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.

• Alpha Nu Scholarship Recipient (2010).
• 1st Place, Innovation Award (2009).

Although the second bullet is a bit better than the first one, both are fairly meaningless. The reason is that both are totally “unquantified.” I have no idea what these awards really mean.

Awards can be a selling for your application because they show at least one occasion where you were, objectively, better than everyone else. So, your job is to show that this is what that award means.

Make it meaningful!

How do you do that? Tell the reader these details:

• How selective is the award? It’s great that you won an award, but there’s a big difference between placing first out of 5 teams and placing first out of 500. Tell me how many people you beat out to get that award (percentage or absolute numbers are both fine).
• What is the award for? I have no idea what the John R. Robertson award is. Tell me why you won the award. Was it academic achievement, test scores, a business plan, etc?
• What did you win? A good way to make an award “meaningful” is to tell me what you won. If you received a $50,000 scholarship, I know you must have done something pretty cool to get that. They don’t just throw $50,000 at anyone.

So next time writing you’re resume, I want to see this instead:

• Alpha Nu Scholarship Recipient (2010). Selected out of 1,500 students to receive $50,000 academic scholarship from Greenberg Bank due to outstanding academic performance and community involvement.
• 1st Place, Innovation Award (2009). Awarded most innovative senior project (out of 120 senior projects) by student and faculty vote.

This Is About More Than Just Awards

Before you assume that this doesn’t apply to you (because you don’t have any awards), remember this is about more than just awards.

Ultimately, this is about how you quantify what your accomplishments, and it’s not always as straightforward as it might seem.

Suppose you wrote this on your resume under your projects section:

• Snakes and Ladders (iPhone App): Built iPhone game for [...].

That’s neat and all. But it’s not nearly as good as this:

• Snakes and Ladders (iPhone App): Built iPhone game for [...]. Downloaded 10,000 times and received rating of 4.7 out of 5.0.

The above one shows that it wasn’t complete junk, because it got good ratings and a decent number of people downloaded it. But is 10,000 downloads great, or just decent? I don’t know – and neither will the person reading your resume.

An even better way of doing this is if you can put it in a way that other people will understand. For example:

• Snakes and Ladders (iPhone App): Built iPhone game for [...]. Downloaded 10,000 times and received rating of 4.7 out of 5.0. Ranked as #2 game on iPhone App Store in June 2011.

So remember: make your accomplishments meaningful.

What other mistakes have you made with your resume? Find out with CareerCup’s Grade My Resume service. Get your resume checked for the 15 biggest and most common problems. Learn more.

I had 5 interviews for a software development position. 4 went really well – I got all the answers perfectly. I bombed the fifth one though. I don’t think I got the best solution, and I made some mistakes in coding. What are my odds of getting an offer?

Let’s step back a moment.

First, your interview performance is nearly impossible to judge. So when you say you “bombed” this interview and did “really well” on the others, you don’t know that – trust me.

Second, I find it hard to believe that you were basically flawless in all your other interviews. For that to have happened, you either had incredibly easy questions or were one of the best candidates that anyone has ever seen. In my interviews at Google, fewer than 1% of candidates answered my moderate-to-hard difficulty questions “perfectly.” Odds are, you made a lot more mistakes than you realize.

Remember that you’re judged relative to other candidates (which is why your interview performance is nearly impossible to judge) and on things like:

• how quickly you arrive at a good solution
• how optimal your algorithm(s) are
• how you discuss the trade offs between the different approaches
• how many bugs you make in your code
• how easily you discover those bugs
• how you fix the bugs

All of these factors are qualitative (and relative to how other candidates do them), not binary “correct vs. incorrect” factors. I have never, ever asked someone a question like, “Design an algorithm to …” and reported that a candidate got the question “correct” or “incorrect.”

So when you say you got a question “correct,” it doesn’t make sense (unless it was a simple factual question). You can say you did an interview flawlessly, but that would mean that you immediately spit out the optimal solution to a problem (and somehow you knew it was optimal), coded it in completion without a single mistake, and checked for bugs anyway but there weren’t any. Did you? It’s possible, but it’s far more likely that you made a bunch of mistakes along the way.

And that’s okay – everyone makes mistakes in interviews. And you can get an offer while bombing one interview. But again – you don’t know which one you bombed, if any. I’ve see a lot of candidates say that they did “bombed” in one interview, when in fact, that was their best interview of all.

Cute things like Ninja make me think I’ll be working with idiots and hipsters. [Start-up Employee]

Personality is cool, but “ninja” is such an overused term that it decreases personality rather than adding it. [University of Washington Student]

I dislike “programmer” because it implies work consisting of only programming, as opposed to design and algorithmic aspects. “Code ninja” is a beautified form of “code monkey”, which is bad for the same reason as “programmer”. Titles like software developer are more general and more neutral. [Student]

The company shoudn’t force cool on its job descriptions. [UC Irvine Student]

Ninja / Rockstar / whatever just sounds immature. Have you ever heard someone outside of technology refer to themselves as a Ninja? [Anonymous]

Ninja and Expert are sometimes outside a new grad’s reach! So I hate it! [NC State Student]

I conducted a survey of 200+ software developers, asking them their thoughts on different titles / labels in job descriptions. Each person was asked to rate the following titles on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best.

The specific question was this: Suppose you see “we’re looking for a _____________”, do you like it or hate it (the title / job name)? 

• Programmer
• Software Engineer
• “Ninja” (Code Ninja / Java Ninja / Ruby Ninja, etc)
• “Expert” (Java Expert / Ruby Expert / C++ Expert / etc)
• Software Developer

People were also asked for their gender, country (US, India, or “Other”), and profession (Professional vs. Student). Note that the last of these was added after about half the responses had been submitted, and not everyone chose to answer these questions.

So what happened?

75% of coders like the term Software Developer in a job description; only 25% like “ninja.”

Cool terms like “ninja” do not impress – anywhere.

In the above graph, I've simplified the data to just "love" and "hate." "Love" = 4 or 5 rating. "Hate" = 1 or 2. The main (purple) bars indicate the overall rating, with the colored lines indicating the rating for a specific subgroup (US, India, Women, Students, and Professionals).

Average scores reported on a scale from 1 to 5

Percentage of people reporting each of 5 scores, on a 5-point scale, across entire population. 1 = Hate It. 5 = This is the Term I Prefer.

Another way to look at this data is this: For every person who hates the term Software Developer, 11 people like it. For every person that likes Ninja, 2 people hate it.

Why are some titles liked more than others? 

The titles tell you something about the job itself.

• Software Engineer / Software Developer: As the official title given at company, these terms are largely neutral and synonymous with each other. They’re not “flashy,” but you can’t really be turned off by them. It is what it is. Only 8 – 11% of people reported hating those terms, and in almost all of those cases, there was something wonky about their response (giving 1s to all or almost all of the choices, etc).
• Software Developer is just slightly preferred over Software Engineer in India, but there’s little difference in the US. Software Engineer may have more of a “science-y / advanced” connotation to it, while Software Developer sounds more practical / real-world. The data here is really too close to tell much more than it doesn’t matter much.
• Expert is preceded with an expert in something – java, rails, etc. If you’re looking so much for someone who’s a Java expert, it suggests that you might be one of those people who doesn’t understand that a good engineer can pick up a new language quickly. And if you don’t understand that, do you really respect engineers? Is your current team talented?
• Programmer sounds like code monkey. Developers are advised not to call themselves programmers, and you shouldn’t call them that either.
• Ninja is perhaps the most debatable term. Not surprisingly, it had the highest variance in responses compared with any of the other job titles. Some people love it; it’s the new hip term. For precisely that reason though, some people hate it. It’s too trendy, and it sounds like you’re trying to be cool. You’re the kid wearing the clothes that some magazine told you was “in style,” not realizing that everyone else is looking at you kind of funny. But hey, some people still think it’s cool.

• Women are statistically more likely to be turned off by job descriptions featuring competitive language (note: “competitive language” is not the same thing as “competitive jobs / careers”). And you don’t get much more competitive than terms like ninja and expert. In fact, here’s a great story: “In 2006, GNOME received almost two hundred GSoC applicants – all male. When GNOME advertised an identical program for women, but emphasizing the opportunities for mentorship and learning, they received over a hundred highly qualified female applicants for the three spots they were able to fund.”
• Students and Professionals differ little, interestingly, with the exception of their feelings on ninja. The relative youth of students probably makes them more accepting of hip / trendy terms.
• India is considerably more accepting than the US of the terms ninja and expert. I’m not an expert in Indian culture, but this might suggest a greater focus on competition. India also doesn’t like the term Software Engineer as much. Anyone who knows a bit more about India care to explain this?

The problem with joining a start-up when you graduate is that most start-ups fail. Sure, if you get into FourSquare or Twitter or Facebook when it’s young, that’s great. But no one really knows what next year’s hot start-up will be.

When you join a start-up when it’s still young and unknown, you’ll probably be jobless in a couple of years. That’s just the reality of start-ups. They fail more often than they succeed. And since anyone can get a job at a start-up, your now-prior job offers little credibility. No one looks at your resume and says, “ooh, this person is probably a great engineer since they worked for UnknownCompany.”

On the other hand, when you work for Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Facebook (and other top tech companies), that credibility will stick with you for a long, long time. Having “Amazon, Software Engineer” on your resume will establish a minimum amount of credibility in a way that “Failed Unknown Company, Software Engineer” will not.

You don’t need to stay at BigTechCompany for long. One year, or even six months, is long enough to establish that credibility. (In fact, if you want to join a start-up, make sure you leave quickly – or if you stay, you’re staying for a very good reason. It’s really easy to get sucked into the nice, cushy jobs that big tech companies offer.)

That technical credibility will help you get a job with the really hot start-ups, or help you recruit people when you found your own start-up, or help you get funding for your start-up.

Isn’t 10 or 20 years of technical credibility worth pushing off your entrepreneurial goals for just six months? I think so.

As someone who has enjoyed success self-publishing and professionally publishing, let me tell you: self-publishing is so much harder.

Calling self-publishing easy is like calling founding a business easy. A lot of people can do the paperwork, but being successful in it is much, much harder.

And this is the biggest thing that everyone needs to realize: self-published authors are entrepreneurs. As such, authors need to ask themselves the same questions that entrepreneurs do:

1. Is there a big market?
How many people want your book? Your book won’t sell well if it’s too “niche.”

2. Is there good demand in your market?
Just because people “need” your book doesn’t mean they actually want it. Is your book useful to your market? How useful? Are they already looking for something like yours?

There is a tradeoff between the size of the market and demand; the bigger your market, the less “perfectly suited” it is for any one person. My book, for instance, is only for software engineers and would be considered very “niche.” However, because it’s a small and focused market, it outsells any of the “general purpose” interview books out there.

3. How much competition is there?
You should be aware of the existing competition for your book. If there are a ton of other books out there, you need to hope that you’ve written a really, really good book (and that’s hard!).

Remember though that just as too much competition is bad, too little competition is bad too. There’s often a reason that there isn’t competition, and it may mean that there isn’t actually a big market out there.

4. How will you market / promote your book?
You can’t expect to just write a great book and suddenly have people desperate to buy it. You need to think about how you are going to promote it. Do you have a popular and relevant website or blog? Do you train people? There are many ways to promote a book or product, and you need to find one that works well for you and your market.

5. What is the minimal viable product?
In start-ups, there’s a concept of the “minimal viable product,” which is the quickest product that you can build that basically solves the customer’s needs. It might not be fully functional and do everything that they want, but it fulfills their most pressing demands. If you release with that first, it will help you get customers and to understand what customers really want.

The same concept applies to non-fiction / business / technical / reference books. The 5th edition of Cracking the Coding Interview is a 500 page paperback book. The 4th edition was “only” 300 pages. The first version? It was a 20 page PDF.

The first edition was the “minimal viable product.” It wasn’t perfect – in fact, it was far from perfect – but it was enough to establish that there was a good demand, a good market, and a good reason to continue to develop the book.

The wonderful thing about print-on-demand services like CreateSpace is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time writing the “perfect” book so that you can do a 3000 copy print-run. You can write the “minimal viable book,” and then write a bigger and better version once you figure out that lots of people want to read it.

6. Are you willing to really, really work for success?
Self-publishing is hard. Really, really hard.

In fact, in many ways, it’s harder than founding a company. At least when you’re founding a company, you have loads of entrepreneurs to turn to for advice about marketing, promotion, hiring, building a product, and so on.

Who do you turn for advice about how to self-publish a “serious” book, when all the advice is written for authors writing vampire fiction who are only self-publishing because they can’t get a “real” publisher? (Side note: I may set up a discussion list for self-published authors, if there’s enough interest. Sign up here if you’re interested.)

Self-published authors have to do everything themselves, from cover design to editing to marketing and promotion. It’s hard, confusing, and takes more time than you can imagine.

They are a lot of rewards to being a self-published author, but, like any entrepreneur, you’ll have to really work for it.

Never forget that. Success is a challenge for any entrepreneur – and you are an entrepreneur.

Fundamentally, their core frustration is not a political one, but an emotional one. They’re sick of feeling ignored by the wealthy and they want to be heard.

And heard they are – on every last demand. Even the crazy ones.

Let’s take a look at some of their most popular demands, according to the votes on OccupySeattle.org.

Allow Everyone to Vote (136 votes)

Who is this for? Ex-cons? Immigrants? Children and teenagers?

Corporate Accountability (495 votes)

Corporations are already overflowing with paperwork. It’s one of the things that makes it really hard for “regular people” to start a business. Maybe more accountability would be good, but they need to say what exactly this means.

End privatization of the commons (natural resources, education, healthcare, etc.) (139 votes)

The US already has both private and public education. And private education is, without doubt, far superior to public education. Would they like to terminate private education? Why? And if that’s not what they’re talking about, what does this mean?

Tax the rich and big business (285 votes)

Obviously the US already does. The rich and big businesses pay a much greater percentage of their income than the poor do. Would they like to raise the tax rate? To what? For whom? Or end some of the tax loop holes? Which ones?

I’m sure there are answers to these questions. But is there a consensus on these answers? And who will deliver the answers, when there is no central voice?

So what will happen to Occupy?

#1 They’ll get a voice, but they won’t get anywhere.

Everyone has gripes about the country, so they’ll get plenty of members. They may even have politicians pander to them – their sheer numbers will do that. But how can anyone meet their demands, when there’s no indication of what’s important or how they would like Washington to “end the greed”?

#2 The crazies will come – and will belong.

As long as Occupy lacks a focused voice and set of demands, every demand can be “one of theirs.” There’s no one to disavow the really crazy demands, and there’s no methodology by which to disavow them.

And if you give the media the choice of talking about the boring ol’ reasonable demands and the crazy ones, guess what they’ll pick?

#3 They’ll be the left’s Tea Party.

Sure, they’ll say they aren’t affiliated with a particular political persuasion. Tea Partiers say they aren’t affiliated with the Republicans. But when the vast majority of their members are part of a particular political party, people won’t distinguish.

Occupy will fuel Republicans’ worst fears about Democrats (even the Occupy logo looks communist!) and will hurt the democrats. And let’s face it – the vast majority of folks in the Occupy movement would much rather see a Democrat in power than a Republican.

It boils down to this: Occupy needs to learn what every business leader already knows. To effect change, you need to have a central voice and focused, reasonable vision. Without that, you’re just a bunch of kids throwing a temper tantrum.

Above image not to scale. The 3D book making software does not understand book length.

The 5th edition of the best-selling programming interview prep book, Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions, is officially on sale. And even better – Amazon is currently running a 20% sale on the book!

Now, I know you’re used to new editions being a couple little fixes here, packaged in a shiny new edition probably for no other reason than to get you to buy your own copy rather than borrow your friend’s. That is not what this is.

The fifth edition of Cracking the Coding Interview is a massive expansion of the fourth edition. It added 200 pages of content, growing the length of the book from 308 pages to 508. A more complete description of the many, many changes are below.

As before, Cracking the Coding Interview focuses on software engineering interviews. If you’re looking for a start-to-end guide on how to get a job a tech company, pick up 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. The book is rated 4.5 stars after 22 reviews and can be purchased from Amazon or any Barnes and Noble store.

Think your resume is “good enough?” Check it against these five big questions.

#1. Is your resume one page (or at most two pages for 10+ years of experience)?

Did you know that longer resumes usually make you look less experienced?

When you include just one page of content, you’re including, by definitely, the “top one page” of experience. Less impressive accomplishments just don’t make the cut. But when you expand into two or three pages of experience, the quality of the average item on your resume drops substantially.

And since resume screeners only skim your resume for 15 – 30 seconds, it’s the “average” that matters, not the sum of all your accomplishments.

(Still disagree? Read Less Is More: Eight Reasons Why You Need a One Page Resume.)

#2. Did you use a resume template, or did you build your own?

If you’re opening up a new page in Microsoft Word, bolding some headings for your job titles, and typing your accomplishments under them in bullets, you’re almost surely making a mistake.

Your resume will wind up looking sloppy and unprofessional. And, perhaps even worse, you’ll probably waste a lot of space. Resume formats are often designed to fit as much as possible on the screen while still being clean and well-organized.

Unless you’re a whiz with Word and with design, you should just use one of the many resume templates out there.

(Here are the two resume templates that I use.)

#3. Are your bullets too long?

As mentioned earlier, resume screeners don’t read your resume; they skim it. The process takes about 15 – 30 seconds per resume and is designed to decide on interview / no interview. Bullets that look like a paragraph are skipped in this process. They take too long to read and too long to really digest.

If you want to make sure your bullets are read, keep them to a mix of one line and two line bullets.

#4. Is your resume accomplishment-oriented or responsibility-oriented?

The work you were assigned to do is sort of, well, boring. I want to know what you actually accomplished.

Consider the difference between these two bullets for a Program Manager:

1. Design features for Amazon S3 and oversee development of the features across software engineers and testers.
2. Designed the SS Frontline feature, managed its development, and led its integration across three products, leading to a $100 million increase in revenue.

The first one doesn’t tell me much more than what I already knew from the job title. The second bullet, however, shows me that you had an impact.

#5. What did you not include?

When I’m reviewing a resume, one question I like to ask is if there’s anything (major or minor, professional or academic, serious or “just for fun,” coding / PM / etc focused or not) that they didn’t include. All too often, the person cut something that’s pretty major – possibly what would have been the “wow” part of their portfolio.

Last month, I was reviewing the resume of a PM at Microsoft who had neglected to mention on her resume that she’d started a video gaming company “on the side,” where she hired and managed several testers and developers. Why didn’t she mention it? Because they hadn’t launched yet.

The belief that you can only list something on resume if some requirement or other is met is common.

When I reviewed resumes after the PennApps hackathon, about half of the CS students left out a major project. Of those, half thought that they couldn’t mention a project because it was for class, and the other half thought that they couldn’t mention a project because it wasn’t for a class.

Ultimately, forget the rules of what does and doesn’t belong on a resume. If it makes you look better, include it.

…………

Want more guidance on how to improve your resume and land a job at a great tech company? Read The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company.

Forbes recently posted an article by me called “10 Secrets to Getting a Job at Apple, Google, or Microsoft.” Here are three of my favorites:

Start Something: Launching a small tech company, or just a project, can demonstrate virtually everything a tech firm wants to see: field expertise, passion for technology, initiative, leadership and creativity. Don’t have software development experience? Not to worry – you can hire an outsourced development team from sites like odesk and elance

Create an Online Portfolio: Almost everyone can benefit from a portfolio. A simple web site with a description of your major accomplishments (both inside and outside of work) can provide more context than what your resume can provide. Recruiters may reference this after seeing your resume, but they might stumble across your portfolio online and give you a call.

Rehearse Your Stories: One of the best ways to improve your overall interview performance is to practice your “stories.” For each major accomplishment, brainstorm ways that you showed leadership, demonstrated influence, or overcame challenges. Rehearsing these responses aloud will help you to more effectively discuss what you did and why it mattered.

Read the rest of the article for the full list. Or check out my book, The Google Resume, from which each of these tips were borrowed.

As an addendum to this, I’d like to add: ask for help. There are people in your field (or your desired field) who can help you. They can suggest ways to get relevant experience through projects, volunteer work, or starting a part-time job. They can help you craft your resume to bring out your best accomplishments. And they can help you prepare for the interviews. Don’t do it alone – ask them for help.