Why I Chose Android Last Year:

To back up a bit, I switched from an iPhone to Android last year for a few reasons:

• The iPhone mail client doesn’t support merged inboxes. This effectively meant that I couldn’t manage my work email from my phone, since I have one Gmail “page” manage multiple email addresses. (Yes, I know you can add multiple email accounts to an iPhone. But if I did that, then my sent items wouldn’t be merged.)
• I wanted to be able to send SMSs online (via Google Voice). The iPhone doesn’t let Google Voice override your outgoing calls’ caller ID, and so doesn’t support Google Voice well.
• I wanted to be able to create 4G wifi hotspots. Android supports this; iPhone doesn’t even support 4G.

Each of these were pretty huge value-adds of an Android for me. I knew the apps wouldn’t be as good on an Android, but what was that compared with the phone being superior in terms of the most common things I do on a phone (email and SMS)?

Why I Went Back to iPhone

What I didn’t expect was how frustrating the Android would be on a daily basis.

Certainly, the biggest issue was the battery life. It was terrible. My phone couldn’t even last a day with pretty minimal usage. I tried everything I could think off — re-installed the OS, upgraded to a new OS, got a new phone, tried different battery management apps, turned off 4G, etc. Nothing worked.

But even beyond the battery life, there were all sorts of little issues that made the phone feel very poorly designed and frustrating to use:

• Annoying notifications. The phone would vibrate / beep to alert me that the battery was fully charged. This means that every single night — and frequently right as I’m falling asleep — BUZZZZZZ. I know this isn’t a huge deal, but, who on earth thought this was a good feature? Poor design.
• Caller ID was slow. The caller ID would sometimes take 10 seconds or so to kick-in, so I often couldn’t tell who was calling. This presented a problem frequently with my building’s buzzer, which rang my phone. I wouldn’t realize it was the buzzer and wouldn’t think to buzz someone in.
• Google Voice issues. In order to send SMSs from my Google Voice number (which is the only number I wanted people to know of), I couldn’t use the built-in SMS app — only the Google Voice app. (If Google could fix the calling caller ID issue, why can’t they fix SMS?)
• Slow. The UI was frequently slow, non-responsive, and clunky. I hated using it.
• Frequent reboots. The phone would frequently freeze. I had to reboot it every several days. I’ve missed many phone calls because of this.
• Bloatware. The phone had a lot of pre-installed apps that you couldn’t remove without rooting the phone. I’m not talking about things like Calculator that you might actually want to use — I’m talking about golfing games and strange apps that most people would never use. It reminded me of the bloatware when you buy a new computer. (Yes, I did root the phone, but I shouldn’t have had to do that.)
• Poor app management. Apps were always sorted in alphabetical order. So when you installed a new app, or just wanted to find a specific one, it could be hard to find it. Yes, you can add “shortcuts,” but there was no real concept of grouping or re-ordering apps the way that the iPhone allows. This is particularly problematic given all the bloatware.
• GPS issues. The GPS often didn’t work on Google Maps.
• Navigation issues. Even when the GPS worked on Google Maps, somehow the GPS on the turn-by-turn Navigation app would rarely work. It worked at most 5% of the time.
• MMS / Google Voice issues. Google Voice just dropped MMS messages. That is, if someone sent me a picture, it would just… disappear. They would think that I received it, and I would never know that there was a message. There was no error message on either side. (Of course, this isn’t Android’s fault, but it is Google’s.) This became an even bigger issue when iPhone started supporting group SMS’, which also uses the MMS protocol. Friends would send me a group message and I would never receive it.

I know, I know — each one of these isn’t a big deal. But this is just a partial list, and all these tiny little issues add up to a phone that I hated using. The only thing I really loved about Android was the mail client, but that wasn’t enough to keep me.

Every time I used my Android phone it felt like a chore. And that’s why I switched.

[Related: How to Port a Number Out of Google Voice and into Verizon.]

There were a lot of things I loved about Google Voice — being able to send online, having a history of all my texts, being able to send/receive SMS while traveling internationally (without crazy fees) — but ultimately, the fact that messages would disappear was unacceptable. Why would they disappear? Because Google Voice doesn’t support MMS. While I don’t need to send my friends a pic every time I see a cute puppy, I do want to know when my friends send me a pic. Or, at the very least, they should know that the message was dropped. Google Voice fails to report any error message on either side. Not okay.

This issue became particularly problematic with iOS’ new iMessage functionality which supports group chat. This works on the MMS protocol, so, again, messages would vanish. People thought I was just being rude and not responding.

So, after much debate, I switched off of Google Voice. Plus, I hated my Android and Google Voice doesn’t work as well on an iPhone.

I couldn’t find much online about what to expect when porting out of Google Voice, so I thought I’d write up my experience. [For simplicity, I'll call 610 my Google Voice number and 650 my Verizon number. Prior to porting, my 610 number forwarded to my 650 Verizon number.]

1. I unlocked my Google Voice (610) number at www.google.com/voice/unlock. Because I’d previously ported that number into Google Voice, I didn’t have to pay anything. Unlocking appeared to happen instantly.
2. [Monday @2 pm PST] I went into the Verizon store to explain what I needed to do. I already had an existing Verizon contract, so they would need to switch my contract to the 610 Google Voice number. The representative appeared to understand what Google Voice was, but wasn’t very clear on how to go about this.
3. The Verizon rep talked to a manager and various people and eventually learned that he needed to port the (610) Google Voice number as though it were a land line number. 
4. Their system requires an account number. This is your Google Voice number (610). Apparently, this failed the first time he tried it (possibly he typed in the wrong number), but worked the second time. I spent about an hour in the shop total.
5. The Verizon rep explain what I should expect. He said it would take 2 to 10 business days, during which time I might not receive SMSs. When I left the shop, nothing had changed. My old non-Google Voice Verizon number was still active. I continued to get calls and SMSs to my (610) Google Voice number. Google Voice showed the same “status” of just being unlocked. There was basically no sign that anything had changed. Verizon explained that, at some point in the next 10 days, my phone would be suddenly disconnected. At that point, I needed to call *226 to attach my 610 number to my Verizon iPhone. It could still take a while after that to complete the porting though. Of course, their “what to expect” explanation was based on land lines, not Google Voice.
6. [Wednesday @ 6:30 pm PST] My phone just disconnected with no notice. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the instructions with me right then, so I couldn’t re-connect my phone.
7. [Thursday @ 1:00 am PST] I call *226 to complete the porting. With a few minutes, I received an SMS to my 610 number that I’d missed while my number was disconnected. Everything seemed to work instantly.
8. [Thursday @1:30am PST] I need a local phone number for my apartment buzzer, so I set up a new Google Voice number to forward to my 610 number. Although some people report having difficulties doing this, I was able to have my new Google Voice number immediately start forwarding to my 610 number.

As far as I could tell, everything started working instantly. Others report it taking several days (or even weeks) to receive SMSs from all carriers.

If you decide to port your Google Voice number to Verizon, AT&T, or any other carrier, I’d recommend that you do the following:

1. Unlock your Google Voice number before going into the store.
2. Start this process on a Monday, or maybe Tuesday, as this process is measured in business days.
3. After the porting is theoretically complete, have people on each major carrier test sending you a message. If you are using an iPhone, you should probably select “test senders” who are not on iPhones. iPhones will use iMessage to SMS between each other when possible. It’s possible that iMessage is working when normal SMSs are not.

All in all though, it was a pretty fast, seamless process. (For what it’s worth, porting from AT&T to Google Voice resulted in about 2 – 5 days when I couldn’t receive any SMSs.)

I wanted to talk to you today about why I think technology is such a great field to enter. But, first, I think I need to tell you a bit about who I am and how I got here.

Geek^3

Fifteen years ago, when I was fourteen, my mother sat me down for a “chat.” She told me I had to take one programming class before I graduated high school.

Now, for some people, it’s surprising that it was my mother – and not, say, my father – who would require me to learn to code. But the truth is that I’m far from the first woman in my family to be “geeky.”

In fact, it started with my grandmother. My grandmother was the first woman at John Hopkins University in engineering. This was in the 1940s of course – a time when few women even went to college, let alone take something as “serious” as engineering.

My grandmother later transferred to Cornell with my grandfather, where they wouldn’t let women enroll in engineering. So instead, she did a math major, but decided to sit in on — and do the coursework for — my grandfather’s engineering courses. I can only imagine how well that went over with my grandfather’s buddies, to have his wife in their classes. And kicking their butts.

When she graduated, she and my grandfather started a successful engineering firm together – a company that they ran for the rest of their lives.

My grandmother lived in a world where the rules actually barred her from doing what she wanted – but she found a way to do it anyway. Her attitude was “rules be dammed. I’m going to do what I want.”

My grandmother must have set a good example, because three of her four daughters chose engineering majors. My mother, of course, was one of them.

I once asked my mom why she majored in electrical engineering. Her response: “Because it was the hardest.” Well, okay then.

By the late 1960s, when my mother was in college, the rules had slightly relaxed from my grandmother’s time – women were now actually permitted to major in engineering. Of course, that didn’t stop her professors from actively discouraging her from pursuing the sciences.

Her freshman year, her physics professor asked all the students who got As on the midterm to stay after class. My mother, one of the A students, listened as the professor explained why they should all strongly consider engineering. He explained that it was a difficult exam, and by getting an A, they have  demonstrated that they have quantitative skills and ambition to excel in such a rigorous field.

After his speech, the students got up to leave. The professor then pulled my mother aside: “Oh, Kathy, obviously I didn’t mean you…”

My mother went on to not only major in electrical engineering, but also to get her PhD in it – while working full time. She’s now launching her fourth medical device company.

So, you see, when my mother told me that I was required to take a programming class, there would be no whining about it being too hard, or there not being enough girls in it, or it being too nerdy or geeky or whatever. If my mother could do it, and her mother – not to mention my aunts too  – with actual real obstacles in the way, the least I could do was give it a shot.

I wasn’t too happy about the situation, but what choice did I have? So, I figured I’d take computer science my freshman year of high school and get it out of the way.

Becoming an Inventor

Unfortunately, then, something terrible happened: my mother was actually right about something. Which is weird, really, because when are parents ever right about anything? But, the sad truth was… I loved programming.

Programming was different than anything else I’d done before. I’ve always enjoy math and science, but this was more like… grown up legos.

I was the kind of little girl who, when she got a barbie, was like, “but what does it actually do?” I never really understood what other girls like about Barbies. I mean, rearranging Barbie’s limbs to make Mutant Barbie and then setting its hair on fire was fun and all, but then what do you do with it? Booooooooring.

I much preferred legos. I loved legos as a little kid. I loved how you could turn these tiny little bricks – that, really, were stupid and useless on their own – into houses, cars, stores, and so on. Programming was just like that. Building some really cool thing from these basic little parts.

Actually, programming was more like super-charged grown up legos, because you could do so much more with it. In my first two months of programming, I was already writing games – in fact, some of the same games I remember growing up. Except this time, I was writing the games. So they went by my rules.

And that’s what’s so remarkable about technology – it gives you the ability to create.

Most of my non-techie friends are in what I would call analytical roles. Some sit at their desks and analyze financial reports. Others analyze market data and make recommendations. That’s great – hey, the world needs those people too. But, interestingly, so many of them say, “darn, I wish I’d gotten an engineering degree.”

Because that’s what’s so empowering about technology. You’re not studying what’s already there, or analyzing a bunch of information. You’re not piling through mountains of numbers to make vague projections about the future. You’re actually creating something new. You are an inventor, and you can invent anything you want. You have immense power.

College Opportunities

So I stuck with Computer Science for the rest of high school, and throughout college. Now, I’ll be honest. It’s not always fun. Some aspects are less enjoyable than others, and there are great teachers and less than great teachers in every subject. Plus, it can be really challenging sometimes.

What got me through these courses – the reason that I stuck with it – is that I found a side of it that I loved. I loved the part where I was actually building software. And I knew, that if I stuck with it, I would not only love what I did, but I would get some incredible opportunities.

After my freshman year of college, I landed one of the prestigious Microsoft internships and got flown out to live in Seattle for the summer. While most of my non-CS friends were working at restaurants, I was building real experience. That was amazing.

Opportunities like this are so much more common in engineering because the US is severely lacking in sufficient technical talents. Companies are literally throwing everything they can to recruit talented engineers. Huge paychecks. Free gourmet lunches and dinners. Free soft drinks. Onsite massages. Flexible hours. Bring your dog to work (cats are rarely permitted – sorry cat lovers). It’s literally perk overload.

What can you do with an engineering / computer science degree? Anything and everything.

But the true benefits of pursuing computer science are not just money and glitzy perks. It’s about this simple fact: you can swim farther and faster when the tide is in your favor.

So I wanted to speak to you all to tell you all to pursue technology and engineering careers.

Not just because we need more females (but we do).

Not just because we need more people in the field (but we really, really do).

But also for you — because I truly believe that it’s one of the best investments in yourselves that you can make. The possibilities are endless.

When I graduated from school, I took a role as a Software Engineer for Google. Now, many people think, “well, of course that’s what you do with a computer science degree. You go write code for some big company.” But the truth is that there is no standard career path.

• Some of my classmates chose to join a start-up instead and build software all day.
• Some went to start-ups to design, but not actually build, the software.
• Some went into marketing roles because a CS degree is really, really valuable there.
• A lot of people went to take on a role called Program or Product Management, where they help figure out what kind of software people wanted.
• And then a bunch of my friends went to work for banks on wall street. They love CS majors there, even for non-coding roles, because it’s like a giant stamp of approval that you’re smart, quantitative, and can work hard.
• And still others went to launch their own businesses.
• One good friend of mine went to be an agent for stand-up comics in New York. And, yes, he was a computer science major too.
• A few went on to get their masters and PhD degrees, and are working towards becoming a professor or a researcher.
• Still others went on to become lawyers. In fact, some types of law require an engineering degree.

Many are still doing what they started off as – though much more senior – while others have switched careers. The fact is that it’s easy to switch careers and to move up quickly and to do anything you want when you have a skill that is desperately in demand.

For me, I graduated college and went to work at Google as a software engineer. A few years later, I sort of accidentally launched a company and I’m now some bizarre mix of an engineer, an author, and an entrepreneur.

And I can tell you, without a doubt, it would be a whole lot harder to be any of those things – let alone all of them, or be successful in all of them – without a technical degree. It just wouldn’t be possible.

As I said before, you can swim farther and faster when the tide is in your favor.

The Future

What I’m most excited for though is the future. My future. Your futures. Everyone’s future.

Technology is increasingly the backbone of the world. You connect with your friends through your iPhone. You record the events of your life in digital pictures and then you upload them to Facebook and Flickr. You can do almost all your research for school work online. You can decide that you want a song or book or movie and be reading or listening or watching within seconds. You might buy so much stuff online that you may forget that actual, physical stores exist.

But what’s happening today goes so, so far beyond that.

• Self-driving cars are being developed as we speak. This doesn’t just make your parents’ morning commute a little less stressful. It’ll also give freedom to disabled people who may currently depend on other people for getting around .
• Foreign language translation is not just about dodging learning French and Spanish in school. It also will connect people in non-English speaking countries, giving them access to critical agricultural and healthcare information.
• Video conferencing is helping grandparents watch their children grow up. It’s enabling soldiers to say hi to their children on their birthdays. But it’s also enabling patients in developing countries or rural areas to speak with a doctor.
• Robotic devices help Amazon ship your purchases to you cheaply and efficiently. But they also help find survivors after earthquakes and tsunamis.
• Even things as seemingly frivolous as YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook is helping launch revolutions around the world. And even within the US, it’s enabling kids who are victims of gay bullying to connect with people who will support them and tell them hey, it gets better. This stuff is so, so important and technology is enabling it.

So technology is not just about making our lives easier and more convenient. It’s also about saving our lives. It’s about connecting with friends, family, and even strangers around the world. It’s about learning and growing. And sometimes, it’s just about making our lives a little less hard and a little more fun.

Where do we go from here?

In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing at the time – light bulbs basically eliminated the need for candles. But to say that that – eliminating candles – was the entirety of his impact would be doing a great disservice to Mr. Edison. After all, I don’t think you can build a computer monitor with hundreds of mini-candles. So no light bulb means no computers, no smart phones, and virtually none of the technology we depend on today.

This is where we are with technology. With the internet, computers, and mobile devices, we’ve only just scratched at the surface of what we can do. This isn’t going away; in fact, the pace is accelerating. We can barely even guess at where things will go from here. We just know that it’s going to be really exciting.

Technology is a wave that’s moving very fast, and it’s growing in size. It stands to change everything in its path.

So get on board.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell is author of two books, Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company. While Cracking the Coding Interview is a deep-dive into coding interviews, The Google Resume is a comprehensive book covering a person’s full career path. It starts from how someone should be thinking about college courses, majors, and other topics, up through resume, cover letters, interviews, offers, and graduate schools. It’s the perfect book to help guide yours or your child’s career. [Click here to purchase it on Amazon.com.]

What does Google ask Software Engineers?

The questions usually fall into a few categories:

• Data Structures and Algorithms: These questions can be very challenging, but typically do not rely on “advanced algorithms.” It’s very rare for an interviewer to ask you about Red/Black Tree. They could, of course, but tend not to because (1) it tests knowledge and memorization, which is not something they especially care about and (2) your interviewers, typically being at least a few years out of school, probably do not remember this knowledge.
• Coding: This may involve coding an algorithm that you just designed, or it may be to code a pretty straight-forward method. Remember that even simple problems can be tricky to code.
• Scalability: It’s very likely that at least one of your interviewers will ask you a question like “design a system to search a billion documents.” These questions do not require advanced knowledge in distributed systems; just good instincts. How would do this if there were just one computer involved? Now how do you scale that to many computers?
• Behavioral / Experience Questions: Almost all of your interviewers will probably ask you about some elements of your prior experience. You should be prepared to speak about anything from your resume.

Most people think through if they want to live in the city, but what people forget to think about is the long term impact of living in a particular city.

Suppose you’re graduating college and you get an offer from Google’s Irvine CA office. That’s fantastic. You must be really excited. Great company + great weather. What’s not to love?

But what are you going to do in, say, five years? Odds are good that you’ll want to leave the company, or at least consider leaving. Where do you go?

And there’s the problem – you’re sort of stuck. I’m sure there are other tech companies in the area, but how many? And do you want to join those companies? If you do, will you get an offer?

You may be stuck choosing between three less than great choices:

• Sticking it out at your current company for some indefinite length of time.
• Going to a less desirable company than you otherwise would have wanted.
• Leaving your friends and possible uprooting your family.

This is true for almost every field, but especially so in technology.

Even in Seattle, arguably the #2 tech hub in the US, has limited choices. If you’re a software engineer at Microsoft in Seattle, you have basically three other choices for major tech companies: Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Maybe you’ll get an offer from those companies, maybe you won’t.

The situation gets much worse if you’re not in the bay area, Seattle, or New York. It may still be worth it for personal and other reasons, of course, but that’s a tradeoff only you can make.

Somehow, many candidates have gotten the impression that the interview process is some elaborate system, and if their process is different from their friend’s, it must be a reason for it.

The truth is so much more straightforward than that, and once you get, everything will make sense. Or that’s my hope, anyway.

Here’s how the process works at Google for software engineers. We’ll look at this from the interviewer’s side and from the recruiter’s side. Although this is technically just about Google and Software Engineering, the advice / structure is largely universal across tech companies.

What Your Interviewer is Doing

This is more or less how an interviewer becomes an interviewer:

1. Training: Your interviewer takes an interview training course to teach them how to interview. Actually, they’re really just told things like, “Don’t ask the candidate if they’re married,” and “Don’t ask where their accent is from.” In other words, don’t do anything that’s going to get the company sued.
2. Shadowing: Next, they “shadow” two interviews… you know, in case they didn’t get enough of Google interviews when they were a candidate (yep, your parents were once children themselves, and your interviewers were once candidates). This lets them see the process again, freshly, and chat with the “primary” interviewer about what they thought.
3. Instruction: Then… they’re thrown into a room and asked to interview a candidate. Where do their interview questions come from? Well, where would you come up with interview questions if you were in their shoes? You’d probably bring them from you own interview experience or find them online on sites like CareerCup.
4. Evaluation: Interviewers evaluate how well you did relative to other candidates. (This point is so important that I’m obnoxiously bolding and highlighting it. If there were a <BLINK> tag still, I’d use that.) There are two interesting parts of this statement. (1) It’s “how well,” not “% correct.” It’s a multifaceted, qualitative evaluation that takes into account how you solved the problem, how long it took you, how many mistakes you made, how much help you needed, and how optimal your solution was (note the “hows”, not the “ifs”). I’ve never once made a simple statement like, “the candidate got this question correct,” because that statement doesn’t make sense for anything other than simple factual questions. (2) Performance on a question is judged in comparison to other candidates on the same question. Taking 10 minutes to solve a question optimally may be great performance on one problem, but horrible performance on another. How do you know if you did well or not? You don’t.

Note that no one here has told them what to ask, or given them a list of potential questions, or asked them to focus on a particular topic.

In other words, they have about as much interviewing training / instruction when they’re getting started as any candidate does.

Think about this. There is no system. “Recent Google onsite interview questions” are no different from “old Google onsite questions,” or, for that matter, from old Amazon phone interview questions. When interviewers ask more or less whatever they want, there’s little consistency* across a company, interview type (phone vs. onsite), or timeline.

[* There are some differences, but most of these are minor. Phone interviews will generally focus slightly less on coding, though there is still coding.  Non-web based companies aren't likely to ask about scalability, unless it's relevant for their team. And some companies have a slight preference towards certain topics, such as Amazon's focus on object-oriented design. The differences between Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Apple are covered more in Cracking the Coding Interview, 5th Edition.]

What Your Recruiter is Doing

You might not know this, but your recruiter is a person too.

Ideally, your recruiter wants to usher you through the process efficiently. If you are going to get you an offer, they want to tell you as quickly as possible. If you’re not going to get an offer, they still want to tell you as quickly as possible.

But, that doesn’t always happen because stuff comes up - reorgs, vacations, general life / work busyness.

Next time you ask why your recruiter took a while to respond, ask yourself why you sometimes take a while to respond. More often than not, it’s just that stuff came up that has nothing to do with the other person.

—-

So with all of that as preamble, let’s see if we can answer some quick questions.

I made a mistake in coding. Am I going to get rejected?

See above. Do most other candidates make that mistake (or similar mistakes)? [FYI: on a medium difficulty or higher problem, very few people solve the problem “perfectly.”

I’m preparing for a Microsoft phone interview. What should I focus on?

See above. The fact that it’s a Microsoft interview, or that it’s a phone interview, is mostly irrelevant. Look at software engineering interview questions. If there are particularly points of knowledge you’re struggling with (e.g., you forgot how to traverse a binary tree), you should study those. You shouldn’t worry too much about who is giving the interview.

How long do I have to solve an interview question?

This is sort of like asking how long you have to solve a math problem. Arithmetic problems are solvable in seconds, basic calculus problems in minutes, and complex theory in hours, weeks, or even years.

For a specific interview problem, taking “too long” might indicate poor performance, but that amount of time varies significantly across problems.

When my buddy interviewed with Apple, he was asked to solve 3 questions in 30 minutes. I didn’t even finish one problem in that amount of time. Do I have any chance?

My imaginary 10 year old niece solved 5 math problems in only 10 minutes, while my math professor has been working on this other math problem for a year now. My imaginary niece, therefore, is smarter than my math teacher.

The above question makes about as much sense as this statement.

Unless you and your friend were asked the same interview questions, you really can’t conclude anything from your experiences.

My friend heard back from Google the day after his interview, but it’s been five days and I haven’t heard a word. Is this just Google’s way of rejecting me?

Nope. Doesn’t mean a thing.

I am an experienced candidate. Will I held to the same standards and asked the same kinds of questions?

More or less, yes. Depending on who you talk to, experience either helps you on standard coding / algorithm questions (since you’ve been coding for longer) or hurts you (since you’re further away from these academicy topics).

The slightly unfortunate reality is that interviewers tend to repeat their favorite questions across candidates, so, all else being equal, someone with 30 years or experience will probably be asked the same things as a recent graduate.

However, there will probably be somewhat higher expectations when it comes to behavioral / resume questions.

How long does Facebook take to respond after an interview?

See earlier section about recruiters. Asking how long they take to respond is like asking how long you take to respond to an email. The company may target responding within a week (which is a fairly standard amount of time), but delays can happen for all sorts of reasons.

—

I hope this little window into the interview process helps you next time you wonder why something happened the way it did. Mostly, it’s just people running around doing whatever they want. Yep – that’s it. There is no system.

Shameless plug (but, hey, lots of candidates swear by it): Just because there’s no grand, overall system doesn’t mean you can’t prep for your interviews. You can and you should. Check out Cracking the Coding Interview, 5th Edition: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions. Lots of advice, and none of the fluffy “be the best you can be!” stuff. Straight, to the point, and lots and lots of cool coding problems.

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Yep, that’s right. The long awaited Cracking the Coding Interview v5 is almost out. And we’re going to be giving out a limited number of free, signed copies to lucky readers.

Want to snag your copy? Enter here for your chance to win a copy.

What’s Changed?

To be succinct, a lot! This is not your “I want people to buy a new copy, so I’ll make a few quick changes and call it a new edition” sort of thing. This is a totally re-written, much expanded, new edition.

• Grown to 506 pages in v5, up from 308 pages in v4. (And no, I didn’t pull the ol’ college make-the-margins-bigger trick.) The images on the right are not to scale.
• Much expanded sections on resume design, interview prep, behavioral prep, mastering technical questions.
• More complete sections introducing each chapter.
• 24 new questions.
• Plus, many many additional / alternative / rewritten solutions.

The focus of the book is still Software Engineering interview prep. If you’re looking for a more general start-to-end guide to getting a job at a tech company, check out my second book: The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company.

Enter here for a free, signed copy of Cracking the Coding Interview.

From what the people we met told us, the impact of Millennium Villages has been striking. The impact of One Laptop Per Child, which aims to put an ultra-cheap ($165 + training and maintenance costs) laptop in the hands of each child (not family, and not school), has been a bit more questionable. This is particularly true when you look at its per-dollar impact.

The School

It was around noon on a Tuesday when we arrived at the rural school. Today was a half day, which they do twice a week to keep costs low. The morning students were returning home as the afternoon students were arriving to take their places. Each kid was carrying his or her papers or books. No one had their laptop. Where were these $165 laptops? Left at home. Even if they wanted to use their laptops, they couldn’t do much with them. As is common in this town, the internet hadn’t been working for several days.

The teacher who showed us around was proud to show off the gadgets. Apparently the kids love taking pictures of themselves with the built-in camera. That was as far as the “impact” he mentioned went.

The school lunch program, however, he praised. By giving otherwise hungry students free lunch at school, attendance had increased dramatically. You want kids to get an education? Feed them.

The Hospital

The true lost opportunity for OLPC funds really hits you when you go to the hospital. This town, as a beneficiary of Millennium Villages, was one of the lucky ones. They had adequately trained nurses. Refrigerators to store medicines. Equipment to test people for malaria and HIV, and the drugs to treat them. And, perhaps most significantly, birth control.

Our guide was nearly boastful about the family planning clinic, and he awkwardly  pushed us through the crowd of women awaiting treatment. He whipped out a packet of birth control pills and explained to us how they worked: “Green pills for three weeks. Pinks pills for one. Don’t get them confused. Is very bad.”

In just a few years, the usage of birth control pills had increased from non-existent to over 60%. When families have just two extra mouths to feed, instead of seven or eight, children have more food, more clean water, and more medicine.

Healthcare premiums are just $2 per person per year (true cost is $10 – $20), but most people still can’t afford that.

The Impact

No doubt, OLPC has added value to the students it has reached. The question though, is how much? Is this really the best use of limited resources?

Education is critical to reducing poverty, and certainly, technology is a means to access nearly infinite educational resources online. But if we give one laptop per family, or set up a computer lab in each school, we would touch far more people for far less money.

The choice comes down to this: do you give a family with six children six laptops? Or do you give them one laptop to share, and then cover the healthcare premiums of another 500 children?

So how do you stand out in a stack of hundreds of resumes? Ideally, you don’t. Instead, you find more creative avenues in.

I wrote an article for CNBC offering suggestions on how candidates can land an interview with their dream company. Read it here.

I wanted to tell him to do “the right thing” and turn down the dream offer, but I couldn’t. Why? Because, about seven years ago, I was in a nearly identical situation. And I did the so-called “wrong” thing.

In 2004, I was interviewing for an internship. I didn’t want to go back to Microsoft – three internships there was plenty. Google and Apple had both rejected me, though Apple told me that I was their “#2” candidate for this position. So, though I was pretty lukewarm on the position and would never join there fulltime, I accepted the IBM position. I had stopped all other interviews and had every intention of completing the internship.

Then, six weeks before the internship was supposed to start, I got an email from the Apple team. Their #1 candidate just reneged. Was I still available? This was my dream job. I loved the company. I loved the product. I loved the team. So I said yes.

The After Math

Here’s where I’m supposed to say that it caused some horrific impact on my career. Recruiters no longer trusted me. I got blacklisted. And ever since then I’ve regretted my decision, or something like that.

But the truth is that none of that happened.

IBM was annoyed, but they replaced me. Word didn’t get out about that awful thing I did. Even the other IBM recruiters had no idea what had happened. And why would they? It’s a huge company and one candidate reneging is just not that big of a deal.

But it was a big, big deal to me.

Should you renege?

I can’t – and won’t – advise anyone to renege. It can certainly hurt your reputation. You may be seen by others as unreliable. People who know about the situation may hesitate to recommend you to a company in the future. And, of course, there is definitely an unethical component to it. You’re breaking a promise, and a promise you made in a professional context. That’s never good.

At the same time, I do feel that much like an awesome sales person will recommend a competitor’s product if it’s clearly a better fit for you, an awesome recruiter should understand the position you’re in. This is your dream job – you don’t just walk away from it. (And, in fact, the Apple recruiter was supportive when their original candidate reneged – and would have eagerly interviewed him in the future.)

Additionally, unless the original offer was from a very small company or for a very high level position, the impact on the company probably pales in comparison to the impact on you. Is it really so wrong to renege?

Rather than the knee-jerk “ZOMG-it’s-wrong” response, think seriously here. What is so special about committing to a job offer?

So, what’s so special about this promise?

You shouldn’t promise to see a movie with friends, but then shop around for better plans. You shouldn’t get engaged if you’re not sure you want to get married. And you shouldn’t offer a friend a ride to the airport if you don’t have a car. But, sometimes your parents unexpectedly come to town, sometimes relationships fail, and sometimes cars break down. Life happens.

So let’s all move away from this absolutist “it’s always wrong” mindset and be honest: we break promises all the time and we’re okay with that. Life happens, and things come up. And sometimes that thing is your dream job. Why do we accept broken promises in other cases, but think that it’s always wrong for a job offer?