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Comment by lbarrow | Hacker News Reader

I see posts like this all the time on HN and I really wonder if there's an alternate world of really stupid interview practices out there that I've just been lucky enough to avoid.

In this case: I've never heard of, participated in or administered a programming interview where the candidate couldn't Google things.

I remember when I interviewed at Braintree, I spent a good chunk of the pairing interview searching for Linux command syntax because I was new to using it. I got the job and spent 7 years there.

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When I interviewed for Facebook, the interviewer berated me for the coding pad losing focus with an alt-tab for a second ("What are you doing?").

I wasn't aware they were tracking this, of course, nor that it wouldn't be kosher, and I specifically asked about whether I could look up Java API at the start and did not get a "no" ("We don't necessarily require working code here" is pretty ambiguous).

I passed the technical round, and then they ghosted me after asking what my technical level at Google was (which I didn't have to tell, as it's hidden even within Google).

Are you allowed to Google things in a Google interview? I don’t think I was allowed to!

How would that even work? You’d just Google for the answer to the brain teaser and find it because there’s only so many brain teasers out there.

I'm referring to a programming interview, where you are writing code with the candidate -- not a brain teaser.

I'm not sure there's much of a clear line between the two. Google asked me to solve what was really a brain teaser, but solve it using code. Don't think I was allowed to Google anything.

That's fair, in that situation there's probably a valid case for disallowing use of a search engine. Whether or not that's an effective interview is another story :)

I failed an interview once because I knew pacman but they were looking for apt. Big green GPU company.

Were you the only candidate? I mean maybe they interviewed a few people, who already knew apt. So it’s a choice between hiring someone who already knows the tech stack they use, and someone that doesn’t.

To take this even further, it is possible that they had this same situation before, went with the one that didn't know the stack, and regretted it terribly.

Once bitten twice shy and all that.

Yeah I guess I was just thinking that this kind of thing seemed totally irrelevant to the job description which was for a CUDA application engineer, but maybe it was a lot more important for their people to be facile with ubuntu cli in front of customers.

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