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The Google Coding Interview
What I learned from 10 years on hiring committee and 3,000 hiring packets
Following on from The Google Design Interview I’m also going to write up my experience of the Google Coding Interview. For context for the reader — I used to teach the Technical Interview Training course at Google, spent 10 years on various hiring committees and gave a few hundred interviews during my time at Google. That’s not to say there is a single perfect way to give coding interviews — just that I’ve had a fair bit of experience.
The question I’m going to cover this is Conway’s Game of Life which is on the banned list as too well known to the outside world. It’s also considered among the simpler problems to offer candidates. It’s a good way of checking whether they can work through a problem and write clean code rather than testing the candidate’s ability to reproduce a given algorithm.
Before that I feel I should give some context about why coding interviews are important. And, in particular why in-person coding interviews are important. I know that there are differing views as to how useful they are so I’m going to present my rationale and the reader can come to their own conclusions. To understand why we want to give a coding interview we should consider the job a software engineer is going to do when they arrive:
- Write software. Duh…
