4 min read
Today I had my second mock interview (or third if you want to count the BS 20-minute one from last Wednesday with the HashSet). I was a little stressed in the half hour beforehand since screwing up in front of your manager is more embarrassing than in front of your mentor. Plus it might impact their opinion of you which might be an issue for final internship feedback if you screw up badly enough I'd imagine. Thankfully today didn't go like Friday though.
I actually had a warm-up coding question and then a real algorithms question where I did both brute force and almost all the way through optimal. The first one was just reading numbers separated by newlines from a file and finding the average of them, which was a piece of cake after I remembered how to read from a file since that's not something I do often in code. The second one seemed like a real Google question since I've never heard of any problem like it before and it didn't have an obvious solution. I managed not to stall for more than a few seconds the entire time.
The mock interview went for the full 45 minutes even though I only booked the room for 30. My host seemed pretty happy with how it went and said I write very well on the whiteboard. I guess that's probably an issue with some candidates who are only used to typing code. Writing code on the whiteboard takes practice since it has to be legible to the interviewer sitting on the other side of the room and it has to not have sloppy indentation because it's tougher to check if it's missing a curly brace somewhere. Not to mention it's tough to write up high in a straight line since the board fills up fast regardless of how small you write the code.
He suggested we plan another one for Thursday but I was already ahead of him and had one booked beforehand in the same room but with no person to give the the mock interview until today. So I have at the very least 3 more mock interviews until the big day. One intern I heard is doing 9 total but that seems a bit like overkill to me.
I'm at a disadvantage compared to the others since they've been using a language they've already known for their internship, which is most likely what they're interviewing in. In my case I have to keep 3 languages straight in my mental cache since I program both in Go and C++ every day at work and then I need to remember all the correct Java syntax and methods without the help of a computer for mock interviews.
Besides that I finally finished my horrific unit test and got the coverage up to a decent percentage. It's still waiting to be reviewed by one more reviewer before submission. In the meantime I'm wrapping up my project and putting together an awesome presentation for my last Wednesday. I have to stand up in front of the entire team between both NYC and Googleplex to explain my internship project, what I contributed to Google, what I learned, etc.
I don't care that this has nothing to do with my project, it's going in the slides because it took flying out to the other side of the country for me to finally learn how to ride a bike
Other than that I've gotten some new prizes from my team as the final few weeks are winding down. I got a Google infrastructure backpack, a stuffed fluffy android, and a Google NYC shirt. At this point I'm definitely going to need to start boxing stuff up and mailing it home. There's no way this all is going to fit on the train with me. After getting back home I'll have to post a picture of my accumulated loot because according to one intern who already left they even give you stuff on the last day.
A new squishable for my workstation (I have no idea why it's spherical)
We finished the LOTR trilogy last night too. It was great but like one intern said after the second or third fake ending "it just keeps ending!" Once again we watched the extended edition and I swear it could have ended at least 30 minutes sooner. Now I'm not sure what the movie group is going to do. I'm betting we'll either watch The Hobbit next or Star Wars. Although this is taking 4 hours out of my day each time, which can easily be valuable study time, I'm guessing it's probably in my best interest that I take breaks. There's still time to study, but it seems to be running out fast.