I imagine the bigger concern is that it's pretty easy to social engineer your way into most online accounts with an email and the info from a drivers license.
Like many other comments, I like this and find it useful. Recently I took a Lyft ride late from SFO to home and it was late and I was tired and I didnt concentrate on the route taken by the driver but I was certain we took the 101. Later when I saw the charge, I was surprised to see the ride map showing me taking a roundabout way, heading on 280 and essentially doing a 70mile ride. I complained to Lyft and they refunded the money but I still wanted to know how I got home. Checked back on this and found that it was in fact a regular 101 ride home and I had proof just in case Lyft wanted it.
As others have mentioned, it is nice to look back at the trips I took and also share with others who might be visiting places where I have been in the past.
Confused... you make it sound like faulty location history led you to erroneously report your Lyft driver. But that doesn't jive with the tone and thrust of your comment.
I too am confused. If I'm interpreting (guessing) correctly, Lyft showed (and charged based on) an erroneous route in their app. GP reported it and got a refund, but after reviewing Google's location history found that the driver had actually driven the route that they expect, not the route that Lyft claimed they did.
Lyft had the wrong route (280 and longer)
Google confirmed my suspicion that we took the shorter route (101)
Lyft credited back regardless but it was good to know what really happened
I interviewed for a Product Manager role at Google and my experience was awful. Put this things in perspective, I was a Director of PM managing a team at my current role and working a lot with customers, presenting in speaking engagements etc as part of my day to day.
I get into the interview and the person on the other side seems to know very little of my background. He says he is a PM and starts with how much is google's spend on storage for youtube on an annual basis. Knowing very well, I walk through assumptions like the average youtube video size, no of formats based on screen res and video quality etc etc and give him the logic. He pauses and says give me a dollar value. He doesnt want to understand the logic behind the calculations. Anyway, next few questions are more of the same.. code optimizations etc etc. After 3 or so questions, we were done. No, do you have any questions for me. No customer related discussions. No what I have done in the past and how I've been successful.
I feel like these kind of interviews are not judging what the person brings to the table, rather do you know what I'm gong to ask you and that's all that matters.
I always look for 2 things in any interview. Are you smart and motivated because nothing we do is rocket science. If you are smart and motivated, you will succeed. The other is, will I (and the rest of the team) get along with you. Teams need to work together and people who lack tact in personal skills end up being very difficult to work with.
I feel like this hits the nail on the head. They aren't looking for smart, motivated people who will work well on the team. They think they are, and that's what they say they are doing, but large companies have a hard time really doing that. There are so many other motivating factors and interests in the interviewers, the committees, the corporate structure, etc. If you are running your own company and building the product and you know you are going to work with a person you are interviewing, you can select, consciously and unconsciously, for all kinds of things that are important to you as an individual and you are free to pick the person you think has the "smarts you want", which might be technical, personal, emotional, etc. And which might compliment your own skills. But there are all sorts of strengths, and you can be biased enough to select for the ones that work with/for you. in a massive company, you get a watered down set of some sort of skills selected for by a competing line of somewhat disinterested (which can be a bad thing) people trying to meet some "objective" one-size-fits-all criteria.
He asked you for "how much is google's spend" and you finished your estimations without giving him a dollar value? Did you forget his question?
> He doesnt want to understand the logic behind the calculations.
From your description that sounds like a false assumption to me. It sounds like despite your estimations you didn't give him an answer to his actual question, and so he had to prompt you.
>He asked you for "how much is google's spend" and you finished your estimations without giving him a dollar value? Did you forget his question?
He didn't say he finished without ever giving him an answer. He was simply explaining that he tried to give an explanation of calculating the amount and the interviewer cut him off and asked for a number. Its absolutely stupid that the interviewer for such a question would only be interested in the number and not the candidate's thought process for arriving at that number. For a question like this its also absolutely reasonable for the candidate to assume that the interviewer wanted his thought process, because from an objective standpoint, that's the only scenario where this specific question wouldn't be a complete waste of time.
>From your description that sounds like a false assumption to me. It sounds like despite your estimations you didn't give him an answer to his actual question, and so he had to prompt you.
This sounds like an assumption on your part. You might be right, but you could also easily be wrong.
I'm fairly sure that he was speaking his calculations aloud in the process of reaching the dollar value when the interviewer stopped him and asked for an answer.
It's a great interview question in the sense of a Fermi problem (I was once asked by a startup "how many window washers are there in [CITY]?"). The premises you choose and how you evaluate them, however, are so much more important in a Fermi problem than a correct answer. I remember being about 5x off but it was only because of a drastic underestimation on the time it takes to clean a window.
Fermi problems are terrible questions when asked about things the questionee has no concept of. The point of a Fermi problem is to make an educated guess, and doing so requires knowledge of the problem space the guess is being made in. Pulling random constraints out of your ass for a domain you do not know does not demonstrate this ability.
If you're saying that in regards to the window washer question, I actually enjoyed it!
The point of a Fermi problem is to arrive at a reasonable estimation for a fairly unknown value by extrapolating and connecting from known values (by known, I mean there's a more narrow lower and upper bound).
I wouldn't say that a Fermi problem about how many window washers are in a city is a terrible question; it is more challenging than something in which you already have domain expertise, but that just makes you have to extrapolate further, which is the real point of the Fermi problem. In fact, pretty easy (and knowable) starting points are the population of the city, windows per individual, etc.
Doesn't a Fermi problem without domain expertise display more critical thinking and reasoning style, while a Fermi problem with domain expertise is less of a Fermi problem, and more of a knowledge test?
> Doesn't a Fermi problem without domain expertise display more critical thinking and reasoning style, while a Fermi problem with domain expertise is less of a Fermi problem, and more of a knowledge test?
A Fermi problem is both a test of knowledge and a test of reasoning skills. The types of estimates Enrico Fermi was known for were only possible because he had the domain knowledge for his reasoning to leverage. If you remove the domain knowledge from the problem you remove a significant amount of the signal from trying to concoct the estimate. It is a much easier problem if you can just make up numbers rather than infer accurate guesses from the domain.
And how would an outsider have any idea of the cost do you just mean the plant costs how much does google pay per MW in each locale how much does labour costs what allowance for accrued pension rights.
Costs to Google are not magically different. You can make estimates without insider knowledge, but as in the window cleaner example, your estimates will be as bad as your assumptions.
You can also make estimates for compute, network, and storage costs based on the prices Google charged its Cloud customers for the same.
You don't. The exercise is in estimation. This is specifically not a case of the interviewer looking for you to get the "right" answer. The interviewer likely doesn't even know what the right answer is. They want to see if you can make back-of-the-envelope calculations and if you're capable of making sane (if inaccurate) assumptions.
Make a guess at total cost for an hour of compute time and how long it might take to transcode the average video. Guess at how many videos are uploaded on a typical day. Guess at how much the typical SRE costs Google and how many SREs YouTube employs. Do the same for software engineers, or explicitly exclude R&D. Guess at networking, storage, etc. Then roll all that together with some hours of video * (cost to transcode + cost to storage + cost to upload + cost to playback * average viewers) + sre cost +.... Bonus points if you can account for elasticity and peak load instead of just averages.
The point is to show that you can think through the problem. If all you can say is "I don't know what your networking costs are", then you come across as useless.
He's not a new grad, he was a director of PM. He should have a feel for ballpark figures regarding infrastructure and personnel costs, which don't vary by that big a factor from company to company.
The question is perfectly reasonable (and it sounds like the interviewee was providing a reasonable answer). The issue is the way the interviewer ran the interview, not with the particular question itself.
I can't speak for rlpb, but it's how I read it, albeit not with much confidence. Why? Because "he pauses and says ..." doesn't fit with the interviewer interrupting and not waiting for the answer to be finished -- there must have been enough of a gap for the interviewer to pause and then ask that question.
Hey man, it looks like you are trolling all of my comments from days ago because I once noted that you had changed the entire text of one of your comments after it had already received replies.
This behavior of yours is weird and obsessive. Maybe reevaluate what it is you are trying to accomplish here and in life.
I think the thinking behind not asking about your background and looking at your resume etc - is that these things can introduce a bias. By asking for particular types of questions and training their interviewers in a particular way they are trying to reduce bias and streamline the whole process.
In the truest sense of the process, an interview and hiring/not hiring decision IS discrimination. You are selecting for traits you (in theory) want, and (in theory) rejecting traits you don't want. Well, you are doing it if your interviewing process is not broken.
If you simply try to elide all bias, then you would never be able to make a decision.
The problem with Allo and Duo and other "chat" tools google provided never felt feature complete. If I'm on my mobile phone, I want one app to get messages regardless if it comes from the carrier or my peeps on google. Hangouts is the closest thing we have to this. Even hangouts doesnt fully integrate. I'm a Fi user and when use apps that send text to verify, the autoverify doesnt work with Hangouts as my default messaging app. It only seems to work with Android Messaging app. These kind of half baked reasons are why none of the google messaging apps really have taken off. I agree with the past comment that Google had the opp to just improve on Google Talk and build on it rather than create 6 different messaging apps.
Looks like Dashlane ($40) and Sticky Password ($20) are viable alternatives. Both are more expensive than Lastpass. Reading the reviews, these seem like the best so far. Anyone with experience on either of these they can share?
Sounds more like what you'd like to see rather than reality. Nothing in your article suggest what's in it for Apple or even more so, what's in it for Telsa. More like how cool would it be if this were to happen.
The United States is too big (in terms of population density) for a replacement solution to gain traction outside major metros without massive government subsidies.
It's cool to think as techies we could come up with some massive disruption technology, but short of a super blue sky type project, our best bet to leave a better internet to our children is to throw money into tech lobbying.
Regardless of technology who is going to build it? Techies? A large portion of the high speed internet we have today was done with private investment, the same goes for all that cell power out there.
The government hasn't spent nearly as much on infrastructure as private business yet far too many think that the same government who cannot maintain highways and bridges sufficiently would be best to handle the internet? Even city governments are scrambling to fix sewer and water systems they invested in ONCE and left to rot.
I still don't see the value in investing so much in broadband other than cellular. Wired solutions require far too much expense, meet more regulatory hurdles, and simply isn't quickly deployed. With all the small businesses available, let alone franchise businesses, there are millions of locations across this country to anchor transmitters. The big stumbling block is the cash to start it all.
Actually the US government spent quite a lot on the infrastructure. Around '97, I moved from Sweden to the US, after running an ISP there since '93. Since it was an obvious concern I checked and the US was pumping in slightly more per capita, while being ~40% more population dense. So no problem (I thought) - if anything speed and availability will rocket up faster here. However, back there the government kept control of the lines (not entirely unlike US telecom). Net neutrality was kind of a given - obviously the government can't (at least without massive legal changes) give preferential speed to some peoples information directly (i.e. blatant censorship - if you're a private enterprise you can limit stuff like that, not so much if you're the govt). Back home things rolled along swimmingly, the same crew I ran with back then are still online, some of them whining that they haven't pulled gigabit fiber into their areas and have to settle for 100 megabit symmetric. Even before the millennium 10 Mbit symmetric fiber was becoming pretty normal all the way into residences. No one really pulled copper wire for comm anymore really, if a new line went in, fiber. Need to redraw power lines? Throw in fiber. Water? Fiber. Just dug up a sewer line? Throw down some fiber, you never know..
Here? I can get 20 Mbit (5 down) in a fairly large town. Some cities have more, but I've seen none where 50 or 100 Mbit symmetric is considered the sort of "lowest tier" broadband (kind of like "at least it's not dialup"). For only 2-3x the price. Why? Because no one with the peoples actual interest kept the reins, they just handed shit over to the six majors and told them to get building. Why would they, when they're already competing against no one but themselves? Cuts into profit, stuff like that.. So you get to pay more in tax dollars for it, more for the service itself and it's way slower. The same seems to be true for korea (et al, the other fast nations), they're not spending more, they're just negotiating harder with those contracted to build it. Now, Sweden is talking about selling it off (since the whole place is shifting right). Predictably, prices are going up and speed increase is stagnating. Idiots, all of them. The free market rocks for optimizing low entry threshold fields and optimizing already existing solutions. It's horrible at things that are mostly infrastructure based, with high cost of entry and nearly all costs being in fixed infrastructure improvement chunks. Highways, telecom, power, water, etc all work the same - if you want to run them free market style, prepare to suffer until you decide to simply join forces and run it jointly without a profit goal bidding it out in small enough chunks to make actual competition possible.
Well, history repeats itself. See the mobile phones for cellular networks (aka GSM). Made initially by Motorola, the technology spread all over the world and the US networks were actually lagging behind everyone else for quite a while.
> The United States is too big (in terms of population density) for a replacement solution to gain traction outside major metros without massive government subsidies.
