Well, its not the credit card industry that is behind when it comes to CC technology.(I work for a CC Company and I know a thing or two about the technology we tried)
Its the merchants that are not ready to upgrade there decade old POS systems..
Every time we come up with a better and secure way of dealing with fraud, they reject the idea saying that its too expensive, because there is no need. For the bean counters it's not worth it...
My Google Interview Experience
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
I received a call from Google last October and the recruiter wanted to setup a technical interview over phone with one of their Engineers and when I said I may need to prepare for it and she said, you cannot prepare for the interview as it is going to be on general programming techniques and algorithms. Even then I wanted at least a week to locate and brush up cobwebs from my old Knuth algorithm books.
I got the call at the exact time and the guy was very nice and we chatted on general topics like why I am interested in leaving my current job etc. Then he asked me to write a routine in Java to reverse a String. Naturally with gusto I started writing and explaining the code I was writing on my note pad. Of course I gave the easy solution of creating an additional character Array to copy the characters from source string in reverse order.
He wanted to complicate the question further and said, he wanted to reverse the words in a sentence and to complicate even more he would like the algorithm to reverse the words in place (in-situ replacement: No additional char arrays or additional Strings) After a couple of iterations I gave him the solution he was looking for. I was happy with my solution and the rest of interview went on quite well. Meanwhile I asked him if I could skip the coding part and just explain logic, for which he agreed.
The recruiter called me back the next day and wanted to schedule another telephone interview.
This time, the person called me and asked me to explain about various ways to join two different tables and he also asked me to write an SQL which ended up using a sub query, though it took me a while to arrange my thoughts and create the SQL. Then he asked about ways to identify and solve bottlenecks while rendering a Servlet page. Then I started explaining various reasons and various ways to solve it. It appears he was looking for a particular solution with out giving me any hints and the question is in such broad terms I couldn't pinpoint the problem location. I tried, threading issues, session problems, Memory allocations, Garbage collections, VM settings etc.
That's it, I didn't hear from them for about a month in spite of my weekly reminders. Then I received the infamous "Thanks from Google" mail.
In retrospect I am sure I didn't fail just because I couldn't read the second interviewer's mind (I really hope so!), but you never know! Though my ego was bruised it was a good experience. However one thing is certain, the candidates that interviewed me were very polite and courteous and there is no sign of "I am at Google and you don't".
Slashdot Mirror
Its the merchants that are not ready to upgrade there decade old POS systems..
Every time we come up with a better and secure way of dealing with fraud, they reject the idea saying that its too expensive, because there is no need. For the bean counters it's not worth it...
I got the call at the exact time and the guy was very nice and we chatted on general topics like why I am interested in leaving my current job etc. Then he asked me to write a routine in Java to reverse a String. Naturally with gusto I started writing and explaining the code I was writing on my note pad. Of course I gave the easy solution of creating an additional character Array to copy the characters from source string in reverse order.
He wanted to complicate the question further and said, he wanted to reverse the words in a sentence and to complicate even more he would like the algorithm to reverse the words in place (in-situ replacement: No additional char arrays or additional Strings) After a couple of iterations I gave him the solution he was looking for. I was happy with my solution and the rest of interview went on quite well. Meanwhile I asked him if I could skip the coding part and just explain logic, for which he agreed.
The recruiter called me back the next day and wanted to schedule another telephone interview.
This time, the person called me and asked me to explain about various ways to join two different tables and he also asked me to write an SQL which ended up using a sub query, though it took me a while to arrange my thoughts and create the SQL. Then he asked about ways to identify and solve bottlenecks while rendering a Servlet page. Then I started explaining various reasons and various ways to solve it. It appears he was looking for a particular solution with out giving me any hints and the question is in such broad terms I couldn't pinpoint the problem location. I tried, threading issues, session problems, Memory allocations, Garbage collections, VM settings etc.
That's it, I didn't hear from them for about a month in spite of my weekly reminders. Then I received the infamous "Thanks from Google" mail.
In retrospect I am sure I didn't fail just because I couldn't read the second interviewer's mind (I really hope so!), but you never know! Though my ego was bruised it was a good experience. However one thing is certain, the candidates that interviewed me were very polite and courteous and there is no sign of "I am at Google and you don't".