Hacker News Reader

Comment by khedoros | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience (and result) recently, although it was my first time interviewing with Google, and I did my coding in Python. I want able to get any detail whatsoever about why I was rejected; the feedback Vijay got would have been appreciated!

View on HN

Isn't Python a decent choice for whiteboarding algorithms style interviews? Visually Python is quite streamlined and also Python alleviates having to write a bunch of boilerplate. I'm curious why using Python would be an issue for a Google type interview?

It was my understanding that one of the reasons for these style interviews was to get away from being language specific - in other words if someone has good CS fundamentals, and could reason about different problem spaces that they could probably pick up any language. Is this no longer true?

Using Python for an interview at Giogle is absolutely not a problem. Source: I interview candidates there.

Thank for the feedback, at some point though is that looked down upon if the candidate isn't also equally fluent in at least Java and C++?

In my experience, they were language agnostic till it is high level. Unfortunately I use C at my work place, embedded C to be exact :)

the practice (generally) at present is that you are asked to choose a specific language ahead of time from a list the recruiter offers you. python is one of them, so is C++. but many languages aren't. for example, you could not go in and do your interview with, say, OCaml or Clojure.

Yes, I think it's decent (and that's the reason I chose it). I don't think it was an issue in my interview process; I was just trying to say that I had a similar experience to the OP, but I also wanted to mention some differences.

Google's questions tend to be about data structures and algorithms, and fairly language-agnostic (although you're expected to know the language that you choose well, and use it elegantly).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com