Wow, the replies to this actually saying Guido van Rossum should do an algorithm/DS leetcode interview.
It's so ridiculous to see these replies. So Microsoft should've sent Guido van Rossum a note saying, hey study algorithm/DS for at least a month and do 100 leetcode before you come talk to us or it's a waste of time, thanks, bye.
Discussions of the industry tech interview process are now poisoned by these factors:
* There is an entire industry built around tech interview prep now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many would defend this practice because their paycheck directly depends on it.
* Many see this as a hazing ritual that protects their high compensation and often their egos as well. These people are often young and will eventually see how harmful these interviews are when they get older and need to switch jobs. But by then there will be a new generation of young engineers defending the practice.
It's like people forget the purposes of interviewing. "Can this candidate do the job we're asking them to do?". If the candidate has a proven, public, track record doing the things you're going to ask them to do, then you can skip the jumping through hoops part.
We use shitty algorithmic questions as a proxy for answering the above question (in the vast majority of cases).
That's assuming you want to hire the first person that can do the job.
The companies that popularized this were and still are EXTREMELY lucrative, and get a TON of competition.
They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST.
And that's really hard to tell from just looking at their work experience. You want to see how their brain works under pressure, dealing with an ambiguous new problem they've never seen before.
A lot of people who rag on modern tech interviewing don't get this. Unfortunately, so do a lot of people DOING these modern tech interviews. "He said the algorithm was O(n log n) but the answer is actually O (k log n). Not inclined"
> They can afford to be choosey. So they can try to find not only the person who can do the job but also do it BEST.
Selecting people based on how well they can code some linked-list traversal, in a web editor, while someone is timing them is not a good metric for overall "best". In fact you might reject candidates that think more about larger design problems, and overall your code might suffer.
This is the part I dislike the most. They usually disable copy-pasting too because they know it's that easy to google so you can't just code in your IDE and paste.
I've done my fair share of algorithmic hoop-jumping and have worked at a few of these companies over the last 10 years. I'm not convinced that the people performing these interviews are able to tell how a candidate's brain works at all in 45 minutes.
At some point it's all just signaling and wild guesses.
No it's not, the creator of Homebrew has nowhere near the clout of Van Rossum or Thompson. I don't think it's a big enough or technically complex enough project that its author should expect to skip the standard interview procedure, whereas the creators of Python and C absolutely should.
I believe this is actually about checking in code, not about getting a job.
From what I understand it is like a "driving license" for each language - if you haven't passed the driving test you can still drive but you need to have an instructor keep an eye on you. If you haven't passed the coding test you need someone to review your code before submitting.
It's mostly about getting used to the language usage style used in Google (the style guides are open, so you can see it).
The philosophy is that all Google code base should look like it was written by 1 person. It's great actually in practice: code in a big company should be hard to write and easy to read, as it's read by many people.
> It's mostly about getting used to the language usage style used in Google (the style guides are open, so you can see it).
> The philosophy is that all Google code base should look like it was written by 1 person.
But all google products look like they are written by only one person so the aim is achieved. The worst thing however is that other person started doing the same.
It is certainly not a driver's license, this makes as much sense as asking Hamilton or Vittel to do a driving test before giving them a job as a driver.
That said, I would not be surprised this would happen at Google as they truly believe their process is vastly superior, as they believe themselves.
Pretty sure they would ask Linus to to a C programming test as well, and score him badly because he can't remember the exact details of some algorithm he has not used since he wrote the first lines of Linux.
As it said, it makes no sense at all. F1 is not Google, "Provided a driver has previously held a super licence they do not have to meet these requirements, a driver who has held a valid super licence for any of the previous three seasons is eligible for a new licence, "
> I believe this is actually about checking in code, not about getting a job.
I'd say it's about doing the work for which he came there, from TFA:
"Google hired Thompson to create a new language, Go. But Google also requires all of its recruits to pass a language test. According to Thompson, he hasn't quite got round to it yet - and so can't submit code."
And no, I have no understanding for that utter stupidity, or any attempt to accept it.
As a Googler, that statement is just wrong. They were looking for a fun story and somehow got just the right quote to make one.
Code committed to the internal repo requires a review from someone certified familiar with that language's internal style guide.
He was hired to work on Go, not C, and just didn't get around to writing enough C to bother getting that certification. He can write C whenever he wants to, just like literally every other engineer, he would just get a style guide review at review time.
Indeed... I wonder why anyone would think ken would magically be familiar with Google’s internal C++ (not C!) style. I’m sure he would admit that he isn’t, and doesn’t deserve to be granted the C++ Readability certification just because he was involved in C’s development.
But it was not about some "certification." He states was not allowed to check in the C code he wrote, lacking a Google required exam. To quote that once again:
"Google hired Thompson to create a new language, Go. But Google also requires all of its recruits to pass a language test. According to Thompson, he hasn't quite got round to it yet - and so can't submit code."
It's not and it wasn't about any C++ "certifications." He was involved in the creation of a new language. For the new language there could have not been any existing certification. And as far as I know, the initial implementation language of Go was not C++ but C. In creation of which was Thompson also directly involved. And as far as I know the people worked on the parts of the code before Google and these parts of said C code already existed before Google (Go had some dependencies on code from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)).
So it was indeed as absurd as it could have been. He was a part of the team that directly invented both the language and the style guide of the language, but some bureaucratic exam was expected from him to submit the code to the source control system.
As I said above, the literal interpretation flat out wrong. There is no mechanism that exists now nor in the past to make the statement literally true as written.
I don't know how they managed to get that statement, but it's misleading. Many misconceptions begin with an element of truth. I'm guessing the element of truth here was the "certification" process. (Maybe it was something else, like a mixup having him as an advisor accidentally caused him to not be hired into the engineering group and thus there was a wait before he got engineering credentials to view/edit code. But that kind of thing is just silly paperwork and clearly fixed promptly.)
I just checked. He had literally written some C++ code before that snippet was published.
It was not the absurd statement it's been made out to be. It sounds unbelievable for a reason: It is unbelievable because it didn't happen.
But writing this you 1) just confirm that there are mechanisms by which he could have be not allowed to check in the code; 2) show how invested in the claim you are by comparing the date the Thompson statement was published and some date from the source control attributed to him, which again proves nothing -- his statement could have been true before it was published. I'm still puzzled by the passion behind "didn't happen" claim which still remains unsupported, while showing that the mechanisms for the Thompson's statement to be true unsurprisingly exist. I'm also surprised by your insistence on "C++" sources and "certification" there because neither is a part of his statement.
I didn't get that impression, considering the uniqueness of Thompson's engagement: the major point from the start was that he was not an intern who came to add a few lines in existing C++ code. He was there with the bunch of old C (not C++) code which was already written according to different rules, and was to develop a new language for which he was to write the rules (with other such developers). Additionally, he was involved not only in developing that C code, but in initial development of very C language! Under all these circumstances, he apparently couldn't check in the code, for not passing some "test."
Your failure to even recognize all that (instead mentioning "C++" and "certification" which is not the same) and to address the fact that these circumstances completely differ from your own much more narrow experience with established practices when checking in C++ code for which the bureaucratic rules already existed simply doesn't tell me that you can be believed regarding organization's capability to not react bureaucratically. Which is what Thompson apparently said and I still find, as I explain, very believable.
That is how I searched in the responses for any claim which would directly support your opinion, and still haven't found it.
I have no problem to admit I was wrong, but I'd really like to see some direct proof. Like somebody investigating what actually happened there and getting some first hand account. Not the talk about "C++" and existing rules for that (for which there is up to now a confirmation of strong enforcement, not tolerance).
Ken is a friend and colleague. I worked with for years on the Go team, from the early days.
But ken was at Google a long time before the Go project started. (The Go project was not developed in Google's monorepo and was not subject to Google's readabiliy process, as is the case for many Google projects.) What ken was referring to was indeed the C++ Readability process (which doesn't stop anyone committing code, just requires a review from a person with the 'readability' certification before committing; as mentioned upthread). I know this from talking to him about it, specifically.
I can't offer you any more proof other than the fact that I was a witness. If you don't believe that, then I'm sorry? Not sure what else to tell you.
FWIW your conduct in this thread is extremely obnoxious. I'm sure you'll find a way to debate that, too, but please consider that I have no vested interest in telling you this other than hoping you might better learn how your conduct is perceived by others.
> I know this from talking to him about it, specifically.
Perfect! So what's the exact story, then, finally?
1) Was the quote from him completely invented?
2) Was he allowed to check in or not? Did he need the test to check in at that moment to which the quote refers? (I don't care about the moment when it was published).
3) And even more specifically: were there ever the times where he was in Google but when he not able to check in the code lacking some Google-prescribed "test"?
Just "yes", "no" or "I don't know" there, please. Also (just for my curiosity):
4) How long that period lasted?
Then you can elaborate where I was wrong by searching thorough what I've written -- I've specifically quoted the article and talked about his C background and involvement in a new language, never claimed anything about his C++ code and a "certification." I have an impression that your perception of what I've written and that, what I actually have written don't match.
This is not true though. All code at Google goes through review. If you aren't certified in a language, your reviewer must be (or you need to get another reviewer with it). Unless Thompson's code is being reviewed by someone that has been at Google for just a few months, this is a non-issue.
Wow, the replies to this actually saying Guido van Rossum should do an algorithm/DS leetcode interview.
It'd actually be really, really cool if more than few people of Guido/Linus/etc's calibre did go in for some of the whiteboarding interviews (under an anonymous resume of course).
As both of them explicitly acknowledge - they don't (or no longer) consider themselves as top notch "coders" as such. Linus has said something like "I'm not even a programmer anymore" recently. And Guido said something like "I'm not the best Python coder by far - on a scale of 1-10 I'd say I'm at most a 6". Not because they're lousy coders of course. Just that (in recent years) they've had far, far, far bigger fish to fry.
So they go in, and "fail" the contrived Sudoku / Knapsack / "build me an Instagram clone, please" problem... then get strung along and gaslit for a while, before receiving an email 6 weeks later tell them that they're "not a fit".
The solution to this is simple - any engineer applying for a job should simply say "no" and this practice will end. The real problem is that engineers in general do not know how to say "no", or they do not know how to negotiate. The role of college education is to weed out those who are not capable, so if you already have a degree of a reasonably reputable (not necessarily ivy league) college or university these type of interviews are completely unnecessary. Also, in the US the cost of firing someone is extremely low compared to europe so these type of interviews make no sense at all. In europe you would need to pay someone months of severance pay and what not, in the US you can simply tell them they are fired and that's it. The goal of these interviews is really to find something that can be used to negotiate your salary down, so don't be a sucker and don't fall for it.
> There is an entire industry built around tech interview prep now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many would defend this practice because their paycheck directly depends on it.
Or you know... an algorithm and data structures class that's part of a serious Engineering/CS curriculum.
That's enough for passing familiarity with what the algorithms are / pointers to reference material when appropriate. Not nearly enough to perform on command from memory in 20-40 minutes.
At the end of Princeton's Algorithms I-II on Coursera you've done fewer than 20 implementations, and those were open-book assignments with week-long deadlines.
A reasonable interview prep cycle would be closer to 200 practice problems, under time pressure.
It's so ridiculous to see these replies. So Microsoft should've sent Guido van Rossum a note saying, hey study algorithm/DS for at least a month and do 100 leetcode before you come talk to us or it's a waste of time, thanks, bye.
Discussions of the industry tech interview process are now poisoned by these factors:
* There is an entire industry built around tech interview prep now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many would defend this practice because their paycheck directly depends on it.
* Many see this as a hazing ritual that protects their high compensation and often their egos as well. These people are often young and will eventually see how harmful these interviews are when they get older and need to switch jobs. But by then there will be a new generation of young engineers defending the practice.