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Another Google Recruiting Technique
An anonymous reader writes "The new edition of Linux Journal has a special insert: The GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test) is a Google recruiting quiz presented as a spoof of standardised aptitude tests. It is filled with math and Google-related trivia."
reply, but cruftbox.com has been /. already. :S
I do hate standard aptitude tests, they are usually unrealistic and have nothing to do with what you have actually learned. Take the National Registry EMT tests, they are so "wordy" that you could pick any answer and be right in your head, but because of the one word, the answer is wrong. Anyone can tell you how to do the procedure, but picking the right answer from two right answers is a hard thing to do!
http://dont.spam.me.anymore.com
They've been putting puzzles on the inside front cover of the Mensa Bulletin for at least the past few months (I just joined). This month, the GLAT was stapled to the inside instead of the inside cover puzzles I'd been seeing.
It actually has some neat questions. Lots of fun!
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Yeah, one person I used to work with who was hired by Google was nothing special in the slightest, and was slated to be fired by my company in a layoff (due to lack of tech skills, that is).
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
As an employee in a longtime Google competitor (gee, guess who), I must say from day to day I find the foot soldier, often educated at a state school, much more useful than the Einstein. They work their tails off, don't say no to any project, and work instead of cruising the web.
Honestly, I was happy when I got a job after college where I could do real work (design/architect & implement) and quit jumping through stupid hoops to prove how smart I was. I've answered my fair share of brain teasers, pattern recognition, cute/stupid questions. This is crap that pisses me off. I'm sure google wants smart people, but they're going to overlook all the people who just get shit done when it needs to be done (and do it well) because they're going for the people who are creative. I'll take someone slightly less smarter with a good work ethic who realizes that work is more than just answering stupid riddles.
And yes, I may be slightly jealous that I don't work at Google, but honestly this type of thing really turns me off. I guess I'm not what they're looking for then.
I typed out a few more lines and immedaitely noticed the following:
:)
1) you can obviously never have a digit over 3
2) if you right-justify the numbers you immediately see many 2d structures, as well as periodicity to each column, but the way the pattern changes from one col to the next is not obvious
3) if you sum each row, or look at the differences in sums between rows, there are even more patterns... is there a fibonacci sequence buried in there? will have to spend some more time on this one.
Very interesting things happen if you try it in binary, i.e. 111100 -> 1001100
I'd post the results but I haven't the patience to circumvent the lameness filters.
for f(1):
0, 1
the number 1 is written once.
for f(13):
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
there are 6 ones: 1 from each of 1, 10, 12, 13, and two from 11, for a total of 6.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
I was quite stunned to see the form in my magazine.
The job screening exam clearly breaches Australia's anti-discriminiation laws (simplifying somewhat, Google is asking some questions unrelated to my potential performance as an employee, therefore the questions must be for some discriminatory purpose). I'd be surprised if the same were not true of the US.
What this screening exam did for me was to confirm Google's corporate stupidity.
Google is now first on the list of places I'd never want to work -- what concern is it of their's what I do with my spare time.
I've no idea what Linux Journal thought they were doing by accepting the insert.
Since it is illegal to test people's intelligence in the U.S. for a job
Reference, please? I don't think that's true (unless it's relatively recent). For example, seven years ago IBM was still giving aptitude tests as a part of the interview process for new hires.
I don't think you're drawing the diagram of the problem correctly. You're finding the resistance between two points defined by the knight's move ("two squares straight and one square to the side" http://chess.about.com/library/ble132kn.htm). As a result, the resistance is definately not infinite.
Each square of the infinite chess board has a resistor. Therefore, the squares involved in te knight's move look like this:
--+--R--+--R--+--R--+--B
| | | |
R R R R
| | | |
A--+--R--+--R--+--R--+--
Y
Where each R is 1 Ohm. You're finding the resistance between the points A and B. We want to find the resistance between points A and B. Let's look at a simplification and find the resistance between points B and Y. You have two Rs in series and then each of these pairs are in parallel: 1/(1/(R+R) + 1/(R+R)) = 1/(1/2 + 1/2) = 1.
Care to guess what the resistance between A and B is?
For those wishing to find organizations more stringent in their requirements than Mensa (pages all from :
TOPS (99th percentile, which apparently equates to a 1360 on the SAT, which is surprisingly low)
One in a thousand society (99.9th, ~1520 on the SAT), all the way to the Giga society which demands with a straight face an IQ of 196 or higher to join.
Ok, I'm tired of providing links. Look a few pagefuls down on this page http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/hoeflin.html and you'll see that such societies are both in abundance and have widely varying selection criteria. I qualify for most - but certainly not all! - of those societies purely on academic test scores (haven't been IQ tested since I was a youth) but don't see the point of them and don't feel like going through the trouble of specialized "entrance exams". I can stroke my ego myself, thank you very much, and defining any of my life strictly on "how smart I am" vs. "what I have accomplished" or "what am I in the process of accomplishing" would be counterproductive imo.
I recently interviewed at Google and got an offer, but didn't go. I think they sort of dropped the ball.
At the risk of sounding arrogant (and, there's no way I'd post this if I weren't doing so anonymously), I was a very qualified candidate. I solved all their puzzles and made an incredibly positive impression on everyone there I visited. Simiarly, Google made a very positive impression on me. It's been my dream to work for them for many years and I finally had the opportunity!
Then, things sort of turned a little bit worse. I was also being courted by a Very Large Software Company. VLSC also made me an offer. It was better, but the money wasn't the issue. Every few days, someone from VLSC would call me to tell me how important it was that I go to work for them. How excited they were about me and extolling the virtues of VLSC.
First my future boss called. His boss called. HIS boss called. And *that* guy's boss called! At this point it was someone very high up in the company. All of them had the same message: we really want you to come here. They started sending little gifts to my house.
Meanwhile, I heard nothing from Google. Their recruiter called me occasionally but never replied to my emails or indicated having read them on phone calls. I asked if it would be possible to speak to anyone else in Google who I might speak with about the type of work I'd be doing or the people I'd be working with. No one ever contacted me. Now, they were getting ready for their IPO so I suppose they had better things to think about, but the overwhelming impression I got was "Your loss if you don't work here. Whatever, come if you want." Meanwhile, VLSC made it clear it would be *their* loss if I didn't work there and that they'd do everything they could to make it the best place ever to work.
It was incredibly painful to have to give up my dream of working for Google. But ultimately, VLSC convinced me that they were more excited about the work I could do and that I'd have a better opportunity there to do it.
I really wanted to want Google. They made it very hard.
I hope someone from Google reads this and maybe can pass this on to HR folks. It's not something I feel comfortable attaching my name to.
Wrong, the proper capitalization is PhD, meaning lowercased 'h'. Assuming ASCII, the 'h' goes from 0x38 for 'H' to 0x58 for the properly cased 'h'. So the difference between PhD and PHB is really 0x22.
Thereby proving that there actually is something more than just a shave and a haircut between the PHB and PhD.
And yes, this is probably the dorkiest slashdot post I've ever written.
make world, not war
Each letter equals one digit, there are ten different letters. Solve without using a computer. It is possible, and can be considered easy if you can work out how to record what letters can and can't be which digits.
I have nothing against using a program to solve this, but it defeats the purpose (which is to see who can logically solve - not brute force - the puzzle).
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
In a nutshell, he hinted that they use Linux, that they have loads of cheap systems which 1) they expect will break down and 2) are cheap to fix, that a large part of the systems indexes content and that another large part of the systems serves content. And Google is hiring.
He constantly repeated that because they went public he was not allowed to be specific. And he wasn't. There was a watchful Google woman that apparently took note of everything that went on and assisted at the proclamations of secrecy. And Google is hiring.
Then he touched the Google policy and hinted that Google has a sort of principle of "not being evil". In my words, this means Google has considered being evil and decided not to be (maybe for the time being). Did I mention that Google is hiring?
Oh yes and they were hiring. Yes hiring, hiring and hiring. There were even forms (as if the audience didn't know where to look for them on Google). And of course he couldn't say anything about the rates, due to... But Google is hiring.
At the end of the presentation I thought:
- Google kicks ass in low cost high performance computing.
- Gmail will give them experience in how to handle confidentially in low cost high performance computing.
- They (and not RedHat) have everything in order to become the next MS.
(Monopoly on a technology and loads of quickly earned bucks.)
- I guess that their going public results in less fun at the company.
- Why do they need/want more money? They are doing OK as it is!
- I decided to let Google have loads of fun with their money and not to take anything of that away from them by applying.
- Oh yeah, they probably want the best for the lowest price. Both in HW and HR.
And not to forget: Google is hiring.I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
GLAT: Number of blank lines for testee's answer: 5.
Number of "found pages" for typical google search: 523,984