{"id":132,"date":"2007-03-13T20:51:06","date_gmt":"2007-03-13T20:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=132"},"modified":"2007-03-13T20:51:06","modified_gmt":"2007-03-13T20:51:06","slug":"google-applications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"Google applications"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got an email from a guy at Google a couple of weeks ago. He said that he had come across my CV<\/a> online and asked if I’d consider opportunities at Google. I’m not really looking to leave IBM, but I was curious to hear more about Google and figured that I had nothing to lose by finding out more. It led to me having a quick chat on the phone with him and a ‘mini-interview’. So I thought people might be interested to know what this included.<\/p>\n

A chance to rate my competence on a range of technical topics<\/strong>
\nNever a good thing for me… I tend to be a little on the conservative side when it comes to “selling myself”. <\/p>\n

What is the complexity of quicksort?<\/strong>
\nErg… I struggled with this one. My (very maths-based) Computing degree<\/a> did include a module where I had to learn the complexities of different sort algorithms, and be able to reproduce the proofs for calculating them. But it’s been four years since I last had to think about it! I admitted that I’d have to look it up, and didn’t know the answer.<\/p>\n

What is 210<\/sup>?<\/strong>
\nEurgh… I hate maths. That’s why I have a calculator. I probably should’ve known this, but I didn’t. So another question that I had to say that I didn’t know the answer to.<\/p>\n

Sort these into order of how long they take: read from register, disk seek, context switch, read from memory<\/strong>
\nEasy-peasy – that’s more like it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

What is a context switch?<\/strong>
\nAnother easy one. I think I rambled a bit about time-slicing and stuff like that, but I think that was just the relief at knowing an answer or two! <\/p>\n

So there we are. A chance for me to underrate myself, then get half the technical questions wrong. I bet they were impressed \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

It perhaps gives an insight into the sort of candidate that he was after – someone focused on performance and complexity, with a mathematical background. At any rate, we had an interesting chat and it was fun to hear about what it’s like at another big tech company. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got an email from a guy at Google a couple of weeks ago. He said that he had come across my CV online and asked if I’d consider opportunities at Google. I’m not really looking to leave IBM, but I was curious to hear more about Google and figured that I had nothing to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}