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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 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.

[–] [email protected] 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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

someone watching you code in a google doc

I’ve had nightmares less terrifying than this

[–] [email protected] 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't do take-home assignments.

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