and that your comparison of incompetence is apt.
As far as I know Gayle didn't work to create the interview process, she was just part of the board and now she actively works to help people pass it. Saying that there exists many people who can't pass the google interview will harm sales of her book. I believe it is against her incentive to say it and that she only said it because she believe it's the truth. There is no active lying going on here.
Know a few ex coworkers and friends of friend who after multiple failures eventually got accepted.
Their strategy is the same across the board: practice makes perfect (a.k.a leetcode). Don't give up, keep trying.
You are well aware that there's a big industry around interview preps for Hi-Tech BigCos and Gayle herself is one of the implicit founding of this industry right?
Pre-Leetcode/HackerRank the kind of people who got accepted to Google are mostly their kind: ACM/TopCoder and most folks who grew up/go to school in Bay Area because well duh... It's what they do everyday: practicing leetcode style problem solving. The Stanford/UC Berkeley folks got in because well... Interview questions are shared among interns because there's no database like today's LeetCode.
Ironically, the people who are truly of the highest intelligence and skill level would never choose to work at a place like that. So it's fair to say that what they are actually selecting for are people who are smart, but not too smart. Just like cops, really.
You don't have to be mean. Claiming that algorithmic interviews is a proxy for IQ is also probably something that the powers that be at Google "pulled out of their ass". I don't see any data that says it's correlated with standard IQ test scores. I'm skeptical that it is a good proxy since you can specifically study for these interviews. The IQ tests, at least in theory, should be attempted without preparation so as to reflect your "raw ability". Leetcode grind for 3 months is not exactly raw ability.
Not trying to be mean but the fact he made that up out of thin air is not only something that isn't backed with data but something that is intuitively not true. With the reputation and amount of comp google offers there is no reason why intelligent people or less intelligent people would just avoid google. You're assuming only less intelligent people want higher salaries while intelligent people don't which isn't true at all.
>I don't see any data that says it's correlated with standard IQ test scores.
While there's no Data that correlates IQ with algorithm problems. Intuitively the more intelligent you are the better you would be at these algorithm problems.
If IQ measures intelligence and if intelligence determines your ability to perform well on algorithm problems than your performance on these problems correlates with IQ.
To deny the above logic would be to say intelligence has no correlation with IQ and/or algorithms therefore algorithms don't correlate with IQ.
Not every axiom needs to be measured with data. Common sense and intuition also fill the gap where no data exists. Google saying Intelligence correlates with your problem solving abilities and abilities to solve computer science problems is something that absolutely makes sense even if no data to back it exists.
>Leetcode grind for 3 months is not exactly raw ability.
Doesn't matter how long you spend on leetcode. Google will present you with a problem you haven't seen before and there are a huge amount of people who have done leetcode for years and can't pass the interview questions.
If you're a guy who just grinds for 3 months and can suddenly pass the google interview with flying colors than you're the guy that google wants because there are many people who can't do this.
> Doesn't matter how long you spend on leetcode. Google will present you with a problem you haven't seen before and there are a huge amount of people who have done leetcode for years and can't pass the interview questions.
It matters how long you spent time on leetcode/other practices from popular algorithm books (comen, skiena, sedgewick). Source : friends, ex co-workers, and personal experience. Sometimes they just change the "story" questions but the algo and tricks are the same, sometime they took it verbatim from leetcode (or the other way around: someone leaked them to leetcode).
Real Talk tho: Whats the range?
Im ~low 90 percentile and I wonder if I bang my head against the LeetCode wall for a few months, then I too, can get $200K+ and free lunch 4 lyfe.
I largely brushed up on algorithms, though I'd seen most in grad school (which was a while ago). There's a recommended book on algorithms which is very nice (red cover, but can't recall title). Man pages are good, too--one Googler was quite unhappy that I didn't know the 'ps -o' flags off the top of my head.
I actually passed the on-site and hiring committee on my third try, but was (apparently) nixed by some executive, for reasons I can only guess at.
I'm estimating prevalence based on my SAT and GRE scores. As supporting evidence, even colleagues with PhDs often seem not to do as well when mathy sorts of puzzles come up in real life. As often noted, however, that and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.
It might be sour grapes, but lately I've come to appreciate the benefits of being the big fish in a tiny pond, rather than the tiny fish in an ocean I'd be at a FAANG. Money's nice, of course, but in the end you do pay for it, one way or another.
There's a recommended book on algorithms which is very nice (red cover, but can't recall title).
Bit of a tangent, but, for anyone who's interested, I'm guessing the book was Steven Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual [0], as it is well-regarded and has a red cover.
Also, even more tangentially, there are videos of the author's Algorithms course lectures online from 2012 which I went through once and they were pretty good [1].
(There were one or two that had audio issues or issues seeing what he projected on the screen, but there are multiple years' worth of videos, so you can choose an alternate from an earlier year if necessary and the slides are available there too, so you can follow along with them, if need be; audio-only files are are also available if you want them).
