Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
The reason I won&#x27;t work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It&#x27;s not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview.  Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview.  Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in interesting and novel ways.<p>I have seen the worst apps written by &quot;Very Smart People&quot; who obviously had never built an Android application before.  It doesn&#x27;t matter how smart you are, the first time you do something it <i>will</i> suck.  I have had catastrophic failures caused by premature optimization, because locking a tool into a fancy algorithm before you know where the actual bottleneck is is a recipe for disaster.  I have seen so many problems caused because people couldn&#x27;t take feedback or didn&#x27;t ask for help, because they were so wrapped up in being The Kind Of Person Who Knows The Answers.<p>Frankly, passing algorithm questions is a great way to signal that I probably don&#x27;t want to have to deal with your code.<p>Personally, I love working with people coming out of the good agencies because building 15 or 30 applications from scratch in an environment with strong mentorship and rapid feedback is, in my experience, more likely to produce a good programmer than all the smarts in the world.