Programming

17423 readers

100 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

Has anyone else seen this interesting "challenge site" when googling a programming topic? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sisyphean@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I looked it up (on Google of course) and it seems like this is one of Google's recruitment channels.

You get access to a terminal and a text editor:

Here are the commands you can execute:

You have a week to complete each challenge. I've done 2 of them so far, and requested the third one - they have been very enjoyable and I've already learnt a lot from them.

I'm pretty sure I have literally zero chance of being hired by Google (and I'm not even sure I would want to work for them even if they made the mistake of wanting to hire me), but this has been super interesting so far. And yeah, also a huge time waster, I've been thinking about making the solution to the third challenge more elegant and performant all day instead of doing my actual job.

top 8 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] zemja@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

I had that once. I think it used to be much more secret than it is now, and was actually used to hire people for Google. Nowadays it's more of a fun easter egg. I didn't bother with any of it, because I couldn't be bothered with Python or Java.

[–] imBANO@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Oh yeah. This is quite fun, though once you hit level 4/5 some problems require fairly advanced algorithms / mathematics. One of the problems I gave up on solving on my own required knowledge of Polyas enumeration theorem to solve. Fortunately or unfortunately you can find some answers online, otherwise I would’ve never even known such a theorem existed.

For the tougher problems, expect a lot of graph theory / combinatorics, which I guess is the nature of Googles challenges as a search engine.

[–] occams_chainsaw@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I got this a few years ago. When I solved most of the questions, it asked for my contact info and Google reached out for an interview... which involved someone watching you code in a google doc, which distracted me so much I bombed

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

someone watching you code in a google doc

I’ve had nightmares less terrifying than this

[–] scarecrw@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

I went through these challenges a while back; they were super fun! I remember at the end there was something about "notify me if there are more challenges" but I don't believe I ever heard anything.

I'm a sucker for puzzles, and the write-ups for the challenges were the right level of silliness.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

I don't do take-home assignments.

[–] douglasg14b@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yep, saw it one day before I had to have surgery, went into it and it gave me a couple day timer before it will vanish. So it timed out and I wasn't able to play around with it.