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Comment by josephg

Nobody at Google wants you to do boring work without questioning the need for it. That would be a waste of money and time.

Hard interview questions are asked for the same reason hard questions are asked in SAT tests. The assumption is that if you can do a hard thing in the interview (implement a mutex using a semaphore or whatever) then you can probably write simple code too.

A few years ago I was working somewhere that had a low hiring bar. We were using an opensource graphql library to interact with some service. The graphql library didn’t expose some queries we needed, so I forked the library and added those queries.

After I left I heard through the grapevine that they were very unhappy with my work. They didn’t have anyone on the team who was skilled enough to maintain the code I wrote, so I left them in a bad place.

In retrospect I’m still not sure what else I could have done to solve the team’s graphql problems. Not that, but what?

parent josephg 4 years ago

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