Has anyone else seen this interesting "challenge site" when googling a programming topic?
Has anyone else seen this interesting "challenge site" when googling a programming topic?
I looked it up (on Google of course) and it seems like this is one of Google's recruitment channels.
You get access to a terminal and a text editor:
Here are the commands you can execute:
You have a week to complete each challenge. I've done 2 of them so far, and requested the third one - they have been very enjoyable and I've already learnt a lot from them.
I'm pretty sure I have literally zero chance of being hired by Google (and I'm not even sure I would want to work for them even if they made the mistake of wanting to hire me), but this has been super interesting so far. And yeah, also a huge time waster, I've been thinking about making the solution to the third challenge more elegant and performant all day instead of doing my actual job.
It's a bit of an easter egg which once was actually used as a way to get additional candidates. My friend did the entire thing last year and never heard from them, so sounds like they don't use it anymore or perhaps it was due to the layoffs.
11I had that once. I think it used to be much more secret than it is now, and was actually used to hire people for Google. Nowadays it's more of a fun easter egg. I didn't bother with any of it, because I couldn't be bothered with Python or Java.
9Oh yeah. This is quite fun, though once you hit level 4/5 some problems require fairly advanced algorithms / mathematics. One of the problems I gave up on solving on my own required knowledge of Polyas enumeration theorem to solve. Fortunately or unfortunately you can find some answers online, otherwise I would’ve never even known such a theorem existed.
For the tougher problems, expect a lot of graph theory / combinatorics, which I guess is the nature of Googles challenges as a search engine.
5I went through these challenges a while back; they were super fun! I remember at the end there was something about "notify me if there are more challenges" but I don't believe I ever heard anything.
I'm a sucker for puzzles, and the write-ups for the challenges were the right level of silliness.
5I got this a few years ago. When I solved most of the questions, it asked for my contact info and Google reached out for an interview... which involved someone watching you code in a google doc, which distracted me so much I bombed
5someone watching you code in a google doc
I’ve had nightmares less terrifying than this
4
I don't do take-home assignments.
2Yep, saw it one day before I had to have surgery, went into it and it gave me a couple day timer before it will vanish. So it timed out and I wasn't able to play around with it.
2