> My friend who had next to no experience got a job at Google as a contractor through a 3rd party company. He gets very solid pay and access to all of Google's lux facilities/food and he didn't even have to do a technical interview. I think they do this because if you suck they can basically fire you anytime.

Yup. Not a lot of people know this, but a significant percentage of people at Google are contractors (red badges). One of my friends is currently working there as a contracted web developer. He said that while working there is awesome, the turnover in the contractor ranks is very high and there is not a lot of support for newbies. It is pretty much a sink-or-swim environment. Outside of "codelabs", there isn't much documentation of their internal tools so my friend has to constantly read the source code to figure out how to use something.

Can you elaborate on why you would never consider resumes from bootcamp grads?

There is one, it is right above Blaze cafe (1225 Charleston Rd). There's a huge sign by the visitor's area: "Google Research & Development".

But there isn't really a "trick" here, though. The point of these questions is to figure out if the candidate has enough CS fundamentals to construct a reasonable solution to a problem that they've never seen before.

There is a trick. Loop over the array, remembering the maximum and minimum. If you've seen it before, the question is MUCH easier, making it a bad question.

Cafe Algiers @ Beale and Mission (financial district)

$5 sandwiches

It works for you but you were most likely interrupting the people around you.

I really hate it when I'm deep into coding up something and someone just starts throwing questions at me.

I much would rather prefer an IM if someone wants to bounce ideas. If needed, putting down something on my calendar for a quick meeting works too.

This is a very good point.

I've been in an open workspace that had three or four people to a desk and it was a nightmare. Now I work at an open workspace where everyone is spread out and it is much better. The closest person to me is ~2 meters away.

cheeky bastards got some variants of it, though:

"How I quit my job and went into consulting" "How I quit consulting and went into freelancing" "How I quit consulting and went into your mom's vagina" "How I quit my consulting job for a month and learned to program and am now making 80k a year writing Ruby apps" "How I quit my contractor Ruby dev gig and joined the Node.js behemoth (and why you should too)"

brilliant

heh, humblebrag much? :P

azio_m said something like:

"Get real. Interviews are a one-way street unless the candidate is a top talent AND the company is trying to recruit him."

His response to being called out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6702475