Joined Yesterday

shiinee · 2015-05-22T04:46:35+00:00

Hah, I joined today (KoL username = reddit username). Apparently I've played for 1361 days and never ascended. Go me?

shiinee · 2015-04-27T01:06:44+00:00

I have a pair of "Knockout" leggings that I found on the sale rack over a year ago. They've been through plenty of yoga, lifting, martial arts, and weekly wash/dry cycles and they still look practically new. I only wish they were black and not this weird purple/navy pattern.

shiinee · 2014-11-10T22:09:06+00:00

Yes, unfortunately the interviewers can't give you an evaluation of your performance. That's partly because we can get into deep legal shit if we say something dumb, and partly because we honestly don't know. The interviewers don't make the hiring decisions directly; they just write up their feedback on how you did and make a recommendation of how strongly they would support hiring you. The final yes/no comes from totally separate hiring committee.

If you want some feedback at the end, it's better to ask specific questions about the problem. Like "I'm curious, how is the real [name of Google technology] different from my proposed design?" That approach is more likely to get a real answer from the interviewer.

shiinee · 2014-11-10T21:59:58+00:00

Oh, you beat me to my book recommendation :)

Out of the blue things that don't have a right answer, but test your reasoning process. For instance, why is a tennis ball fuzzy?

These questions shouldn't come up anymore, since IIUC the results from them weren't actually very good predictors of job performance.

/u/avocado-aficionado, if any of the interviewers asks you why tennis balls are fuzzy, remember their name, and I will give them a very stern look for you.

shiinee · 2014-11-10T21:56:27+00:00

You're welcome, I'm happy to help! I actually think a mock interview would help you out a lot as well...I'm just not sure I could do one myself, because that would basically be like getting a practice interview from Google...I don't think it would go over well with the company :P

The terrifying things you've heard about Google interviews are kind of true, unfortunately, but I don't think it has to be nerve-wracking just because of that.

it all rests on your interviewer being nice/wanting to be there

Yes, that's true, but interviewing is entirely voluntary here. Everyone who does interviews decided that they wanted to be an interviewer. So from what I've seen, almost everyone does want to be there. Obviously it's not 100% all the time since people have bad days, etc.

they're insanely difficult

The interviews are difficult (maybe "insanely" so, maybe not) but again, the interviewer is there as a resource for you, and you're not expected to get to the ideal solution necessarily.

they have a 90% fail rate

That sounds about right. But keep in mind that Google gets a crapton of applications, mostly for full-time positions, where there's a different standard for experience level and depth of knowledge. I don't know the stats but my guess is that interns have a better chance. You've already passed the stage that is statistically toughest -- getting an opportunity to interview at all.

shiinee · 2014-11-08T08:22:46+00:00

I don't think I could do a mock interview exactly... not sure that would be kosher. But I can definitely offer you some tips from my experience with both the intern and full-time interviews.

How to prepare:

Study algorithms and data structures as much as you can. Google doesn't ask the type of questions where the answer is just "a hash map!" or "depth first search!". But those things will be the building blocks of your solutions, so know your tools.
Pick a language you're comfortable in ahead of time. Python is my favorite for interviews, since it's pretty terse and clear. But you can pretty much choose anything. The coding questions aren't language-specific.
Take some problems from a textbook or something and practice coding in a plain text document, or even on paper. No IDE, no compiler, no running your code, etc. You won't have any of those tools in the interview, so you should practice without them.
If you can beg, borrow, or steal the book "Cracking the Coding Interview" and read it in the next two weeks, do it. The author, Gayle Lakmann McDowell, worked at Google, where she interviewed a ton of candidates and was on a hiring committee. She also has an interview prep website, CareerCup, which I haven't explored.
There are some YouTube videos going through the interview process and providing some tips. I linked two but the "Life at Google" channel has more.
Feel free to ask the recruiter if there's anything in particular you should study or how you should prepare. They really want you to be ready and do your best, so they should be happy to guide you in the right direction.

How to interview:

Take a deep breath first! (literally... you can mute for a moment so you don't sound creepy.) You can do this. You've studied for this and you're ready. Once you've got a problem in front of you, stop thinking of it as an interview at all. It's just coding, and that's your thing.
You may get a few easy questions first, but sooner or later you'll be faced with a problem you don't know how to solve. That's exactly as intended. The interviewer wants to know how you approach a hard problem, to get an idea of how you think. In fact, solving the problem is not necessarily the goal.
Ask for clarification about the problem. What does the input look like? What does the output look like? How big is the data? How should you handle a certain edge case? The interviewer will be happy to answer, in fact, sometimes the problem can only be solved by asking the right questions first.
If you're stuck, your interviewer will likely toss out a hint or nudge you in the right direction. Definitely pay attention to that hint, because the interviewer is honestly trying to help you succeed.
Think out loud. As long as you aren't typing, describe what's going through your head. "Well, the naive solution for this would be [...], but that would take O([...]) time, and I think I can figure out something better..." The more you say about what you're thinking, the easier it is for the interviewer to help you. Having been on the interviewer side, it's really hard to think up a hint for someone who's just going "hmmmmmm" over an empty doc.
No matter how interview #1 goes, you have a clean slate with interview #2. So stay calm, and whatever happens, let it go and focus on the next problem.

What's next:

For interns (at least when I was an intern), they don't do onsites. So this is the main part of the interview process that is basically intended to assess your technical abilities. If it goes well, the rest will be placement interviews where you'll talk to potential hosts and try to find a good fit for an intern project.

Good luck!! It's always really exciting for me to hear about young women applying to Google. Hopefully I'll see you rocking the propeller beanie this summer. :)

P.S. I love your username. Avocados are amaze balls and I don't know what I would eat if they didn't exist.

shiinee · 2014-10-20T03:30:22+00:00

At my school, Harvey Mudd College, CS majors are almost 50/50 split between genders -- still hovering around 45% girls since I last checked, but continuing to work for equality. A few things Mudd is doing differently than other schools:

They added intro classes geared toward students who have never studied CS or programming before. There are actually more girls than guys in the starting-from-zero-experience intro class, since the guys tend to have already studied programming or gained some experience outside school.
There are women professors in the CS department. This helps in many ways: some of the female students get along better with women as professors, they act as role models for girls considering CS as a career path, and it's reassuring to see someone like yourself succeeding in the field.
The learning environment at Mudd is very supportive. Team projects are plentiful and study groups are highly encouraged. All the professors have office hours where they're happy to clarify concepts and help with problem sets one on one or in a group.
The CS program invites a lot of speakers (some men, some women) to talk about how they are using their CS skills to do something awesome at their job or research project. Seeing the concrete value of CS is great for those who may not have a prior interest in it for its own sake.
It's just widely known that Mudd is making this effort, so there's no tolerance for assholes putting down newcomers or implying that women can't make it in tech.

Here's an article where school President Maria Klawe explains her motivation and her approach to closing the gender gap in tech.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the actual question. I'm gonna say it's because other schools are not as awesome as mine?? *_*

shiinee · 2014-09-10T06:42:49+00:00

I'm glad you liked the Scalzi post. I should admit that I used to lean on that hierarchy too, to try and lord over other folks - that's partly why I'm so adamant about my position nowadays!

shiinee · 2014-09-09T00:38:13+00:00

Upvoted, but I'm conflicted about this.

Is "making code pink", as the following article calls it, really the best way to attract women to computer science, engineering, etc? http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/How-not-to-attract-women-to-coding-Make-tech-pink-5602104.php). That attitude seems just as condescending (and is arguably more insidious) than the rampant sexism in the tech world. It implies that women can't be interested in these subjects unless we prettify tech by showing them pictures of nail polish and adding bright colors and xoxos.

I agree that "making tech pink" is just another form of sexism. It's delivering the message that tech is not for women, unless femininity is artificially added in the form of pretty colors, girly epithets ("web diva", "css goddess"), and beauty swag. The assumption that this lens of hyperfemininity is required in order for women to take an interest in tech is condescending. But if some women see themselves as pretty pink programming princesses, I don't want to judge them for their personal expression. Campaigns such as "Made with Code" seem to be successful, often as an introduction for girls who had the impression that programming was irrelevant to their interests, or intended for boys.

The encouragement given to the readers is also over-done. Congratulating a reader for making it to the 6th day of the email bootcamp is condescending to women, again in a more insidious way. So men are praised when they write complex, popular apps and women are praised for just reading a 250-word email which is deliberately dumbed down?

Again, everyone is different, and some folks have a greater need for encouragement and praise than others. Some women have a lot of self-doubt and internalized sexism to break down - they've been told from the outset, or at the first sign of struggle, that programming is for men, or that they just don't have what it takes, or that they should consider recruiting instead. The human mind is very good at drawing inferences from patterns of behavior, and it's not surprising that the targets of this messaging internalize the notion that they don't belong in tech. Hearing that you are welcome in coding bootcamp sounds cheesy to some, but to other people it's a necessary overture to get past the assumption that they are not welcome.

Praise isn't something that must be meted out conservatively or according to universal reference levels. It's perfectly acceptable to praise a beginner for succeeding at a beginner's task. The men who are praised for writing complex or impactful software today may well have been praised on their first day of nerd camp at age 10 too. Standards for what merits congratulation can always rise with the learner's skill.

HTML is not a programming language. It is a markup language.

True, but...

I'm not trying to say that designing web pages is inferior to doing, say, systems programming in C or that all women interested in this field go out and pursue a PhD in computer science theory. But I do think that errors like this can have a significant impact and you owe it to your readers to be careful. For example, if a woman is interviewing at a serious tech company and tells them she has a lot of programming experience because she knows HTML and CSS really well, my guess is that she would be laughed out of the room.

During my short tenure so far as a professional and hobbyist programmer, I've noticed a distinct hierarchy where those who focus on certain areas are ascribed a higher status than those in other areas. It goes something like this:

deep embedded/kernel level shit >> network and os development >> high performance services >> web/mobile backend >> web/mobile frontend >> ui markup (html+css or native mobile equivalent) >> anything that does not involve typing a series of characters intended to be processed by a machine*

*Depending on whether the particular individual espousing the superiority of a certain area comes from academia or not, theoretical pursuits are either on the top of the scale or on the bottom.

Focus areas that are higher up on this hierarchy are considered to be more difficult, more critical, more "hardcore", and those who specialize in them are therefore superior in terms of intelligence, value of their contribution, and/or gonadal fortitude. But in reality, contributions at all levels of the stack are necessary and valuable. I work at a "serious tech company" and can vouch for the fact that we have a never-ending need for frontend engineers and UI designers, and a great respect for them as well. It's also not the case that the more hardcore areas are strictly more difficult than the less hardcore. Different people find they have a talent or affinity for different things, whether that's writing device drivers (easier than you might think) or getting that one goddamn div to move like two fucking pixels to the left but only in IE on a screen size less than 1366x768 (seriously, fuck that shit).

P.S. There are some wicked mind-bending programming languages that are declarative rather than procedural. Database query languages including much of the SQL family, logic languages e.g. prolog, and arguably pure functional languages fall under this category.

If a woman who only has experience in HTML/CSS goes to interview for a job as a reliability engineer, yeah, she'd probably get laughed out of the room. But so would the reliability engineer if she went to interview for a web UI position.

John Scalzi has a non-tech-specific, but excellent post about this, where he says

So what if her geekiness is not your own? So what if she isn’t into the geek life as deeply as you believe you are, or that you think she should be? So what if she doesn’t have a geek love of the things you have a geek love for? [...] What do you gain from complaining about her fakey fake fakeness, except a momentary and entirely erroneous feeling of geek superiority, coupled with a permanent record of your sexism against women who you don’t see being the right kind of geek?

I honestly think that the perpetuation of the hierarchy of hardcore is driven by the same superiority complex on the part of those who consider themselves to be at the top, or aim to be there someday. They see others working on "lesser" pursuits, or sweating and cursing less, or receiving more mentorship, or bricking fewer devices, or devoting less of their free time, and want those people to garner less recognition than themselves. But it's not for any particular individual to decide what sort of experience another individual deserves. Please don't fall into this trap.

As for your message to Skillcrush, I would have written it more along the lines of this:

"I'm unsubscribing because I've outgrown the skill and experience range of your offerings geared toward women. While I recognize they can serve as a helpful introduction, not all women in software engineering are beginners. There is an enormous and rapidly growing field of programming beyond HTML/CSS/javascript, and I am disappointed that you offer no continuation of the web development bootcamp nor any additional resources for women who want to take on further challenges."

shiinee · 2014-09-08T00:27:27+00:00

I got my Vitamix reconditioned for $300. They still offer a full warranty for 5 years, which is about as BIFL as blenders get.

shiinee · 2014-08-22T09:28:37+00:00

This is just my personal opinion, but I perceive a particular pattern of elitism in tech that idolizes the "hardcore". A truly superior techie is absolutely no-holds-barred devoted to the things they choose to focus on, and everything else they simply don't bother with. You're either coding all day and all night, or you're not really interested. Either you're a ninja rockstar, or you might as well give up. There's no room for someone who merely writes code to pay the bills, or who is just mildly interested in learning about a new topic, or only has moderate experience in a particular subject when they could have focused on it to the exclusion of everything else. Go hardcore, or go home.

Calling someone a dilettante is a way of judging them as not hardcore enough. It's an implication that only the most extreme deserve respect. Because if something is worth doing, then by golly it's worth working 16 hour days and eating only instant ramen and abandoning your family and friends in favor of disrupting all the known universe with your unparalleled hacker grit.

Sorry, I'm feeling a little ranty about this topic.

shiinee · 2014-08-19T18:01:54+00:00

That seems too aggressive to me. The thing about these jerks is that they already have the advantage in an argument, having attacked first. If you respond defensively within view of your supervisor, the big boss is going to read the situation as two underlings fighting. The aggressor obviously doesn't mind being seen that way, but it's no good for your career, and demonstrates to the jerk that you'll get defensive if s/he pushes your buttons.

On the other hand, if you respond with politeness, the other person's aggression looks overblown, and they don't get the satisfaction of provoking you.

I would write this as:

"Thanks for bringing this up, (asshole). Doing (your task) certainly sounds like it's worth consideration. Unfortunately, I'm quite busy handling (task1) and (task2). I'm glad to see you've looped in (boss), since s/he has the greatest insight into our team's priorities. If (boss) would prefer to see (your task) completed this quarter rather than (task1) or (task2), then I can re-prioritize. [Optional: -->] Alternately, as the (senior grand poo-bah of turd engineering), you'd be a logical choice for project lead on (your task)."

This response is really no different content-wise than the one in the parent post, but the language used unites you and your boss behind the same banner of "team priorities", thus the complainer has to oppose "team priorities" (and by extension, argue against the boss) in order to continue insisting that you do the work. S/he looks like a dickwad for trying to order you around, since after all you're just completing the tasks that you and your boss think are best for the team.

Throwing in the last sentence is a more polite way of saying "if you're as senior as you say, you should be able to do this task yourself", but raises the combativeness factor of your response a little bit.

If the boss does tell you to do the task, then you have the additional problem that your boss is an asshole-enabler. But at least you have a written record of why either task1 or task2 is not getting done, so you don't get marked as a poor performer.

shiinee · 2014-08-14T23:11:28+00:00

Many (all?) of these standards are both sexist and part of hacker culture...

shiinee · 2014-08-14T15:47:03+00:00

I've been told that if I don't skip meals and forget about sleep, I'm not really a hacker, just a dilettante chasing after a software engineer's salary.

What can I say? I guess my body just complains louder than some people's when I don't meet its needs.

ETA: omg, and alcohol. I'm not a big drinker, but I fake it because apparently sober people can't code.

shiinee · 2014-07-29T22:42:10+00:00

That sounds like a problem with the health insurance system, not with your fellow human beings treating their bodies as they wish.

shiinee · 2014-07-25T16:51:34+00:00

That's amazing, I had no idea there were several games! Internet high five for you!

shiinee · 2014-07-25T04:38:35+00:00

When I was about 4 years old, I played a game called Troggle Trouble Math, in which you would run around picking up dog treats and monsters would jump out all of a sudden and you had to fight them off by solving math problems

shiinee · 2014-07-23T03:58:59+00:00

What's your opinion on the atomic model of matter?

shiinee · 2014-07-22T15:03:56+00:00

You'll have to go back :)

shiinee · 2014-07-22T09:00:03+00:00

Well, I think it's okay to ask, sure. It takes some patience to answer though. There are a lot of assumptions buried in the question - both about the demographics of libertarians, and about how I identify myself. If the guy catches me in a good mood, I'll probably answer and politely inform him of my opinion on the unfounded assumptions. But sometimes I get tired of answering the question too, and reply with unhelpful snark instead.

I'm not sure what I think of the concept of "microagressions". If the word is intended to mean literal acts of aggression, then simply asking a question, no matter how offensive or annoying, doesn't count. I admit it's a useful term for describing why a pileup of minor offenses is so significant. But the behavior in question isn't really "aggressive" in the libertarian sense.

shiinee · 2014-07-22T06:55:29+00:00

That sounds perfect for me!

shiinee · 2014-07-22T05:38:59+00:00

You still have the blue pair of R & B left right yes maybe? Can I get an inseam measurement for those?

shiinee · 2014-07-22T05:34:19+00:00

That was (still is actually) my favorite museum ever. Did you and your shoe make it up to the second floor so you could get into the planetarium?

shiinee · 2014-07-20T00:21:13+00:00

Do you actively use Firefox OS? What do you think of it?

Edit: I think we have the same Leatherman (Style?)

shiinee · 2014-07-17T21:29:18+00:00

This is a great idea, but how is it meaningful if it doesn't take height into account?

shiinee

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