everyone:
don't poke around /admin
don't look in /cgi-bin
don't put javascript into the form fields
don't make your username look like valid SQL
users:
don't try to access IDs that you don't own
always trust emails that appear to be from us
don't look at /pricing#fine_print
hackers and security researchers:
please stay away
lawyers:
don't look too closely at /eula
employees:
don't look at other companies' job postings
don't talk about your salary
competitors:
don't copy us
don't undercut the prices listed at /pricing
potential investors:
don't look in /forum or /complaints
don't look at /user_stats
look at /pricing#most_expensive_plan
I'd love to see more companies with an evil canary cartoon image file. Perhaps when violated, canary.png could direct to a cartoon unicorn sheepishly grinning with one stuffed cheek.
i was cofounder at a startup a long time ago, and wrote most of the backend code.
i put a humans.txt in there, and updated it every time we had a new employee.
then the CEO fired all the best engineers, and I decided to leave shortly after because sometimes in life you gotta let go.
the company is still (miraculously) around these days, although all of the original engineers are long gone.
the humans.txt is still accessible on their domain as it was on my last day, with all the names of the founding team for the first ~2 years inscribed in there - looks like their newer engineers never stumbled upon it.
sometimes when i get nostalgic i like to hit that URL and look at it
At a previous job, the equivalent to this was `make babies` which would output the names of all the kids that were born to engineers. The unwritten rule was that you'd text someone the good news, and then, that person was to add the name to the list and create the commit. That would serve as the birth announcement to engineering.
Is it really that easy to miss an errant text file in the site directory? I'm so meticulous when it comes to code that you couldn't possibly get that past me.
From my own experience: probably no one cared to touch that server because no one knows what apache foo is running on it and they had better things to do than to worry about what the long time ago guys left there as long as no one complains.
http, no auto redirect to https? On chrome. I thought Google preloads key pins which force https loading, but apparently the www subdomain isn't included [0]. Are there legacy reasons why?
The best meritocratic way (i.e. not dependent on your CV too much) to get invited to an interview with Google is to be top 1000 in Google Code Jam.
Study algorithms a lot, practice on CodeForces and TopCoder. If you work hard on it, in some year you will be on top of Google Code Jam.
Recommendations is good to have but it won't help you to be successful on the interview.
Practice algorithms a lot, ... I mean literally A LOT.
P.S. I had recommendations from Google employees. I screw up Google interview. Now, I'm preparing with algorithms and participate on coding contests including Google Code Jam (right now).
I've actually interviewed with them, before when I was in college. In all honesty, I used to be on the defensive side of things against technical interviews only because I got really nervous and my mind would go completely blank, especially this one time when a BigTechCo hiring manager asked me to sort a LinkedList without using additional space.
So after many rejections and rushed algorithms textbooks regurgitations, I decided to start somewhere my well-roundedness counted more than my algorithm implementation skills( a big awesome Fortune 20 company too) , and actually REALLY take my time to study the ins and outs of being a real World software engineer and ENJOY IT.
A year and a half later after graduation, I don't regret my decision at all. My problem-solving and implementation skills have improved tremendously, especially after I discovered Firecode.io, which takes a more pedagogical approach to interview prep than TopCoder or google CodeJam.
I live in Seattle and have a few acquaintances who are in tech at various companies(Google, FB, Amazon, MSFT..) . My interactions with Googlers have been very pleasant; they just seem to be very down to earth compared to other engineers I have encountered, in general. I am not in a rush, though. I am gainfully employed and like my job, so that also drive my job search to be largely serendipitous.
After many failed approaches, I came with conclusion that the best way to practice algorithms (and math) is to trying to solve some problem which you can not solve and getting stuck, after you tired and failed to solve a problem, you can read answer how to solve a problem.
This will help your brain to remember particular method/algorithm/concept because your brain will think that this is very important problem, a sort of missing puzzle for your brain.
If you just passively read book about algorithms, you will have false feeling that you learn quickly but you will forget everything very soon and not being able to reconstruct any of algorithms you learned so far.
If you participate in algorithm contests, you will struggle a lot and after contest you will read editorials and may be redirected to CLRS or Knuth books.
Your learning curve will grow very slowly but believe me you will get very solid knowledge which won't be forgotten for a long time.
P.S. I practised a lot of passive learning by reading algorithms books. I forgot almost everything. Now, I'm switched to learning though competitions. It's hard way but very solid.
Actually, in order to advance to round 2 you have to be top 1000 in one of the first rounds, so you make it to the top 3000.
The reason I asked is because I placed in the top 1000 (top 1000 of round 2) back in 2011 but was only contacted by a google recruiter in late 2012 (in the 2012 edition I had been just outside of the top 1000 in round 2).
It is certainly a common desire of a lot of people to work there. And it certainly can be achieved if you have the technical skills
But the advantages of a position are overrated, and the disadvantages, underrated.
Certainly, not everywhere you can work on Google sized problems, but other place have interesting problems as well, and you'll feel your work to be more valued
That. As an ex-Google engineer, I'm often asked why I quit. I usually reply with a soccer analogy. If you're a decent player, and somehow you're bought by Real Madrid, you won't see much real action. There are enough superstars (technical and political) who get to do exciting stuff to keep you relegated to tedious, menial tasks.
Google is known for paying way above market average, but there's also the question of levels. I'd venture to say that most Google engineers I know work two levels below their capability. The concentration of talent is one thing, but the promotion process is so tedious that folks just tend not to go for it. As a result, what you call "average talent" will more than likely get less compensation at Google than they otherwise would. Certainly that was my case, even though money played no part in my decision.
Speaking as a former Google engineer? I know a few disillusioned Google engineers :) Just understand from the outside looking in the company is still very much tantalizing. Most companies worth working for these days have a similarly stringent interview process so I can't see what the disadvantage would be of upping your technical skills.
But the question is, are you going to pass the interview? Getting an interview is the easy part - I've gotten two Google interviews so far just from recruiters and a friend recommending me.
Send me an email(to my username @ gmail.com ) with your resume, and we can have a chat, and I can provide you with something akin to a reference if you like.
It looks kind of interesting. Do you have anything explaining how it's supposed to work? Are you determining if people are humans by their attempt to answer the math questions?
When it says "you are one of them?" does that mean I'm a human or a robot? I'll answer an addition, but then it will ask something like "43 >> 86 = " or " ~ 76 = " and it's like "wtf is going on here?" as the counter ticks down.
I hope this becomes a thing though -- a text file you can reliably find that gives you the barebones explanation of what the sites is for ... though I guess /about already functions that way.
It's two weeks late though, would have been a great "April Fools but we're serious" thing.
It's already a thing (http://humanstxt.org/), and Google's has had the file for quite a while now.
It's currently used mostly as a "painting's signature", a point of pride for the team behind the site. Looking through all the comments in this thread you will see many other examples.
to me this reads as "Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others..." but frankly we don't really care enough about them to bother naming them. Come, join the great "team" of faceless cogs.
