Surviving (hell, _killing_) the Technical Intereview

Mikhail Naganov has written a handy post for engineers who are stressing out about interviewing.  He’s spot-on when he says:

“what are the staffing needs in smart companies? They want people that can tackle complex problems in new problem areas. They want people that are responsible and passionate about their work. And, of course, they want people that can explain their solutions to colleagues.”

We’re going to grill you when you come through, but it’s not like we expect you to solve all of our problems correctly – if you do that, expect an offer before you leave (unless you’re a jerk – we have a policy against hiring those…)

One more resource I’d point you at (hat tip to Mikhail) – Steve Yegge’s poston interviewing at Google.  Worth a gander or two… That said, very funny counterpoint to Steve’s raving about Google culture can be found here (hat to William Wechtenhiser for that one).

Shameless, Shameless Plug…

…for votes   For whatever reason, Good to Know  is up for best recruiting blog of the year.  I’m pretty sure it’s not because my employer is paying for the grand prize (seriously – what I suspect is that Jason Davis, the guy who runs RecruitingBlogs.com, the organizer of the whole contest, is just ridiculously nice and felt bad at how poorly I did at poker last time we hung out).

While I’m under zero illusion I’ll win, I wouldn’t mind not coming in dead last.  Seriously.  Soooo…. if you’re so inclined, I’d appreciate it if you clicked here and exercised your right to vote.  Primarily in categories #1& #6 – well, feel free to vote in the rest, too – in fact, I’d recommend checking out all of the nominated blogs – there’s a lot of really great guidance out there, from a gang of remarkable minds.

Algorithm Engineers/ Puzzles

This is for those of you who enjoy high-level problem solving and engineering – if you’d like, feel free to play with this, and shoot me your answers, to: burns@zoominfo.com.  (Just to warn you, if your answers are interesting, expect me to reach out to you about joining our Core Development team).

It would be a great benefit if we could categorize each site upon visiting it so as to know what kind of information we should be looking for. For example, a typical company site will have a contact page, a management page, press releases, and a description of the company. If our goal was to find information about people and companies it could be argued that we’d be smart to visit every page of these sites. Alternatively, some websites’ purpose is to try to sell you something. These are shopping sites or online marketplaces, like Amazon.com, for example, containing products and prices and should be pruned so that we visit only the sections that are interesting to us. Still other sites provide information about a particular topic (like www.cancer.org) and another approach might have to be taken to find the kinds of pages we’re looking for. The purpose of this project is to identify the types of sites we want to be able to recognize. Once there exists a set of categories we can work to develop the criteria that puts a site into one of the categories. So, take the sites on the spreadsheet and go through as many as you can to determine what you think the site categories ought to. You only need to go through as many sites as it takes to come up with 5 to 10 categories. Next, think about what characteristics of the sites identify them to be in their specific category. And then, please explain what your methodology or approach would be if you were told to write software to automatically type other websites. Just a few paragraphs of your ideas giving some examples would be fine – we’re not looking for a full, working prototype or anything. Good luck!