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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Side tangent:

He mentioned the algorithm questions he had to study to pass the interview and that knowing the algorithms came in handy.

If you are interviewing for Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix, etc. solving problems that have never been solved at thier scale, algorithm questions are important.

If you just want someone to right the next software as a service CRUD app, don't waste my time.

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Speaking as a former Googler, many (most?) Googlers never work on complex algorithms at huge scale. The interview questions are often completely irrelevant to their work.

Do you think that even at Google the algorithm questions are useless and shouldn’t be asked? I was trying to give Google the benefit of the doubt.

"At Google" is such a broad category that no single answer suffices. For anyone working on the hot-path of search/ads/knowledge graph back-end, sure, they need to know their algorithms. Same for the language teams like Nystrom is on. For a front-end engineer, which is what I was at Google (exclusively in Dart fwiw)? Probably not. I implemented a graph traversal exactly once.

However, Google uses the same interview process for all software engineers, and mostly decides what job they will do after deciding whether to hire them. So they really can't tailor their questions without changing their entire process. I think they should change it, but I understand why they haven't.

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