They say that every bit of blink of a fimto second accounts for something in your life.I have always denied but came to agree at worse conditions... Am talking about The first semester of my Third year! The year was 2011 and as usual we are used to This our 'Kenyan workers style of complaining ' public university lectures went on strike and we had only covered Introduction on 'Linked List'. I was Happy we went back to do the exams but wait a little bit... We haven't covered Queues, Hash Tables, Graphs , Binary Search trees?? "Well, you don't have to worry, I will only bring what i taught in class.... "
Above were the comforting words of data structures' Lecture and for that case we really applauded Him...Not Knowing How I will once Wish that we made some make up's with Him, even if personal to introduce and guide me on Hash Tables, binary Search Trees and at least Graphs. "Well, haidhuru (it doesn't harm), as long as we do away with this hectic semester...".
The exams came and the lecture kept his words.He didn't even bring any question touching on hash Table, Graphs or binary Search trees even on the optional section..what a trustworthy lecturer!!.
As the semester ended, i applied for a Google Internship that would give me a chance to move out of my motherland grounds and explore Zurich, Switzerland.I prayed to God that such an opportunity wouldn't pass me if i am worthy, then i submitted my application.
Upon resuming the second semester of my third year,a month after my application, Google replied to me that they had received my request and thus forwarded a form to me asking me to add more colours to my skills and knowledge.I did as requested and submitted the form. a positive and encouraging reply followed two weeks later..that of course they got interested with my skills but rather wanted to test me further.by then i gained more trust with myself than ever before, not surely knowing what the future holds for me , but mesmerised and hopeful that it would be bright with Google as my internship provider.
Things started to move faster and within a week i got two email replies, which made the deal more lively and promising than i at first thought.I was given a go ahead to take an online coding exam that would further prove my coding ability to Google. I did the exam that was supposed to be done for a maximum of 1 hour 2o min, but it encouragingly took me only 30 minutes to accomplish the questions.by that time, i had already imagined myself in Zurich.Things seemed to be going alright and no seeming obstruction threatened my sweet wishes.
The following week, a Google people operations personnel mailed me and informed me that i had passed the online coding exam and for that i was congratulated.I knew only a little more bit of interviews stood between me and the coveted three month period Zurich Internship.she told me that the next step would be a phone interview with a google engineer, who would ask me several questions based on several categories of computing. "Waaah!! but wat do i have that Google can aspire to tap from me?" . I turned beside to my friend who was in the lab with me, looked at him Facebooking and wished He would know what awaits me. I just rubbed my eyes in disbelief and then re-read my mail again. I really needed to brush up on any questions that would seem typical in the phone interview . Ofcourse i Googled questions common in Google Software Engineering interviews and by so doing i hopped that i would get at least one deep question that my interviewer would repeat...Ithough as far as i can recall i wasnt lucky enough to be asked a replicated question.
I was asked to give out as many time slots as possible in the following week that would be used by the engineers to choose their favorite slot and schedule an interview.After an hour , i had reviewed my weekly class time table and had already designed when i would be free for the precious although difficult task.
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Well, Last time i was so tired to finish the long story of one of my most unfortunate days.Today i am willing to go on and say the rest of my story.
My first slot time slot allocation didn't help me so much in that i wasn't scheduled for any interview with any Google engineer. I knew i was just not lucky enough to be scheduled on that week.But at least somebody apologized for not having linked me with a software engineer, but asked me again to revisit my time slot and give them a new one.I did so by simply re-sending the slot range i had send previously, only that i changed the dates. This time round, I was assured that i would be interviewed and it never took long enough before the final hour that i would be conducted was communicated to me. I shivered a bit in worry of how i would manage to be courageous to go through the whole interview. Of all the things, what if the accent goes unfavorable for me, how will i launch a complain for that. And for your information it was my first time to have a deep insight with Google docs. All my answers for the questions that would be asked during the Phone interview were to be answered via the Google Docs. If you have never known, a group of people can have a live chat via Google docs, such that a live typing proceeding being done by the other person you are sharing the document with can see everything you are typing including cursor movements. That gives a heavy sense of what Cloud Computing comprises of. Finally , a bit of Divine courage which came from above (I think so) accompanied me to the Computer Science Computer Lab 2. EUCOSSA classes were still on and thus i had to sort myself at one of the back Benches at the lab. I have not yet told you that i were to be interviewed for a whole 45 minutes and that would include some coding sessions. At exactly 1800 hrs GMT +3 time, i was called and the Google engineer who i would not love to mention his name here, began the long awaited Interview. One happy thing was that his English accent was so good for my ears such that i was now settled and calm for any Question.
However, the calm didn't last long. I was shocked to hear the engineer ask me about hash Tables, a data structure that i ignored reading some minutes before the interview, with an excuse that even the lecturer had not taught us that. Now i agree i was kind of lazy .I only wished the engineer would listen to me and change the question since i knew nothing about Harsh Tables. In a way God Talked to Him and he changed the Question, but not to any better topic, Binary Search Trees. I only knew how to define the binary tree search method but not much on it.The questions were generally about look up, insert and delete Complexities of Binary Search Trees. This seems to be easy for you, isn't it? Remember that i hadn't done that in my varsity curriculum.That however didn't make me stop from trying out the question. At least i had to show up that at times i could go ahead even when everything seems to be doomed. I just guessed based on the LITTLE knowledge i had learned while in the class. After the first two minutes of terror and shock, the seeming simple and dooming question, a coding question. I was given a string of words in this form String words="abbbd cdda cbaa"; then given another letter like b, and then told to write a code using whatever language of interest that i could use to look for the word that contains the most number of occurrences of the given letter.I decided to use java, and thought this was pretty easy. I had planned to brute force the question since i didn't know of a good method that could help me go through the question. I started writing the code, and had a clue on how to halfway go through it. I later got stuck for a while and my interviewer decided to assist me. He told me to use the java method Split so that i could have my string split based on the spaces in between words.I got the clue but hadn't also used it before.In the verge of going successful through the code, i was damn shocked to get an alert that my time was over!!!!!!... I breathed heavily and sighed and remembered How i have been just unlucky through the whole interview, that week wasn't one of my best ones. I completed it though with no hopes whatsoever of proceeding to the next round. I thanked the engineer for his clear accent and assistance oh and the calling airtime he had consumed just to have me interviewed.I thanked God for the grace of having me interviewed by GOOGLE.
After one and a half weeks, i got a mail containing what i had expected, a mail of appreciation for my skills, but a regret that software engineering wasn't just my right field to be interviewed.I never regretted much for that. That's my tale to those yet to be interviewed, but one think i said is that my interest for working at Google and using its best life changing products isn't ending soon. Yeah , it isn't ending soon, more so with their Project glass still in the kitchen cooking.I saw the Google co-founder wearing it just the other day and made me wish to have this so much.
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