I went to one of the Google's luxury office in Boulder, CO (an office filled with rock climbing walls, buffet, guitar hero... and etc) for the full time software engineering position opportunity with Google on last Friday (October 17, 2008).
I solved the problem given and failed to make it more efficient although I received 'A' on the algorithm from Andrzej Ehrenfeucht. I went like “Huh? Binary Search?”. Well, I know what binary tree is and also know a couple of searching algorithms but it wasn't popping up on my head during that time. I wasn't trying to prove my aptitude in this interview so I guess it doesn't really matter as I am fully aware I am not much better than other recent college graduates in that sense.
My teacher on the CU algorithm class was Andrzej Ehrenfeucht from CS department. His lecture didn’t teach me anything much about the CS algorithms and all I did was just doing homework solving some greatest common divisor and some graphs... sign... However, he is one of the distinct professor from CU who doesnt get fired for not walking into the classroom without advanced notice and make all students waiting over 20-30 minutes. I am sure he had his own reasons but I wasn't too happy with it.
I think we are all smart in a lot of different ways and he wasn't extremely smart about his teaching and genius about his research when I was taking his course. I would understand if it was just once but it kept happening and I remember just not going to his class but still got through his course fairly successfully I think =)
I should have studied more about algorithm but my life was too busy to spend extra time into that. I really wish I had John R. Black because he also teaches algorithm and I learned heck a lot from his CS6000 level network security course when I was in CU.
What I have learned in the industry during a couple months is the realization of scalability and performance issues and how to troubleshoot the problems before they even arise and avoid putting myself in a DOO-DOO situation. I am still learning though I ironically had never ran into serious one to research to come up with one on my own =)
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