Delete comment from: Stevey's Blog Rants
From a fellow Kirkland Googler:
An excellent post that I highly recommend Google candidates read before their phone screens or interviews. I can't stress the importance of hashtables or big-O enough. Whether or not the topics are actually important, they come up regularly in interviews often in the same question: "So, you've given me a O(n*logn) solution using a tree, can you come up with a better solution?" should serve as a huge hint.
I also want to echo the extremely high false negative rate and it's arbitrary nature. It's true and it's frustrating from both sides of the table (a candidate several interviewers may like can still get rejected), but dust yourself off and try again.
One minor quibble though, depending on the job for which you are applying you may be asked to rate yourself in several areas. This is, generally, to alleviate some of the problems with getting an interview quizzing you about Java when you're more familiar with C++ (or Python). It's not perfect, but interviewers typically will take that into consideration before asking questions.
Related to the point about asking questions, just demonstrating some enthusiasm goes a long way. There's often not much you can do about this, if the interviewer is asking you particularly inane questions, but in a typical interview there should be at least one question that can be taken in an interesting direction.
Mar 14, 2008, 3:39:00 PM
Posted to Get that job at Google