Google Recruiter Survey: Tell us what you think!

(ed: I can't believe it's been almost three months since I posted. Maintaining two blogs and twitter is more work than one might think)

Hello,
  Thank you for applying to recruit me to Google. I'm continuously working to provide a great experience to my recruiters throughout the hiring process, so I greatly value any feedback you’re willing to share about your experience—both what’s going well and what needs work.

Please share your feedback through my recruiter experience survey, which will be open from now through Monday, May 44. The survey should take less than 15 seconds to complete, and you can skip over any questions you prefer not to answer. Please keep in mind that your responses are not confidential, and will be used for humor improvements—not in decisions as to who I choose to allow to recruit me.

I absolutely do not love chatting with recruiters, though I sometimes receive more emails than I can respond to and have to prioritize questions regarding technical difficulties. Below are a few of my most frequently asked questions (FAQs) that may provide the answer you need.

Thank you for your time and have a great day,

Suresh, Suresh Venkatasubramanian Recruitment Experience Team.

FAQs
I never received feedback on my recruitment email - can you give me feedback?

I'm pretty limited on what I have access to within your recruiter profile (to ensure that my brain doesn't melt). I don't particularly mind you feeling confused about the outcome. Therefore, I suggest reaching out to your friends and family  if you have specific questions regarding your attempt to  recruit me at Google.


I’d like to provide more input on your process - should I email that over?
Please use the open ended comments at the end of the survey to leave any anecdotal feedback or additional thoughts. It's in the handy box titled /dev/null. This ensures your thoughts are not saved as I ignore aggregate feedback to share with my internet following.

 

21st century proverbs

Having nothing better to do, I decided to create a twitter meme: updating proverbs for the 21st century. Use the hashtag #21stcentproverbs and join in the fun below.

  Tweets about "#21stcentproverbs"

Absentmindedness

And now for a break from SODA updates. 

They say that professors are absentminded. I say that my mind is not absent: it's very very present - just somewhere else.

On that note, here are some levels of absentmindedness. I will refrain from any comment on how I came up with this list.

10. forgetting your keys are in your pocket
9. putting down your coffee while looking for keys and forgetting where you left it.
8. forgetting your glasses are on your head
7. forgetting that you're wearing your glasses
6. looking for your phone while holding it
5. missing your bus stop because you're day dreaming
4. missing your bus because you're day dreaming at the bus stop
3. taking your bus because you forgot you had the car that day
2. having to be reminded by your spouse not to take the bus because you took the car that day

I used to remember #1, but I've forgotten it.

And for some Sunday entertainment

(dare I say XKCD-style) Flowcharts for the life of the tenured and untenured professor. A collaborative School of Computing effort between my colleagues John Regehr, Matthew Might and myself (who says professors can't collaborate inside a department!).

Incidentally, we also make up the vast majority of our department's blogging presence.

If only they had given me an igNobel ...

Via Jeff Erickson (though I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be thanking him for this), my absurd research: http://bit.ly/d2CGJH

Although my wife is more impressed with this than
with any of my other papers ...

The limerick I used to introduce Emmanuel Candes

I was assigned the task of introducing Emmanuel Candes for his invited talk at SODA. After getting tired of my incessant pacing up and down the hotel room at 3am mumbling about the text of the intro, my roommate took pity on me and composed a cute little limerick for the occasion.

Now whether it was madness, desperation or both, I don't know. But I decided to use that limerick to open the introduction, much to the consternation of my (unnamed) roommate, who hadn't intended his little throwaway to take on such prominence.

But use it I did, and it didn't fall entirely flat, for which I am very grateful. I won't out the composer unless he does it himself :), but here's the limerick:

There once was a professor from Caltech
who represented his signals with curvelets
But upon reflection
realized, he'd prefer projection
As they could better capture sparse sets.

Thank you all: I'll be here all night....

Math != calculation, part 537...

From the NYT, on scoring the i-can't-believe-it's-not-a-sport sport of gymnastics:

The new system is heavy on math and employs two sets of judges, an A panel and a B panel, to do the computations. Two A-panel judges determine the difficulty and technical content of each routine. Six B-panel judges score routines for execution, artistry, composition and technique.

The A-panel judges’ scorecards start at zero, and points are added to give credit for requirements, individual skills and skills performed in succession.

The A panel counts only the gymnast’s 10 most difficult skills, which are ranked from easiest to most difficult (from A to G for women and from A to F for men). An A-level skill, like a back handspring in the floor exercise, is worth one-tenth of a point. The value increases by one-tenth of a point for each subsequent level, meaning a B-level skill is worth two-tenths and an F-level is worth six-tenths.

Required elements add a maximum of 2.5 points to the score. Extra points, either one-tenth or two-tenths, are given for stringing skills together.

Each judge adds the marks, then the two reach a consensus. Elite gymnasts usually have a difficulty score in the 6’s; the toughest routines generally have difficulty scores in the high 6’s or 7’s.

[...]
The system rewards difficulty. But the mistakes are also more costly.

Which is where the judges on the B panel come in. They rate the execution, artistry and technique of a routine, starting at a score of 10.0 and deducting for errors.

This score, called an execution score, is where the perfect 10.0 still exists. But reaching it is unlikely.

A slightly bent knee can be a deduction of one-tenth of a point. A more drastically bent knee can cost three-tenths. In this system, the deductions jump from one-tenth to three-tenths to five-tenths. A fall costs a gymnast eight-tenths. In the old system, a fall was a five-tenths deduction.

The highest and the lowest of the judges’ scores are thrown out. The remaining four scores are averaged to obtain the final B-panel score.

On the scoreboard, the final score appears in big numbers, just above the gymnast’s marks for difficulty and execution.

Apart from my grumble about the level of 'math', it's an interesting way of doing the scoring.

I wonder if this could work for conferences: replace 'degree of difficulty' by 'hardness of problem, general hotness of the area, etc', and then you could deduct points for things like

• More than two digits after the decimal point in the approximation ratio
• exponent of running time requires the \frac environment
• More than two parameters in the running time
• Gratuitous use of O() notation to hide dependencies you don't like (yes I'm talking to you, high dimensional clustering folk)
• Requiring your winged pigs to be large in dimension, have extra glitter on the wing tips, and carry golden harps in order to make the horses take off (Hi there, complexity denizens)

The F-1 process

I've been out of grad school long enough that I should know better, but PhD Comics still rings true in a way few comics can (xkcd is another). Of course, now I will find myself identifying more with the bearded old professor than the students, but still...

Today's strip sums up the foreign student visa experience perfectly. What they could have also added was a panel where Tajel explains the umpteenth bazillionth time to a clueless local, "Yes, we need a visa to go to X".

Loading Image

Click anywhere to cancel

Image is Unavailable

The history of Alice and Bob

The Alice and Bob approach to cryptography is brilliant on so many levels:

• It personalizes the discussion, rather than dealing with impersonal As and Bs
• It creates a gender-neutral discussion framework
• It's much more effective at capturing the imagination of the non-expert public (see point 1).
  

I was wondering about the origin of this coinage. It's attributed to the original RSA paper, and here's what Ron Rivest had to say about it:

RSA co-founder Rivest, who is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, says he came up with Alice and Bob to be able to use "A" and "B" for notation, and that by having one male and one female, the pronouns "he" and "she" could be used in descriptions. Rivest says it is possible that Alice came to mind because he is something of an Alice in Wonderland buff.

If you've wondered about the deeper personal lives of Alice and Bob, go no further than this speech. And for more on the extended Alice and Bob family, check out the wikipedia entry. (xkcd has more on the sad tale of the maligned other woman Eve).

On interview puzzles

Michael Mitzenmacher got hammered over at the complexity blog for trying to argue against the 'interview puzzle' style of interviewing so in vogue at places like Google, Microsoft and others.

Here's PhDComics' take on it:



I should add that I've been collecting questions that job-seekers are asked on such interviews.

I foresee mass murders of cell phone users...

From the NYT:

It’s been a long time, but Led Zeppelin, one of the last superstar acts to refrain from selling its music online, is finally offering its catalog to digital-music fans. The shift by Led Zeppelin, whose reunion concert in London next month has already incited a frenzy for tickets, highlights the clout of digital sales in the music market as mass merchants reduce the shelf space devoted to compact discs. Under a series of new agreements expected to be announced today, the band will make its songs available first as ringtones and similar mobile features starting this week in an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless.

And if you don't believe me, watch Wayne's World.

Sunday afternoon MathTubing

Via John Baez, learning category theory on YouTube ! Now what we need is a YouTube video for Scott Aaronson's soap film demonstrations.

The videos are listed under the category, 'How-to and DIY'. Indeed ! Make your own monads, in 9 minutes or less !

Physician, heal thyself ?

There's been a lot of grief over the reduction in price for iPhones only a few months after they were released. Wired magazine interviewed people who don't regret paying the higher price for the virtue of being an early adopter/arbiter-of-cool, and this comment caught my eye (emphasis mine):

"If they told me at the outset the iPhone would be $200 cheaper the next day, I would have thought about it for a second - and still bought it," said Andrew Brin, a 47-year-old addiction therapist in Los Angeles. "It was $600 and that was the price I was willing to pay for it."

I don't know: I think there are some other people who should get their money back.

Tenure committee is to Colombian drug cartel as ...

Via HWTW, a hilarious advice piece to new profs by Phil Ford at Inside Higher Ed, adapted from a Notorious B.I.G rap, "The Ten Crack Commandments". The article is great, but the comments are even funnier.

As usual, Randall Munro is a genius

Latest xkcd:

Hazardous Jobs #523: Dean of Undergraduate Studies

From Bob Sloan's rumination on the joys of being an NSF program manager:

When I left for NSF, I was Director of Undergraduate Studies for a department that had well over 600 majors at the height of the dot com boom. The previous two holders of that position had only ended their time in it by leaving the country in one case and dying in the other—both far more extreme than going to NSF for a couple of years

It's the Sans Serif smackdown

In the right corner: HELVETICA !!

Helvetica, which had its world premiere at the conference, presents the life story of something all of us encounter on a daily (or even hourly) basis. Created in 1957 by the Swiss modernist designer Max Miedinger as a response to the cluttered typography and design of the postwar era, Helvetica's clean neutrality and balanced use of the empty space surrounding letters quickly made it a go-to font for public signage, advertising, corporate logos and works of modernist design around the world

[...]

Filmmaker Gary Hustwitt revels in his fascination with something so commonplace that it blends almost entirely into a context-less background, becoming a detective of sorts to unveil the myriad everyday places Helvetica is hiding (“It's a disease,” Hustwitt said of his obsessive font-spotting).

In the left corner: COMIC SANS MS:

Earz: I found a weird website on typography, it was written in Italian I think, and had images of a gravestone lettered in comic sans. What does that say to you?

That would only be appropriate if the deceased were a clown or comedian, but other than that, I'd come back to haunt whoever did that if I were the dead guy.

Personally, I prefer Trebuchet MS.

p.s In the top corner, ARIAL:

It's been a very long time since I was actually a fan of Helvetica, but the fact is Helvetica became popular on its own merits. Arial owes its very existence to that success but is little more than a parasite—and it looks like it's the kind that eventually destroys the host. I can almost hear young designers now saying, "Helvetica? That's that font that looks kinda like Arial, right?"

The Cauchy-BUNYAKOVSKY-Schwarz inequality

Episode #2583 of "By the law of large numbers (of Russian mathematicians), your theorem has been proved by some Russian before you even thought of it":

Viktor Bunyakovsky worked on Number Theory as well as geometry, mechanics and hydrostatics. He discovered the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality 25 years before Cauchy or Schwarz.