Friday, November 12, 2004

Shock & Awesome

I thought I knew what cool was... turns out I had NO IDEA!!
I don't even know where to start writing this post, so... I guess it will be chronological.

Wednesday
I had to call SuperShuttle to schedule a shuttle from the San Jose Airport to The Grand Hotel in Sunnyvale. I'm not sure... but the lady that was that was attempting to take my reservation was probably retarded. That was a PAIN IN THE ASS (the Google recruiter actually apologized about the Super Shuttle people today).

Thursday
My flight was leaving Spokane at 12:30PM, so I decided that I should probably skip class on Thursday (Great decision on my part (Sorry Bruce :)). The really cool part about today was that while I was sitting in the terminal in Spokane, I got a call from Apple. I applied to be a student blogger about a month ago... but it turns out that it was only for Apple Campus Representatives... but she liked my writing enough to think that I should write for them anyways. That was a good little morale booster. I got to San Jose and had to deal with SuperShuttle again... not pleasant, but I'll spare you.
I met a couple pretty cool guys on the SuperShuttle on the way over to the hotel that were interviewing at Google too. Then at 7PM we had a 'BBQ reception'. Decent food, lots of really cool, intensly smart people. It was definitely intimidating. I was literally in a room full of people from: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cornell, and ME from University of Idaho. BUT I learned that the name of you school speaks almost nothing of your intelligence. I definitely feel like I was as smart or smarter than most people here (OH, there were about 60 people intervewing).
I tried to get to sleep at like 11PM, because I was really tired. I was WAY too excited to sleep.. so I didn't fall asleep until about 3AM.
Oh, and I almost forgot about a few important perks of coming to this interview: I checked in, and they gave me a $50 traveler's cheque... JUST FOR COMING TO THE INTERVIEW!. I get into my room... and I can't even see the other side of the room. My hotel room is as big as my apartment at school, and the bathroom is as big as my room at home. I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but in hotel rooms, the fan in the bathroom always turns on when you turn on the lights. Not this place... it was too nice for that. This definitly let me know that Google has a few buck to toss around. There was also a nice little gift bag in my room with: a pen, a hat, and a few other random things.

Friday
A bus picked us up at the hotel at 9:15AM-ish. We get a short little introduction, then I started my interviews.
Interview #1
This one started off by asking me how to find the depth of a tree. I gave a good enough explanation that he didn't have me code it up. Then he asked me to find the nth node in an in-order search of a tree. I had to code this one up. The coding for this had a few little gotchas in it. It was my first interview for the day, so I was still a little jittery. I still think I did pretty good. We started talking about how to represent an integer in a float. We didn't get to finish the question, but apparently I got the jist of what they were trying to get.
Interview #2
This interview was actually pretty good. It started off with a good, pretty simple question. Find the intersection of 2 sorted integer arrays. Then you expand on that: what if one of them is huge? what if one of them is so huge, it can't fit in memory, how do you minimize the number of disk seeks?
Interview #3
This guy noticed that I did DBA work this summer, so he asked me how I'd represnt a directed graph in a relational table. Then he asked me how I'd do it for an undirected graph (making sure there were no duplicates). Then he asked me to give an algorithm to reverse a character array in place, but... keeping the words spelled forward (i.e. "I AM TEXT" would go to: "TEXT AM I"). And this went decently well too.
The Rest of the Day
We went to lunch, and the cafe they have is actually pretty good. After that we had a tour of the campus... and I actually think this was kind of lame. I understand they're trying to sell the google workplace to us... but, at that point, I didn't care. I just wanted to get back to my hotel room, and recoup a little bit. But, they redeemed themselves. I got a massage. After that, they brought in an engineer and had a Q&A session. Then we headed back to the hotel.

Now, I'm in the hotel room, blogging the occurances of the day. I'm suppose to hear back within 2 weeks, but my recruiter said that I'd probably hear by Friday the 19th.

Bad news: I heard from the Deloitte recruiter today, and I didn't get that job. So far, I'm 0 for 2 in my final round interviews. Hopefully that will change after this one.

Next weekend I'm going to Navair. The job at Navair sounds like it has to do with lots of cool technology. But, A) the technology kills people, and B) its in the middle of the desert.

Ok, this post is probably long enough. sorry.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

thats pretty cool :)
-a7

Anonymous said...

kickin ass and takin names, nice workage bomb

-b

Adam Phillabaum said...

well... there must has been a miscommunication somewhere... because it turns out that I'm not going to be able to write for Apple :(. that was gonna be fun.

Anonymous said...

FYI, most resume's are in reverse chronological order so that the most recent stuff is on top. You should reorder the entries on your resume for easier reading. most people read the top 1/3rd of a resume, and skim the rest. it's confusing when it's in forward chronological order.

Adam Phillabaum said...

Yeah, I know that. I made a quick version, then realized it was in forward chronological order... but, the latest revision, is reverse chronological.

It was a stupid mistake on my part. Thanks for pointing out my incompetence though... anonymous person.

Where were you looking at my resume?

Anonymous said...

Addy P:

Morale, not moral.

Wow, amazing situation. Can I write a book about your life?

L.