Google Blogoscoped

Monday, March 24, 2008

Corey’s Google Interview

Corey Trager was interviewed by Google and rejected, and wrote an interesting piece on the process he went through as a result. From Corey’s post on one of the guys who interviewed him:

This second guy was definitely an alpha. He made intense direct eye contact with me, unsmiling. He seemed irritated. He didn’t shake any banana branches at me or make mock charges at me, but he might as well have. His flat, cold affect in turn made me, I guess, somehow try harder, in a pathetic way, to evoke some sort of warmer response from him. If it would have helped to pick insects from his fur, I would have tried it. Now keep in mind, these thoughts are all happening while I was trying to figure out how to adjust my faulty algorithm for solving the design challenge to work in constant time rather than linear time (O(1) vs O(n) in Big O notation!. Look at me! I can spake Big O! Caramba!). There had been a misunderstanding between us earlier in the session, a sort of fork in the road of the conversation, so his thinking went one way down that fork and mine another. Although I eventually realized what happened, and saw the misunderstanding as mutual, that’s not how he saw it, and my attempt to explain and backtrack to that fork in the road just sounded argumentative and weasel-like.

[Via Reddit and Friendfeed.]

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!