Anyone ever been invited by Google for a programing challenge?

[Legend]

I thought it was a random Easter egg or something because my google search had a black bar at the top inviting me to solve some challenges. Clicked it and now I'm infiltrating an evil organization in order to save the world.

Apparently it's one way Google recruits developers. Sucks for me though because I don't know python or java lol. I finished the first challenge but I'm probably going to have to duck out pretty soon.



edt: also it was strange but I got the invitation while in incognito mode.

[Legend]

Challenge 2 was kinda fun. It was again pretty simple but not something I've ever done.

[Legend]

Challenge 3 was just some pretty basic math so my solution was only 4 lines of code. Solved it my first try. I wonder if there were similarly elegant solutions for the previous challenges that I missed lol.

[Legend]

Challenge 4 down. I could essentially reuse my solution from challenge 2, just needing to do it in an alternate way. Felt elegant.

Bit worried about how the next challenges will go. I don't want to spend too much time on this and yet they give 7 days per question.

edt: Challenge 5 was pretty quick. I think I'm getting used to java lol.

[Legend]

Oh gosh did challenge 6 suck. Was stuff I never think about or use so I had to do a fair amount of research. In the end my solution only worked 70% of the time, so then I basically had to cheat and see what other people had to say about the problem.

Popped up with an offer to share my code with google recruiters, but oh my was it trash for that one. Still though I'm really really happy to have made it this far. Since I'm self taught I always wonder if I actually know what I'm doing.

edt: oh good, I have 360 hours for the next one.

[the-pi-guy]

Solved the first challenge.

Figuring out the logic was simple. Took much longer to actually get the code to work for reasons*

*I don't even know the reasons. Google's stuff didn't seem to like certain operations?

[Legend]

Solved the first challenge.

Figuring out the logic was simple. Took much longer to actually get the code to work for reasons*

*I don't even know the reasons. Google's stuff didn't seem to like certain operations?

My first challenge was taking a list of numbers and removing some of them. Was yours the same?

Yeah using google's editor with zero debugging is kind of a pain.

[the-pi-guy]

My first challenge was taking a list of numbers and removing some of them. Was yours the same?

Yeah using google's editor with zero debugging is kind of a pain.

Nope.
Mine was breaking down a number into squares basically.

Kind of painful in Java because arrays aren't dynamic.
Kind of painful in python, because variables aren't typed. So you might return the wrong type.

[kitler53]

so I'm no expert personally but I've had a few developers try to move to Google and fail.  

just so you know solving the problem isn't really the test.  they expect everyone to be able to solve the challenges.  they are grading you on the efficiency of the solution.  


one guy told me one of his first questions was "do you have experience with graph data structures" and when he said no they immediately ended the interview. 

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/graph-data-structure-and-algorithms/

[Legend]

Finished with challenge 7. Back again to a problem that was primarily a struggle with java more than anything else. These are pretty fun when it's more like solving a puzzle, not just the slog of writing a bunch of code since I've never used java before.

so I'm no expert personally but I've had a few developers try to move to Google and fail.  

just so you know solving the problem isn't really the test.  they expect everyone to be able to solve the challenges.  they are grading you on the efficiency of the solution.  


one guy told me one of his first questions was "do you have experience with graph data structures" and when he said no they immediately ended the interview.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/graph-data-structure-and-algorithms/

I'm not interested in applying at google so I'm not worrying about the finer details, but I went in understanding that it's all about the execution. I gave up on that with challenge 6 but so far with everything else I think I've done things in a decent way. Was kinda hoping the-Pi-guy would get identical problems so he could point out things I missed though  

[Legend]

I'm on to the last challenge. 8 was a bit complex for me beyond just my struggles with java. Had to do a good amount of debugging since it was failing only one test.

edt: 528 hours for this one.

edt2: awesome! The final challenge is based off something I have a fair amount of experience with. Might still be pretty complicated, but at least I understood the setup immediately.

[darkknightkryta]

Good luck y'all.

so I'm no expert personally but I've had a few developers try to move to Google and fail.  

just so you know solving the problem isn't really the test.  they expect everyone to be able to solve the challenges.  they are grading you on the efficiency of the solution.  


one guy told me one of his first questions was "do you have experience with graph data structures" and when he said no they immediately ended the interview.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/graph-data-structure-and-algorithms/

There's a lot of stuff that's starting to get glossed over today.  It's why I don't like these coding boot camps.  Even on my end, I had like 5 students drop my grade 12 comp sci class and another 5 drop out of the AP into the regular grade 12 course (The course is split) each semester.  So I only really have a handful of students who want to learn this right.  The rest are just here for the ride.  With that said, our comp sci program in university didn't go thoroughly into graph data structures.  We only really saw them as finite state machines in our math class.  We focused on every other algorithm.

[the-pi-guy]

Dumb solution:
Time: O(2^h)
Memory: O(2^h)

My solution:
Time: O(h)
Memory: O(1)

Nice  

[Legend]

Dumb solution:
Time: O(2^h)
Memory: O(2^h)

My solution:
Time: O(h)
Memory: O(1)

Nice  

My final challenge is the same, hopefully. Currently my solution only works on a subnet of the problem. I believe I can expand it to work universally while keeping it O(n), but we'll see. I'm doing yard work today.

[Legend]

Done with my last challenge! My final solution ended up being essentially O(2^n). I was worried I had produced a dud but it's thousands of times faster than the solution I found shared online. Probably could have been optimized more but I was so close to giving up tonight. Was nice pondering this question over Easter weekend but I really needed to be fully focused on Hapax for Monday.

There's a special bonus thing at the end. Glad I didn't give up.