Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Copied from mitbbs, not mine.

Just back from Google on-site. I am a fresh minted Ph.D. in computer science.
It was a long dreadful 5 hour interview by 4 Google enginners, plus the fifth
guy asked my thesis.

A little heads up: be prepare for writing error-free C/C++ code on board given
30 minutes or so. The code has to be generic enough to handle different
platforms and data. Sorry, I can not give out the question in detail here. (as
you know why, please don't ask me) Basically , you must understand from
inside out the memory layout, algorithm and recursion. I prepared for the
interview for about two months, reading algorithm book from cover to cover.
But honestly, none of the interview questions I encountered was what I had
seen before. I wound up digging deep in my old bag of tricks to figure out the
solution. Each interviewer would only ask you one question or two, but hard
enough for you to figure out the solution and possible improvements in 45
minutes. If you screwed, you were done with that Engineer

I don't think I can get the offer. As one of the interviewer said to me, they
turned down a lot of ph.d.s who were not good programmer. The acceptance ratio
is about 1 out of 6, even lower than the best conference in my field.

So take it easy if you are about fly to Google, and enjoy the stay.

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