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How to use Google Search and ChatGPT side by side?
Google and ChatGPT are two powerful tools for searching the internet, but Google can provide you with a much larger variety of results. To get the best of both worlds, try using Google Search and ChatGPT side by side:
First, download the Google Chrome or Firefox browser extension;
then open Google in one tab and ChatGPT in another. This way, you can quickly compare results from Google with those provided by ChatGPT. It’s a sure-fire way to get the kind of search results that perfectly fit your needs!
If Google Chrome is not available on your device, don’t worry – simply install the Opera browser extension to get Google Search and ChatGPT working together even more smoothly.
How to use Google Search and ChatGPT side by side? AI Unraveled: Demystifying Frequently Asked Questions on Artificial Intelligence Intro
Google Search and ChatGPT can work side by side. Google Search can be used to find specific information on the internet, while ChatGPT can be used to understand and generate human-like text. They can be integrated together in various ways, such as providing answers to user queries by combining information found through Google Search with the language generation capabilities of ChatGPT. It could be used to provide more accurate, complete and human-like answers to the user.
Use a browser extension to display ChatGPT response alongside search engine results
How to use Google Search and ChatGPT side by side?
How to make it work in Opera
How to use Google Search and ChatGPT side by side? ChatGPT For Google
Enable “Allow access to search page results” in the extension management page
Google Search and ChatGPT are an unbeatable duo when it comes to finding information. Google is the world’s foremost web search engine, whereas ChatGPT has current, informative content from intelligent chatbots. Together they make a great combination for research and education purposes. Google can be used through Chrome, Firefox, or Opera browsers – all you need is a Google account and the browser extension. Once installed in your chosen browser, you can find out about anything via Google Search and speak with ChatGPT for even more details! Google and ChatGPT are constantly updating their content, making them up-to-date sources of knowledge so you can stay ahead of the game. Why not pair up Google Search and ChatGPT today?
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Optimizing Your Blog for Google’s 2023 Algorithm
Google’s Ranking Factors
Google uses hundreds of different factors to determine where a page appears in its SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). These factors range from user experience metrics such as page speed and mobile-friendliness, to content quality indicators such as topic relevance and keyword usage. In order to optimize your blog for the 2023 algorithm update, you must consider all of these ranking factors when structuring your blog posts.
Optimizing Your Blog for Google’s 2023 Algorithm: Google Search Engine Tech Stack
Content Quality
Content quality is one of the most important ranking factors in any given algorithm update. Google wants to ensure that searchers find relevant, accurate information when they perform a query – so it’s important that you create content with this goal in mind. When crafting blog posts, focus on providing useful information instead of just “filler” content; this will help you rank higher in Google’s search results. Additionally, make sure that you use keywords throughout your post; doing so will make it easier for Google to identify what the content is about and rank it accordingly.
User Experience Metrics
Google also takes user experience metrics into account when determining rankings. This means that if your website takes too long to load or isn’t mobile-friendly, then it won’t rank as highly as other pages with better user experience metrics. Make sure that your website is optimized for both desktop and mobile devices; this will improve page load times and make it easier for readers to access your content on their preferred device. Additionally, utilize caching techniques to reduce server response time and ensure that visitors have a pleasant browsing experience on your site.
Research Before Writing
No matter what kind of content you’re creating, research is key. Before writing a blog post, make sure that you have done thorough research on the topic and its related keywords. This will help you create content that is relevant and accurate. Additionally, it’s important to do regular keyword audits and track how often certain terms are being used in order to ensure that your content remains up-to-date with current trends.
Optimize Your Content
It’s not enough just to write great content; you also need to make sure that it’s properly optimized for search engines like Google. That means using appropriate keywords in key places (title tags, meta descriptions, headings) and making sure that all of your content is well-structured and easy-to-read. Additionally, optimizing images and videos will help your website load faster which can improve user experience—something Google values highly when ranking websites.
Google regularly updates their algorithms in order to deliver better search results for users—which means SEO best practices are constantly changing as well. To stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your blog remains visible online, pay close attention to any changes or updates in SEO best practices for 2023. Read industry blogs and newsletters or talk with experts about what techniques might be most effective this year. By staying informed about these changes, you can make sure that your blog remains compliant with Google’s algorithm throughout the year.
How to structure a blog to be compliant with Google latest search algorithm in 2023?
To structure a blog that is compliant with Google’s latest search algorithm, you should focus on the following:
Use keywords in your content that are relevant to your topic and are commonly searched by your target audience.
Optimize your blog’s title, meta description, and headings (H1, H2, etc.) to include your keywords and provide a clear and concise summary of your content.
Use internal linking to connect your blog post to other relevant content on your website, and external linking to credible sources to show that your content is well-researched.
Use images and videos to break up text and make your content more visually appealing. Be sure to optimize them with descriptive file names and alt tags that include keywords.
Optimize your website for mobile devices and ensure it loads quickly.
Use structured data markups to help search engines understand what your content is about and how to display it in search results.
Make sure your blog is easy to navigate and has a clear hierarchy of information.
Publish high-quality, original content on a regular basis.
Use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap and monitor your website’s performance on Google search.
Keep an eye on Google’s webmaster guidelines and updates to their algorithm to stay compliant and improve your website’s visibility on search engine.
What techniques do reliable SEO agencies use to improve organic rankings on Google?
Reliable SEO agencies use a variety of techniques to improve organic rankings on Google. Some of the most common techniques include:
Keyword research: Identifying the most relevant and profitable keywords for a business and incorporating them into the website’s content, meta tags, and URLs.
On-page optimization: Optimizing the website’s content and structure to make it more search engine friendly. This includes things like header tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
Content creation: Creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that provides value to users and helps to establish the website as an authority in its industry.
Link building: Acquiring backlinks from other websites that point to the website. These backlinks help to improve the website’s visibility and search engine rankings.
Technical SEO: Ensuring that the website’s technical infrastructure is optimized for search engines. This includes things like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability.
Local SEO: Optimizing the website for local search results, by including location-specific keywords and information, and claiming and verifying business listings on local directories.
Analytics and Reporting: Analysing website data and user behavior to track progress, identify areas for improvement and report the results to the client.
Continuous Optimization: Continuously monitoring and optimizing the website to keep up with the latest search engine algorithms and industry trends.
Please note that SEO is a complex and dynamic field, and these techniques are not exhaustive. Additionally, SEO agencies that rely on manipulative techniques such as buying backlinks or using hidden text, can get their clients penalized by Google.
In what ways have Google’s algorithm updates impacted organic SEO strategies over time?
Google’s algorithm updates have had a significant impact on organic SEO strategies over time. Some of the key ways that these updates have affected SEO include:
Prioritizing mobile-friendly websites: With the increase in mobile usage, Google has placed a greater emphasis on websites that are optimized for mobile devices. This means that if a website is not mobile-friendly, it may be penalized in search rankings.
Focusing on quality content: Google’s algorithm updates have placed a greater emphasis on high-quality, relevant, and unique content. Websites with thin or low-quality content may be penalized in search rankings.
Valuing backlinks: Backlinks, or links from other websites to a particular website, have traditionally been a key factor in determining a website’s search ranking. However, Google’s algorithm updates have placed more emphasis on the quality of backlinks, rather than the quantity.
Using secure connections: Google has also begun to favor websites that use secure connections (HTTPS) over those that use unsecured connections (HTTP).
Using structured data (schema markups) : Google has been using structured data (schema markups) to understand the context of the webpage and to show rich snippets in SERPs.
It is important to note that Google’s algorithm updates are ongoing, and SEO strategies will need to adapt to these changes in order to be successful.
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How has Google’s latest algorithmic updates changed the landscape of SEO best practices?
Google’s latest algorithmic updates have shifted the focus of SEO best practices towards creating a more user-centric experience. Some of the ways in which these updates have changed the landscape of SEO include:
Prioritizing user experience: Google’s algorithm updates have placed greater emphasis on factors that contribute to a positive user experience, such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, and accessibility. This means that websites that provide a good user experience are likely to rank higher in search results.
Focusing on quality content: Google’s updates have also emphasized the importance of high-quality, relevant, and unique content. Websites with thin or low-quality content may be penalized in search rankings.
Valuing natural language and user intent: Google’s updates have also placed more emphasis on natural language and user intent. This means that content that is written in a way that is easy to understand, and that is tailored to the specific needs and interests of the user, is more likely to rank well.
Emphasizing the importance of technical SEO: Google’s updates have also made it more important than ever to ensure that your website is technically sound. This includes things like using structured data, optimizing page speed, and making sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Focusing on local SEO: Google’s updates have also placed more emphasis on local SEO. This means that businesses that want to rank well in local search results need to ensure that they have accurate and up-to-date information on their Google My Business listing and that they have a strong presence on local review sites.
It is important to note that Google’s algorithm updates are ongoing and SEO best practices are also evolving constantly, so keeping up with the latest trends and changes is crucial for SEO success.
How does Google Panda update affect on-page content and how could it be optimized for better performance?
Google’s Panda update is a algorithm that was first released in 2011 and is designed to lower the rank of low-quality or “thin” websites while promoting high-quality content. It particularly looks at the quality of the on-page content, and the user engagement metrics.
To optimize for better performance with Panda, your on-page content should:
Be high-quality, informative, and useful for the user
Be original and not duplicated from other sources
Be well-written and free of grammatical errors
Include keywords that are relevant to the topic of the page
Provide a good user experience, with a clear and easy-to-use layout
Be of sufficient length, with at least 300 words of content per page
Be regularly updated with fresh, relevant content
Have engagement signals like comments, social shares and time spent on site.
Additionally, you should avoid:
Creating content that is thin or low-quality
Duplicating content from other websites
Using keyword stuffing tactics
Creating pages with little or no content
Creating pages with a lot of ads and not enough content
Creating pages with a lot of low-quality user-generated content
By following these guidelines, you can help ensure that your website is providing high-quality content that will be well-received by both users and the Panda algorithm.
How can A/B testing be effectively used to improve content’s performance on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)?
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or other content to see which one performs better. It can be effectively used to improve content’s performance on a search engine results page (SERP) by allowing you to make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your content for better visibility and engagement.
Here are a few ways you can use A/B testing to improve your content’s performance on SERP:
Test different headlines: A/B test different headlines for your content to see which one is more likely to attract clicks from users.
Test different meta descriptions: A/B test different meta descriptions to see which one is more likely to be clicked on by users.
Test different content layouts: A/B test different layouts for your content to see which one is more likely to be engaged with by users.
Test different images and videos: A/B test different images and videos to see which one is more likely to be engaged with by users.
Test different calls to action: A/B test different calls to action to see which one is more likely to be clicked on by users.
Test different keywords: A/B test different keywords to see which one is more likely to be clicked on by users.
It’s important to note that A/B testing should be used as part of a comprehensive optimization strategy, not as a standalone method. Also, it’s essential to have a significant amount of data to make a decision and make sure to test one variable at a time to ensure the results are meaningful.
By using A/B testing to optimize your content, you can make data-driven decisions about how to improve your content’s visibility and engagement on SERP.
The upcoming 2023 algorithm update could have drastic consequences on the way search engine results are ranked – so it’s important to make sure that your blog is properly optimized beforehand. By focusing on content quality and user experience metrics like page speed and mobile-friendliness, you can ensure that your blog is compliant with Google’s latest requirements and continues to rank highly in its SERPs moving forward. With proper optimization, you can maintain an edge over competitors while improving visibility within organic search results!
Staying compliant with Google’s algorithms doesn’t have to be difficult! By following these simple steps – researching before writing, optimizing your content based on latest trends, and staying updated on SEO best practices – you can easily ensure that your blog stays visible online throughout 2023 (and beyond). Remember: it pays off in the end if you put in some extra effort now! Happy blogging!
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What is trending in January 2023?
What’s trending in January 2023?
Google Trend has the answer! Every month, millions of people turn to Google search to find out what everyone is talking about. According to Google Trend insights, January 2023 is all about the latest metamorphic technology and virtual entertainment. People are searching for new ways to stay connected with friends, work from home, and so much more. It’s quite remarkable how far we have come since the start of the century; even now, innovation continues unabated and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon!
Top Trends January 31th, 2023
The unemployment rate across the US and the EU in January 2023. The US average unemployment rate is 3.5%. The EU average unemployment rate is 6.1% 🇺🇸🇪🇺
What’s trending in January 2023: The unemployment rate across the US and the EU in January 2023. The US average unemployment rate is 3.5%. The EU average unemployment rate is 6.1%
What is the retirement age in Europe: Generally between 65 and 67.
What is the Retirement age in America: Generally 67.
Is $1.5 million enough to retire at 62? It depends on various factors such as your expected lifestyle, healthcare costs, inflation, and taxes. A general rule of thumb is to have savings equivalent to 80% of your pre-retirement income, which in this case would be around $60,000 per year. $1.5 million can provide this amount with a 4% withdrawal rate, but this may not be sufficient for everyone.
How much will I get a month if I retire at 62? The amount you will receive per month will depend on how you choose to receive your retirement benefits, such as through Social Security or through withdrawals from a savings account.
How much can I earn if I retire at 62 in 2023? Again, the amount you can earn in retirement will depend on various factors, including Social Security benefits, pension plans, and personal savings.
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Why retire at 62? Retiring at 62 may be appealing to some people as it allows them to leave the workforce earlier and potentially enjoy a longer retirement. It is important to consider factors such as your financial situation, healthcare needs, and life expectancy before making a decision to retire.
How much is needed to retire at 62? The amount needed to retire at 62 depends on various factors such as lifestyle, healthcare costs, inflation, and taxes. A general rule of thumb is to have savings equivalent to 80% of your pre-retirement income. It is recommended to speak to a financial advisor for a personalized plan.
Serbian tennis player, Novak Djokovic is a top trending person, spiking +450%, in the world over the past day as he won the 2023 Australian Open men’s singles.
After American actress Annie Wersching passed away on Sunday, she became a top trending person in the US over the past day. “annie wersching cancer type” is a top related search.
In the US, all of the other top ten trending topics are related to the NFL over the past day. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy spiked +950% in the same time period.
Jill Biden became a top trending person in the US as she appeared at the NFC Championship Eagles-49ers game on Sunday.
“school closings” spiked +2,200% over the past day in the US. The top state searching for this is Missouri, followed by Oklahoma and Michigan.
“pakistan mosque bombing” is a global top trending topic related to Pakistan over the past day.
Top trending questions about police reform, past week, worldwide
What would police reform look like? Police reform refers to changes and improvements made to the policies, training, and practices of law enforcement agencies with the aim of improving the relationship between the police and the communities they serve, increasing accountability and transparency, and reducing police violence.
How to support police reform?
There are several ways to support police reform. You can get involved in local advocacy groups, write to your elected officials, support organizations that promote reform, attend public meetings and protests, and educate yourself and others on the issues.
Why won’t police reform work? There are several reasons why police reform may not work, including resistance from law enforcement agencies, lack of political will, limited funding, and difficulty in implementing changes. Reform also requires buy-in and commitment from all stakeholders, including police departments, elected officials, and the public.
What is police reform? Police reform refers to the changes that are made to the way law enforcement agencies operate to improve their behavior and accountability towards the public. The aim of reform is to address issues of police misconduct, brutality, and discrimination and to improve relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
What states have police reform? Several states have implemented police reform measures in recent years, including California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and others. The specifics of these reforms vary by state, but common reforms include changes to the use of force policies, hiring practices, and training programs.
“memphis police officer charged” was a breakout search in the US in the past day, after five officers were charged with the murder of Tyre Nicolas.
“kobe bryant” was a breakout search in the past day, Worldwide, after the third anniversary of his tragic death along with his daughter Gianna Bryant.
“teen wolf” was a breakout search in the past day Worldwide after the movie spinoff was released today. Jamaica is the top country searching for “teen wolf the movie”
“colon cancer” is a breakout search in the past day, Worldwide, after TikTok star Randy Gonzalez, 35, passes away from the disease. This news also comes amid studies that colorectal cancer rates are rising amongst younger people.
Searches for “when to check for colon cancer” and “what causes colon cancer in males” were up +200% in the past 7 days, Worldwide
Ireland is the top country searching for “Jenin refugee camp” in the past 7 days
Top questions on Jenin, Palestine in the past day, Worldwide
Where is Jenin? Palestinian city in the northern West Bank. It serves as the administrative center of the Jenin Governorate of the State of Palestine and is a major center for the surrounding towns.
Is Jenin Safe? Jenin is a city in the West Bank and the level of safety in the area can be influenced by the ongoing political and security situation in the region. It’s best to check current travel warnings and advice from local authorities and international organizations before traveling to Jenin or any other city in the West Bank. Additionally, it’s always recommended to exercise caution and be aware of your surroundings when traveling to any location
Is Jenin in the West Bank? Jenin is a city located in the northern part of the West Bank, in the Palestinian territories.
Rent and Housing
“rent burdened definition” is a breakout search in the US, past 7 days after Moody’s Analytics found that renters in the US now pay more than 30% of their median income for rent
Florida is the top state searching for Rent, 2004 – present
Top questions on affording rent, past day US
How much rent can I afford? The amount of rent you can afford depends on several factors such as your monthly income, credit score, employment history, and other debts and expenses you may have. A general rule of thumb is that your monthly housing expenses should not exceed 30% of your gross monthly income. This means that if you make $3,000 per month, you should aim to spend no more than $900 on rent and utilities. However, this is just a guideline and you should consider your individual financial situation and needs when determining how much you can afford to spend on rent.
How much mortgage can I afford? The amount of mortgage you can afford depends on several factors, including your income, monthly debts, credit score, and down payment. A general rule of thumb is to spend no more than 28% of your gross monthly income on housing expenses, including mortgage payments, insurance, and property taxes. However, the best way to determine how much mortgage you can afford is to speak with a lender and get pre-approved for a loan. They will take into account your specific financial situation and provide you with a more accurate estimate.
How much rent can I afford on 40k salary? The amount of rent you can afford on a 40k salary can vary based on several factors, such as the cost of living in your area, your monthly expenses, and your desired level of savings. Generally, it’s recommended to spend no more than 30% of your gross monthly income on housing. For a 40k salary, that would be $1,000-$1,200 per month for rent. However, it’s important to take into account other expenses such as utilities, groceries, transportation, and insurance to determine the most realistic amount you can afford for rent. It may also be helpful to have a savings cushion for emergencies and unexpected expenses.
How much rent can I afford making 18k? As a general rule of thumb, it is recommended to spend no more than 30% of your monthly income on housing expenses, including rent, utilities, and any other housing-related expenses.
Based on this rule, if you earn $18,000 per year, your monthly income would be $1,500. Therefore, you could afford to spend about $450 per month on rent.
Keep in mind that this is a general guideline, and other factors, such as your location, the cost of living, and your personal financial situation, can affect how much rent you can afford. It is always advisable to also consider your monthly expenses, such as food, transportation, and other bills, when determining your budget for housing expenses.
How to calculate how much rent you can afford? To calculate how much rent you can afford, follow these steps:
Determine your monthly net income: Subtract your monthly expenses from your monthly income, including taxes, insurance, and other deductions.
Calculate your debt-to-income ratio (DTI): Divide your monthly debt payments by your monthly net income. A general guideline is to keep your DTI under 40%.
Consider other expenses: Don’t forget to factor in utilities, transportation costs, and other monthly expenses when determining how much rent you can afford.
Set a budget: Based on your DTI and monthly expenses, set a budget for your monthly rent payment. A good rule of thumb is to spend no more than 30% of your monthly net income on housing.
Adjust as needed: If your rent budget is higher than what you can afford, consider finding a roommate, reducing your other expenses, or finding a less expensive housing option.
Bond girl was a breakout search in the US in the past day related to the Academy Award-nominated actress Michelle Yeoh. Yeoh is the first Malaysian actress to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“tiktok mascara meaning” was a breakout search in the past day in the US related to the popular TikTok hashtag
“how much does an abrams tank cost” was a breakout search in the past day in the US after President Biden announced he will be sending the Ukrainian army the tanks. M88 Recovery Vehicle was also a breakout search yesterday in the US as they are included in the White House’s Ukraine package.
When did Russia invade Ukraine? On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014. The invasion has caused tens of thousands of deaths on both sides and Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine in a steep escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War. The campaign had been preceded by a Russian military buildup since early 2021 and numerous Russian demands for security measures and legal prohibitions against Ukraine joining NATO.
“half moon bay” and “mushroom farm” were breakout searches in California this past week in the aftermath of the mass shooting that took place at a mushroom farm in the city of Half Moon Bay, CA
“gun reform meaning” was a breakout search in California in the last 7 days after multiple mass shootings occurred in the state in the past week.
“ronald reagan gun laws” was a breakout search in the past day in the United States. The 1967 Mulford Act was signed into effect by then-Governor Ronald Reagan and prohibited the public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.
Top questions on Gun control, past week, California
What state has the strictest gun laws? California has some of the strictest gun laws in the United States. These laws include a ban on assault weapons, a 10-day waiting period for firearm purchases, and a requirement for background checks for all firearms sales and transfers.
What are the gun laws in California 2022? California has some of the strictest gun laws in the United States. In 2022, California’s gun laws include: -A waiting period of 10 days for all firearm purchases -A ban on assault weapons -A requirement for all firearm transactions to go through a licensed dealer -A requirement for background checks for all firearm purchases -A requirement for all firearm owners to have a Firearm Safety Certificate -Restrictions on the possession of large capacity ammunition magazines -A “red flag” law that allows for the temporary removal of firearms from individuals deemed to be a danger to themselves or others -A process to remove firearms from individuals convicted of certain crimes or placed under certain restraining orders -A process for voluntarily surrendering firearms to law enforcement agencies.
When was the constitution written? The United States Constitution was written in 1787.
What is gun control? Gun reform refers to changes or adjustments to laws and regulations related to the possession, sale, and use of firearms. This can include measures such as background checks, waiting periods, and limits on certain types of weapons or accessories. The goal of gun reform is to reduce the incidence of gun violence and improve public safety.
What is gun reform? Gun reform refers to changes or proposed changes to laws and regulations related to firearms and their ownership. This can include measures such as background checks, waiting periods, limits on certain types of weapons or accessories, and increased penalties for crimes committed with firearms. The goal of gun reform is generally to reduce the number of deaths and injuries caused by firearms.
Top Trends January 25th, 2023
Panic! At The Disco was the top trending topic related to Breakup after the pop rock band announced that its next tour would be its last, past day, US
“tornado watch” was a breakout search, past day, US, after weather forecasters issued a warning about a developing storm to parts of the Gulf Coast on Tuesday. It was most searched in Texas
“oscar nominations 2023” was the top trending topic, past day, worldwide, after the nominees were announced on Tuesday morning. See yesterday’s special Oscars newsletter for more Academy Awards-related trends
“ind vs nz” was the top trending sports game worldwide after a Tuesday cricket match, past day, worldwide. It was most searched in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka
Earth’s inner core was a breakout search and was searched in every US state, past day, US, following the publication of a new study, which describes potential changes the Earth’s inner core’s rotation
World Population
“most populated country” was a worldwide breakout search in the past week. It was most searched in India, followed by Nepal and the United Arab Emirates
Search interest in Birth Rate hit a five year-high in 2022, past five years, worldwide
Japan and Prime Minister of Japan were two of the top trending topics related to the Birth Rate, past week, worldwide
Top questions about Population, past week, worldwide:
What is the population of India? 1,375,586,000 as 0f 2023
What country has the highest population? China
What is the population of China? 1,411,750,000
Top “birth rate in” searches, past week, worldwide:
Birth rate in India: The birth rate in India is currently around 20 births per 1,000 people. However, this rate has been decreasing in recent years due to factors such as increased access to education and family planning resources.
Birth rate in US: The birth rate in the United States has been on a decline in recent years. In 2020, the birth rate in the United States was 13.5 births per 1,000 total population, which is the lowest it has been in the country’s history. This decline in the birth rate can be attributed to a variety of factors, including economic uncertainty, delays in starting families, and changes in cultural attitudes towards having children.
Birth rate in Japan: The birth rate in Japan has been declining for several decades. In 2020, the birth rate in Japan was 7.9 births per 1,000 population. This is significantly lower than the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, which is the number of children needed to maintain a stable population. Factors contributing to the low birth rate in Japan include a lack of affordable childcare, a lack of support for working mothers, and a cultural preference for small families.
Birth rate in China: The birth rate in China has been decreasing in recent years due to the country’s one-child policy and increasing urbanization. The policy, which was implemented in 1979 and officially ended in 2015, limited most urban couples to one child and many rural couples to two children. As a result, the birth rate in China has been below the replacement level for some time. However, the Chinese government has recently loosened its population control policies, allowing couples to have two children. But the decrease in birth rate remains a concern.
Birth rate in Canada: The birth rate in Canada is around 10 births per 1,000 people. This is considered a low birth rate compared to other countries. Factors that contribute to this include access to birth control and family planning, as well as economic and social factors such as the high cost of raising children and women’s increasing participation in the workforce.
Advanced Placement
Advanced Placement was searched in every US state in the past day. It was most searched in Georgia, followed by New Jersey and Florida
In 2022, AP Computer Science Principles was searched two times more than AP Computer Science for the first time ever. AP Computer Science Principles also saw a huge spike last year, reaching an all-time high in terms of search interest
The San Francisco 49ers are the top trending topic in the world following their playoff defeat of the Dallas Cowboys and Brock Purdy is the top trending topic in the US, past day
Search interest in “maya rudolph m&m” is more than twice that of both “blue m&m” and “red m&m” following news that actress Maya Rudolph will be a spokesperson for M&Ms, past day, US
Washington DC, followed by California and New York are the top US states searching for “oscar nominations” following the release of the nominations, past four hours:
Best Picture
Top Gun: Maverick
Tom Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer, Christopher McQuarrie, …
Women Talking
Frances McDormand, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Jonathan Wang
The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh, Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin
Triangle of Sadness
Erik Hemmendorff, Philippe Bober
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner, Kristie Macosko Krieger
All Quiet on the Western Front
Malte Grunert
Avatar: The Way of Water
James Cameron, Jon Landau
Elvis
Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, …
Tár
Todd Field, Alexandra Milchan, Scott Lambert
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
NOMINEES
BRENDAN GLEESON
The Banshees of Inisherin
BRIAN TYREE HENRY
Causeway
JUDD HIRSCH
The Fabelmans
BARRY KEOGHAN
The Banshees of Inisherin
KE HUY QUAN
Everything Everywhere All at Once
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
NOMINEES
CATE BLANCHETT
Tár
ANA DE ARMAS
Blonde
ANDREA RISEBOROUGH
To Leslie
MICHELLE WILLIAMS
The Fabelmans
MICHELLE YEOH
Everything Everywhere All at Once
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
NOMINEES
ANGELA BASSETT
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
HONG CHAU
The Whale
KERRY CONDON
The Banshees of Inisherin
JAMIE LEE CURTIS
Everything Everywhere All at Once
STEPHANIE HSU
Everything Everywhere All at Once
ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
NOMINEES
GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO
Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson, Gary Ungar and Alex Bulkley
MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON
Dean Fleischer Camp, Elisabeth Holm, Andrew Goldman, Caroline Kaplan and Paul Mezey
PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH
Joel Crawford and Mark Swift
THE SEA BEAST
Chris Williams and Jed Schlanger
TURNING RED
Domee Shi and Lindsey Collins
CINEMATOGRAPHY
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
James Friend
BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS
Darius Khondji
ELVIS
Mandy Walker
EMPIRE OF LIGHT
Roger Deakins
TÁR
Florian Hoffmeister
COSTUME DESIGN
NOMINEES
BABYLON
Mary Zophres
BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER
Ruth Carter
ELVIS
Catherine Martin
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Shirley Kurata
MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS
Jenny Beavan
DIRECTING
NOMINEES
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Martin McDonagh
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
THE FABELMANS
Steven Spielberg
TÁR
Todd Field
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS
Ruben Östlund
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM
NOMINEES
ALL THAT BREATHES
Shaunak Sen, Aman Mann and Teddy Leifer
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED
Laura Poitras, Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin and Yoni Golijov
FIRE OF LOVE
Sara Dosa, Shane Boris and Ina Fichman
A HOUSE MADE OF SPLINTERS
Simon Lereng Wilmont and Monica Hellström
NAVALNY
Daniel Roher, Odessa Rae, Diane Becker, Melanie Miller and Shane Boris
DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM
NOMINEES
THE ELEPHANT WHISPERERS
Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga
HAULOUT
Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev
HOW DO YOU MEASURE A YEAR?
Jay Rosenblatt
THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT
Anne Alvergue and Beth Levison
STRANGER AT THE GATE
Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones
FILM EDITING
NOMINEES
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Mikkel E.G. Nielsen
ELVIS
Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Paul Rogers
TÁR
Monika Willi
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
Eddie Hamilton
INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Germany
ARGENTINA, 1985
Argentina
CLOSE
Belgium
EO
Poland
THE QUIET GIRL
Ireland
MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Heike Merker and Linda Eisenhamerová
THE BATMAN
Naomi Donne, Mike Marino and Mike Fontaine
BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER
Camille Friend and Joel Harlow
ELVIS
Mark Coulier, Jason Baird and Aldo Signoretti
THE WHALE
Adrien Morot, Judy Chin and Anne Marie Bradley
MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE)
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Volker Bertelmann
BABYLON
Justin Hurwitz
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Carter Burwell
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Son Lux
THE FABELMANS
John Williams
MUSIC (ORIGINAL SONG)
NOMINEES
APPLAUSE
from Tell It like a Woman; Music and Lyric by Diane Warren
HOLD MY HAND
from Top Gun: Maverick; Music and Lyric by Lady Gaga and BloodPop
LIFT ME UP
from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; Music by Tems, Rihanna, Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Goransson; Lyric by Tems and Ryan Coogler
NAATU NAATU
from RRR; Music by M.M. Keeravaani; Lyric by Chandrabose
THIS IS A LIFE
from Everything Everywhere All at Once; Music by Ryan Lott, David Byrne and Mitski; Lyric by Ryan Lott and David Byrne
BEST PICTURE
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Malte Grunert, Producer
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin and Martin McDonagh, Producers
ELVIS
Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick and Schuyler Weiss, Producers
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert and Jonathan Wang, Producers
THE FABELMANS
Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, Producers
TÁR
Todd Field, Alexandra Milchan and Scott Lambert, Producers
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison and Jerry Bruckheimer, Producers
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS
Erik Hemmendorff and Philippe Bober, Producers
WOMEN TALKING
Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Frances McDormand, Producers
PRODUCTION DESIGN
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Production Design: Christian M. Goldbeck; Set Decoration: Ernestine Hipper
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
Production Design: Dylan Cole and Ben Procter; Set Decoration: Vanessa Cole
BABYLON
Production Design: Florencia Martin; Set Decoration: Anthony Carlino
ELVIS
Production Design: Catherine Martin and Karen Murphy; Set Decoration: Bev Dunn
THE FABELMANS
Production Design: Rick Carter; Set Decoration: Karen O’Hara
SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)
NOMINEES
THE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE
Charlie Mackesy and Matthew Freud
THE FLYING SAILOR
Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby
ICE MERCHANTS
João Gonzalez and Bruno Caetano
MY YEAR OF DICKS
Sara Gunnarsdóttir and Pamela Ribon
AN OSTRICH TOLD ME THE WORLD IS FAKE AND I THINK I BELIEVE IT
Lachlan Pendragon
SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION)
NOMINEES
AN IRISH GOODBYE
Tom Berkeley and Ross White
IVALU
Anders Walter and Rebecca Pruzan
LE PUPILLE
Alice Rohrwacher and Alfonso Cuarón
NIGHT RIDE
Eirik Tveiten and Gaute Lid Larssen
THE RED SUITCASE
Cyrus Neshvad
SOUND
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Viktor Prášil, Frank Kruse, Markus Stemler, Lars Ginzel and Stefan Korte
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
Julian Howarth, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Dick Bernstein, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers and Michael Hedges
THE BATMAN
Stuart Wilson, William Files, Douglas Murray and Andy Nelson
ELVIS
David Lee, Wayne Pashley, Andy Nelson and Michael Keller
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
Mark Weingarten, James H. Mather, Al Nelson, Chris Burdon and Mark Taylor
VISUAL EFFECTS
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Frank Petzold, Viktor Müller, Markus Frank and Kamil Jafar
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett
THE BATMAN
Dan Lemmon, Russell Earl, Anders Langlands and Dominic Tuohy
BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER
Geoffrey Baumann, Craig Hammack, R. Christopher White and Dan Sudick
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
Ryan Tudhope, Seth Hill, Bryan Litson and Scott R. Fisher
WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY)
NOMINEES
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Screenplay – Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson & Ian Stokell
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY
Written by Rian Johnson
LIVING
Written by Kazuo Ishiguro
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
Screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie; Story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks
“how many countries celebrate lunar new year” +3,800% and “lunar new year video for kids” is up +2,550%, past day, worldwide: Many countries in East and Southeast Asia, including China, Vietnam, Korea, and Singapore, celebrate Lunar New Year. Other countries with significant Asian populations, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, also observe the holiday. In addition, some countries in the West also celebrate Lunar New Year, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Global search interest in “love character test” tripled, past day, since its popularity on TikTok
Search interest in “snow day calculator” increased fivefold, past day, US. The top state searching for this is Maine.
Mycology is a top trending topic related to The Last of US, TV series, past day, worldwide.
Eat a balanced diet: Include a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins in your diet. Avoid processed foods and added sugars, which can disrupt the balance of gut bacteria.
Take probiotics: Probiotics are live microorganisms that can help to maintain a healthy balance of gut bacteria. They can be found in supplements, fermented foods such as yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut and kimchi, and in some non-fermented foods like pickles.
Consume prebiotics: Prebiotics are non-digestible carbohydrates that act as food for probiotics. They can be found in foods such as bananas, onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus, and oats.
Stay hydrated: Drinking enough water can help to keep your digestion regular and prevent constipation.
Exercise regularly: Physical activity can help to stimulate the movement of food through the gut, promoting healthy digestion.
Manage stress: Chronic stress can disrupt the balance of gut bacteria and contribute to digestive issues. Find ways to manage stress, such as through exercise, yoga, or meditation.
Avoid antibiotics: Antibiotics can kill off both bad and good bacteria in the gut, disrupting the balance of gut microbiome. Be sure to only take antibiotics when it is necessary and as prescribed by a healthcare professional.
It’s also worth noting that everyone’s gut health is different, it’s important to experiment and find what works best for you. Always consult with a healthcare professional if you have any concerns about your gut health.
More than ever before are Americans searching for “fermented food” in January 2023.
Do probiotics Stop diarrhea? Probiotics have been shown to be effective in reducing the duration and severity of diarrhea caused by certain types of infections, such as those caused by bacteria or viruses. However, it’s important to note that probiotics are not effective for all types of diarrhea, such as that caused by certain medications or underlying medical conditions. It’s also important to consult with a healthcare provider before taking probiotics, especially if you have a weakened immune system or a chronic medical condition.
Do probiotics Cause acne? There is currently limited scientific evidence to support the claim that probiotics cause acne. While some studies have suggested a possible link between probiotics and acne, the results are not conclusive and more research is needed to determine a definitive cause-and-effect relationship. It’s also important to note that individual factors, such as diet, genetics, and skin care regimen, can also play a role in the development of acne. That being said, if you have a history of acne and are considering taking probiotics, it may be a good idea to consult with a healthcare provider or a dermatologist first.
Do probiotics Help with infections? Probiotics have been shown to be beneficial in the prevention and treatment of certain types of infections, particularly those that affect the digestive tract. For example, probiotics may help to prevent and treat diarrhea caused by bacterial or viral infections. They may also help to reduce the risk of urinary tract infections, and can improve symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease. Probiotics may also help to improve the balance of the gut microbiome which can help to boost the immune system and decrease the chance of infection. However, it’s important to note that probiotics are not effective for all types of infections, and it’s always best to consult with a healthcare provider before taking probiotics, especially if you are currently experiencing an infection or have a weakened immune system.
Do probiotics Cause bloating? Probiotics have been known to cause bloating and gas in some people, especially when they first start taking them. This is because probiotics may increase the production of gas in the gut as they ferment undigested food. However, these side effects are usually temporary and should subside within a few days to a week. It’s also worth noting that some people may be more sensitive to certain strains of probiotics than others, so it may be helpful to try different types of probiotics to see which one works best for you. If you are experiencing severe or persistent bloating, it is always best to consult with a healthcare provider to rule out other underlying causes.
Do probiotics Help acne? There is some evidence that suggests that probiotics may help to improve acne by regulating the balance of bacteria in the gut and reducing inflammation. Studies have shown that people with acne tend to have a less diverse gut microbiome compared to those without acne. By taking probiotics, it can help to restore the balance of gut bacteria and reduce inflammation which can help to improve acne symptoms. However, it’s important to note that research in this area is still ongoing and more studies are needed to fully understand the relationship between probiotics and acne. Also, it’s worth noting that probiotics may work differently for different people, what works for one person may not work for another, so it’s always best to consult with a healthcare provider before taking any new supplement.
Trending “does… help gut health” past week, US
Does Collagen help gut health? Collagen is a protein that is found in the body and is known to play a role in supporting the health of the skin, joints, bones, and tendons. Some studies suggest that consuming collagen supplements may also help to support gut health by strengthening the gut lining, which can help to prevent leaky gut syndrome and other gut-related issues. However, more research is needed to fully understand the potential benefits of collagen for gut health.
Does Kefir help gut health?
Kefir is a fermented milk drink that has been traditionally used in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It is made by fermenting milk with kefir grains, which are a combination of lactic acid bacteria and yeasts. Due to the fermentation process, Kefir is a probiotic-rich food, which means it contains beneficial microorganisms that can help to promote a healthy gut.
Research has shown that consuming kefir can help to improve the balance of gut bacteria, which can in turn improve gut health and boost the immune system. It has been found to help with diarrhea, constipation, IBS, and other digestive issues. It also has been found to have anti-inflammatory properties, which can help to reduce gut inflammation.
It’s worth noting that kefir is generally well tolerated, but as with any food, some people may be allergic or intolerant to the milk used to make it.
Does Magnesium help gut health?
Magnesium is an essential mineral that plays a role in many bodily functions, including muscle and nerve function, and the regulation of the heart’s rhythm. Some studies suggest that magnesium may also play a role in supporting gut health.
Magnesium has been found to have a relaxing effect on the muscles of the gut, which can help to ease symptoms of constipation and diarrhea. It also plays a role in maintaining the integrity of the gut lining, which can help to prevent leaky gut syndrome and other gut-related issues. Additionally, magnesium can help to regulate the activity of the immune system, which can help to reduce inflammation in the gut.
However, It is worth noting that not all forms of magnesium are easily absorbed by the body, and people with gut issues or malabsorption may have trouble getting enough magnesium from food or supplements.
It is always best to consult with a healthcare professional before starting any supplement regimen.
Does Apple cider vinegar help gut health?
Apple cider vinegar (ACV) is a popular natural remedy that is claimed to have many health benefits, including supporting gut health. ACV is made by fermenting apples, which gives it many of the same properties as other fermented foods, such as kefir.
Some research suggests that consuming ACV may help to improve the balance of gut bacteria, which can in turn improve gut health. It may also help to reduce inflammation in the gut, which can be beneficial for people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or other gut issues.
ACV may also help to ease symptoms of constipation and diarrhea, and it has been found to have anti-inflammatory properties, which can help to reduce gut inflammation.
It’s worth noting that while ACV is generally considered safe, consuming too much of it can be harmful and lead to side effects such as throat burns, nausea, and tooth erosion. It’s best to consume it in moderate amounts and dilute it with water before consuming it.
It is also important to note that while there is some research suggesting that ACV may have health benefits, more research is needed to fully understand its effects on gut health, and it should not be used as a substitute for any medical treatment or medication.
Does Coconut oil help gut health?
Coconut oil is a popular natural remedy that is claimed to have many health benefits, including supporting gut health.
Coconut oil is high in medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), which are a type of saturated fat that is easily digested and absorbed by the body. MCTs have been found to have a beneficial effect on gut health by promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria in the gut, which can improve the balance of gut bacteria.
Coconut oil has also been found to have anti-inflammatory properties, which can help to reduce inflammation in the gut, which is beneficial for people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or other gut issues.
Additionally, Coconut oil has also been found to have a beneficial effect on the digestive system. It can help to ease symptoms of constipation and diarrhea, and it can also help to improve gut motility, which is the ability of the gut to move food through the digestive tract.
However, it’s worth noting that not all the research on coconut oil’s effects on gut health are conclusive, and more research is needed to fully understand its effects. Also, people who are sensitive to coconut oil or have a history of allergies should be cautious when consuming it, and it’s best to consult with a healthcare professional before starting any supplement regimen.
Revenge Songs
Over the past week, the top searched people worldwide are “Shakira”, “Pique” and “clara chia”
People searching for Jam over the past week in the US are also searching for Shakira after the singer hinted a half-eaten jar of jam led her to suspect infidelity.
The top trending “flowers” and “sample” searched this week are related to Miley’s new song.
Searches for Bruno Mars increased by +2,250% over the past week after Miley referenced one of his songs in her new single with “bruno mars response to flowers” as a breakout search.
Late night thoughts keeping you awake? Searches for cheating in a relationship peak between 3-6 AM EST in the US.
Trending “who is… about” past 12 months, US
Who is Vigilante Sh*t?
Who is Candle in the Wind? “Candle in the Wind” is a song by British singer Elton John. The original version of the song was released in 1973 and was a tribute to Marilyn Monroe. In 1997, the song was re-released as “Candle in the Wind 1997” in tribute to Princess Diana, and this version became one of the best-selling singles of all time.
Depeche Mode’s Never Let Me Down Again is being searched over 100x more this week than last week in the US
Cordyceps is the top trending topic related to zombie, past day, US
“last of us zombie types” is up +550% and “clickers last of us” nearly doubled, past week, US
“last of us no spores” nearly doubled and “tendrils the last of us” nearly tripled, past week, US
“who are the fireflies the last of us” is a breakout search, past week, US
Top trending questions on fungus, past week, US
Can fungi control humans? No, fungi cannot control humans. Fungi are a type of organism that belong to the kingdom of fungi and include species such as yeasts, molds, and mushrooms. While some fungi can cause infections in humans, they do not have the ability to control or manipulate human behavior.
Can fungus take over your body?
While it is possible for certain types of fungus to infect and cause damage to the body, it is highly unlikely for a fungus to completely take over the body. The human body has a number of mechanisms in place to prevent the overgrowth of fungus, including the immune system, which helps to fight off infection.
Fungal infections can occur in various parts of the body such as the skin, nails, hair, and the respiratory, urinary and gastrointestinal tracts. Some fungal infections are limited to certain areas of the body and are treated with topical or oral antifungal medications, however, some fungal infections can be invasive and can affect internal organs and systems, causing serious illness.
Examples of invasive fungal infections include candidemia (a bloodstream infection caused by Candida), aspergillosis (caused by Aspergillus), and mucormycosis (caused by Mucor and Rhizopus) which can affect people with weakened immune systems. These types of fungal infections are usually treated with antifungal drugs and may require hospitalization.
It’s important to keep in mind that fungal infections are not contagious, they are usually caused by the overgrowth of already present fungus in the body. If you suspect you have a fungal infection, it’s important to see a healthcare professional for proper diagnosis and treatment.
Can fungi infect humans? Yes, certain types of fungi can infect humans and cause a variety of illnesses, ranging from mild skin infections to life-threatening systemic infections
Can fungus survive heat? Yes, some fungi can survive high temperatures, but their survival depends on the type of fungus and the specific conditions of heat exposure. Some fungi can tolerate temperatures as high as 60°C, while others can only survive up to 30°C. The ability of fungi to withstand heat can vary based on factors such as the species, growth conditions, and surrounding environment. In general, high heat can damage or kill many fungi, but some heat-resistant species can persist and continue to grow in these conditions.
How does the fungus spread in The Last of Us? In the video game “The Last of Us,” the fungus that caused the outbreak of the pandemic is known as the Cordyceps fungus. It infects insects and small mammals, taking control of their bodies, then uses them to spread its spores to other animals or humans. The fungus infects the brain and alters the behavior of the host, causing it to become violent and spread the fungus further. The fungus then grows and spreads throughout the body of the infected host, eventually killing them and producing new fungal spores.
Top trending questions related to the United States debt ceiling, past week, US
What is the US debt limit? What happens when we hit the debt ceiling? When the debt ceiling is reached, the government is unable to borrow any more money and is forced to limit its spending to the amount of money it is currently bringing in through revenue. This can lead to a government shutdown, as non-essential government services and programs will cease to be funded, and government employees may be furloughed. Additionally, the government will not be able to make payments on its debt, which could lead to a default. It is considered a serious issue, and in the past, raising the debt ceiling has been a contentious political issue.
Most searched “how much does the US spend on…”, past year, US
How much does the US spend on Military?
The United States spends a significant amount on its military. According to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. spent an estimated $801 billion on national defense in fiscal year 2022, which includes all spending related to the military, including personnel, operations and maintenance, procurement, and research and development. This represents about 3.5% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).
It’s worth noting that the U.S. military budget is one of the highest in the world, and it is significantly higher than the military spending of any other country. The U.S. military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next seven highest-spending countries, which include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
It’s also worth noting that the amount of military spending can vary depending on the year and the current political climate. The budget is subject to change depending on the priorities of the government and the current events.
It’s important to note that the military budget is just a small part of the overall federal budget, which includes spending on a wide range of other programs such as education, healthcare, and social security.
How much does the US spend on Healthcare?
The United States spends a significant amount on healthcare. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the U.S. spent an estimated $4.3 trillion on healthcare in 2022, which represents about 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).
The U.S. healthcare spending is among the highest in the world, and it continues to grow each year. The high cost of healthcare in the United States can be attributed to a variety of factors, including an aging population, the high cost of prescription drugs, administrative costs and a high utilization of medical services.
It’s worth noting that the U.S. has a mixed system of healthcare, with a mix of public and private healthcare systems. The government funds programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, which provide healthcare coverage for low-income and older Americans, respectively. The majority of Americans receive their healthcare through private health insurance, which is provided by their employer or purchased individually.
It’s also worth noting that the U.S. healthcare system is complex, and the spending can vary depending on the state and the type of care. The U.S. healthcare spending is not only on health care services, but also on health care goods such as drugs, medical equipment and medical facilities.
It’s important to note that the healthcare spending is just a small part of the overall federal budget, which includes spending on a wide range of other programs such as education, military, and social security.
How much does the US spend on Education?
The United States spends a significant amount on education, but it varies depending on the level of education and the source of funding. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the U.S. spent an estimated $1.5 trillion on education in 2022.
The U.S. federal government contributes a significant amount of funding for education, primarily through programs such as Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which provide funding to support disadvantaged students and students with special needs. State and local governments also contribute funding for education, primarily through property taxes.
The spending on education also varies depending on the level of education. The U.S. spend more on higher education than on primary and secondary education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in 2020, the U.S. spent $730 billion on elementary and secondary education and $567 billion on postsecondary education.
It’s worth noting that the U.S. education spending as a percentage of GDP is lower than most other developed countries. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the US spent about 4.6% of GDP on education in 2019, which is below the OECD average of 5.2%.
It’s important to note that the education spending is just a small part of the overall federal budget, which includes spending on a wide range of other programs such as healthcare, military, and social security.
How much does the US spend on Welfare? The United States government spends a significant amount of money on welfare programs aimed at assisting low-income individuals and families. The exact amount varies from year to year and depends on various factors, such as the state of the economy, the number of people in need of assistance, and the cost of living. In recent years, the total federal spending on welfare programs has been estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
How much does the US spend on Prisons? As of 2021, the United States spends an estimated 80 billion dollars annually on its prison system. This amount covers various costs including construction and maintenance of prison facilities, staffing and employee salaries, and prisoner services such as medical care and rehabilitation programs. The cost of incarceration has risen dramatically in the US in recent decades, due to factors such as longer prison sentences, the War on Drugs, and increased spending on prison security measures.
Top Trends on January 17th, 2023
Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s IHave a Dream speech is the most searched speech of all-time in the US. The most searched MLK quote is “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Top searched “what is…” related to tennis, past day, worldwide
What is break point in tennis? A break point in tennis refers to a point in a game where the receiving player has the opportunity to win the game by breaking their opponent’s serve. In other words, it is a point at which the serving player’s serve can be “broken” and the receiver can win the game. A break point occurs when the receiver is able to get to deuce (40-40) or advantage on the server’s side of the court. If the receiver wins the next point, they will have won the game. If the server wins the next point, the game will continue. Break point can be a crucial moment in a match, as it can change the momentum of the game and put the receiver in a strong position to win the set or match.
What is a set in tennis? A set in tennis is a unit of play that consists of several games. Typically, a set is won by the first player to win at least six games and be ahead by at least two games. In Grand Slam tournaments and many professional events, a set is usually the best of three or the best of five games. The winner of the match is the player who wins the most sets.
What is a tennis Grand Slam? A tennis Grand Slam refers to the four most prestigious annual events in the sport of tennis, namely the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. Winning all four events in a single calendar year is considered a Grand Slam, and is one of the greatest achievements in tennis.
What is an ace in tennis? An ace in tennis is a serve that lands in the opponent’s court and is not touched by the opponent, resulting in an immediate point for the serving player.
What is AD in tennis? AD in tennis refers to the term “advantage.” In tennis, the score is called “40-40” when both players have won three points each. When one player wins the next point, they are said to have the “advantage.” If the player who has the advantage wins the next point, they win the game. If the player who does not have the advantage wins the next point, the score is “deuce” and play continues until one player wins two consecutive points to win the game.
Ranked search interest in women’s singles players, past month, worldwide
In the United States, the federal government offers a tax credit for the purchase of new electric vehicles (EVs). The credit amount can vary depending on the make and model of the EV, and can range from $2,500 to $7,500. The credit begins to phase out once a manufacturer has sold 200,000 qualifying vehicles.
In Canada, the government offers a federal rebate of up to $5,000 for the purchase of new electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, this rebate is non-refundable, so it can only be applied to reduce taxes payable to the government. The rebate also begins to phase out once a manufacturer has sold 2,500 units of the vehicle.
In Europe, the policies regarding EV tax credit vary from country to country. Some countries like Norway have a very generous EV purchase incentive with zero-emission vehicles being exempt from VAT, road tolls and other taxes, while other countries like France offer a bonus and malus system which rewards buyers of electric or hybrid vehicles with a discount on the purchase price while applying a surcharge on vehicles with high emissions.
It’s worth noting that these policies are subject to change depending on the government and regulations of each country. Before making a purchase, it’s always best to check the current policies and regulations in the country you’re in, to ensure you’re getting the most out of any available tax credit or rebate.
There are several reasons why your tax refund might be lower than expected in 2023. Some possible reasons include:
Your income has increased: If you earned more money in 2023, you may have moved into a higher tax bracket and paid more taxes.
Changes in deductions and credits: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 made significant changes to the tax code, including limiting certain deductions and credits, which may have affected your refund.
More taxes were withheld from your paychecks: The IRS encourages taxpayers to adjust their withholding so that they don’t get a large refund, but rather pay the right amount of taxes throughout the year, thus avoiding owing taxes or getting a refund. If you have adjusted your withholding, you may have paid more taxes throughout the year and therefore have a smaller refund.
You owe money to other government agencies: If you owe money for things like unpaid student loans or back taxes, your refund can be offset to pay those debts.
You made a mistake on your tax return: If you made a mistake on your tax return, it could result in a lower refund. Double-checking your return and seeking help from a tax professional or using tax software can help you avoid errors.
It’s important to note that receiving a smaller refund or owing taxes is not necessarily a bad thing, it means that you paid the right amount of taxes throughout the year and avoided overpaying the government.
In the United States, the traditional tax filing season usually starts on January 1st and ends on April 15th, 2023. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the deadline was extended to May 17th, 2023. So, you can file your taxes between January 1st and May 17th, 2023.
It’s important to note that the deadline to file taxes may change in the future, and it’s always best to check with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or a tax professional for the most up-to-date information.
It’s also worth noting that even though the deadline to file taxes is April 15th, 2023, you can file for an extension if you need more time. An extension allows you to file your taxes up to October 15th, 2023. But even if you file an extension, any taxes due still need to be paid by the April 15th deadline to avoid penalties and interest.
When are taxes due in 2023? April 15th, 2023 (unless you request an extension)
What is a consumption tax?
A consumption tax is a type of indirect tax that is imposed on goods and services when they are purchased by consumers. The tax is typically added to the price of the goods or services, and the consumer pays the tax when they make the purchase. Consumption taxes are also known as sales taxes, value-added taxes (VAT), or goods and services taxes (GST).
The idea behind a consumption tax is that it is paid by the end consumer, rather than by the business or producer. It is considered to be a “regressive” tax, as it takes a larger percentage of income from low-income individuals than from high-income individuals.
In the United States, consumption taxes vary from state to state, with some states having no sales tax, while others have a high sales tax rate. Additionally, some localities within states may also impose their own consumption taxes.
It’s important to note that consumption taxes are not the same as income taxes, which are taxes imposed on the income earned by individuals and businesses. Income taxes are considered to be a “progressive” tax as the tax rate increases with the income level.
Is social security taxable?
In the United States, the taxation of Social Security benefits is determined by the recipient’s income and filing status. Social Security benefits can be subject to federal income tax if a recipient’s combined income exceeds certain thresholds. The combined income is calculated by adding together the recipient’s adjusted gross income, nontaxable interest, and half of their Social Security benefits.
For the tax year 2021, if the recipient’s combined income is less than $25,000 for an individual or $32,000 for a married couple filing jointly, their Social Security benefits will not be taxed. If the combined income is between $25,000 and $34,000 for an individual or between $32,000 and $44,000 for a married couple filing jointly, up to 50% of the Social Security benefits may be subject to federal income tax. If the combined income is more than $34,000 for an individual or more than $44,000 for a married couple filing jointly, up to 85% of the Social Security benefits may be subject to federal income tax.
In Canada, the Old Age Security (OAS) pension is not subject to tax on its own, however, if you have other income and it exceeds a certain amount, you may have to repay some or all of your OAS pension.
It’s important to check with a tax professional to determine if and how much of your Social Security benefits may be subject to federal income tax, as there are different rules and regulations that apply.
How much is the child tax credit for 2023?
Top trending “what is…” related to tax, past week, US
What is a national consumption tax?
A national consumption tax is a type of indirect tax that is imposed on goods and services consumed within a country. It is also known as a value-added tax (VAT) or a goods and services tax (GST). The idea behind a national consumption tax is to tax the final consumer, rather than the producers and sellers of goods and services.
The way a national consumption tax works is that businesses must register and collect the tax from consumers on behalf of the government. The tax is typically levied at a percentage of the retail price, and is usually included in the advertised price of goods and services. Businesses can claim back the tax they have paid on their inputs (goods and services they bought to produce their own goods and services) as a credit against the tax they collect. This is known as the credit-invoice method.
National consumption taxes are widely used around the world, with many countries levying VAT or GST on a wide range of goods and services. The rate of tax varies from country to country, and can range from 5% to 25% or more.
It’s worth noting that consumption tax is not universally accepted and there are arguments for and against it. The main argument for consumption taxes is that they are considered more efficient and less distortionary than other types of taxes. On the other hand, it could disproportionately affect lower income households, as they tend to spend a larger proportion of their income on consumption.
Tesla’s tax credit refers to the federal tax credit available in the United States for the purchase of certain electric vehicles (EVs), including those made by Tesla. The credit amount can vary depending on the make and model of the EV, and can range from $2,500 to $7,500.
The credit begins to phase out once a manufacturer has sold 200,000 qualifying vehicles. For Tesla, the full $7,500 credit began to phase out on January 1, 2020, and will be gradually reduced by 50% every six months until it reaches zero in 2022.
It’s worth noting that this is a federal tax credit and it’s not a refundable credit, meaning that it can only be applied to reduce taxes payable to the government. Additionally, the credit is only available to individuals who purchase the vehicle for personal use and not for business or commercial use. It’s also important to check with a tax professional to determine if and how much of the credit you may be eligible for, as there are different rules and regulations that apply.
What is a 1098-E form?
What is a federal tax credit?
Top trending tax credit, past week, US
Electric vehicle tax credits
Premium tax credit
Child tax credit
Working families tax credit
American opportunity tax credit
Air Travel • Inflation
Top Trends
Search interest in “tornado watch” spiked in the past day +1550% in the US as severe weather warnings are issued across the country. Georgia is the state most searching for tornado watches in the US.
Searches for “bacterial meningitis” spiked +2200% in the US after it was reported that guitarist Jeff Beck passed after contracting the illness
“date night ideas” hit an all-time high worldwide this January with the US and South Africa as the top countries searching for them. Pleasant and cheap are two of the top trending topics related to “date night ideas”
“faa” was a breakout search, past week, US, after a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system outage led to a temporary stoppage of thousands of domestic flights on Wednesday morning
“Is air travel back to normal?” was the top question on Air Travel, past week, US
“Pete buttigieg,” the United States Secretary of Transportation, was a breakout search, past week, US
Search interest in Flight cancellation and delayreached a five-year high in December of 2022 after scores of holiday travelers’ plans were upended amid a winter storm, past five years, US
The United States was the top country searching for Flight cancellation and delay, followed by Canada and Jamaica, past week, worldwide
Inflation
Searches for inflation reached a global all-time high in 2022
The top country searching for Inflation worldwide is Turkey in 2023
Top trending questions on “inflation rate”, past day, US
1. What is the current inflation rate? you can find the most recent inflation rate by consulting the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Federal Reserve. They typically release updates on inflation on a regular basis.
The inflation rate can be calculated using the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by consumers for a basket of goods and services. To calculate the inflation rate, the following formula can be used:
Inflation rate = (CPI in current period – CPI in base period) / CPI in base period * 100
For example, if the CPI in the current period is 110 and the CPI in the base period is 100, the inflation rate would be (110 – 100) / 100 * 100 = 10%. This means that prices have increased by 10% over the base period.
It’s also worth noting that there’s different types of inflation measures, like the Producer Price Index (PPI) that measure the average change over time in the prices received by domestic producers for their output.
Inflation is the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising and subsequently, purchasing power is falling. It is measured as an annual percentage increase. Central banks and governments use different measures to calculate inflation, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or the Producer Price Index (PPI).
Inflation occurs when there is an increase in the money supply and a decrease in the demand for goods and services. When the supply of money increases, the value of money decreases, and prices of goods and services go up. This decrease in purchasing power causes inflation.
Inflation can have both positive and negative effects on an economy and people. Moderate inflation can be a sign of a growing and healthy economy, as it can signal increased demand for goods and services. However, high and persistent inflation can lead to economic instability and can harm the purchasing power of people, particularly those on fixed incomes.
Central banks and governments use different tools to control and stabilize inflation. These tools include setting interest rates, adjusting money supply, and implementing fiscal policies such as taxation, government spending and regulations.
It’s worth noting that, while inflation is usually measured by the increase in the general price level, there are different types of inflation such as cost-push, demand-pull and built-in inflation each with different causes and effects on the economy.
Inflation is caused by an overall increase in the level of prices in an economy. There are several factors that can contribute to inflation, including:
Demand-pull inflation: This occurs when there is an increase in demand for goods and services that outpaces the growth in supply. This can lead to higher prices as businesses try to meet the increased demand.
Cost-push inflation: This occurs when the cost of production increases, such as an increase in the cost of raw materials or wages. Businesses will pass these increased costs onto consumers in the form of higher prices.
Monetarism: This occurs when there is an increase in the money supply that outpaces the growth in the economy. This can lead to more money chasing the same amount of goods, driving up prices.
Built-in inflation: This is the increase in prices that is built into the economy due to past inflation. Businesses and workers may expect prices to rise, and therefore increase wages and prices to keep pace with inflation.
Structural inflation: This occurs when there is a mismatch between supply and demand due to structural changes in the economy. For example, a natural disaster that disrupts production or a sudden increase in the price of oil can lead to inflation.
It’s worth noting that inflation can be caused by a combination of different factors and can also vary in different countries and regions.
What does spare mean to Prince Harry? Prince Harry nods to the old adage, “an heir and spare” referring to the tradition of aristocratic families having at least two children; first “an heir” to the title and then a “spare” to bolster the family line, just in case
Trending types of loan calculators, past 7 days, US
Consolidating student loans can be a good option for some borrowers, but it may not be the best choice for everyone. Here are a few things to consider when deciding whether to consolidate your student loans:
Interest rates: If you have multiple student loans with different interest rates, consolidating them into a single loan may lower your overall interest rate. This can help you save money on interest over the life of the loan.
Repayment terms: Consolidating your student loans may also allow you to extend your repayment term, which can lower your monthly payments. However, keep in mind that this will also increase the total amount of interest you pay over the life of the loan.
Eligibility: Not all student loans are eligible for consolidation, so it’s important to check with your loan servicer to see if your loans qualify.
Flexibility: Consolidating your student loans may limit your options for loan forgiveness or income-driven repayment plans. It’s important to weigh these options and see what works best for you.
Fees: Consolidation may come with fees, it’s important to weigh the benefits of consolidation against the cost of the fees.
It’s also worth noting that consolidation may also have negative effects on your credit score, so it’s recommended to consult with a financial advisor or loan servicer before making a decision.
Shakira and Bizarrap collaborate on an explosive new song, leading their music session to become the top trending “lyrics” over the past day in the US.
Searches for “Naomi Osaka” climbed by +1,750% in the US after the tennis star announced her pregnancy.
Tatjana Patitz, a 90s supermodel who appeared in George Michael’s iconic “Freedom! ’90” music video, passed away at 56. Over the past day, her native Germany hads the highest search interest in the supermodel, followed by Austria and Luxembourg.
British rock guitarist, Jeff Beck dies at 78. Across the globe, he was searched most in his native United Kingdom, followed by the United States and Canada over the past day. In that same time frame, “blow by blow” became his top trending album and “freeway jam” his top trending song worldwide.
The Mega Millions prize money reached its second highest jackpot ever this week. Over the past day, Wisconsin became the state with the highest search interest in Mega Millions, followed by New Hampshire and Delaware.
Consumer Debt
Over the past 7 days, Americans are searching for credit card debt 1.5x more than student debt.
Global search interest in FA Cup spikes annually in January. Uganda is the country with the highest search interest since the 2022-2023 tournament began in August 2022
The Mediterranean diet is a dietary pattern that is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, and healthy fats, and it has been shown to be beneficial for people with arthritis.
Some specific foods and nutrients that may be particularly beneficial for people with arthritis include:
Fish: Fish such as salmon, tuna, and sardines are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which have anti-inflammatory properties.
Fruits and vegetables: Fruits and vegetables are rich in antioxidants, which can help to reduce inflammation. Some particularly good options include berries, tomatoes, leafy greens, and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower.
Nuts and seeds: Nuts and seeds such as almonds, walnuts, and flaxseed are a great source of healthy fats and can also provide anti-inflammatory benefits.
Olive oil: Olive oil is a staple of the Mediterranean diet, and it is a good source of monounsaturated fats which can help to reduce inflammation.
Whole grains: Whole grains such as quinoa, barley, and whole wheat bread are a great source of fiber and have anti-inflammatory properties.
Herbs and spices: Herbs and spices such as turmeric, ginger, and garlic are great sources of anti-inflammatory compounds.
Moderate amount of red meat and processed meat should be avoided as they contain high level of saturated fat.
It’s also important to note that the Mediterranean diet is not only about the foods you eat, but also about the way of eating. It encourages a way of eating that is relaxed, social, and often involves shared meals.
It’s always best to consult with a healthcare professional, a dietitian, or a nutritionist before making any significant dietary changes, especially if you have any underlying health condition or taking any medication.
Here are a few key components of the Mediterranean diet that can be beneficial for pregnant women:
Fruits and vegetables: These foods are rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that are important for both the mother and the developing baby. Eating a variety of fruits and vegetables can help ensure that pregnant women get the nutrients they need.
Whole grains: Whole grains are a good source of fiber and B vitamins, which are important for a healthy pregnancy. Whole grains also have a lower glycemic index than refined grains, which can help keep blood sugar levels steady.
Fish and seafood: Fish and seafood are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which are important for the development of the baby’s brain and eyes. Pregnant women should aim to eat at least two servings of fish per week, but should avoid certain types of fish that are high in mercury, such as swordfish and tilefish.
Healthy fats: Olive oil, avocado, and nuts are all good sources of healthy fats that can help support a healthy pregnancy.
Iron: Iron is essential for the development of the baby’s blood cells. Legumes and leafy greens are a good source of iron.
It’s worth noting that pregnant women should avoid certain foods such as raw fish, deli meats, and soft cheeses, as they may contain bacteria that can harm the developing baby. It’s always recommended to consult with a dietitian or a physician to create a personalized plan that fits your nutritional needs and health conditions.
The Mediterranean diet has been shown to be effective in reducing high cholesterol levels. This diet is characterized by a high intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and a moderate intake of fish and seafood. It also includes healthy fats, such as olive oil and avocado, and a moderate intake of red wine.
The Mediterranean diet emphasizes the consumption of monounsaturated fats, which have been shown to reduce LDL (bad) cholesterol levels and increase HDL (good) cholesterol levels. The diet is also low in saturated fats, which have been linked to increased cholesterol levels.
The Mediterranean diet also includes foods that are high in fiber, such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Fiber can help lower cholesterol levels by binding with bile acids, which are made from cholesterol, and carrying them out of the body.
Eating fish, especially fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines, is a key feature of Mediterranean diet. These fish are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown to help lower triglycerides and reduce the risk of heart disease.
Additionally, the Mediterranean diet is rich in antioxidants, which can help reduce inflammation in the body, which has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease. It’s worth noting that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, therefore, it’s recommended to consult with a dietitian or a physician to create a personalized plan that fits your nutritional needs and health conditions.
Most searched recipes related to Mediterranean diet, past month, US
Improving cardio fitness involves increasing the strength and efficiency of your heart, lungs, and blood vessels. Here are a few ways to improve cardio fitness:
Aerobic exercise: Engage in regular aerobic activities such as running, cycling, swimming, or brisk walking, as these activities will increase your heart rate and improve your lung function. Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity per week, according to the physical activity guidelines for Americans.
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): This type of training involves short, intense bursts of activity followed by a recovery period. It is known to be more effective than steady-state cardio in improving cardiovascular fitness.
Resistance Training: Resistance training helps to improve cardiovascular fitness by increasing muscle mass and improving the body’s ability to use oxygen. This type of training includes exercises such as weightlifting, calisthenics, and bodyweight exercises.
Yoga and stretching: Yoga and stretching can help to improve cardiovascular fitness by increasing flexibility, balance, and breathing.
Monitor your heart rate: Keep track of your heart rate during exercise to ensure that you’re working at the right intensity level.
Consistency: Regular exercise is key to improving cardiovascular fitness, so it’s important to make it a part of your weekly routine.
Adequate rest: Give your body enough time to recover from intense workouts to prevent overtraining and injury.
It’s important to consult with a healthcare professional or a trainer before starting any new exercise program, especially if you have any underlying health condition. They can help you to determine the best type and intensity of exercise for your fitness level and goals.
Taking body measurements is a useful tool for tracking your progress and monitoring changes in your body composition as you work towards your fitness goals. Here are a few steps to follow when taking body measurements:
Gather your tools: You will need a tape measure, a pen, and a notebook or a measuring tape app on your phone.
Measure your body in several places: Common measurement areas include the chest, waist, hips, thighs, upper arms, and calves.
Take measurements in the same place every time: It’s important to measure the same area of your body each time, so you can track changes over time.
Measure at the same time of day: Try to measure at the same time of day, as your measurements can be affected by factors such as hydration levels and digestion.
Take measurements standing: Stand up straight and breathe normally when measuring, as this will give you the most accurate measurements.
Record your measurements: Write down your measurements in a notebook or in a fitness tracking app, so you can track your progress over time.
Repeat measurements every 4-6 weeks: It’s useful to repeat measurements every 4-6 weeks to monitor any changes in your body composition.
It’s important to note that body measurements are not the only way to track your fitness progress, it’s also important to pay attention to how you feel, how your clothes fit, and how your performance improves in physical activities.
It’s always best to consult with a healthcare professional, a personal trainer, or a nutritionist before making any significant changes to your diet or exercise routine, especially if you have any underlying health condition.
Maintaining a healthy weight is important for overall health and wellness. Here are a few ways to maintain a healthy weight:
Eat a balanced diet: A healthy diet should include a variety of nutrient-dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, and healthy fats. Avoid processed foods, sugary drinks, and excessive amounts of saturated and trans fats.
Watch your portion sizes: Eating smaller portions can help you to manage your calorie intake and maintain a healthy weight.
Be active: Engage in regular physical activity, such as brisk walking, cycling, swimming, or running. The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity per week for adults.
Avoid fad diets: Crash diets or fad diets that promise rapid weight loss are often not sustainable in the long term, and can be harmful to your health.
Get enough sleep: Adequate sleep is important for weight management, as lack of sleep can lead to weight gain and obesity.
Manage stress: High levels of stress can lead to overeating and weight gain, so it’s important to find healthy ways to manage stress such as yoga, meditation, or talking to a therapist.
Keep track of your progress: Use a journal or an app to track your food intake and physical activity, it will help you to stay on track and make adjustments as needed.
It’s important to note that weight management is different for each individual and it’s not always about weight loss. It’s about reaching and maintaining a healthy weight for your body type, age, and overall health. It’s always best to consult with a healthcare professional, a dietitian, or a nutritionist before making any significant changes to your diet or exercise routine.
The federal pay raise is typically announced by the President in the budget proposal and then must be passed by Congress. The exact timing of when a federal pay raise would take effect would depend on the specifics of the proposal and the legislative process.
It’s worth noting that the federal pay raise could be different each year and also could depend on the budget availability, economic conditions, and political considerations. It’s recommended to check for updates on the official government websites or consult with the human resources department of your agency for more information.
Asking for a raise can be nerve-wracking, but it’s important to remember that you deserve to be compensated fairly for your work. Here are a few tips to help you prepare for a conversation with your manager about a raise:
Research: Look up the average salary for your position in your area and industry. This will give you a benchmark to use when discussing your salary with your manager.
Prepare a case: Make a list of your accomplishments and contributions to the company. Be specific and use data and examples to show how you have added value to the company.
Choose the right time: Timing is important when asking for a raise. Try to schedule your meeting when your manager is less busy and more likely to have time for a thoughtful conversation.
Practice: Rehearse what you want to say so you feel more confident during the meeting.
Be professional: During the meeting, be calm, polite, and professional. Avoid getting emotional or confrontational.
Be open to negotiation: Be prepared to discuss different options, such as a raise or other benefits like additional vacation days or flexible working hours.
It’s important to remember that the answer may not be yes immediately or in the amount you expect, but it is important to express your value and worth to the company. Also, it’s recommended to check your company’s policies or guidelines regarding pay raises and performance evaluations.
Most searched “how does raising minimum wage/increase in minimum wage affect…”, past week, US
How does raising minimum wage affect Small businesses?
Raising the minimum wage can have both positive and negative effects on small businesses.
On the positive side, raising the minimum wage can lead to increased consumer spending, as workers will have more money to spend on goods and services. This can lead to increased sales and revenue for small businesses. Additionally, raising the minimum wage can also lead to decreased employee turnover and recruitment costs, as workers will be more satisfied with their wages.
On the negative side, raising the minimum wage can lead to increased labor costs for small businesses. This can be a significant burden for small businesses with tight profit margins, as they may not have the financial resources to absorb the increased costs. As a result, some small businesses may be forced to reduce their workforce, reduce employee hours, or raise prices to offset the increased labor costs.
It’s also worth noting that the effects of raising the minimum wage can vary depending on the specific industry and location. For example, small businesses in high-cost areas may be more affected by a minimum wage increase than those in low-cost areas.
It’s important to note that the effects of raising the minimum wage are not clear cut and there are arguments for and against it. It’s important for policymakers to consider the potential effects on small businesses when making decisions about the minimum wage. It’s also important for small business owners to stay informed about potential changes to the minimum wage and plan accordingly.
How does raising minimum wage affect the economy?
How does raising minimum wage affect quantity demanded?
How does raising minimum wage affect cost of living?
Minimum wage laws were created to protect workers from being exploited by employers. The idea behind a minimum wage is to ensure that workers are paid a fair wage for their labor. Without a minimum wage, employers could pay workers very low wages, which would make it difficult for them to make ends meet.
The first minimum wage law was passed in New Zealand in 1894, followed by Australia in 1896. The United States passed its first federal minimum wage law, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), in 1938. The FLSA established a minimum wage of 25 cents per hour for covered workers.
The purpose of the FLSA was to reduce poverty and inequality by ensuring that workers were paid a fair wage. It aimed to achieve this by setting a minimum wage that would provide workers with enough money to meet their basic needs. Additionally, it was created to reduce competition among workers for jobs by preventing employers from undercutting each other by paying lower wages, which would benefit employees and employers.
Minimum wage laws have been updated and changed over time, reflecting the changes in the economy and the cost of living. The current federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour, but many states and municipalities have set their own higher minimum wage rates.
It’s worth noting that there’s ongoing debate on the effects of minimum wage on employment, with some arguments saying it could lead to job loss and others stating it could increase purchasing power and reduce poverty.
Commotio cordis is a type of sudden cardiac arrest that occurs as a result of a blow to the chest, typically from a blunt object such as a ball or a puck. The blow causes the heart to momentarily stop beating properly, leading to a loss of consciousness and cardiac arrest. It most commonly occurs in young athletes and it’s most common in baseball, hockey, and lacrosse.
Commotio cordis is caused by a specific type of heart rhythm disturbance called ventricular fibrillation. Ventricular fibrillation is a chaotic, ineffective contraction of the ventricles (the lower chambers of the heart) that prevents the heart from pumping blood effectively.
Commotio cordis is a very rare condition and it’s estimated that it occurs in 1 out of every 50,000 to 80,000 athletes who participate in chest-contact sports. However, when it happens, it’s often fatal if not treated immediately with CPR and defibrillation.
There are steps that can be taken to prevent commotio cordis, such as wearing chest protectors and using safer equipment. It’s also crucial for those who participate in sports to learn CPR, and for organizations to have defibrillators available at events.
It’s important to note that if a person has a blow to the chest, and they lose consciousness or show any other signs of cardiac arrest, emergency medical services should be called immediately.
Cardiac arrest is a serious medical emergency that occurs when the heart stops pumping blood effectively to the body. It is caused by an electrical malfunction in the heart, which can lead to an abnormal heart rhythm called ventricular fibrillation. When this happens, the heart is unable to pump blood effectively and the person will lose consciousness and stop breathing. If left untreated, cardiac arrest can lead to brain damage and death within minutes.
There are several different causes of cardiac arrest, including heart attack, trauma, drowning, electrocution, and drug overdose. In some cases, the person may have an underlying heart condition that increases their risk of cardiac arrest.
Cardiac arrest is different from a heart attack, which is a circulation problem caused by a blocked blood flow to the heart. A heart attack can lead to cardiac arrest but not always.
The most important treatment for cardiac arrest is immediate CPR and defibrillation to restore the normal heart rhythm. Early recognition and treatment of cardiac arrest is crucial to increase the chances of survival.
It’s important to note that if someone is suspected of having a cardiac arrest, emergency medical services should be called immediately and CPR should be started right away if the person is unresponsive and not breathing. If a defibrillator is available, it should be used as soon as possible.
Who got injured in football today? Damar Hamlin
Why was the Bills game suspended? Damar Hamlin cardiac arrest during the game
What happens when a NFL game is suspended? It gets rescheduled or cancelled
Create a flood emergency plan: Identify potential evacuation routes and shelter areas, and make sure everyone in your household knows what to do in case of a flood.
Elevate important items: elevate furniture and appliances that may be damaged by floodwater.
Seal basement walls: install a sealant or waterproofing membrane on basement walls to prevent water from entering.
Install a sump pump: if your basement is prone to flooding, a sump pump can help remove water from the area.
Keep sandbags on hand: Sandbags can be used to block water from entering your home.
Have a flood insurance: check your insurance policy to make sure you have adequate coverage for flood damage.
Be aware of flood-prone areas: know the areas in your community that are prone to flooding, and avoid these areas during heavy rainfall.
Keep an emergency kit: keep an emergency kit with essentials such as food, water, and flashlights in case you need to evacuate your home.
Keep important documents safe: Keep important documents such as ID cards, insurance papers, and emergency contact information in a safe and easily accessible place.
Keep your phone charged and have a way to charge it: Keep your phone charged, and have a way to charge it in case of power outages.
Keep a supply of rock salt, sand, or cat litter to create traction on walkways and driveways.
Insulate pipes: wrap pipes with insulation or newspapers and allow faucets to drip during freezing temperatures to prevent pipes from bursting.
Keep a supply of emergency heating sources such as firewood, portable heaters, and blankets.
Have a plan to keep warm: in case of a power outage, know where you can go to keep warm.
Keep a supply of non-perishable food and water in case you are unable to leave your home.
Make sure your car is winterized: Keep your gas tank at least half full, check your brakes, tires, battery, and windshield wipers.
Keep a winter emergency car kit, including blankets, a flashlight, and an ice scraper.
Keep a battery-powered radio on hand: Listen to weather updates and alerts.
Keep your phone charged: Keep your phone charged in case you need to call for help.
Be aware of the weather forecast: Stay informed about upcoming storms, and take necessary precautions.
How to prepare for a power outage
Create an emergency kit: Include items such as flashlights, batteries, a manual can opener, non-perishable food, and water.
Have backup power sources: Consider purchasing a generator or a portable power bank for charging devices.
Keep important documents safe: Keep important documents such as ID cards, insurance papers, and emergency contact information in a safe and easily accessible place.
Keep your fridge and freezer closed: This will help to keep food fresh for longer in case of a power outage.
Charge devices before an outage: Charge your phone, tablet, and other devices before a power outage so that you can use them if needed.
Keep extra cash on hand: In case of power outages, ATMs and credit card machines may not be able to process transactions.
Have a plan for communication: Make sure everyone in your household knows how to contact each other in case of an emergency.
Know how to manually operate essential equipment: Learn how to manually operate essential equipment such as your garage door and security system.
Familiarize yourself with utility company’s emergency plan: Contact your utility company to know their emergency plan and how they will inform you about power outages and when power will be restored.
Have a backup plan for medical needs: If you or a family member relies on powered medical equipment, make sure you have a backup plan in case of a power outage.
Stay indoors: Stay inside as much as possible to avoid the dangerous conditions outside.
Prepare food and water: Stock up on non-perishable food and water supplies in case you get stuck at home for a few days.
Dress in layers: Wear multiple layers of clothing to stay warm and remove layers as needed to prevent overheating.
Stay warm: Keep your home warm by closing windows and doors, using blankets, and taking advantage of alternative heating sources if necessary.
Avoid travel: If you must travel, do so only if absolutely necessary and take your time. Use a shovel to clear a path if necessary and make sure your car is equipped with winter safety gear.
Keep a disaster supply kit: Make sure you have a disaster supply kit with essentials like flashlights, batteries, and a battery-operated radio.
Stay informed: Stay informed about weather conditions and any changes in the storm by listening to the radio or television, or checking online weather websites.
To dry a lightning connector, you can try the following steps:
Disconnect the lightning cable from any device or power source and leave it unplugged for a few hours to allow it to air dry.
Gently shake the cable to remove any excess moisture, then use a soft cloth to wipe the connector and remove any visible water droplets.
Place the lightning connector in a warm, dry place, away from direct heat sources or damp areas. You can use a fan or a small portable heater to help speed up the drying process.
If the lightning connector still does not work after a few hours, you may need to consider using a dryer or a desiccant bag, such as silica gel, to absorb any remaining moisture.
Note: It’s important to be patient and not force the cable into a device while it’s still wet, as this could cause damage to the device or the cable.
Driving in snow can be challenging but by following these steps, you can stay safe on the road:
Slow down: Snow and ice can reduce visibility and traction, so slow down and allow extra time to reach your destination.
Accelerate and decelerate slowly: Sudden acceleration or deceleration can cause the wheels to spin and lose traction.
Use lower gears: Use lower gears to help maintain traction when driving up or down hills.
Increase following distance: Snow and ice can reduce visibility and stopping distance, so increase the distance between your vehicle and the one in front of you.
Avoid sudden movements: Sudden movements, such as sudden steering or braking, can cause the vehicle to lose traction.
Brake gently: If you have to brake, do it gently and slowly to avoid skidding. If your vehicle has anti-lock brakes, apply steady pressure.
Avoid using cruise control: Cruise control can cause the wheels to spin and reduce traction.
Watch for black ice: Black ice is a thin layer of ice that can form on roads and is difficult to see. Keep an eye out for it, especially in shaded areas or on bridges and overpasses.
Prepare your vehicle: Make sure your vehicle is equipped with snow tires or chains and that the windshield wipers and defrost system are working properly.
By following these steps and taking it slow and steady, you can stay safe while driving in snow.
How to measure humidity at home? To measure humidity at home, you can use a hygrometer, which is a device that measures relative humidity levels. Hygrometers can be found at hardware stores and online, and can be analog or digital. Digital hygrometers are generally more accurate and easier to read, but analog hygrometers are less expensive. To use a hygrometer, simply place it in a room where you want to measure the humidity, and the device will give you a reading. If you want to measure the humidity in a specific area, such as a closet or room, you may want to invest in a more advanced hygrometer with a remote sensor that you can place in the specific area you want to measure.
What is a polar vortex? A polar vortex is a large area of low pressure and cold air surrounding the Earth’s poles. These air masses can weaken and cause cold Arctic air to spill into lower latitudes, leading to frigid winter weather conditions in normally milder areas. The term “polar vortex” has become more commonly used in recent years due to an increase in instances of these events and their impacts on the mid-latitudes.
Racing in the rain can be a challenge due to reduced visibility and traction. Here are some tips for racing in wet conditions:
Slow down: Wet roads reduce traction, so it’s important to slow down to maintain control of your vehicle.
Maintain a safe distance: Keep a safe distance from the car in front of you to allow for extra stopping time.
Use brakes carefully: Avoid sudden braking or acceleration, which can cause your wheels to lock and lose traction.
Use lower gears: In wet conditions, it’s best to use lower gears when accelerating to maintain traction.
Avoid puddles: Puddles can reduce visibility and hide hazards. If you must drive through a puddle, do so slowly to minimize splashing and maintain control.
Use headlights: Turn on your headlights to improve visibility in the rain.
Stay focused: Stay focused on the road and avoid distractions, such as texting or using your phone.
By following these tips, you can increase your safety and chances of successfully racing in the rain.
Pele’s runaround move: Pele’s runaround move, also known as the “rainbow flick,” was a skillful move used by the Brazilian soccer player Pele during his career. The move involves the player lifting one leg, and using the other leg to control the ball and flick it over the opponent’s head. This move is considered to be quite difficult to execute and requires a high level of ball control and balance. Pele was known to use this move to great effect, catching many defenders off guard and leaving them behind. The move is considered to be one of Pele’s most iconic and memorable moments in the history of soccer.
Pele is the nickname of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, a Brazilian soccer player who is widely considered one of the greatest players of all time. He was given the nickname “Pele” at a young age by his schoolmates, who decided to call him after the American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison. The nickname was later shortened to “Pele,” and he became known by this name throughout his career.
Pele is considered one of the greatest soccer players of all time due to his impressive skills, speed, and goal-scoring ability. He won three World Cup titles with the Brazilian national team and scored a total of 1,281 goals in his career, a record that still stands today. Pele was also known for his sportsmanship and leadership on and off the field, and he has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades throughout his career.
Most searched Pelé goals on Youtube, all time, worldwide
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What is Problem Formulation in Machine Learning and Top 4 examples of Problem Formulation in Machine Learning?
Machine Learning (ML) is a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables computers to learn from data, without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning algorithms build models based on sample data, known as “training data”, in order to make predictions or decisions, rather than following rules written by humans. Machine learning is closely related to and often overlaps with computational statistics; a discipline that also focuses on prediction-making through the use of computers. Machine learning can be applied in a wide variety of domains, such as medical diagnosis, stock trading, robot control, manufacturing and more.
What is Problem Formulation in Machine Learning and Top 4 examples of Problem Formulation in Machine Learning?
The process of machine learning consists of several steps: first, data is collected; then, a model is selected or created; finally, the model is trained on the collected data and then applied to new data. This process is often referred to as the “machine learning pipeline”. Problem formulation is the second step in this pipeline and it consists of selecting or creating a suitable model for the task at hand and determining how to represent the collected data so that it can be used by the selected model. In other words, problem formulation is the process of taking a real-world problem and translating it into a format that can be solved by a machine learning algorithm.
2023 AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty (MLS-C01) Practice Exams
There are many different types of machine learning problems, such as classification, regression, prediction and so on. The choice of which type of problem to formulate depends on the nature of the task at hand and the type of data available. For example, if we want to build a system that can automatically detect fraudulent credit card transactions, we would formulate a classification problem. On the other hand, if our goal is to predict the sale price of houses given information about their size, location and age, we would formulate a regression problem. In general, it is best to start with a simple problem formulation and then move on to more complex ones if needed.
Some common examples of problem formulations in machine learning are: – Classification: given an input data point (e.g., an image), predict its category label (e.g., dog vs cat). – Regression: given an input data point (e.g., size and location of a house), predict a continuous output value (e.g., sale price). – Prediction: given an input sequence (e.g., a series of past stock prices), predict the next value in the sequence (e.g., future stock price). – Anomaly detection: given an input data point (e.g., transaction details), decide whether it is normal or anomalous (i.e., fraudulent). – Recommendation: given information about users (e.g., age and gender) and items (e.g., books and movies), recommend items to users (e.g., suggest books for someone who likes romance novels). – Optimization: given a set of constraints (e.g., budget) and objectives (e.g., maximize profit), find the best solution (e.g., product mix).
Problem Formulation: What this pipeline phase entails and why it’s important
The problem formulation phase of the ML Pipeline is critical, and it’s where everything begins. Typically, this phase is kicked off with a question of some kind. Examples of these kinds of questions include: Could cars really drive themselves? What additional product should we offer someone as they checkout? How much storage will clients need from a data center at a given time?
The problem formulation phase starts by seeing a problem and thinking “what question, if I could answer it, would provide the most value to my business?” If I knew the next product a customer was going to buy, is that most valuable? If I knew what was going to be popular over the holidays, is that most valuable? If I better understood who my customers are, is that most valuable?
However, some problems are not so obvious. When sales drop, new competitors emerge, or there’s a big change to a company/team/org, it can be easy to say, “I see the problem!” But sometimes the problem isn’t so clear. Consider self-driving cars. How many people think to themselves, “driving cars is a huge problem”? Probably not many. In fact, there isn’t a problem in the traditional sense of the word but there is an opportunity. Creating self-driving cars is a huge opportunity. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem or challenge connected to that opportunity. How do you design a self-driving system? What data would you look at to inform the decisions you make? Will people purchase self-driving cars?
Part of the problem formulation phase includes seeing where there are opportunities to use machine learning.
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I) Amazon recently began advertising to its customers when they visit the company website. The Director in charge of the initiative wants the advertisements to be as tailored to the customer as possible. You will have access to all the data from the retail webpage, as well as all the customer data.
ML is appropriate because of the scale, variety and speed required. There are potentially thousands of ads and millions of customers that need to be served customized ads immediately as they arrive to the site.
The problem is ads that are not useful to customers are a wasted opportunity and a nuisance to customers, yet not serving ads at all is a wasted opportunity. So how does Amazon serve the most relevant advertisements to its retail customers?
Success would be the purchase of a product that was advertised.
This is a supervised learning problem because we have a labeled data point, our success metric, which is the purchase of a product.
This data is appropriate because it is both the retail webpage data as well as the customer data.
II) You’re a Senior Business Analyst at a social media company that focuses on streaming. Streamers use a combination of hashtags and predefined categories to be discoverable by your platform’s consumers. You ran an analysis on unique streamer counts by hashtags and categories over the last month and found that out of tens of thousands of streamers, almost all use only 40 hashtags and 10 categories despite innumerable hashtags and hundreds of categories. You presume the predefined categories don’t represent all the possibilities very well, and that streamers are simply picking the closest fit. You figure there are likely many categories and groupings of streamers that are not accounted for. So you collect a dataset that consists of all streamer profile descriptions (all text), all the historical chat information for each streamer, and all their videos that have been streamed.
ML is appropriate because of the scale and variability.
The problem is the content of streamers is not being represented by the existing categories. Success would be naturally grouping the streamers into categories based on content and seeing if those align with the hashtags and categories that are being commonly used. If they do not, then the streamers are not being well represented and you can use these groupings to create new categories.
There isn’t a specific outcome variable. There’s no target or label. So this is an unsupervised problem.
The data is appropriate.
III) You’re a headphone manufacturer who sells directly to big and small electronic stores. As an attempt to increase competitive pricing, Store 1 and Store 2 decided to put together the pricing details for all headphone manufacturers and their products (about 350 products) and conduct daily releases of the data. You will have all the specs from each manufacturer and their product’s pricing. Your sales have recently been dropping so your first concern is whether there are competing products that are priced lower than your flagship product.
ML is probably not necessary for this. You can just search the dataset to see which headphones are priced lower than the flagship, then compare their features and build quality.
IV) You’re a Senior Product Manager at a leading ridesharing company. You did some market research, collected customer feedback, and discovered that both customers and drivers are not happy with an app feature. This feature allows customers to place a pin exactly where they want to be picked up. The customers say drivers rarely stop at the pin location. Drivers say customers most often put the pin in a place they can’t stop. Your company has a relationship with the most used maps app for the driver’s navigation so you leverage this existing relationship to get direct, backend access to their data. This includes latitude and longitude, visual photos of each lat/long, traffic delay details, and regulation data if available (ie- No Parking zones, 3 minute parking zones, fire hydrants, etc.).
ML is appropriate because of the scale and automation involved. It’s not feasible to drive everywhere and write down all the places that are ok for pickup. However, maybe we can predict whether a location is ok for pickup.
The problem is drivers and customers are having poor experiences connecting for pickup, which is pushing customers away from the platform.
Success would be properly identifying appropriate pickup locations so they can be integrated into the feature.
This is a supervised learning problem even though there aren’t any labels, yet. Someone will have to go through a sample of the data to label where there are ok places to park and not park, giving the algorithms some target information.
The data is appropriate once a sample of the dataset has been labeled. There may be some other data that could be included too. What about asking UPS for driver stop information? Where do they stop?
In conclusion, problem formulation is an important step in the machine learning pipeline that should not be overlooked or underestimated. It can make or break a machine learning project; therefore, it is important to take care when formulating machine learning problems.”
AWS machine Learning Specialty Exam Prep MLS-C01
Step by Step Solution to a Machine Learning Problem – Feature Engineering
Feature Engineering is the act of reshaping and curating existing data to make patters more apparent. This process makes the data easier for an ML model to understand. Using knowledge of the data, features are engineered and tuned to make ML algorithms work more efficiently.
For this problem, imagine a scenario where you are running a real estate brokerage and you want to predict the selling price of a house. Using a specific county dataset and simple information (like the location, total square footage, and number of bedrooms), let’s practice training a baseline model, conducting feature engineering, and tuning a model to make a prediction.
First, load the dataset and take a look at its basic properties.
# Load the dataset import pandas as pd import boto3
df = pd.read_csv(“xxxxx_data_2.csv”) df.head()
housing dataset example: xxxxx_data_2.csv
Output:
feature_engineering_dataset_example
This dataset has 21 columns:
id – Unique id number
date – Date of the house sale
price – Price the house sold for
bedrooms – Number of bedrooms
bathrooms – Number of bathrooms
sqft_living – Number of square feet of the living space
sqft_lot – Number of square feet of the lot
floors – Number of floors in the house
waterfront – Whether the home is on the waterfront
view – Number of lot sides with a view
condition – Condition of the house
grade – Classification by construction quality
sqft_above – Number of square feet above ground
sqft_basement – Number of square feet below ground
yr_built – Year built
yr_renovated – Year renovated
zipcode – ZIP code
lat – Latitude
long – Longitude
sqft_living15 – Number of square feet of living space in 2015 (can differ from sqft_living in the case of recent renovations)
sqrt_lot15 – Nnumber of square feet of lot space in 2015 (can differ from sqft_lot in the case of recent renovations)
This dataset is rich and provides a fantastic playground for the exploration of feature engineering. This exercise will focus on a small number of columns. If you are interested, you could return to this dataset later to practice feature engineering on the remaining columns.
A baseline model
Now, let’s train a baseline model.
People often look at square footage first when evaluating a home. We will do the same in the oflorur model and ask how well can the cost of the house be approximated based on this number alone. We will train a simple linear learner model (documentation). We will compare to this after finishing the feature engineering.
import sagemaker import numpy as np from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split import time
t1 = time.time()
# Split training, validation, and test ys = np.array(df[‘price’]).astype(“float32”) xs = np.array(df[‘sqft_living’]).astype(“float32”).reshape(-1,1)
If you examine the quality metrics, you will see that the absolute loss is about $175,000.00. This tells us that the model is able to predict within an average of $175k of the true price. For a model based upon a single variable, this is not bad. Let’s try to do some feature engineering to improve on it.
Throughout the following work, we will constantly be adding to a dataframe called encoded. You will start by populating encoded with just the square footage you used previously.
Let’s start by including some categorical variables, beginning with simple binary variables.
The dataset has the waterfront feature, which is a binary variable. We should change the encoding from 'Y' and 'N' to 1 and 0. This can be done using the map function (documentation) provided by Pandas. It expects either a function to apply to that column or a dictionary to look up the correct transformation.
Binary categorical
Let’s write code to transform the waterfront variable into binary values. The skeleton has been provided below.
You can also encode many class categorical variables. Look at column condition, which gives a score of the quality of the house. Looking into the data source shows that the condition can be thought of as an ordinal categorical variable, so it makes sense to encode it with the order.
Ordinal categorical
Using the same method as in question 1, encode the ordinal categorical variable condition into the numerical range of 1 through 5.
A slightly more complex categorical variable is ZIP code. If you have worked with geospatial data, you may know that the full ZIP code is often too fine-grained to use as a feature on its own. However, there are only 7070 unique ZIP codes in this dataset, so we may use them.
However, we do not want to use unencoded ZIP codes. There is no reason that a larger ZIP code should correspond to a higher or lower price, but it is likely that particular ZIP codes would. This is the perfect case to perform one-hot encoding. You can use the get_dummies function (documentation) from Pandas to do this.
In this way, you may freely encode whatever categorical variables you wish. Be aware that for categorical variables with many categories, something will need to be done to reduce the number of columns created.
One additional technique, which is simple but can be highly successful, involves turning the ZIP code into a single numerical column by creating a single feature that is the average price of a home in that ZIP code. This is called target encoding.
To do this, use groupby (documentation) and mean (documentation) to first group the rows of the DataFrame by ZIP code and then take the mean of each group. The resulting object can be mapped over the ZIP code column to encode the feature.
Nominal categorical II
Complete the following code snippet to provide a target encoding for the ZIP code.
means = df.groupby(‘zipcode’)[‘price’].mean() encoded[‘zip_mean’] = df[‘zipcode’].map(means)
Normally, you only either one-hot encode or target encode. For this exercise, leave both in. In practice, you should try both, see which one performs better on a validation set, and then use that method.
Scaling
Take a look at the dataset. Print a summary of the encoded dataset using describe (documentation).
encoded.describe()
Scaling – summary of the encoded dataset using describe
One column ranges from 290290 to 1354013540 (sqft_living), another column ranges from 11 to 55 (condition), 7171 columns are all either 00 or 11 (one-hot encoded ZIP code), and then the final column ranges from a few hundred thousand to a couple million (zip_mean).
In a linear model, these will not be on equal footing. The sqft_living column will be approximately 1300013000 times easier for the model to find a pattern in than the other columns. To solve this, you often want to scale features to a standardized range. In this case, you will scale sqft_living to lie within 00 and 11.
Feature scaling
Fill in the code skeleton below to scale the column of the DataFrame to be between 00 and 11.
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Google interview questions for various roles and How to Ace the Google Software Engineering Interview?
Google is one of the most sought-after employers in the world, known for their cutting-edge technology and innovative products.
If you’re lucky enough to land an interview with Google, you can expect to be asked some challenging questions. Google is known for their brainteasers and algorithmic questions, so it’s important to brush up on your coding skills before the interview. However, Google also values creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box when answering questions. product managers need to be able to think strategically about Google’s products, while software engineers will need to demonstrate their technical expertise. No matter what role you’re interviewing for, remember to stay calm and confident, and you’ll be sure to ace the Google interview.
The interview process is notoriously difficult, with contenders being put through their paces with brain-teasers, algorithm questions, and intense coding challenges. However, Google interviews aren’t just designed to trip you up – they’re also an opportunity to show off your skills and demonstrate why you’re the perfect fit for the role. If you’re hoping to secure a Google career, preparation is key. Here are some top tips for acing the Google interview, whatever position you’re applying for.
Firstly, take some time to familiarize yourself with Google’s products and services. Google is such a huge company that it can be easy to get overwhelmed, but it’s important to remember that they started out as a search engine. Having a solid understanding of how Google works will give you a good foundation to build upon during the interview process. Secondly, practice your coding skills. Google interviews are notoriously difficult, and many contenders fail at the first hurdle because they’re not prepared for the level of difficulty.
The company is known for its rigorous interview process, which often includes a mix of coding, algorithm, and behavioral questions. While Google interview questions can vary depending on the role, there are some common themes that arise. For software engineering positions, candidates can expect to be asked questions about their coding skills and experience. For product manager roles, Google interviewers often focus on behavioral questions, such as how the candidate has handled difficult decisions in the past. Quantitative compensation analyst candidates may be asked math-based questions, while AdWords Associates may be asked about Google’s advertising products and policies. Google is known for being an intense place to work, so it’s important for interviewees to go into the process prepared and ready to impress. Ultimately, nailing the Google interview isn’t just about having the right answers – it’s also about having the right attitude.
Below are some of the questions asked during Google Interview for various roles:
What do you know about Google’s product and technology?
If you are Product Manager for Google’s Adwords, how do you plan to market this?
What would you say during an AdWords or AdSense product seminar?
Who are Google’s competitors, and how does Google compete with them?
Have you ever used Google’s products? Gmail?
What’s a creative way of marketing Google’s brand name and product?
If you are the product marketing manager for Google’s Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?
How much money you think Google makes daily from Gmail ads?
Name a piece of technology you’ve read about recently. Now tell me your own creative execution for an ad for that product.
Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?
Estimate the number of students who are college seniors, attend four-year schools, and graduate with a job in the United States every year.
What is the most efficient way to sort a million integers?
How would you re-position Google’s offerings to counteract competitive threats from Microsoft?
How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)
Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.
Describe a technical problem you had and how you solved it.
How would you design a simple search engine?
Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
There’s a latency problem in South Africa. Diagnose it.
What are three long term challenges facing Google?
Name three non-Google websites that you visit often and like. What do you like about the user interface and design? Choose one of the three sites and comment on what new feature or project you would work on. How would you design it?
If there is only one elevator in the building, how would you change the design? How about if there are only two elevators in the building?
What is the difference between a mutex and a semaphore? Which one would you use to protect access to an increment operation?
A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
Explain the significance of “dead beef”.
Write a C program which measures the the speed of a context switch on a UNIX/Linux system.
Given a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 5, write a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 7.
Describe the algorithm for a depth-first graph traversal.
Design a class library for writing card games.
You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write a the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?
How are cookies passed in the HTTP protocol?
Design the SQL database tables for a car rental database.
Write a regular expression which matches a email address.
Write a function f(a, b) which takes two character string arguments and returns a string containing only the characters found in both strings in the order of a. Write a version which is order N-squared and one which is order N.
You are given a the source to a application which is crashing when run. After running it 10 times in a debugger, you find it never crashes in the same place. The application is single threaded, and uses only the C standard library. What programming errors could be causing this crash? How would you test each one?
Explain how congestion control works in the TCP protocol.
In Java, what is the difference between final, finally, and finalize?
What is multithreaded programming? What is a deadlock?
Write a function (with helper functions if needed) called to Excel that takes an excel column value (A,B,C,D…AA,AB,AC,… AAA..) and returns a corresponding integer value (A=1,B=2,… AA=26..).
You have a stream of infinite queries (ie: real time Google search queries that people are entering). Describe how you would go about finding a good estimate of 1000 samples from this never ending set of data and then write code for it.
Tree search algorithms. Write BFS and DFS code, explain run time and space requirements. Modify the code to handle trees with weighted edges and loops with BFS and DFS, make the code print out path to goal state.
You are given a list of numbers. When you reach the end of the list you will come back to the beginning of the list (a circular list). Write the most efficient algorithm to find the minimum # in this list. Find any given # in the list. The numbers in the list are always increasing but you don’t know where the circular list begins, ie: 38, 40, 55, 89, 6, 13, 20, 23, 36.
Describe the data structure that is used to manage memory. (stack)
What’s the difference between local and global variables?
If you have 1 million integers, how would you sort them efficiently? (modify a specific sorting algorithm to solve this)
In Java, what is the difference between static, final, and const. (if you don’t know Java they will ask something similar for C or C++).
Talk about your class projects or work projects (pick something easy)… then describe how you could make them more efficient (in terms of algorithms).
Suppose you have an NxN matrix of positive and negative integers. Write some code that finds the sub-matrix with the maximum sum of its elements.
Write some code to reverse a string.
Implement division (without using the divide operator, obviously).
Write some code to find all permutations of the letters in a particular string.
What method would you use to look up a word in a dictionary?
Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you fine the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
What is the C-language command for opening a connection with a foreign host over the internet?
Design and describe a system/application that will most efficiently produce a report of the top 1 million Google search requests. These are the particulars: 1) You are given 12 servers to work with. They are all dual-processor machines with 4Gb of RAM, 4x400GB hard drives and networked together.(Basically, nothing more than high-end PC’s) 2) The log data has already been cleaned for you. It consists of 100 Billion log lines, broken down into 12 320 GB files of 40-byte search terms per line. 3) You can use only custom written applications or available free open-source software.
There is an array A[N] of N numbers. You have to compose an array Output[N] such that Output[i] will be equal to multiplication of all the elements of A[N] except A[i]. For example Output[0] will be multiplication of A[1] to A[N-1] and Output[1] will be multiplication of A[0] and from A[2] to A[N-1]. Solve it without division operator and in O(n).
There is a linked list of numbers of length N. N is very large and you don’t know N. You have to write a function that will return k random numbers from the list. Numbers should be completely random. Hint: 1. Use random function rand() (returns a number between 0 and 1) and irand() (return either 0 or 1) 2. It should be done in O(n).
Find or determine non existence of a number in a sorted list of N numbers where the numbers range over M, M>> N and N large enough to span multiple disks. Algorithm to beat O(log n) bonus points for constant time algorithm.
You are given a game of Tic Tac Toe. You have to write a function in which you pass the whole game and name of a player. The function will return whether the player has won the game or not. First you to decide which data structure you will use for the game. You need to tell the algorithm first and then need to write the code. Note: Some position may be blank in the game। So your data structure should consider this condition also.
You are given an array [a1 To an] and we have to construct another array [b1 To bn] where bi = a1*a2*…*an/ai. you are allowed to use only constant space and the time complexity is O(n). No divisions are allowed.
How do you put a Binary Search Tree in an array in a efficient manner. Hint :: If the node is stored at the ith position and its children are at 2i and 2i+1(I mean level order wise)Its not the most efficient way.
How do you find out the fifth maximum element in an Binary Search Tree in efficient manner. Note: You should not use use any extra space. i.e sorting Binary Search Tree and storing the results in an array and listing out the fifth element.
Given a Data Structure having first n integers and next n chars. A = i1 i2 i3 … iN c1 c2 c3 … cN.Write an in-place algorithm to rearrange the elements of the array ass A = i1 c1 i2 c2 … in cn
Given two sequences of items, find the items whose absolute number increases or decreases the most when comparing one sequence with the other by reading the sequence only once.
Given That One of the strings is very very long , and the other one could be of various sizes. Windowing will result in O(N+M) solution but could it be better? May be NlogM or even better?
How many lines can be drawn in a 2D plane such that they are equidistant from 3 non-collinear points?
Let’s say you have to construct Google maps from scratch and guide a person standing on Gateway of India (Mumbai) to India Gate(Delhi). How do you do the same?
Given that you have one string of length N and M small strings of length L. How do you efficiently find the occurrence of each small string in the larger one?
Given a binary tree, programmatically you need to prove it is a binary search tree.
You are given a small sorted list of numbers, and a very very long sorted list of numbers – so long that it had to be put on a disk in different blocks. How would you find those short list numbers in the bigger one?
Suppose you have given N companies, and we want to eventually merge them into one big company. How many ways are theres to merge?
Given a file of 4 billion 32-bit integers, how to find one that appears at least twice?
Write a program for displaying the ten most frequent words in a file such that your program should be efficient in all complexity measures.
Design a stack. We want to push, pop, and also, retrieve the minimum element in constant time.
Given a set of coin denominators, find the minimum number of coins to give a certain amount of change.
Given an array, i) find the longest continuous increasing subsequence. ii) find the longest increasing subsequence.
Suppose we have N companies, and we want to eventually merge them into one big company. How many ways are there to merge?
Write a function to find the middle node of a single link list.
Given two binary trees, write a compare function to check if they are equal or not. Being equal means that they have the same value and same structure.
Implement put/get methods of a fixed size cache with LRU replacement algorithm.
You are given with three sorted arrays ( in ascending order), you are required to find a triplet ( one element from each array) such that distance is minimum.
Distance is defined like this : If a[i], b[j] and c[k] are three elements then distance=max(abs(a[i]-b[j]),abs(a[i]-c[k]),abs(b[j]-c[k]))” Please give a solution in O(n) time complexity
How does C++ deal with constructors and deconstructors of a class and its child class?
Write a function that flips the bits inside a byte (either in C++ or Java). Write an algorithm that take a list of n words, and an integer m, and retrieves the mth most frequent word in that list.
What’s 2 to the power of 64?
Given that you have one string of length N and M small strings of length L. How do you efficiently find the occurrence of each small string in the larger one?
How do you find out the fifth maximum element in an Binary Search Tree in efficient manner.
Suppose we have N companies, and we want to eventually merge them into one big company. How many ways are there to merge?
There is linked list of millions of node and you do not know the length of it. Write a function which will return a random number from the list.
You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write a the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?
How long it would take to sort 1 trillion numbers? Come up with a good estimate.
Order the functions in order of their asymptotic performance: 1) 2^n 2) n^100 3) n! 4) n^n
There are some data represented by(x,y,z). Now we want to find the Kth least data. We say (x1, y1, z1) > (x2, y2, z2) when value(x1, y1, z1) > value(x2, y2, z2) where value(x,y,z) = (2^x)*(3^y)*(5^z). Now we can not get it by calculating value(x,y,z) or through other indirect calculations as lg(value(x,y,z)). How to solve it?
How many degrees are there in the angle between the hour and minute hands of a clock when the time is a quarter past three?
Given an array whose elements are sorted, return the index of a the first occurrence of a specific integer. Do this in sub-linear time. I.e. do not just go through each element searching for that element.
Given two linked lists, return the intersection of the two lists: i.e. return a list containing only the elements that occur in both of the input lists.
What’s the difference between a hashtable and a hashmap?
If a person dials a sequence of numbers on the telephone, what possible words/strings can be formed from the letters associated with those numbers?
How would you reverse the image on an n by n matrix where each pixel is represented by a bit?
Create a fast cached storage mechanism that, given a limitation on the amount of cache memory, will ensure that only the least recently used items are discarded when the cache memory is reached when inserting a new item. It supports 2 functions: String get(T t) and void put(String k, T t).
Create a cost model that allows Google to make purchasing decisions on to compare the cost of purchasing more RAM memory for their servers vs. buying more disk space.
Design an algorithm to play a game of Frogger and then code the solution. The object of the game is to direct a frog to avoid cars while crossing a busy road. You may represent a road lane via an array. Generalize the solution for an N-lane road.
What sort would you use if you had a large data set on disk and a small amount of ram to work with?
What sort would you use if you required tight max time bounds and wanted highly regular performance.
How would you store 1 million phone numbers?
Design a 2D dungeon crawling game. It must allow for various items in the maze – walls, objects, and computer-controlled characters. (The focus was on the class structures, and how to optimize the experience for the user as s/he travels through the dungeon.)
What is the size of the C structure below on a 32-bit system? On a 64-bit?
struct foo {
char a;
char* b;
};
A triomino is formed by joining three unit-sized squares in an L-shape. A mutilated chessboard is made up of 64 unit-sized squares arranged in an 8-by-8 square, minus the top left square.
Design an algorithm which computes a placement of 21 triominos that covers the mutilated chessboard.2.
The mathematician G. H. Hardy was on his way to visit his collaborator S. Ramanujan who was in the hospital. Hardy remarked to Ramanujan that he traveled in a taxi cab with license plate 1729, which seemed a dull number. To this, Ramanujan replied that 1729 was a very interesting number – it was the smallest number expressible as the sum of cubes of two numbers in two different ways. Indeed, 10x10x10 + 9x9x9 = 12x12x12 + 1x1x1 = 1729.
Given an arbitrary positive integer, how would you determine if it can be expressed as a sum of two cubes?
There are fifty coins in a line—these could be pennies, nickels, dimes, or quarters. Two players, $F$ and $S$, take turns at choosing one coin each—they can only choose from the two coins at the ends of the line. The game ends when all the coins have been picked up. The player whose coins have the higher total value wins. Each player must select a coin when it is his turn, so the game ends in fifty turns.
If you want to ensure you do not lose, would you rather go first or second? Design an efficient algorithm for computing the maximum amount of money the first player can win.
You are given two sorted arrays. Design an efficient algorithm for computing the k-th smallest element in the union of the two arrays. (Keep in mind that the elements may be repeated.)
How do you merge two sorted linked lists”?
It’s literally about 10 lines of code, give or take. It’s at the heart of merge sort.
Given an array of integers which is circularly sorted, how do you find a given integer.
Write a program to find depth of binary search tree without using recursion.
Find the maximum rectangle (in terms of area) under a histogram in linear time.
Most phones now have full keyboards. Before there there three letters mapped to a number button. Describe how you would go about implementing spelling and word suggestions as people type.
Describe recursive mergesort and its runtime. Write an iterative version in C++/Java/Python.
How would you determine if someone has won a game of tic-tac-toe on a board of any size?
Given an array of numbers, replace each number with the product of all the numbers in the array except the number itself *without* using division.
Create a cache with fast look up that only stores the N most recently accessed items.
How to design a search engine? If each document contains a set of keywords, and is associated with a numeric attribute, how to build indices?
Given two files that has list of words (one per line), write a program to show the intersection.
What kind of data structure would you use to index annagrams of words? e.g. if there exists the word “top” in the database, the query for “pot” should list that.
Google Interview: Quantitative Compensation Analyst
What is the yearly standard deviation of a stock given the monthly standard deviation?
How many resumes does Google receive each year for software engineering?
Anywhere in the world, where would you open up a new Google office and how would you figure out compensation for all the employees at this new office?
What is the probability of breaking a stick into 3 pieces and forming a triangle?
You’re the captain of a pirate ship, and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?
Google Interview: AdWords Associate
How would you work with an advertiser who was not seeing the benefits of the AdWords relationship due to poor conversions?
How would you deal with an angry or frustrated advertisers on the phone?
Google is one of the most sought-after employers in the tech industry. The company is known for its rigorous interview process, which often includes a mix of coding, algorithm, and behavioural questions. While Google interview questions can vary depending on the role, there are some common themes that arise. For software engineering positions, candidates can expect to be asked questions about their coding skills and experience. For product manager roles, Google interviewers often focus on behavioral questions, such as how the candidate has handled difficult decisions in the past. Quantitative compensation analyst candidates may be asked math-based questions, while AdWords Associates may be asked about Google’s advertising products and policies. Google is known for being an intense place to work, so it’s important for interviewees to go into the process prepared and ready to impress. Ultimately, nailing the Google interview isn’t just about having the right answers – it’s also about having the right attitude.
Is “cracking the coding interview” enough to prepare you for Google onsite interview?
Simply put, no.
There’s no doubt that Cracking The Coding Interview (CTCI) is a great tool for honing your coding skills.
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Google receives about 3 million job applications every year.
But it hires less than 1% of those people.
Most of those who get the job (if they’re software engineers, at least) spent weeks or months practicing problems in CTCI and LeetCode before their interview.
But so did the people who don’t get hired.
So if a mastery of coding problems isn’t whats set the winners apart from the losers, what is?
Believe it or not, soft skills matter a lot, even as a software engineer.
Here are three soft skills Google looks for that CTCI won’t help you with.
#1 LEADERSHIP
You’d be amazed how many candidates overlook the importance of leadership as they try to get hired by Google.
They forget that recruiters are not looking for their ability to be a strong junior engineer, but their ability to develop into a strong senior engineer.
Recruiters need to know that you have the empathy to lead a team, and that you’re willing to pull up your socks when things go awry.
If you can’t show that you’re a leader in your interview, it won’t matter how good your code is—you won’t be getting hired.
#2 COMMUNICATION & TEAMWORK
Teamwork and communication are two other skill sets you won’t gain from CTCI.
And just like leadership, you need to demonstrate these skills if you expect to get an offer from Google.
Why?
Because building the world’s best technology is a team sport, and if you want to thrive on Team Google, you need to prove yourself as a team player.
Don’t overlook this.
Google and the other FAANG companies regularly pass up skilled engineers because they don’t believe they’ll be strong members of the larger team.
#3 MASTERY OVER AMBIGUITY
Google recruiters often throw highly ambiguous problems at candidates just to see how they handle them.
So if you can’t walk the recruiter through your process for solving it, they’re going to move on to someone else.
The ambiguous problems I’m talking about are not like the ones you face in CTCI. They’re much more open-ended, and there truly are no right answers.
These are the sort of questions you need a guide to help you navigate through. That’s why you need more guidance than what CTCI provides if you want to give yourself the best chance at getting an offer.
If you just want to hone your coding skills, CTCI is a good place to start.
But if you’re serious about getting a job at Google, I recommend a more comprehensive course like Tech Interview Pro, which was designed by ex-Google and ex-Facebook software engineers to help you succeed in all areas of the job hunt, from building your resume all the way to salary negotiations.
Whatever you do, don’t overlook the importance of soft skills on your journey to getting hired. They’ll be what clinches your spot.
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Tech Jobs and Career at FAANG (now MAANGM): Facebook Meta Amazon Apple Netflix Google Microsoft
The FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft) are some of the most sought-after employers in the tech industry. They offer competitive salaries and benefits, and their employees are at the forefront of innovation.
The interview process for a job at a FAANG company is notoriously difficult. Candidates must be prepared to answer tough technical questions and demonstrate their problem-solving skills. The competition is fierce, but the rewards are worth it. Employees of FAANG companies enjoy perks like free food and transportation, and they often have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects.
If you’re interested in a career in tech, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft are great places to start your search. These companies are leaders in their field, and they offer endless opportunities for career growth.
Legend – Base / Stocks (Total over 4 years) / Sign On
Google (Alphabet)
– 145/270/30 (2017, L4) – 150/400/30 (2018, L4)
*Google’s target annual bonus is 15%. Vesting is monthly and has no cliff.
Facebook ( Meta) – 115/160/100 (2017, E3)
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That’s my guess. It hasn’t changed when Google became Alphabet.
FAANG stared as FANG circa 2013. The 2nd A became customary around 2016 as it wasn’t clear whether A referred to Apple or Amazon. Originally, FANG meant “large public, fast growing tech companies”. Now in 2021, the scope of what FANG referred to just doesn’t correspond to these 5 companies.
From an investment perspective (which is the origin of FANG) Facebook stock has grown the slowest of the 5 companies over the past 5 years. And they’re all dwarfed by Tesla.
From an employment desirability perspective (which is the context where FAANG is most used today). Microsoft is very similar to the group. It wasn’t “cool” around 2013 but its stock actually did better than Facebook or Alphabet over the past five years. Other companies like Airbnb, Twitter or Salesforce offer the same value proposition to employees, that is stability and tradable equity as part of the compensation.
FAANG refers to a category more than a specific list of companies.
As a side note, I expect people to routinely call the company Facebook, just like most people still say Google when they really mean Alphabet.
The technical interviews at FAANG companies, in the grand scheme, aren’t very difficult.
People frequently fail FAANG interviews because they choke — they experience anxiety and just forget their knowledge — or they don’t know the material to begin with.
Inverting a binary tree, matching up pairs of brackets, finding the duplicate in an array of distinct integers, etc., are all weeder-questions that should be solvable in 5–10 minutes, if you’re the type to suffer from interview jitters. You should know which data structures to use, intuitively, and you should be doing prep work to cover your knowledge gaps if you don’t.
Harder questions will take longer, but ultimately, you’ll have 45 minutes or so to solve 2–3 questions.
Technical interviews at FAANG companies are only difficult if you have shaky computer science fundamentals. Luckily, the process for cracking the code interview *cough* is very well-documented, hence, you only need to follow the already established strategies. If you’re interested in maximizing income while prioritizing career growth, it behooves you to spend a month or two studying these strategies.
In FAANG interview process, when you fail at the 1st (or 2nd stage), does it mean that single interviewer on the respective stage failed you, or is it still team collaboration /hiring manager decision?
If you were dropped after doing a single interview (usually called a “screen”) it means that this interviewer gave negative feedback. I would guess at some companies this feedback is reviewed by the hiring manager, but mostly I think a recruiter will just reject if the interviewer recommends no hire. Even if a hiring manager looks at it, they would probably reject almost always if the feedback is negative. The purpose of the screen is to quickly evaluate if a person is worth interviewing in depth.
If you were rejected after a whole interview panel, probably a hiring manager or similar did look at the entire feedback, and much of the time there was a discussion where interviewers looked at the entire feedback as well and shared their thoughts. However, if the feedback was clearly negative, it could’ve been just a snap decision by a manager without much discussion. Source.
What do you do after you absolutely flop a technical interview?
Take care of yourself / don’t beat yourself up.
It happens. It happened to me, it happened to smarter people. It’s ok.
Two thoughts to help here –
Getting to the interview stage is already a huge achievement. If you are interviewed, this means that in the expert opinion of the recruiters, people that did tech screens etc. you stand a chance to pass the interview. You earned your place in the interviewee seat. This is an accomplishment you can be proud of.
The consequences are probably* negligible in the long run. There’s at least 100 very desirable tech companies to work at at a given moment. You didn’t get in 1% of them at a moment in time. Big deal. You can probably retry in a few months. It’s very likely that you get an equivalent or even better opportunity, and there’s no use imagining what would have happened if you had had that job. (*“probably” because if you’re under time pressure to get a job rapidly… it may sting differently. But hey, there’s still the first thought).
As a bonus, you’ll probably remember very well the question on which you failed. Source: Jerome Cukier
If an interviewer says “we’re still interviewing other candidates at the moment”, and then walks you out into the lobby, does that mean they want to hire you potentially after or no?
Here’s a secret. I have been a recruiter for 24 years and when they walk you out after your interview and tell you that they are still interviewing other candidates at the moment, it really means they’re still interviewing other candidates at the moment. There’s no secret language here to try to interpret. It means what it means. You will have to wait for them to tell you what next steps are for you because, again, they have other people to interview. By Leah Roth
The difficulty of the interview is going to vary more interviewer to interviewer, than company to company. Also, how difficult the questions are is not directly related to how selective the process is; the latter being heavily influenced by business factors currently affecting these companies and what are their current hiring plans.
Comments:
#1: So, how do know you this? You don’t. An affirmative answer to this question can only come from data.
#Answer #1: Fair question. I have been very involved in interviewing in a number of large tech cos. I have read, by now, thousands of interview debriefs. I have also interviewed a fair amount as a candidate, although I have not interviewed in each of the “FAANG” and I have definitely be more often on the interviewing side.
As such, I have seen for the same position, very easy questions and brutally difficult ones; I have seen very promising candidates not brought to onsite interviews because the hiring organization didn’t currently have resources to hire, but also ok-ish candidates given offers because the organization had trouble meeting their hiring targets. As a candidate I also experienced: easy interview exercises but no offer, very hard interview exercises and offer (with the caveat that I never know exactly how well I do, but I certainly can tell if a coding question or a system design question is easy or hard).
So. I am well aware that it’s still anecdotal evidence, but it’s still based on a fairly large sample of interviews and candidates.
#Reply to #1: Nope, you’re wrong. I have experience in the interview process at Amazon and Microsoft and have a different conclusion. Moreover, “experts” in lots of disparate fields make claims that are a bunch of bullcrap due to their own experiential biases. Additionally, you would need to be involved at all of the companies listed, not just some of the them, for that experience to be relevant in answering this question. We need to look at the data. If you don’t have data, I will not trust you just because of “your experience”. I don’t think it’s possible for Jerry C to have the necessary information to justify the confidence that is projected in this answer.
What you need is not so much a list of “incidents” but more generally some self-awareness on what you care about and how you’ve progressed and how you see your career.
The best source for this material is your performance reviews. Ideally you also kept some document about your career goals and/or conversation with your manager. (If you haven’t such documents, it’s never too late to start them!).
You should have 5–6 situations that are fairly recent and that you know on the back of your hand. These must include something difficult, and some of these situations must be focused on interpersonal relationships (or more generally, you should be aware of more situations that involved a difficult interpersonal relation). They may or may not have had a great outcome – it’s ok if you didn’t save the day. But you should always know the outcome both in terms of business and on your personal growth.
Once you have your set of situations and you can easily access these stories / effortlessly remember all details, you’ll find it much easier to answer any behavioural question.
In a software engineering interview, How should one answer the question, ‘Could you tell me about some of the technical challenges in your previous projects’?
To take a few steps back, there are 2 things that interviewers care about in behavioural interviews – whether the candidate has the right level, and whether they exhibit certain skillsets.
When you look at this question from the first angle, it’s important to be able to present hard problems on which it’s clear what the candidate’s personal contribution was. Typically, later projects are better for that than earlier ones.
Now, in terms of skillsets, this really depends company by company but typically, how well a candidate is able to describe a problem especially to someone with a different expertise, and whether they spontaneously go on to describe impact metrics, goes a long way.
So great answer: hard, recent, large scale project, that the candidate is able to contextualize (why was is important, why was it hard, what was at stake), where they are able to describe what they’ve done and what was the potential impact, and what were the actual consequences.
Not so great answer: a project that no one asked the candidate to do, but which they insisted on doing because they thought it was cool/interesting, on which they worked alone and which didn’t have any business impact. Source.
This question (like many other things in life) is much more complicated than it appears on the surface. That’s because it is conflating several very different issues, including:
What is retirement?
What is “early”?
At what age do most software engineers stop working in that role?
How long do employees stay on average at the FAANGs?
In the “old” days (let’s arbitrarily call that mid-20th century America), the typical worker was white, male and middle class, employed on location at a job for 40–50 hours a week. He began his working career at 18 (after high school) or 22 (after college), and worked continuously for a salary until the age of 65. At that time he retired (“stopped working”) and spent his remaining 5–10 years of life sitting at home watching tv or traveling to places that he had always wanted to visit.
That world has, to a large extent, been transmogrified over the past 50 years. People are working longer, changing employment more frequently, even changing careers and professions as technology and the economy change. The work force is increasingly diverse, and virtually all occupations are open to virtually all people. Over the past two years we have seen that an astonishing number of jobs can be done remotely, and on an asynchronous basis. And all of these changes have disproportionately affected software engineering.
So, let’s begin by laying out some facts:
When people plan to retire is a factor of their generation: Generation Y — ages 25 to 40 — plans to retire at an average age of 59. For Generation X — now 41 to 56 — the average age is 60. Baby boomers — who range from 57 to 75 — indicated they plan to work longer, with an average expected retirement age of 68.[1]
The average actual retirement age in the US is 62[2]
Most software engineers retire between the ages of 45 and 65, with less than 1% of developers working later than 65.[3]
But those numbers are misleading because many software engineers experience rapid career progression and move out of a pure development role long before they retire.
The average life expectancy in Silicon Valley is 85 years.[4]
The tenure of employment at the FAANGs is much shorter than than one might imagine. Unlike in the past, when a person might spend his or her entire career working for one or two employers, here are the average lengths of time that people work at the FAANGs: Facebook 2.5 years, Google 3.2 years, Apple 5 years.[5]
Therefore, if the question assumes that a software engineer gets hired at a FAANG company in his or her 20s, works there for 20 or 30 years as a coder, and then “retires early”, that is just not the way things work.
Much more likely is the scenario in which an engineer graduates from college at 21, gets a masters degree in computer science by 23, starts as a junior engineer at a small or large company for a few years, gets hired into a FAANG by their early 30s, spends 3–5 years coding there, is recruited to join a non-FAANG by their early 40s in a more senior role, and moves into management by their late 40s.
At that point things become a matter of personal preference: truly “retire”, start your own venture; invest in cryptocurrency; move up to senior management; begin a second career; etc.
The fact is that software engineering at a high level (such as would warrant employment at a FAANG in the first place) pays very well in relative terms, and with appropriate self-control and a moderate lifestyle would enable someone to “retire” at a relatively early age. But paradoxically, that same type of person is unlikely to do so.
Are companies like Google and Facebook heaven on earth in terms of workplaces?
No. In fact Google’s a really poor workplace by comparison with most others I’ve had in my career. Having a private office with a door you can close is a real boon to doing thoughtful, creative work, and having personal space so that you can feel psychologically safe is important too.
You don’t get any of that at Google, unless you’re a director or VP and your job function requires closed-door meetings. I have a very nice, state-of-the-art standing desk, with a state-of-the-art monitor, and the only way for me to avoid hearing my tech lead’s conversations is to put headphones on. (You can get very nice, state-of-the-art headphones, too.)
On the other hand, I also have regular access to great food, and an excellent gym, and all the La Croix water I can drink. I get to work on the most incredible technological platform on earth. And the money’s good. But heaven on earth? Nah. That’s one of the reasons the money’s good.
What is the starting salary of a software engineer at Google?
A new grad software engineer (L3) at Google makes a salary around $193,000 including stock compensation and bonus. The industry is getting a lot more competitive and top companies such as Google have to make offers with really generous stock packages. The below diagram shows a breakdown for the salary. View all the crowdsourced reports as well as other levels on Levels.fyi.
Hope that helps!
What is the best Google employee perk, and why?
Having recent left Google for a new startup I have to agree that the most-missed perk is the food. It’s not so much that it’s free — you can get lunch for about $10 per day so the cost is not a huge deal. There is simply nowhere you can go, even in a Silicon Valley city like Mountain View, that has healthy low-fat, varied choices that include features like edible fruits and vegetables. The food is even color-coded (red/yellow/green) based on how healthy it is (it always bothered me that the peanut-butter cups are red….).
Outside of Google you end up having muffins for breakfast and pizza for lunch. It tastes good but it’s not the same to your body.
But beyond just the food, the long term health impact of the set of perks at Google is huge. There is nothing better than being able to come in early, work out at the (free) gym by your office, shower (with towels provided as noted by others), then have eggs (or egg whites if you prefer) and toast (or one of a dozen other breakfasts). Source
Everyone has a study plan and list of resources they like to use. Different plans work for different people and there is no one size fits all.
This by no means is the only list of resources to join a larger technology company. But it is the list of resources I used myself to prepare for all my technology interviews.
Quick Background
I’m a current engineer at Microsoft who previously worked at Amazon for 1 year each respectively. I don’t have a master’s degree and I graduated from NYU, not an Ivy League. I’ll soon be joining Google and the following resources is how I got there.
Yes, the purchasable resources are affiliate links that help support this blog. Regardless, these are the resources I’ve used both purchasable and free.
This is the simplest book to get anyone started in studying for coding interviews.
If you’re an absolute beginner, I recommend you to start here. The questions have very details explanations that are easy to understand with basic knowledge of algorithms and data structures.
Elements of Programming Interviews (Python, Java, C++)
If you’re a little more experienced, every question in this book is at the interviewing level of all large technology companies.
If you’ve mastered the questions in this book, then you are more than ready for the average technology interview. The book is not as beginner friendly as CTCI but it does include a study plan depending on how much you need to prepare for your interviews. This is my personal favorite book I carried everywhere in university.
Blind has a list of 75 questions that is generally enough to solve most coding interviews. It’s a very curated and focused list for the most essential algorithms to leverage your time.
The playlist above is one of the clearest explanations I’ve ever seen and highly recommend if you need an explanation on any of the problems.
These problems are hard. Really hard for anyone who hasn’t practiced algorithms and is not beginner friendly. But if you are able to complete the sorting and searching section, you will be more capable than the average LeetCode user and be more than ready for your coding interview.
Consider this if you’re comfortable with LeetCode medium questions and find the questions in CTCI too easy.
This is the most common and best textbook anyone could use to learn algorithms. It’s also the textbook my university used personally to learn the core and essential algorithms to most coding problems.
The 4th edition was recently released and is still relevant to MIT students. If you need structure and a traditional classroom setting to study, follow MIT’s algorithm course here.
Graph theory does come up in interviews (and was a question I had at both Bloomberg and Google). Stay prepared and follow William Fiset’s graph theory explanation.
The diagrams are comprehensive and the step-by-step explanations are the best I’ve ever seen on the topic.
This handbook is for people who are strongly proficient with most Leetcode algorithms. It’s a free resource that strongly complements the CSES.fi curriculum.
For the most experienced algorithm enthusiasts, this book will cover every niche data structure and algorithm that could possibly be asked in any coding interview. This level of preparation is not generally needed for FAANG type companies but can show up if you’re considering hedge fund type companies.
In my opinion, you will be more than ready for any system design interview using these resources. The diagrams are clear and the explanations are as simple as possible in each book to help you learn system design concepts quickly.
I recommend the online course personally because yes the content from both books is great to own, it’s the online community discord you get access to that makes the yearly subscription worth it. The discord includes mock interview buddies, salary discussion, and over view on each system design topics to study with other users on.
The system design primer is the best free resource on all things system design. Dig deep into the Git repository and you will learn everything you need to know on system design. It’s all curated in a single repository and the clearly structured to give you a guided curriculum.
This quick overview on system design is great to review if you’re in a rush. The read typically takes users 45 minutes but you’ll be left knowing more system design than the average engineer.
Give it a read. If concepts are unclear or confusing, that might be a sign you’re not ready for interviews.
Regardless if you’re learning design patterns for the object-oriented programming interview, you will need to know design patterns as a software engineer at these large companies.
The book is the origin of the world’s most common design patterns today and showing proficiency in these for your object oriented interview is a requirement for certain large technology companies like Amazon.
The above resource is dense and written in language that’s hard to understand. While the original source material in design patterns is great, it doesn’t help much if it’s difficult to understand.
Consider Head First Design patterns to study a simplified explanation of those common design patterns. It might not be as in-depth as the original source material, but your understanding in design patterns will be more than enough to crack any object-oriented interview.
Closing Thoughts
Honestly, I did not go through all of these resources from cover to cover. If you do, I’m sure you wouldn’t need to study for another interview again. But likely we don’t have the time to do that so make sure that once you understand the core concepts in the any of the above categories that you invest your time moving on to the next.
Again, these are the resources I used and is not at all inclusive of anyone else’s study plan.
3 Years ago I applied to Google and was rejected immediately after the phone screen. Fast forward 2022 and was given another chance to re-interview. Here’s how the entire experience went.
Quick Background
I am currently a junior level software engineer at Microsoft (L60) with previous experience at Amazon (SDE I). My tenure is 1 year at Microsoft and 1 year at Amazon.
The first time I applied to Google was fall of my senior year of college at NYU. I failed the phone screen horribly and never thought I would join a company as competitive as Google. But I did not want to count myself out before even interviewing.
Recruiter Screen
I slowly built my LinkedIn to make sure recruiters would notice me whenever I wrote a LinkedIn post. With 15,000 followers at the time, it wasn’t too difficult to have one of them reach out with the chance to interview. A message came in my LinkedIn inbox and I responded promptly to schedule the initial recruiter call.
The chat was focused more on my previous experiences engineering and some of the projects I worked on. It was important to talk about what languages I was using and how much of my day was spent coding (70% of my day at Microsoft).
The recruiter was interested in having me follow through with a full-loop and asked when I would like to go through the process. It was important to me to ask what engineering level I was applying for. He shared it was L3/L4 role where the interviews would calibrate me depending on my performance. Knowing that, I mentioned I’d like to interview 1 month later and asked what the process looked like as explained to me.
Technical Phone Screen
6 Hour Virtual On-site a. 4 Technical Coding Interviews or 3 Technical Coding Interviews + 1 system design b. Behavioral “Googliness” interview
Phone Screen
Following the initial recruiter phone screen, I received an email from Google. It explained that I would be exempt from the Google Technical Phone Screen.
Why? I am personally not sure but it likely had to do with prior experience at large technology companies. I was personally surprised because to this day my first Google Phone Screen is still one of the toughest coding interviews I have ever been given.
It looked like that was as relevant as my current work experience and I didn’t have much to complain about moving quicker through the process and directly on-site.
Technical Onsite
Every coding question I had was a coding question that was either on LeetCode or could be solved with the patterns you find solving coding questions. Here’s what my experience for each of them looked like
Coding Interview #1
The interviewer looked like someone who was my age and likely joined Google directly after university. Maybe I wasn’t jealous. Maybe I was.
The question I was given was a string parsing Hash-Map question. Easily doable if you worked through a few medium questions regarding hash-maps and string parsing. But if you’re not careful, you may have fallen into a common trap.
Let me point it out for you. Abstract away the logic for tedious parsing logic by writing something like “parsingFunction()”. Otherwise 30 minutes may pass without you solving the question. I wrote a short “ToDo” mentioning I’d come back to it if the interviewer cared.
Spoiler: The interviewer didn’t care.
They lastly asked me to optimize with a heap and what the running time was. Unlike others who assert the running time, I solved for it and the interview concluded there.
Coding Interview #2
The interviewer who was more senior than the previous interviewer. I heard the coding question and thought the on-site was over.
The thing about some coding questions is whether you see the pattern for the algorithm or not. The recognizing the pattern for the algorithm can be much more difficult than actually writing the code for it. This was one of those interviews.
After hearing the questions I was thinking of ways to brute force the question or if there was a pattern I could see using smaller test cases. I wasn’t able to recognize it and eventually the interviewer told me what the pattern was.
I tried not to come off embarrassed but followed up with the algorithm to implement that pattern and the interviewer gave me the “go ahead” to code. I finished coding the pattern and answer the follow up by the interviewer on how to make my code modular to handle another requirement. This did not require implementation.
Afterwards was a discussion on time and space complexity and the interview was over.
Coding Interview #3
The interviewer was a mid-level engineer who was not as keen on chatting as much as the interviewers.
Some coding interviews are just one interview where you have to get the question correct or not. This one started off easy and iterated to be tougher.
My quick advice to anyone is to never come off arrogant for any coding question. You may know the question is easy and the interviewer likely does as well. Often times it’ll get harder and all that ego will go out the window. Go through the motions and communicate you always do for any other coding problem.
The problem given was directly on LeetCode and I felt more comfortable knowing I had solved this awhile ago before. If you’re familiar with “sliding window” then you more than likely would be able to solve it. But here’s where the challenge was.
After the warm-up question, the follow up had another requirement on top of the previous question. That follow up was more array manipulation. Finally the last iteration was shared.
I implemented the algorithm where Math.max was being called more than necessary. To me it didn’t affect the output of the algorithm and looked like it didn’t matter. But it mattered to the interviewer. I took that feedback and carefully implemented it the way the interviewer asked me to (whether it actually affected the algorithm or not).
Time and space complexity was solved and the interview was over.
Coding Interview #4
This was another interviewer who had joined Google after university and had the same work experience I did.
This prompt was not given to me and I expected I had to write down the details to the question myself. After asking some clarifying questions on what was and wasn’t in scope, I shared my algorithm.
The question was an object-oriented question to implement a graph. If you had taken any university course on graph theory, you would be more than prepared.
The interesting discussion was whether I had to implement the graph with BFS or DFS and explain the pro’s and con’s of each. Afterwards, I decided with BFS (because BFS is easier for me to implement) and the requirement followed up with taking K-most steps iterative.
I’m not sure if that’s the follow-up because I implemented it in BFS or if that was always the follow-up but I quickly adjusted the algorithm and solved for space and time complexity as always.
Googliness is just Google’s behavioral interview. Most questions were along the lines of
Tell me about yourself
What’s a project you worked on?
When was a time you implemented a change?
When was a time you dealt with a coworker who wasn’t pulling their weight?
To prepare for these, I’d recommend learning about the STAR format and outlining your work experiences if you can recall them before interviewing.
This seemed to go well but then I was given a question I didn’t expect. A product question and my thought process on how to work with teammates to answer the question.
My key point of advice: Nothing matters if the user doesn’t want it.
Emphasize how important user research is to build a product that a user will use otherwise everyone’s time could be better invested in other initiatives. Avoid jumping straight into designing the product and coordinating talks with product managers and UX designers.
Offer
2 weeks later, an informal offer was shared with me in my email.
Most of the interview didn’t not pertain to my previous experience directly. A systematic way of approaching, communicating, and implementing coding problems is enough without experience from Amazon/Microsoft.
That means you interviewed well. Someone else interviewed better for the first role, but the recruiter sees that there other roles for which you might be a better fit.
The eight interviews is a sign that someone in the process wanted you specifically for some role.
I think there may be two different things going on.
First, are you sure whether it’s a FAANG recruiter, or someone from an external sourcing firm which is retained by a FAANG company? I had this experience where someone reached out on LinkedIn and said they were recruiting for a Google role and passed along a job description. As I started asking them questions, it became clear that they just wanted me to fill out an application so that they can pass it to someone else. Now, as it happens, I am a former Google employee, so it quickly became clear that this person was not from Google at all, but just retained to source candidates. The role they wanted me to apply for was not in fact suitable, despite their claim that they reached out to me because I seemed like a good match.
If you are dealing with a case like this, probably what happens is that they source very broadly, basically spamming people, on the chance that some of the people they identify will in fact be a good fit. So they would solicit a resume, pass it to someone who is actually competent to judge, and that person would reject. And the sourcing firm will often ghost you at this point.
If you are dealing with an actual internal recruiter, I think it can be a similar situation. A recruiter often doesn’t really know if you are a fit or not, and it will often be some technical person who decides. That person may spend 30 seconds on your resume and say “no”. And positions get filled too, which would cause everyone in the pipeline to become irrelevant.
In such cases there is no advantage for the recruiter to further interact with you. Now, every place I worked with, I am pretty sure, had a policy that if a recruiter interacted with the candidate at all, they were supposed to formally reject them (via email or phone). But I imagine there’s very little incentive for a recruiter to do it, so they often don’t. And as a candidate, you don’t really have any way to complain about it to the company, unless you have a friend or colleague on the inside. If you do, I suggest you ask them, and it may do some good, if not to you (you are rejected either way), at least to the next applicant.
It’s not actually a line of code, so to speak, but lines of code.
I work in Salesforce, and for those who are not familiar with its cloud architecture, a component from QA could be moved to production only if the overall test coverage of the production is 75% or more. Meaning, if the total number of lines of code across all components, including the newly introduced ones, is 10000, enough test classes must be written with appropriate test scenarios so as to cover at least 7500 lines of the lump. This rule is enforced by Salesforce itself, so there’s no going around it. Asserts, on the other hand, could be done without.
If the movement of your components causes a shift in balance in production and tips its overall coverage to below 75%, you are supposed to work on the new components and raise their coverage before deployment. A nightmare of sorts, because there is a good chance your code is all clean and the issue occurs only because of a history of dirty code that had already gone in over years to drag the overall coverage to its teetering edges.
Someone in my previous company found out a sneaky way to smuggle in some code of his (or hers) without having to worry about this problem.
So this is simple math, right? If you have got 5000 lines of code, 3750 must be covered. But what if I have managed to cover only 2500 (50%) and my deadline is dangerously close?
Simple. I add 5000 lines of unnecessary code that I can surely cover by just one function call, so that the overall line number now is 10000 and covered lines are 7500, making my coverage percentage a sweet 75.
For this purpose they introduced a few full classes with a lone method in each of them. The method starts with,
Integer i = 0;
and continues with a repetition of the following line thousands of times.
i++;
And they had the audacity to copy and paste this repetitive ‘code’ throughout a bulky method and across classes in such a reckless manner that you could see a misplaced tab in first line replicated exactly in every 100th line or so.
Now all that is left for you to do is call this method in a test class, and you can cover scores of lines without breaking a sweat. All the code that actually matters may lie untested in automated coverage check, glaring red if one should care to take a look at, but you have effectively hoodwinked Salesforce deployment mechanism.
And the aftermath is even crazier. Seeing the way hoards of components could be moved in without having to embark on the tedious process of writing test classes, this technique acquired a status equivalent to ‘Salesforce best practices’ in our practice. In almost all the main orgs, if you search for it, you can find a class with streams of ‘i++;’ flowing along the screen for as far as you have the patience to scroll down.
Well, these cloaked dastards remained undetected for years before some of the untested scenarios started reeking. More sensible developers fished out the ‘i++;’ classes, raised the alarm and got down to clean up the mess. Just removing those classes drove the overall production coverage to abysmal low, preventing any form of interaction with production. What can I say, that kept many of us busy for at least a month.
I wouldn’t call the ‘developers’ that put this code in dumb. I would rather go for ‘wicked’. The higher heads and testers who didn’t care to look while this passed under their noses do qualify as dumb.
And the code… Man, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
If you are in the pipeline and you have interviews scheduled, then your recruiter will know exactly what loop will be set up for you and what kind of questions you may have. Recruiters try to get their candidates all the information they need to approach the interviews at the top of their potential, so ask the everything you need to know.
The actual answer depends on the candidate level and profile, the composition of the interviews is pretty much bespoke.
Dev: Alright, let the competition begin! Startup A: We will give you 50% of the revenue! Startup B: To hell with it, we will give you 100%! Startup A: Eh… we will give you 150%!
TL;DR: Nearly impossible. If you are a Google-sized company, of course. Totally impossible in other cases.
I run an outsourcing company. Our statistics so far:
500 CVs viewed per month
50 interview invitations sent per month
10 interviews conducted per month
1 job offer made (and usually refused) per month
And here we are looking for a mid-level developers in Russia.
Initially we wanted to hire some top-notch engineers and were ready to pay “any sum of money that would fit on the check”. We sent many invitations. Best people laughed at us and didn’t bother. Those who agreed – knew nothing. After that we had to shift our expectations greatly.
Still, we manage to find good developers from time to time. None of them can be considered super-expert, but as a team they cooperate extremely effectively, get the job done and all of them have that engineering spirit and innate curiosity that causes them to improve.
It takes constant human effort to keep sites like Google and Gmail online. Right now a Google engineer is fixing something that no one will ever know was broken. Some server somewhere is running out of memory, a fiber link has gone down, or a new release has a problem and needs to be rolled back. There are careful procedures, early warnings, and multiple layers of redundancy to ensure that problems never become visible to end users, but.
Sometimes problems do become visible but not in a way that an individual user can attribute to the site. A request might not get a prompt response, or any at all, but the user will probably blame the internet or their computer, not the site. Google itself is very rarely glitchy, but services like image search do sometimes have user visible problems.
And then of course, very rarely, a giant outage brings down something giant like YouTube or Google Cloud. But if it weren’t for an army of very smart, very diligent people, outages would happen much more often.
It’s what they don’t understand. 10x software engineers don’t really understand their job description.
They tend to think all these other things are their responsibility. And they don’t necessarily know why they’re doing all these other things. They just sense that it’s the right thing to do. If they spot something is wrong, they will just fix it. Sometimes it even seems like they’re not in control of what they do. It’s like a conscientiousness overdose.
10x engineers are often all over the code base. It is like they had no idea they were just part of one eng team.
I don’t think the premise behind the question is entirely true. These companies rely completely on programming problems with junior candidates that are not expected to have significant experience . Senior candidates do, in fact, get assessed based on their experience, although it might not always feel like it.
Let me illustrate this with an interview process I went through when interviewing for one of the aforementioned companies (AFAIK it’s typical for all the above). After the phone screen, there was a phone site interview with 5 consecutive interviews – 2 whiteboard coding + 2 whiteboard architecture problems + 1 behaviour interview. On the surface, it looks like experience doesn’t play a part, but, SURPRISE, experience and past projects play part in 3 interviews out of 5. A large part of the behavioural interview was actually discussing past projects and various decisions. As for the architecture problems – it’s true that the problem discussed is a new one, but those are essentially open ended questions, and the candidates experience (or lack thereof) clearly shines through. Unlike the coding exercises, these questions are almost impossible to solve without tackling something similar in the past.
Now, here a few reasons to why the emphasis is still on solving new problems and not diving into the candidates home territory, in no particular order:
Companies do not want to pass over strong candidates that just happen to be working on some boring stuff.
Most times companies do not want to clone a system that the candidate has worked on, so the ability to learn from experience, and apply it to new problems is much more valuable.
When the interviewer asks different candidates to design the same system, they can easily compare different candidates against one another. The interviewer is also guaranteed to have a deep understating of the problem they want the candidate to solve.
People can exaggerate (if not outright lie) their role in working on a particular project. This might be hard to catch-on in one hour, so it’s to avoid in the first place.
(This one is a minor concern, but still) Large companies hire by committee, where interviewers are gathered from the whole company. The fact that they shouldn’t discuss previous projects, removes the need to coordinate on questions, by preventing a situation where two interviewers accidentally end up talking about the same system, and essentially doing the interview twice.
Originally Answered: What can I, currently 17 years old, do to become an engineer/entrepreneur like Elon Musk?
This is a quick recap of my earlier response to a similar question on Quora:
I would recommend that you take a close look at the larger scheme of things in your life, by spending some time and effort to design your life blueprint, using Elon Musk as your inspiration and/or visual model.
By the way, here’s my quick snapshot of his beliefs and values:
1) Focus on something that has high value to someone else;
2) Go back to first principles, so as to understand things more deeply and widely, especially their implications;
3) Be very rigourous in your own self analysis; constantly question yourself, especially on the practicality of the idea(s) you have;
4) Be extremely tenacious in your pursuits;
5) Put in 100 hours or more every week, as sweat equity of intense efforts and focused execution count like hell;
6) Constantly think about how you could be doing better, faster, cheaper and smarter;
7) Relentlessly and ruthlessly think about how to make a better world;
Again, here’s my quick snapshot of his unique traits and characteristics:
ix) spiritual development (including contributions to society, volunteering, etc.);
2) Translate all your long-range goals and objectives in (1) into specific, prioritised and executable tasks that you need to accomplish daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and even annually;
3) With the end in mind as formulated in (1) and (2), work out your start-point, endpoint and the developmental path of transition points in between;
4) Pinpoint specific tasks that you need to accomplish at each transition point till the endpoint;
5) Establish metrics to measure your progress, or milestone accomplishments;
6) Assign and allocate personal accountability, as some tasks may need to be shared, e.g. with team members, if any;
7) Identify and marshal resources that are required to get all the work done;
[I like to call them the 7 M’s: Money; Methods; Men; Machines; Materials; Metrics; and Mojo!]
8) Schedule a timetable for completion of each predefined task;
9) Highlight potential problems or challenges that may crop up along the Highway of Life, as you traverse on it;
10) Brainstorm a slew of possible strategies to deal with (9);
This is your contingency plan.
11) Institute some form of system, like a visual Pert Chart, to track, control and monitor your forward trajectory, as laid out in your systematic game plan, in conjunction with all the critical elements of (4) to (10);
12) Follow-up massively and follow-through consistently your systematic game plan;
13) Put in your sweat equity of intense effort and focused execution;
14) Stay focused on your strategic objectives, but remain flexible in your tactical execution;
You aren’t so stressed and nervous when you are practicing LeetCode, because your career doesn’t depend on how well you do while solving LeetCode.
When solving LeetCode, you aren’t expected to talk to the interviewer to get clarifications on the problem statement or input format. You aren’t expected to get hints and guidance from the interviewer, and to be able to pick them up. You aren’t expected to be able to communicate with other human beings in general, and to be able to talk about technical details of your solution in particular. You aren’t expected to be able to prove and explain your idea in clear, structured way. You aren’t expected to know how to test your solution, how to scale it, or how to adjust it to some unexpected additional constraints or changes. You may not be able to simply get constraints on input size and use them to figure out what is the complexity of expected solution. You have limited amount of time, so if you slowly got through most of the LeetCode, you may still struggle to get stuff done in 45 minutes. And many more… For all these things, you don’t need them to solve LeetCode, so you usually don’t practice them by solving LeetCode; you may not even know that you need to improve something there.
To sum it up: two main reasons are:
Higher stakes.
Lack of skills that are required at typical Google/Facebook interview, but not covered by solving LeetCode problems on your own.
You should also keep in mind that LeetCode isn’t the list of problems being asked at Google or Facebook interviews. If anything, it is more of a list of problems that you aren’t going to be asked, because companies ban leaked questions 🙂 You may get a question that is surprisingly different from what you did at LeetCode.
Originally Answered: I failed all technical interviews at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple. Should I give up the big companies and try some small startups?
Wanted to go Anonymous for obvious reasons.
Reality is stranger than Fiction.
In 2010: After graduation, I was interviewed by one of the companies mentioned above for an entry level Software Engineering Role. During the interview, the person tells me: ‘You can never be a Software Engineer’. Seriously? Of-course I didn’t get hired.
In 2013: I interviewed again with the same company but for a different department and got hired.
Fast Forward to 2016 Dec: I received 2 promotions since 2013 and now I am above the grade level of the guy who interviewed me. I remember the date, Dec 14 2016, I went to his desk and asked him to go out for a coffee. Initially he didn’t recognize me but later he did and we went out for a coffee. Needless to say, he was apologetic for his behavior.
For me, it felt REALLY GOOD. Its a story I’ll tell my Grandkids! 🙂
Big tech interviews at FAANG companies are intended to determine – as much as possible – whether you’ve got the knowledge and attributes to be a successful employee. A big part of that for software developers is familiarity with a good set of data structures and algorithms. Interview loops vary, but a good working knowledge of common algorithms will almost always come in handy for both interviews and the job.
Algorithm-related to questions I was asked in my first five years, or that I ask people with less than 5 years: sorting, searching, applying hashes correctly, mapping, medians and averages, trees, linked lists, traveling salesman (I was asked this a couple times, never asked it), and many more.
I never recommend an exhaustive months-long review before an interview, but it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re current on your basics: hash tables and sets, string operations, working with arrays and vectors and lists, binary trees, and linked lists.
Compared to other modern languages, python has two features that make it attractive, and then also make learning a second language difficult if you started with python. The first is that, despite some minor steps to allow annotation, python is loosely and dynamically typed. The second is that python provides a lot of syntactic sugar; this is shorthand, like a map function, where you can apply a function to each element in a data structure.
Do these features make it harder to switch to another language that is strongly and statically typed? For some people, yes, and for others, no.
Some programmers are naturally curious what’s happening under the hood. How are data being represented and manipulated? Why does an operation produce one type of result in one situation, and another type of result in another situation? If you are the kind of person who asks these questions, you are more likely to have an easier time transitioning. If you are a person who finds these questions uninteresting or even distasteful, transitioning to another language can be very painful.
I have excellent skills and experience on my resume, which makes it stand out.
Seriously, there is no magical spell that will make a crappy resume attractive to recruiters. Most people give up believing in magic after they are 5 or 6 years old. A software engineer who believes in magic is not a good candidate for hire.
All those complaints you have about their products? The people working there complain about the same exact things. Microsoft employees complain about how slow Outlook is. Google employees complain about everything changing all the time. Salesforce employees complain about how hard our products are to use.
So why don’t we do something about it? There are a few possible answers:
We are actively doing something about it right now and it will be fixed soon.
The problem is technically difficult to fix. For example, it’s currently beyond the state of the art to change the wake word (“Alexa”/”OK Google”) to a user-selected word. A variation of this is the problem that’s more expensive to fix than the amount of annoyance saved.
The team responsible for that functionality has problems. Maybe they have a bad manager or have been reorged a lot, and as a result they haven’t been doing a good job. Even once the problem is solved, it can take a long time to catch up.
The problem is related to making money. For example, Microsoft used to have a million different versions of Office, each including different programs and license restrictions. It was super confusing. But the bean counters knew how much extra money the company made from these bundles, compared to a simpler scheme, and it was a lot. So the confusion stayed.
The problem is cultural. For example, Google historically made its reputation by offering new features constantly. Everything about the culture was geared towards change and innovation. When they started making enterprise products, that cultural became baggage.
But none of that keeps the employees from complaining.
That’s perhaps the first stage of learning, recitation.
Using the four-stage model of learning that goes
Unconscious Incompetence
Conscious Incompetence
Conscious Competence
Unconscious Competence
that’s maybe a 2 to 2.5 there. You know you haven’t really understood why you are doing things that way and without detailed step-by-step, you don’t yet know how you would design those solutions.
You need to step back a bit, by reviewing some working solutions and then using those as examples of fundamentals. That might mean observing that there is a for() loop, for example – why? What is it there for? How does it work? What would happen if you changed it? If you wanted to use a for loop to write out “hello!” 8 times, how would you code that?
As you build up the knowledge of these fundamental steps, you’ll be able to see why they were strung together the way they were.
Next, practice solving smaller challenges. Use each of these tiny steps to create a solution – one where you understand why you chose the pieces you chose, what part of the problem it solves and how.
Early 2020 has been a very rough period for many companies who laid off tons of good people, many of which have bounced to a company who was not a good fit and eventually went to a third one. Forced remote work was also difficult for many folks. So in the current context, having changed 3 jobs in the last 4 years is really a non-event.
Now more generally, would my hiring recommendation be influenced by a candidate having changed jobs several times in a short period of time?
The assumption here is that if a candidate has switched jobs 3 times in 4 years, there must be something wrong.
I think this is a very dangerous assumption. There are lots of things that cause people to change jobs, sometimes choice, sometimes circumstances, and they don’t necessarily indicate anything wrong in the candidate. However, what could be wrong in a candidate can be assessed in the interview, such as:
is the candidate respectful? Is the candidate able to disagree consrtuctively?
does the candidate collaborate?
Does the candidate naturally support others?
Has the candidate experience navigating difficult human situations?
etc, etc.
There are a lot of signals we can detect in the interview and we can act upon them. Everything that comes outside of the interview / outside of reference check is just bias and should be ignored.
My IQ was around 145 the last time I checked (I’m 19).
I feel lots of gratitude for my ability to deeply understand and comprehend ideas and concepts, but it has definitely had its “downsides” throughout my life. I tend to think very deeply about things that I find interesting and this overwhelming desire to understand the world has led me to some dark places. When I was around 9 or 10, I discovered the feeling of existential panic. I had watched an astronomy documentary with my father (who is a geoscience professor) and was completely overwhelmed with the fact that I was living on an unprotected orb, orbiting around a star at speeds far faster than I could even comprehend. I don’t think anyone in my family expected me to really grasp what the documentary was saying so they were a bit alarmed when I spent that whole night and most of the next week panicking and hyperventilating in my bedroom.
I lost my mom to suicide when I was 11 which sent me into a deep depression for several years. I found myself thinking a lot about death and the meaning of human existence in my earlier teenage years. I was really unmotivated to do school work all throughout high school because I found no meaning in it. I didn’t understand why I was alive, or what being alive meant, or if there even was any true meaning to life. I constantly struggled to see how any of it truly mattered in the long run. What was the point of going to the grocery store or hanging out with my friends or getting a drivers license? I was an overdeveloped primate forced to live in and contribute to a social group that I didn’t ask to be in. I was living in a strange universe that made no sense and I was being expected to sit at a desk for 8 hours every day? Surrounded by people who didn’t care about anything except clothing and football games? No way man, count me out. I spent a lot of nights just sitting in my bedroom wondering if anything I did really mattered. Death is inevitable and the whole universe will one day end, what’s the point. I frequently wondered if non-existence was inherently better than existence because of all of the suffering that goes hand in hand with being a conscious being. I didn’t understand how anyone could enjoy playing along in this complex game if they knew they were all going to die eventually.
Heavy stuff, yeah.
When I was 18 I suddenly experienced what some people label as an “ego death” or a “spiritual awakening” in which it suddenly occurred to me that the inevitably of death doesn’t mean that life itself is inherently meaningless. I realized that all of my actions affect the universe and I have the ability to set off chain reactions that will continue to alter the world long after I’m gone. I also realized that even if life is inherently meaningless, then that is all the more reason to enjoy being alive and to experience the beauty and wonder of the world while I’m still around. After that day I began meditating daily to achieve a deeper awareness of myself and try to find inner peace. I began living for the experience of being alive and nothing else. All of this has brought me great peace and has allowed me to enjoy learning again. For so long learning was terrifying to me because it meant that I was going understand new information that could potentially terrify me. Information that I could not unlearn. I have become a very emotionally sensitive person after the death of my mother, so I simply could not handle the weight of learning about existential concepts for a while. Now that I’ve been able to find a state of peace within myself and radically accept the fact that I will die one day (and that I do not know what occurs after death) I have begun to enjoy learning again! I read a lot of nonfiction and fiction alike. I enjoy traveling and seeing the world from as many different perspectives as possible. Talking to new people and attempting to see my world through their eyes is very enjoyable for me. Picking up new skills is generally very easy for me and I spend a lot of my free time pondering philosophical issues, just because it’s fun for me. I’m not a very social person, I like having a few close friends, but I mostly enjoy being alone.
So all in all, I think having an IQ of 140+ is a very turbulent experience that can be very beautiful! When you are able to truly understand deep concepts, it can seriously freak you out, especially when you’re searching for meaning and answers to philosophical problems. If I hadn’t embraced a way of life that revolves around radically acceptance, I don’t think I would have the guts to look as deeply into some things as I do. However, since I do have that safety cushion, I’m able to shape my perception of the world with the knowledge that I learn. This allows me to see incredible beauty in our world and not take things too personally. When I have a rough day, all I need to do is sit on my roof for half an hour and look at the stars. It reminds me that I am a very small animal in a very big place that I know very little about. It really puts all of my silly human problems in perspective.
If you can explain to me how “no-code is the future”, maybe there’s a useful response to this.
As far as I can tell, “no-code” means that somebody already coded a generic solution and the “no-code” part is just adapting the generic solution for a specific problem.
Somebody had to code the generic solution.
As to the second part, “is a CS major even worth it?” I’ve had a 30+ year career in software engineering, and I didn’t major in CS. That hasn’t kept me from learning CS concepts, it hasn’t kept me from delivering good software, and it hasn’t stopped me from getting software jobs.
Is a CS major even worth it? Only the student knows the answer to that.
People have written no-English versions of many programming languages – but they aren’t used as much as you’d think because it’s just not that useful.
Consider the C language – there are no such English words as “int”, “bool”, ”enum”, “struct”, “typedef”, “extern”, or “const”. The words “auto”, “float” and “char” are English words – but with completely different meanings to how they are used in C.
This is the complete list of C “reserved words” – things you’d have to essentially memorize if you’re a non-English speaker…
…but very few of those words are used in their usual English meanings…and you have to just know what things like “union” mean – even if you’re a native english speaker.
But if you really think there is an advantage to this being your native language then:
#define changer switch
#define compteur register
#define raccord union
…and so on – and now all of your reserved words are in French.
I don’t think it’s going to help much.
IT”S ABOUT LIBRARIES AND DOCUMENTATION:
The problem isn’t something like the C language – we could easily provide translations for the 30 or so reserved words in 50 languages and have a #pragma or a command to the compiler to tell it which language to use.
No problem – easy stuff.
However, libraries are a much bigger problem.
Consider OpenGL – it has 250 named function, and hundreds of #defined tokens.
glBindVertexArray would be glLierTableauDeSommets or something. Making versions of OpenGL for 50 languages would be a hell of a lot more painful.
Then, someone has to write documentation for all of that in all of those languages.
But a program written and compiled against French OpenGL wouldn’t link to a library written in English – which would be a total nightmare.
Worse still, I’ve worked on teams where there were a dozen US programmers, two dozen Russians and a half dozen Ukrainians – spread over two continents – all using their own languages ON THE SAME PIECE OF SOFTWARE.
Without some kind of control – we’d have a random mix of variable and function names in the three languages.
So the rule was WE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH.
But that didn’t stop people from writing comments and documentation in Russian or Ukranian.
SO WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
I don’t think there actually is a good solution for this…picking one human language for programmers to converse in seems to be the best solution – and the one we have.
There are 1.3 billion English speakers, 1.1 billion Mandarin speakers, 600 million Hindi speakers, 450 Spanish speakers…and no other language gets over half of that.
So if you have to pick a single language to standardize on – it’s going to be English.
Those who argue that Mandarin should be the choice need to understand that typing Mandarin on any reasonable kind of keyboard was essentially impossible until 1976 (!!) by which time using English-based programming languages was standard. Too late!
SO – ENGLISH IT IS…KINDA.
Even though we seem to have settled on English the problems are not yet over.
British English or US English – or some other dialect?
As a graphics engineer, it took me the best part of a decade to break the habit of spelling “colour” rather than “color” – and although the programming languages out there don’t use that particular word – the OpenGL and Direct3D libraries do – and they use the US English spelling rather than the one that people from England use in “English”.
ARE PROGRAMMERS UNIQUE IN THIS?
No – we have people like airline pilots, ships’ captains.
ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization), require all pilots to have attained ICAO “Level 4” English ability. In effect, this means that all pilots that fly international routes must speak, read, write, and understand English fluently.
However, that’s not what happened for ships. In 1983 a group of linguists and shipping experts created “Seaspeak”. Most words are still in English – but the grammar is entirely synthetic. In 1988, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) made Seaspeak the official language of the seas.
Here’s the thing. The compensation will never be comparable.
When you join a big tech, public company, all of your compensation is public. Also it’s relatively easy to get a fair estimate of what comp looks like a few years down the road.
When you join a private company, the comp is a bet on a successful exit.
In 2015, Zenefits was a super hot company. Zoom had been around for.4 years and was very confidential.
In a now infamous Quora question[1] a user asked wether they should take an offer at Zenefits or Uber. As a result, The Zenefits CEO rescinded their offer. But most people would have chosen an offer at Zenefits or Uber, whose IPO was the most anticipated back then, over one at Zoom.
And yet Zenefits failed spectacularly, Uber’s IPO was lackluster, while Zoom went beyond all expectations.
So this is mostly about to risk aversion. Going to a large co means a “golden resume” that will always get you interviews, so it has a lot of long term value.
Working in a large company has other benefits. Processes are usually much better and there’s a lot to learn. This is also the opportunity to work on some problems at a huge scale. No one has billions of users outside of Google, Meta, Apple or Microsoft.
But working in a small private company whose valuation explodes is the only way for a software engineer to become very wealthy. The thing is though that it’s impossible for an aspiring employee to tell which company is going to experience that growth versus fail.
The pro’s and con’s really depend on the specific situation.
(1) When quitting for a new position…
Pros:
Better pay & benefits
More promotion opportunities
New location
New challenges (old job may have been boring)
New job aligned to your interests.
Cons:
New job/company was seriously misrepresented
“New boss same as the old boss” (no company is perfect!)
You might have wanted a new challenge, but you are now over your head.
Note: if you have a job and are not desperate, please do your homework and remember you are also interviewing them! You want a better job in most cases (unless that moving thing is going on).
(2) When quitting over a conflict…
Pros:
Can sleep at night (providing it was a ethical issue and you were in the right)
You showed them who is the boss!
Plus, you wont be on the local news if they get sued, or the IRS does a audit.
Again, if it was a toxic environment that you get to live as opposed to a stroke on the job! No job is worth it that is impacting your health, including mental health.
Cons:
No unemployment in most states if you just up and quit.
Job search with no income puts a lot of pressure at some point to take any job
the good news though, is you can continue looking while earning a paycheck (and hopefully still growing skills & experience)
The reason so many people are quitting now…
Note there is a third category, when you quit due to a lifestyle change. In this case, we are looking a women quitting to be a full-time mother, or someone going back to school. A spouse getting promoted but with a move might also place the other mate in this position…
Pro:
You get to live the life you want.
You are preparing for a better career
Con:
Loss of income
Reduced social interaction (for the full-time mom)
Note here that most couples that decide to do the stay at home mom generally plan ahead so one income will cover their expenses.
Second, I also don’t consider serious health issues when you leave the work force in general to fall under the scope of this discussion.
Originally Answered: Is practicing 500 programming questions on LeetCode, HackerEarth, etc enough to prepare for Google interview?
If you have 6 months to prepare for the interview I would definitely suggest the following things assuming that you have a formal CS degree and/or you have software development experience in some company:
Step 1 (Books/Courses for good understanding)
Go through a good data structure or algorithms book and revise all the topics like hash tables, arrays and strings, trees, graphs, tries, bit hacks, stacks, queues, sorting, recursion, and dynamic programming. Some good books according to me are:
The Stanford Coursera algorithms courses are also very good and you can look at them if you have time. It’s a bit more theoretical though.
Step 2 (Programming practice for algorithms and data structures)
Once you are done with Step 1 you need a lot of practice. It need not be a set number of problems like 500 or 1000. The best way to practice problems is to mimic an interview setting and time yourself for half an hour and solve a problem without any distraction. The steps here are to read a problem, think of a brute force solution that works very quickly, and then think of an optimized version that works and then write clean working code and come up with test cases within half an hour. Most of the top companies ask you 1 or 2 medium problems or 1 hard problem in 45 mts to 1 hour. Once you are done solving the problem you can compare your solution with the actual solution and see if there is scope to improve your solution or learn from the actual solution.
If you do the math it takes half an hour to solve a problem and at least 15 mts to look and compare with the correct solution. So 500 problems take 500 * 45 mts = 375 hours. Even if you spend 5 solid hours a day for problem-solving it comes to 75 days (2.5 months). If you are in a full-time job it’s hard to spend so much time every single day. Realistically if you spend 2–3 hours a day we are talking about 5 months just for practicing 500 problems. In my opinion, you don’t need to solve so many problems to crack the interview. All you need is a few problems in each topic and understand the fundamentals really well. The different topics for algo and ds are:
arrays and strings, bit hacks, dynamic programming, graphs, hash tables, linked lists, math problems, priority queues, queues, recursion, sorting, stacks, trees, and tries. As a starter try to solve 4–5 problems in each topic after you finish step 1 and then if you have time solve 2–3 problems a day for fun in each topic and you should be good. Also, it is far better to solve 5 problems than to read 50 problems. In fact, trying to cover problems by reading problems is not going to be of any use.
Step 3 (this can be done in parallel with step 1) (Systems Design)
Practice problems in systems, design (distributed systems, concurrency, OO design). These questions are common in Google and other top companies. The best way to crack this section is to actually do complex systems projects at work or school projects. There are lots of resources online which are very good for preparation for this topic.
Edit: Since I have received some request to point some resources I am listing some of my favorite ones:
Please know your resume in and out and make sure you can explain all the projects mentioned in the resume. You should be able to dive as deep as needed (technically) for the projects mentioned. Also do enough research about the company you are interviewing, the product, engineering culture and have good questions to ask them
Step 5 (mock interviews)
Last but not least please make sure you have some good friends working in a good company or your classmate mock interview you. You also have several resources online for this service. Also, work on the feedback you get from the mock interview. You can also interview a few companies you are not interested to work as a practice interview before your goal companies.
It is possible for some people; I don’t know whether it is possible for you.
You’re solving 50% of easy problems. Reality check: that’s…cute. Your target success rate, to have a good chance, should be near-100% on Easy, 75% on Medium, and 50% on Hard. On top of that, non-Leetcode rounds like system design should be solid, too.
You can see there’s a big gap between where you are and where you need to be.
The good news is that despite how large that gap is, without a doubt, there have been cases of people being able to learn fast enough to cover that gap in 90 days. These cases are not at all common, and I will warn you that the vast majority of people who are where you are now cannot get to where you need to be in 90 days. So, the odds are against you, but you might be better than the odds would say.
What is special about the situations of the people who can get there that fast? Off the top of my head, the key factors are:
A strong previous background in CS and algorithms
Being able to spend a significant amount of time daily to study
High aptitude / talent / intelligence for learning these sorts of concepts
Having an effective methodology for learning. The fact that you’re actively solving problems on Leetcode is a decent start here.
If the above factors describe you, you might be better off than the odds would suggest. It is at least possible that you could achieve your goal.
(Note: I’ve interviewed hundreds of developers in my time at Facebook, Microsoft and now as the co-founder and CEO of Educative. I’ve also failed several coding interviews because I wasn’t prepared. At Educative, we’ve helped thousands of developers level up their careers with hands-on courses on programming languages, system design, and interview prep.)
Is Interview Prep a Full-time Job?
Let’s break it down. A full-time job – 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year – encompasses 2080 hours. If you take two weeks of vacation, you’re actually working 2,000 hours. The 1,000 hours recommendation is saying you need six months of full-time work to prepare for your interview at a top tech company. Really?
I think three months is a reasonable timeframe to fully prepare. And if you’ve interviewed more recently, studying the specific process of the company where you’re applying can cut that time down to 4-6 weeks of dedicated prep.
I’ve written more about the ideal interview prep roadmap for DEV Community, but I’ll give you the breakdown here.
The “Secret” to a Successful Interview Prep Plan
First of all, I want to be clear that there’s no silver bullet to interview prep. But during my time interviewing candidates at Facebook and Microsoft, I noticed there was one trait that all the best candidates shared: they understood why companies asked the questions they did.
The key to a successful interview prep program is to understand what each question is actually trying to accomplish. Understanding the intent behind every step of the interview process helps you prepare in the right way.
A lot of younger developers think they need to be experts in a few programming languages, or even just one language in order to crack the developer interview. Writing efficient code is a crucial skill, but what software companies are actually looking for (especially the big ones with custom libraries and technology stacks that you will be expected to learn anyway) is an understanding of the various components of engineering, as well as your creative problem-solving ability.
That breaks down into five key areas that “Big Tech” companies are focused on in the interview process:
1. Coding
Interviewers are testing the basics of your ability to code. What language should you be using? Start with the language you know best. Especially in larger companies, new syntaxes can be taught or libraries used if you establish you can execute well. I have interviewed people that used programming languages that I barely know myself. I know C++ inside and out, so even though Python is a more efficient language, I would always personally choose to interview using C++. The most important thing is just to brush up on the basics of your favorite programming language.
The questions in coding interviews focus on generic problem-solving, data structures (Mastering Data Structures: An interview refresher), and algorithms. So revisit concepts that you haven’t touched since undergrad to have a fresh, foundational understanding of topics like complexity analysis (Algorithms and Complexity Analysis: An interview refresher), arrays, queues, trees, tries, hash tables, sorting, and searching. Then practice solving problems using these concepts in the programming language you have chosen.
Whether you’re building a mobile app or web-scale systems, it’s important to understand threads, locks, synchronization, and multi-threading. These concepts are some of the most challenging and factor heavily into your “hiring level” at many organizations. The more expert you are at concurrency, the higher your level, and the better the pay.
Since you’ve already determined the language you’re using in (1), study up on process handling using that same language. Prepare for an interview – Concurrency
3. System Design
Like concurrency problems, system design is now key to the hiring process at most companies, and has an impact on your hiring level.
There isn’t a clear-cut answer to an open-ended question where a candidate must work their way to an efficient, meaningful solution to a general problem with multiple parts.
Most candidates don’t have a background designing large-scale systems in the first place, as reaching that level is several years into a career path and most systems are designed collaboratively anyway.
For this reason, it is important to spend time clarifying the product and system scope, a quick back-of-the-envelop estimation, defining APIs to address each feature in the system scope and defining the data model. Once this foundational work is done, you can take the data model and features to actually design the system.
In Object-Oriented Design questions, interviewers are looking for your understanding of design patterns and your ability to transform the requirements into comprehensible classes. You spend most of your time explaining the various components, their interfaces and how different components interact with each other using the interfaces. Interviewers are looking for your ability to identify patterns and to apply effective, time-tested solutions rather than re-inventing the wheel. In a way, it is the partner of the system design interview.
This is the one that doesn’t have a clear cut learning path, and because of that, it is often overlooked by developers. But for established companies like Google and Amazon, culture is one of the biggest factors. The skills you demonstrate in coding and design interviews prove that you know programming. But without the right attitude, are you open to learning? Are you passionate about the product and want to build things with the team? If not, companies can think you’re not worth hiring. No organization wants to create a toxic work environment.
Since every company has a few different distinguishing features in their culture, it’s important to read up on what their values and products are (Coding Interview Preparation | Codinginterview has information on many top tech companies, including Google and Facebook). Then enter the interview track ready to answer these basics:
Interest in the product, and demonstrate understanding of the business. (Don’t mistake Facebook’s business model, which relies on big data, for AWS or Azure, which facilitate big data as a service. If you’re going into Google, know how user data and personalization is the core of Google’s monetization for its various products and services, while knowing what makes Android unique compared to iOS. Be an advocate.)
Be prepared to talk about disagreements in the workplace. If you’ve been working for more than a few years, you’ve had disagreements. Even if you’re coming out of school, group projects apply. Companies want to know how you work on a team and navigate conflict.
Talk about how the company helps you build and execute your own goals both as a technologist and in your career. What are you passionate about?
Talk about significant engineering accomplishments – what have you built; what crazy/difficult bugs have you solved?
Conclusion
Strategic interview prep is essential if you want to present yourself as the best candidate for an engineering role.
It doesn’t have to take 1,000 hours, nor should it – but at big companies like Google and Facebook where the interview process is so intentional, it will absolutely benefit you to study that process and fully understand the why behind each step.
There are plenty of battle-tested resources linked in my answer that will guide you throughout the prep process, and I hope they can be helpful to you on your career journey.
Originally Answered: I have practiced over 300 algorithms questions on LintCode and LeetCode but still can’t get any offer, what should I do?
I have interviewed and been interviewed a number of times, and I have found out that most of the time people (including myself) flunk an interview due to the following reasons:
Failing to come up with a solution to a problem: If you can’t come up with even one single solution to a problem, then it’s definitely a red flag since that reflects poorly on your problem solving skills. Also, don’t be afraid to provide a non-optimal solution initially. A non-optimal solution is better than no solution at all.
Coming up with solutions but can’t implement them: That means you need to work more on your implementation skills. Write lots and lots of code, and make sure you use a whiteboard or pen and paper to mimic the interview experience as much as possible. In an interview you won’t have an IDE with autocomplete and syntax highlighting to help you. Also make sure that you’re very comfortable in your programming language of choice.
Solving the problem but not optimally: That could mean that you’re missing some fundamental knowledge of data structures and algorithms, so make sure that you know your basics well.
Solving the problem but after a long time, or after receiving too many hints: Again, you need more problem solving practice.
Solving the problem but with many bugs: You need to properly test your code after writing it. Don’t wait for the interviewer to point out the bugs for you. You wouldn’t want to hire someone who doesn’t test their code, right?
Failing to ask the interviewer enough questions before diving into the code: Diving right into the code without asking the interviewer enough questions is definitely a red flag, even if you came up with a good solution. It tells the interviewer that either you’re arrogant, or that you’re reckless. It’s also not in your favor, because you may end up solving the wrong problem. Discussing the problem and asking questions to the interviewer is important because it ensures that both of you are on the same page. The interviewer’s answers to your questions may also provide with some very useful hints that may greatly simplify the problem.
Being arrogant: If you’re perceived as arrogant, no one will want to hire you no matter how good you are.
Lying on the resume: Falsely claiming knowledge of something, or lying about employment history is a huge red flag. It shows dishonesty, and no one wants to work with someone who is dishonest.
I hope this helps, and good luck with your future interviews.
Unless we’re talking about Google, which has problems that are unique to them in comparison to the rest, you can be sure that big tech companies ask LeetCode-style questions quite often. Seeing LeetCode Hard problems specifically, however, is not that common in these interviews, and it’s more likely that you’ll be facing LeetCode Medium questions and one or two Hard questions at best. This is because having a time limit to solve them as well as an interviewer right beside you already adds enough pressure to make these questions feel harder than they normally would be; increasing their difficulty would simply be detrimental to the interviewing process.
I suggest that you avoid using the difficulty of LeetCode questions that you can solve as a way of telling if you’re prepared for your interviews as well because it can be pretty misleading. One reason this is the case is that LeetCode’s environment is different from an interviewing environment; LeetCode cares more about running time and the optimal solution to a problem, while an interviewer cares more about your approach to the question (an intuitive solution can always be optimized further with a discussion between you and the interviewer).
Another reason you should avoid worrying too much about LeetCode-style questions is that FAANG companies are starting to refrain from asking them, as they’re noticing that many candidates come to their interviews already knowing the answer to some of their questions; currently, if your interviewer notices that you already know the answer to the question you’re given, they won’t take it into account and instead will move on to another question, as already knowing how to solve the problem tells them nothing about the way you approach challenging situations in the first place.
Also, you should consider that LeetCode only lets you practice what you already know in coding; if you don’t have a good knowledge of data structures & algorithms beforehand, LeetCode will be a difficult resource to use efficiently, and it also won’t teach you anything about important non-technical skills like communication skills, which is a crucial aspect that interviewers also evaluate. Therefore, I also suggest that you avoid using LeetCode as your only resource to prepare for your technical interviews, as it doesn’t cover everything that you need to learn on its own.
For example, you may want to enroll in a program like Tech Interview Proas you use LeetCode. TIP is a program that was created by an ex-Google software engineer and was designed to be a “how to get into big tech” course, with over 20 hours of instructional video content on data structures & algorithms and system design.
Another good resource that you could use, this time to cover the behavioral aspect of interviews, is Interviewing.io. With it, you can engage in mock interviews with other software engineers that have worked with Facebook and Google before and also receive feedback on your performance.
You could also read a book like Cracking the Coding Interview, which offers plenty of programming questions that are very similar to what you can expect from FAANG companies, as well as valuable insight into the interviewing process.
Harvard is seen in popular culture as being very selective, and so any funnel which has a conversion rate lower than 5% is going to describe itself as “more selective than Harvard”. “More selective than Harvard” has 70m hits on Google. When Walmart opened a DC store, it hired about 2.5% of the people that sent applications, and ran a story that it was “twice as selective as Harvard”. Tech internships, somewhat unsurprisingly, are harder to get as jobs at Walmart.
Generally speaking, the more LeetCode problems you solve, the better your odds of getting an offer will be. Be careful, however, as using the number of problems you solve on LeetCode as a reference for how ready you are for your technical interviews is misleading, especially if it’s for Google and Facebook. Even if you solve every problem on LeetCode (please don’t try this), there’s still a chance you won’t get an offer, and there are several reasons why.
First of all, coding is not the only thing taken into consideration by interviewers from big tech companies. One of the main things they look for in a candidate is the presence of strong soft skills like teamwork, leadership, and communication. If you’re raising red flags in that department—if the interviewer doesn’t think you have the leadership skills to lead a team down the road, for example—odds are that you’re going to get overlooked. They also expect you’ll be able to clearly explain your thought process before solving a given coding problem, which is something a surprising number of developers have trouble with.
The second problem with using LeetCode alone is that it can only help you practice data structures & algorithms and system design, but not exactly teach you about them. This might not be an issue if you’re solving questions from the Easy section of LeetCode, but once you get to the Medium and Hard problem sets, you’ll need more theoretical knowledge to properly handle these problems.
So, ideally, you’ll want to prepare using resources that help you learn more about DS&A and systems design before you start practicing on LeetCode, and you’ll also want to work on your behavioral skills to ensure you do well there, too. Here are some tools that can help:
Interviewing.io: A site where you can engage in mock interviews with other software engineers—some of whom have worked at Google and Facebook—and receive immediate, objective feedback on your performance.
Tech Interview Pro: An interview prep program designed by a former Google software engineer that includes 150+ instructional video lessons on data structures & algorithms, systems design, and the interview process as a whole. TIP members also get access to a private Facebook group of 1,500+ course graduates who’ve used what they learned in the course to land jobs at Google, Facebook, and other big tech companies.
So, using LeetCode on its own would prepare you well for questions about data structures & algorithms, but may leave you unprepared for questions related to systems design and the behavioral aspect of your interviews. But by complementing LeetCode with other resources, you’ll put yourself in a much better position to receive an offer from Google, Facebook, or anyone else. Best of luck.
Dmitry Aliev is correct that this was introduced into the language before references.
I’ll take this question as an excuse to add a bit more color to this.
C++ evolved from C via an early dialect called “C with Classes”, which was initially implemented with Cpre, a fancy “preprocessor” targeting C that didn’t fully parse the “C with Classes” language. What it did was add an implicit this pointer parameter to member functions. E.g.:
struct S {
int f();
};
was translated to something like:
int f__1S(S *this);
(the funny name f__1S is just an example of a possible “mangling” of the name of S::f, which allows traditional linkers to deal with the richer naming environment of C++).
What might comes as a surprise to the modern C++ programmer is that in that model this is an ordinary parameter variable and therefore it can be assigned to! Indeed, in the early implementations that was possible:
struct S {
int n;
S(S *other) {
this = other; // Possible in C with Classes.
this->n = 42; // Same as: other->n = 42;
}
};
Interestingly, an idiom arose around this ability: Constructors could manage class-specific memory allocation by “assigning to this” before doing anything else in the constructor. E.g.:
struct S {
S() {
this = my_allocator(sizeof(S));
…
}
~S() {
my_deallocator(this);
this = 0; // Disabled normal destructor post-processing.
}
…
};
That technique (brittle as it was, particularly when dealing with derived classes) became so widespread that when C with Classes was re-implemented with a “real” compiler (Cfront), assignment to this remained valid in constructors and destructors even though this had otherwise evolved into an immutable expression. The C++ front end I maintain still has modes that accept that anachronism. See also section 17 of the old Cfront manual found here, for some fun reminiscing.
When standardization of C++ began, the core language work was handled by three working groups: Core I dealt with declarative stuff, Core II dealt with expression stuff, and Core III dealt with “new stuff” (templates and exception handling, mostly). In this context, Core II had to (among many other tasks) formalize the rules for overload resolution and the binding of this. Over time, they realized that that name binding should in fact be mostly like reference binding. Hence, in standard C++ the binding of something like:
struct S {
int n;
int f() const {
return this->n;
}
} s = { 42 };
int r = s.f();
is specified to be approximately like:
struct S { int n; } s = { 42 };
int f__1S(S const &__this) {
return (&__this)->n;
}
int r = f__1S(s);
In other words, the expression this is now effectively a kind of alias for &__this, where __this is just a name I made up for an unnamable implicit reference parameter.
C++11 further tweaked this by introducing syntax to control the kind of reference that this is bound from. E.g.,
struct S {
int f() const &;
int g() &&;
};
can be thought of as introducing hidden parameters as follows:
int f__1S(S const &__this);
int g__1S(S &&__this);
That model was relatively well-understood by the mid-to-late 1990s… but then unfortunately we forgot about it when we introduced lambda expression. Indeed, in C++11 we allowed lambda expressions to “capture” this:
struct S {
int n;
int f() {
auto lm = [this]{ return this->n; };
return lm();
}
};
After that language feature was released, we started getting many reports of buggy programs that “captured” this thinking they captured the class value, when instead they really wanted to capture __this (or *this). So we scrambled to try to rectify that in C++17, but because lambdas had gotten tremendously popular we had to make a compromise. Specifically:
we introduced the ability to capture *this
we allowed [=, this] since now [this] is really a “by reference” capture of *this
even though [this] was now a “by reference” capture, we left in the ability to write [&, this], despite it being redundant (compatibility with earlier standards)
Our tale is not done, however. Once you write much generic C++ code you’ll probably find out that it’s really frustrating that the __this parameter cannot be made generic because it’s implicitly declared. So we (the C++ standardization committee) decided to allow that parameter to be made explicit in C++23. For example, you can write (example from the linked paper):
struct less_than {
template <typename T, typename U>
bool operator()(this less_than self,
T const& lhs, U const& rhs) {
return lhs < rhs;
}
};
In that example, the “object parameter” (i.e., the previously hidden reference parameter __this) is now an explicit parameter and it is no longer a reference!
Here is another example (also from the paper):
struct X {
template <typename Self>
void foo(this Self&&, int);
};
struct D: X {};
void ex(X& x, D& d) {
x.foo(1); // Self=X&
move(x).foo(2); // Self=X
d.foo(3); // Self=D&
}
Here:
the type of the object parameter is a deducible template-dependent type
the deduction actually allows a derived type to be found
This feature is tremendously powerful, and may well be the most significant addition by C++23 to the core language. If you’re reasonably well-versed in modern C++, I highly recommend reading that paper (P0847) — it’s fairly accessible.
When an employee is hired, there is a step in the process where they are given a stack of documents to sign that (anecdotally) I’ll venture maybe 1 in 1,000 actually read. One of the least understood (or read) is the notice that the company controls, collects and analyzes all communications, internet activity and data stored on company-owned or -managed devices and systems.
This includes network traffic that flows across their servers. It’s safe to assume that mid-to-large employers are fully aware of the amount of on-the-clock time employees spend shopping, tweeting or watching YouTube, and know which employees are spending inordinate amounts of ‘company time’ shopping on Amazon rather than tackling assignments.
This also include Bring Your Own Device policies— where employees are allowed to use their personal smartphone, tablet or laptop for business purposes. Companies don’t always ‘exploit’ the policy for nefarious surveillance purposes, but employers are within their rights to collect information like location data from your BYOD smartphone both on and off the clock.
An example of where this can hurt employees is when they start to look for another job.
If you email/Slack/message your supervisor and ask for a personal day off to attend to a family matter, but your device logs show you are accessing job-search sites and your location data suggests your aren’t at home or even within the radius of a competitor’s office, they know. This tends to make your boss cranky, and can adversely impact your employment to the point of losing your job.
I disagree with this kind of intrusive surveillance, and the presumption of guilt employees face when they take steps to protect themselves by using encrypted tools like Signal, proxy servers or switching devices to Airplane Mode intrudes on the employee’s legitimate rights to privacy: you may not want your employer to know that you’re seeing a psychiatrist on your lunch hour, and they really have no reasonable expectation for you to disclose this (or not take steps to conceal it.)
I think so. I remember there was a noticeable number of people going to Facebook, and some discussion of it among the employees. And then there was an explicit event where Google rearranged its compensation strategy. Everyone got a huge raise just at that moment, and from that point on the salaries and stock grants became close to the top of the market, as they need to be for a company that hires top talent.
If you can’t get FAANG to pay attention to you, you probably need to get another job first. Perhaps one of the companies that are considered to be pretty good would be interested.
It is actually quite hard to get an entry-level role at a top tech company, because where you went to college (and internships, which you don’t have) plays a disproportionate role. It’s not surprising, because what else can they go on? Interviewing is expensive, and there are hundreds of applicants per opening, so they want to pre-filter candidates somehow.
Once you have a few years of experience, things look a little better, especially if you climb up the prestige pole. For instance, Microsoft (or Twitter where I work today) isn’t FAANG, but you can be sure that recruiters would take applicants from there seriously, and you would have a good chance to get an interview. But the main factor is what you manage to do in your time at work. If you do well, get promoted, demonstrate clear impact (that you can articulate externally), build your professional network, that would improve your chances to both get your foot in the door, and also to pass the interviews.
There are also other things you can do, but I think they depend on luck too much. Slowly improving your portfolio is the way to go, I think.
All of these companies assume that if you know the front-end domain, you can learn whatever technology du jour to become a front-end developer, and besides, if you don’t know anything about front-end, you can still grow into a front-end developer if that’s the path you’re interested in.
That being said, TypeScript is increasingly becoming the standard way to write client-side web code. Both Microsoft and Google are very committed to TS, while Facebook uses JavaScript with Flow. Google also uses Dart for some of its front end.
Likewise, there are a number of technologies on which the larger companies have taken diverging choices. Google is very committed to gRPC, I mean, g stands for Google; while Facebook is behind graphQL. (graph being, originally. the “social graph” of Facebook). AFAIK, Microsoft uses both.
Neither Google nor Facebook have ever really embraced node.js. This would have seemed odd a few years ago but now the web ecosystem is generally turning away from tools and web servers written in node.js. I don’t know for sure what Microsoft uses for its web servers.
Facebook is unsurprisingly very committed to React and React Native. Google though uses a number of web frameworks, including non-open sourced ones, and among others Angular and Flutter. Microsoft, AFAIK, uses React and React Native and Angular.
But all these skills are transferable. If you understand React, it’s easy to learn Angular and conversely; TypeScript and Flow have similarities, etc.
One common denominator is HTML, CSS, web APIs and web standards, which are always relevant.
Your goal, in an interview, is not to impress your interviewer, but to demonstrate that you have the necessary skill set to be hired.
In a large tech company, the threshold to be considered “impressive” is pretty high… you have people that had superlative achievements in their field (or outside of tech), and in their day to day they’re just treated like normal people. I never interviewed for Amazon, but I interviewed (and got hired) at both Facebook and Google, and both of my interviewer brackets included folks who had their own Wikipedia entry (and since then, all of my Facebook interviewers had amazing careers and most got their own Wikipedia page). So that’s the caliber of folks that your interviewers work with on a daily basis.
So your interviewer is not going to be impressed by your interview performance. That said, I’ve observed that many tech employees treat others as if they could be the next Ada Lovelace or the next Steve Jobs no matter their current achievements. This is not forced, but it’s an attitude that comes naturally because we’ve observed so many people achieve greatness. Interviewers would love nothing more than to give the highest recommendation for the candidate that they are seeing right now, it’s very fulfilling (conversely, having to reject a candidate is always a bit frustrating). So I think it’s fair that your interviewer is hoping you can become a superstar, but that hope is the same as for every other candidate and not directly linked to how well you are doing right now.
Google’s interview process leans towards making sure that an unsuitable candidate is not hired, they are ok if a few suitable candidates are missed in the process.
There is also a factor of chance involved in the process. Here is a story to prove that:
I have personally asked at least 5 engineers at Google if they would be willing to interview again assuming they would be offered 1.5 times their current compensation. Obviously they loose the job if they don’t clear the interview. I am yet to meet somebody willing to take this bargain , I wont take it either.
Btw google also offers anybody who leaves google to comeback and join at the same level without an interview if they comeback within 2 years. My guess is that they also realize the chance involved.
Not clearing an interview at google is an indicator of only one thing, that you did not clear a google interview. Don’t draw conclusions about your ability based on this.
At Google there’s a selection of laptops you can choose from: a couple of Macs, a couple of Chromebooks, a couple of Linux laptops and a couple of windows laptops. Usually there’s a smaller, lighter version, for people who favor portability, and a larger version if you prefer a larger screen.
I’ve seen developers use all. I’d guess that Macs are most common (but under 50%} and Windows machines are least common.
I use a Chromebook (well, two Chromebooks). You turn it on, you log in and it looks exactly the same as your other Chromebook. This saves me carrying a laptop between work and home. If you work from another office, you don’t need to carry your laptop, you just grab one off the shelf, log in, and it looks the same as the computer you left at home.
(I tried using a Mac, I couldn’t get used to it, I didn’t know how to do anything, the keyboard shortcuts drove me crazy and so I gave it back and got a Chromebook).
Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) have a long-standing culture where employees believe that they’re hot stuff and that the company has to keep them happy because the company needs them as much as they need the company. Amazon doesn’t have that, probably because they fire people pretty often, making many of the remaining employees feel disposable.
Google and Meta have different concepts of culture fit—or at least they did historically. At Google, culture fit means “don’t be a person who’s hard to work with”. At Meta, culture fit means “be a person who believes that we are doing great things here and who will be excited to work hard on those great things”. As a result, it tends to be easy for Meta to keep convincing their existing employees that the company is doing the right thing. Google, on the other hand, ends up with a significant proportion of employees who are not easily convinced, and demand change.
Though it’s been so long since I’ve actually worked in the tech industry that I’m not sure if Meta still fits the description I gave above, and there are signs that Google has been trending away from the description I gave above.
The question was:
Why is employee activism seen more in Google but not in other companies like Facebook and Amazon?
Just to add a small note to Dimitriy’s great answer, computer science PhDs tend to be analytical and hyperrational. Working for Google is probably the single best “pass” to choosing whatever the hell you want for the rest of your career, or at least for the next step or two. I think some CS PhDs work for Google not because it’s what they want, but because they don’t know what they want, and if you don’t know what you want and you can get a job there, it would be hard to do better than Google. Why not make $250,000 a year while figuring out your next step? The other companies in this so-called “top-tier” have issues; they are potentially great employers, but their issues make them anywhere from slightly to dramatically less attractive.
The main factor why top prop trading firms and hedge funds are difficult to get into compared to tech companies is their size.
According to Wikipedia Two Sigma has about 1600 employees[1] and Jane Street has about 1900 employees .[2] Even the largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, only has 1500[3] and the third largest hedge fund, Renaissance Technology manages $130 billion with 310 employees.
Maybe these numbers on Wikipedia aren’t exact but I’d bet they’re well within the ballpark of being accurate.
Facebook has nearly 60,000 employees ,[4] Amazon has 160,000 ,[5] Apple has 154,000,[6] Netflix has around 12,000[7], and Google has 140,000[8]. Again, maybe these number aren’t precise but I don’t feel like doing more in depth research.
However, it’s pretty obvious to see that the big tech companies employ multiples of what those finance firms do and quite simply there are far more opportunities at those tech companies. More seats mean it’s going to be less competitive to be hired.
Second, those top hedge funds and prop trading firms pay well. Like really well.
And Jane Street’s 2020 graduate hires straight from college were paid a $200k annual base salary, plus a $100k sign-on bonus, plus a $100k-$150k guaranteed performance bonus. Junior bankers’ high salaries look a little paltry by comparison.[9]
So a new college grad makes $400-$450k. That’s a 22–23 year old making that. That same article found documents that said the average per employee in their London office was $1.3 million. Some make more and some make less, but that’s an eye wateringly high number when you consider all of the admin and support aren’t making close to that.
A friend’s younger brother worked at Jane Street about 10 years ago. He may still but I haven’t talked to her much since we moved. He was a rock star at Jane Street, and while I’m relying on my memory of a 10 year old conversation so I may not be totally accurate, he was in his late 20’s or early 30’s and made $4 million (and it may actually have been $8M) that year.
I know tech people are paid well but I doubt many, if any, make $400-$450k in year one and are making millions by their late 20’s is unheard of unless they founded or join a startup at the right time.
In addition, the interview processes at those firms is insanely difficult. I’ve never worked or interviewed at them but I’ve heard war stories. Just to get your foot in the door is nearly impossible then getting an offer to work there is basically impossible
My friend’s brother was half way through an absolutely top PhD program in Physics when he was recruited by them. I don’t consider myself a slouch and I’ve met a ton of highly intelligent people, but this guy was like his brain was plugged into a computer and the internet. And he was a dynamic personality.
They hire the absolute best of the best and because they’re small and privately held they don’t actually ever need to hire or grow because the public markets can’t punish their stock price because they don’t have one. If some of those top investment firms can’t find the right fit they may simply not need to make a hire right then and can wait. They’re not big banks like Goldman that need to hire X number of analysts and associates because they need to replace the people who left.
So the main reasons that it’s tougher to get into a top hedge fund or prop trading firm than big tech is because they’re much smaller, they pay more, they are even more diligent in their hiring practices, and they hire very intelligent people.
If that were to happen, we’ll have bigger problems to deal with. The Google monorepo exists on tens of thousands of machines. That would mean: every data center, every workstation used by Google would suddenly be out of commission – not just turned off, but so that storage isn’t even available. This is only possible in a complete doomsday scenario.
It’s generally possible to find better compensated jobs for people with experience in big tech cos. This experience is very desirable for companies in fast growth mode – not just the technical expertise but also knowledge of processes of world-class engineering organizations. Smaller but fast-growing companies can offer better packages but with an element of risk – if the company ends up failing, the employee will only get their salary.
To Conclude:
The tech industry is booming, and there are a lot of great opportunities for those with the skills and experience to land a job at one of the FAANG companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft are all leaders in the tech industry, and they offer competitive salaries and benefits. The interview process for these companies can be intense, but if you’re prepared and knowledgeable about the company’s culture and values, you’ll have a good chance of landing the job. Perks at these companies can include free food and transportation, stock options, and generous vacation time. If you’re looking for a challenging and rewarding career in the tech industry, consider applying for a job at one of the FAANGM companies.
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Welcome to the Daily Advice Thread for /r/Apple. This thread can be used to ask for technical advice regarding Apple software and hardware, to ask questions regarding the buying or selling of Apple products or to post other short questions. Have a question you need answered? Ask away! Please remember to adhere to our rules, which can be found in the sidebar. Join our Discord and IRC chat rooms for support: Discord IRC Note: Comments are sorted by /new for your convenience. Here is an archive of all previous Daily Advice Threads. This is best viewed on a browser. If on mobile, type in the search bar [author:"AutoModerator" title:"Daily Advice Thread" or title:"Daily Tech Support Thread"] (without the brackets, and including the quotation marks around the titles and author.) The Daily Advice Thread is posted each day at 06:00 AM EST (Click HERE for other timezones) and then the old one is archived. It is advised to wait for the new thread to post your question if this time is nearing for quickest answer time. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]
Hi everyone! We made a website for the contestant profiles of 'Siren: Survive the Island'. The first 5 episodes are great so far and we were curious to know more about the contestants so we compiled all of them in one place. We'll continuously update the website with more photos and information while the show airs. Don't worry, it's spoiler-free. Hope you guys like it! submitted by /u/wonhoppa [link] [comments]
Random thing I've noticed. I always have subtitles on when watching, but I've noticed some films/shows where the characters might start speaking in a foreign language, it doesn't show the translated subs. However if I turn off the subs entirely, the translations do appear. This doesn't happen all the time, it's very few and far between but it does keep cropping up now and then. Has anyone else noticed this? submitted by /u/zubreeki [link] [comments]
everyone is talking about ai-powered Google search. Are any search categories that DON'T trigger AI results? so that SEO has some room to live. I know (Some) YMYL - Your Money or Your Life content may survive. submitted by /u/IVANTALK [link] [comments]
I am trying to join my friends family for ms365. but everytime it sends me to the family safety page of the family i left (i was the sole adult so it should remove itself). clicking family setting does nothing. i don't have the three dots next to my name, see: link any idea what i should do? or is it just a thing of waiting submitted by /u/light_odin05 [link] [comments]
Just not sure how the whole process works. I’ve applied for a couple positions with Microsoft and they’re fully remote. The location on the application is Redmond, WA and I know that’s where they are headquartered. I don’t live there so I was wondering if it is remote only within Redmond or it applies to the whole US. submitted by /u/Surpakren [link] [comments]
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Hey how do u keep Netflix from automatically taking money off ur Card tired of Netflix taking money not meant for Netflix that's it that's th3 post Why does this post have to be so long for me to post it minimum of one hundred and fifty characters crazy lalalalallalalalalalalalalalalalallaalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalallalalalalaalalalalalalalalalalalalalqlalaalalalalalalalalalalalaqlalqlqlalalalalalalalalalallllalllalalalaalalalalalalalalalalal submitted by /u/Equal-Wishbone-6131 [link] [comments]
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I owned among us, but no longer do for some reason. I had the game but then reset my computer, logged back in and cannot play the game. I checked both microsoft store and xbox but both require payment. I also own minecraft (bedrock) but can play that even after the reset. submitted by /u/CNHGamer [link] [comments]
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I recently added my email to outlook, everything in the inbox I can see but all of my subfolders are not showing. Any help would be appreciated, Thanks. submitted by /u/OllyMB [link] [comments]
Question, I've generated the recovery 25 digit code but I don't know how it work. Do i use it to login or how to redeem it submitted by /u/Ixmomo [link] [comments]
I'm attending a university soon and using my SP7 for my studies. How do I backup all the data on it like I do with my iPhone and iCloud? I mean, syncing all the data with a cloud automatically while online in case something happens to the SP7. submitted by /u/KuroTenshi69 [link] [comments]
I know some will say “don’t give them more money”. I I’m curious if any other US xfinity users have figured out how to add a member. I pay for Netflix through xfinity currently. I have a standard plan and everything I read says I can add 1 additional member. I don’t see any links or pages in my Netflix account to do that. Anyone else who pays through xfinity figured out any of the new pricing/profiles stuff. Thanks I’m advance! submitted by /u/AnySociety3583 [link] [comments]
There seems to be hype for the new season, it looks... alright but you can really see where the quality in the show noticeably dipped - right when Netflix acquired it. I saw the entire history of you the other week and it was brilliant, could've watched a whole series of that. Toby Kebbel was so good in it! Almost none of the new episodes even come close, except USS Calisster, Arkangel and Crocodile which was good - also a bit similar to the entire history of you. Anyone looking forward to the new season? submitted by /u/tylerthe-theatre [link] [comments]
What’s happening is that my dad needs to use the excel app for his work but a glitch is happening where every time he opens the app, it says “Microsoft Excel quit unexpectedly” with no options other than report or ignore. What he is now trying to do is re-install the app onto our MacBook to get around this bug or just to get SOME kind of refresh. The issue is that he cannot re-install the app. My father pays £9.40 a month for these apps, the apps are literally on the screen but the Microsoft 365 website says he cannot install them because he is using a ‘free’ version. What do we do?!? We pay for their services and they refuse to allow us to use them. submitted by /u/CosmicSquiddo [link] [comments]
Originally Answered: What can I improve on for my next FAANG Sr SWE interview?
I’m going to read between the lines and assume that you are working at a grade below senior at a company which is not a FAANG. I’m also assuming that you feel that you are ready and that you’ve already done the obvious, read the books, practiced questions etc.
Your senior eng interview has 3 facets, coding, system design and behavioral.
Your levers to do better at each are:
To get better at coding interviews, interview more candidates. Seeing what others do well and less well is very helpful. This really applies to all sorts of interviews but IMO is most helpful for coding interviews.
To get better at system design interviews, read more design docs at your existing company, attend more design reviews, and force yourself to participate. Comment, ask questions. It doesn’t matter if you’re off the mark. See what doesn’t make sense to you and challenge it.
To get better at behavioral interviews, read your perf packets and the feedback from your coworkers. Read the docs that you wrote on your career plans (If you don’t have any, ask yourself why and start one). Reflect, regularly, on what has been hardest in your career, what you have done very well, where you struggled, what you would do differently.
I’d like to answer first in general — about attrition rates in the tech sector — and then about Amazon specifically.
Industry-Wide Retention
Retention in the US high-tech industry is very challenging. I believe there are two main reasons for that.
First, there is an acute shortage of qualified workers, which means companies are desperate to get employees anywhere they can, including — sometimes mainly — by poaching them from other companies. This is why so many companies moved into the Seattle East Side in the ’90s or South Lake Union in the last five years, for example: to poach from Microsoft and Amazon, respectively.
I remember the crazy late-90’s in the Israel high-tech industry. People would come in, work for 6–12 months, then jump ship for a fancier title and a bump in pay. It was insane; it was disgusting (I mean that literally: I would sometimes feel physically sick thinking about how stupid it all was.)
The second reason — which I’m not as certain about — is that the high-tech industry is so incredibly dynamic. Things change constantly: new companies spring up and grow like crazy (Uber anyone?); “old” companies that were considered the cream of the crop a couple of years ago are suddenly untouchable (Yahoo!). New technologies explode onto the scene and old ones stagnate.
Not only does that create a lot of churn as companies keep growing and shrinking; it also creates incredible pressure on tech workers to stay on top of their game. We’re always looking for the next big technology, the next big field, then next big product… The sad part is that a lot of it is just hype, but the psychological pressure is real enough, and it makes people move around always looking for the next great opportunity.
Amazon
The reason I want to talk about Amazon — which generally suffers from the same problems I’ve described above — is that there’s a perception in the public that Amazon is somehow worse than the rest of the industry; that it has awful attrition, because it’s a terrible place to work. I’ve tackled that in a couple of other answers (e.g. this one and this one), but it’s a very persistent myth.
Much of the fault is in reports like this one from PayScale, which then get regurgitated in hundreds of stories like this one (from BuzzFeed). The basic story seems very simple: the average tenure of an Amazon employee is about a year, which is — undoubtedly — really low, even in tech-industry terms.
That’s a great example of (supposedly) Benjamin Disraeli’s famous quote, “lies, damned lies and statistics”. There are at least two reasons why this number is completely meaningless:
Short tenure does not mean high attrition: in the last 6–7 years the number of employees at Amazon has grown exponentially, and I mean this literally:
This means that at any time, pretty much, about 20–40% of all Amazon employees have joined less than a year ago. It’s no really surprising that they have a short tenure, is it?
Measuring retention is not trivial, but this methodology is just plain dumb (or maybe intentionally misleading).
Amazon is not (only) a tech company: sure, if you compare Amazon to Google and Facebook it comes out bad. But unlike those companies, the majority of Amazon employees are not tech workers. They’re warehouse workers, drivers, customer-service people, etc. Many of them are temp workers, and many others are not considering the job as a career.
There is a good discussion to be had about how Amazon treats these workers and whether it can do better, but it makes no sense to compare it with Microsoft or Apple; Walmart and Target would be much better comparisons.
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Jobs Career Salary Total Compensation Interview Tips at FAANGM: Facebook Apple, Amazon Netflix Google Microsoft
This blog is about Clever Questions, Answers, Resources, Links, Discussions, Tips about jobs and careers at FAANGM companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, AWS, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Linkedin.
How to prepare for FAANGM jobs interviews
You must be able to write code. It is as simple as that. Prepare for the interview by practicing coding exercises in different categories. You’ll solve one or more coding problems focused on CS fundamentals like algorithms, data structures, recursions, and binary trees.
Coding Interview Tips These tips from FAANGM engineers can help you do your best.
Make sure you understand the question. Read it back to your interviewer. Be sure to ask any clarifying questions.
An interview is a two-way conversation; feel free to be the one to ask questions, too.
Don’t rush. Take some time to consider your approach. For example, on a tree question, you’ll need to choose between an iterative or a recursive approach. It’s OK to first use a working, unoptimized solution that you can iterate on later.
Talk through your thinking and processes out loud. This can feel unnatural; be sure to practice it before the interview.
Test your code by running through your problem with a few test and edge cases. Again, talk through your logic out loud when you walk through your test cases.
Think of how your solution could be better, and try to improve it. When you’ve finished, your interviewer will ask you to analyze the complexity of the code in Big O notation.
Walk through your code line by line and assign a complexity to each line.
Remember how to analyze how “good” your solution is: how long does it take for your solution to complete? Watch this video to get familiar with Big O Notation.
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
• Ask clarifying questions. Talk through the problem and ask follow-up questions to make sure you understand the exact problem you’re trying to solve before you jump into building the solution. • Let the interviewer know if you’ve seen the problem previously. That will help us understand your context. • Present multiple potential solutions, if possible. Talk through which solution you’re choosing and why.
While you code
• Don’t forget to talk! While your tech screen will focus heavily on coding, the engineer you’re interviewing with will also be evaluating your thought process. Explaining your decisions and actions as you go will help the interviewer understand your choices. • Be flexible. Some problems have elegant solutions, and some must be brute forced. If you get stuck, just describe your best approach and ask the interviewer if you should go that route. It’s much better to have non-optimal but working code than just an idea with nothing written down. • Iterate rather than immediately trying to jump to the clever solution. If you can’t explain your concept clearly in five minutes, it’s probably too complex. • Consider (and be prepared to talk about): • Different algorithms and algorithmic techniques, such as sorting, divide-and-conquer, recursion, etc. • Data structures, particularly those used most often (array, stack/queue, hashset/hashmap/hashtable/dictionary, tree/binary tree, heap, graph, etc.) • O memory constraints on the complexity of the algorithm you’re writing and its running time as expressed by big-O notation. • Generally, avoid solutions with lots of edge cases or huge if/else if/else blocks, in most cases. Deciding between iteration and recursion can be an important step
After you code
• Expect questions. The interviewer may tweak the problem a bit to test your knowledge and see if you can come up with another answer and/or further optimize your solution. • Take the interviewer’s hints to improve your code. If the interviewer makes a suggestion or asks a question, listen fully so you can incorporate any hints they may provide. • Ask yourself if you would approve your solution as part of your codebase. Explain your answer to your interviewer. Make sure your solution is correct and efficient, that you’ve taken into account edge cases, and that it clearly reflects the ideas you’re trying to express in your code.
Reverse to Make Equal: Given two arrays A and B of length N, determine if there is a way to make A equal to B by reversing any subarrays from array B any number of times. Solution here
Contiguous Subarrays: You are given an array arr of N integers. For each index i, you are required to determine the number of contiguous subarrays that fulfills the following conditions:
The value at index i must be the maximum element in the contiguous subarrays, and These contiguous subarrays must either start from or end on index i. Solution here
Add 2 long integer (Example: “1001202033933333093737373737” + “934019393939122727099000000”) Solution here
# Python3 program to find sum of
# two large numbers.
# Function for finding sum of
# larger numbers
def findSum(str1, str2):
# Before proceeding further,
# make sure length of str2 is larger.
if (len(str1) > len(str2)):
t = str1;
str1 = str2;
str2 = t;
# Take an empty string for
# storing result
str = "";
# Calculate length of both string
n1 = len(str1);
n2 = len(str2);
# Reverse both of strings
str1 = str1[::-1];
str2 = str2[::-1];
carry = 0;
for i in range(n1):
# Do school mathematics, compute
# sum of current digits and carry
sum = ((ord(str1[i]) - 48) +
((ord(str2[i]) - 48) + carry));
str += chr(sum % 10 + 48);
# Calculate carry for next step
carry = int(sum / 10);
# Add remaining digits of larger number
for i in range(n1, n2):
sum = ((ord(str2[i]) - 48) + carry);
str += chr(sum % 10 + 48);
carry = (int)(sum / 10);
# Add remaining carry
if (carry):
str += chr(carry + 48);
# reverse resultant string
str = str[::-1];
return str;
# Driver code
str1 = "12";
str2 = "198111";
print(findSum(str1, str2));
# This code is contributed by mits
Optimized version below
# python 3 program to find sum of two large numbers.
# Function for finding sum of larger numbers
def findSum(str1, str2):
# Before proceeding further, make sure length
# of str2 is larger.
if len(str1)> len(str2):
temp = str1
str1 = str2
str2 = temp
# Take an empty string for storing result
str3 = ""
# Calculate length of both string
n1 = len(str1)
n2 = len(str2)
diff = n2 - n1
# Initially take carry zero
carry = 0
# Traverse from end of both strings
for i in range(n1-1,-1,-1):
# Do school mathematics, compute sum of
# current digits and carry
sum = ((ord(str1[i])-ord('0')) +
int((ord(str2[i+diff])-ord('0'))) + carry)
str3 = str3+str(sum%10 )
carry = sum//10
# Add remaining digits of str2[]
for i in range(n2-n1-1,-1,-1):
sum = ((ord(str2[i])-ord('0'))+carry)
str3 = str3+str(sum%10 )
carry = sum//10
# Add remaining carry
if (carry):
str3+str(carry+'0')
# reverse resultant string
str3 = str3[::-1]
return str3
# Driver code
if __name__ == "__main__":
str1 = "12"
str2 = "198111"
print(findSum(str1, str2))
# This code is contributed by ChitraNayal
Strings
Rotational Cipher: One simple way to encrypt a string is to “rotate” every alphanumeric character by a certain amount.
Rotating a character means replacing it with another character that is a certain number of steps away in normal alphabetic or numerical order. For example, if the string “Zebra-493?” is rotated 3 places, the resulting string is “Cheud-726?”. Every alphabetic character is replaced with the character 3 letters higher (wrapping around from Z to A), and every numeric character replaced with the character 3 digits higher (wrapping around from 9 to 0). Note that the non-alphanumeric characters remain unchanged. Given a string and a rotation factor, return an encrypted string. Solution here
Matching Pairs: Given two strings s and t of length N, find the maximum number of possible matching pairs in strings s and t after swapping exactly two characters within s. A swap is switching s[i] and s[j], where s[i] and s[j] denotes the character that is present at the ith and jth index of s, respectively. The matching pairs of the two strings are defined as the number of indices for which s[i] and t[i] are equal. Note: This means you must swap two characters at different indices. Solution here
Minimum Length Substrings: You are given two strings s and t. You can select any substring of string s and rearrange the characters of the selected substring.
Determine the minimum length of the substring of s such that string t is a substring of the selected substring. Solution here
Recursion
Encrypted Words: You’ve devised a simple encryption method for alphabetic strings that shuffles the characters in such a way that the resulting string is hard to quickly read, but is easy to convert back into the original string.
When you encrypt a string S, you start with an initially-empty resulting string R and append characters to it as follows: Append the middle character of S (if S has even length, then we define the middle character as the left-most of the two central characters) Append the encrypted version of the substring of S that’s to the left of the middle character (if non-empty) Append the encrypted version of the substring of S that’s to the right of the middle character (if non-empty) For example, to encrypt the string “abc”, we first take “b”, and then append the encrypted version of “a” (which is just “a”) and the encrypted version of “c” (which is just “c”) to get “bac”. If we encrypt “abcxcba” we’ll get “xbacbca”. That is, we take “x” and then append the encrypted version “abc” and then append the encrypted version of “cba”.
Slow Sums: Suppose we have a list of N numbers, and repeat the following operation until we’re left with only a single number: Choose any two numbers and replace them with their sum. Moreover, we associate a penalty with each operation equal to the value of the new number, and call the penalty for the entire list as the sum of the penalties of each operation.For example, given the list [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], we could choose 2 and 3 for the first operation, which would transform the list into [1, 5, 4, 5] and incur a penalty of 5. The goal in this problem is to find the worst possible penalty for a given input.
Reverse Operations: You are given a singly-linked list that contains N integers. A subpart of the list is a contiguous set of even elements, bordered either by either end of the list or an odd element. For example, if the list is [1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 16], the subparts of the list are [2, 8] and [12, 16].Then, for each subpart, the order of the elements is reversed. In the example, this would result in the new list, [1, 8, 2, 9, 16, 12].The goal of this question is: given a resulting list, determine the original order of the elements. Solution Here.
Hash Tables
Pair Sums: Given a list of n integers arr[0..(n-1)], determine the number of different pairs of elements within it which sum to k. If an integer appears in the list multiple times, each copy is considered to be different; that is, two pairs are considered different if one pair includes at least one array index which the other doesn’t, even if they include the same values. Solution here.
Note: These exercises assume you have knowledge in coding but not necessarily knowledge of binary trees, sorting algorithms, or related concepts. • Topic 1 | Arrays & Strings • A Very Big Sum • Designer PDF Viewer • Left Rotation
/**
* Your solution in here. Just need to add the number in a variable type long so you
* don't face overflow.
*/
static long aVeryBigSum(int n, long[] ar) {
long sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
sum += ar[i];
}
return sum;
}
/**
* HackerRank provides this code.
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
int n = in.nextInt();
long[] ar = new long[n];
for(int ar_i = 0; ar_i < n; ar_i++){
ar[ar_i] = in.nextLong();
}
long result = aVeryBigSum(n, ar);
System.out.println(result);
}
}
static int[] leftRotation(int[] a, int d) {
// They say in requirements that these inputs should not be considered.
// However, noting that we should prevent against those.
if (d == 0 || a.length == 0) {
return a;
}
int rotation = d % a.length;
if (rotation == 0) return a;
// Please note that there is an implementation, circular arrays that could be considered here,
// but that one has an edge case (Test#1)
// As, we don't need to optimize for memory, let's keep it simple.
int [] b = new int[a.length];
for (int i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
b[i] = a[indexHelper(i + rotation, a.length)];
}
return b;
}
/**
* Takes care of the case where the rotation index. You have to take into account
* how it is rotated towards the left. To compute index of B, we rotate towards the right.
* If we were to do a[i] in the loop, then these method would need to be slightly chnaged
* to compute index of b.
*/
private static int indexHelper(int index, int length) {
if (index >= length) {
return index - length;
} else {
return index;
}
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
int n = in.nextInt();
int d = in.nextInt();
int[] a = new int[n];
for(int a_i = 0; a_i < n; a_i++){
a[a_i] = in.nextInt();
}
int[] result = leftRotation(a, d);
for (int i = 0; i < result.length; i++) {
System.out.print(result[i] + (i != result.length - 1 ? " " : ""));
}
System.out.println("");
in.close();
}
}
Sparse Array in Java
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class Solution {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
final int totalN = Integer.parseInt(scanner.nextLine());
final Map<String, Integer> mapWords = buildCollectionOfStrings(scanner, totalN);
final int numberQueries = Integer.parseInt(scanner.nextLine());
printOcurrenceOfQueries(scanner, numberQueries, mapWords);
}
/**
* This method construcs a map with the collection of Strings and occurrence.
*/
private static Map<String, Integer> buildCollectionOfStrings(Scanner scanner, int n) {
final Map<String, Integer> map = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
final String line = scanner.nextLine();
if (map.containsKey(line)) {
map.put(line, map.get(line) + 1);
} else {
map.put(line, 1);
}
}
return map;
}
private static void printOcurrenceOfQueries(Scanner scanner, int numberQueries, Map<String, Integer> mapWords) {
for (int i = 0; i < numberQueries; i++) {
// for each query, we look for how many times it occurs and we print on screen the value.
final String line = scanner.nextLine();
if (mapWords.containsKey(line)) {
System.out.println(mapWords.get(line));
} else {
System.out.println(0);
}
}
}
}
The interviewer will be thinking about how your skills and experience might help their teams.
Help them understand the value you could bring by focusing on these traits and abilities. • Communication: Are you asking for requirements and clarity when necessary, or are you just diving into the code? Your initial tech screen should be a conversation, so don’t forget to ask questions. • Problem solving: They are evaluating how you comprehend and explain complex ideas. Are you providing the reasoning behind a particular solution? Developing and comparing multiple solutions? Using appropriate data structures? Speaking about space and time complexity?Optimizing your solution? • Coding. Can you convert solutions to executable code? Is the code organized and does it capture the right logical structure? • Verification. Are you considering a reasonable number of test cases or coming up with a good argument for why your code is correct? If your solution has bugs, are you able to walk through your own logic to find them and explain what the code is doing?
– Please review Amazon Leadership Principles, to help you understand Amazon’s culture and assess if it’s the right environment for you (For Amazon) – Review the STAR interview technique (All)
FAANGM Compensation
Legend – Base / Stocks (Total over 4 years) / Sign On
I am not a lawyer, but I believe there is some sort of legal restrictions on what an internship can be (in California, at least). In my previous company, we had discussed cases on whether or not someone who was out of school can be an intern, and we got an unequivocal verdict that you have to be in school, or about to start school (usually college or graduate school, but high school can work too), in order to be considered for an internship.
I suspect the reason for this is to protect a potential intern from exploitation by companies who would offer temporary jobs to people while labeling them as learning opportunities in order to pay less.
Personally, I feel for people like you, in an ideal world you should be allowed to have the same opportunities as the formally schooled people, and occasionally there are. For example, some companies offer residency programs which are a bit similar to internships. In many cases, though, these are designed to help underrepresented groups. Some examples include:
This is a common bug in the thinking of people, doing the wrong thing harder in the hope that it works this time. Asking tough questions is like hitting a key harder when the broken search function in LinkedIn fails. No matter how hard you hit the key, it won’t work.
Given the low quality of the LinkedIn platform from a technical perspective it seems hard to imagine that they hire the best or even the mediocre. But it may be that because their interviews are too tough to hire good programmers.
Just because so few people can get a question right, does not mean it is a good question, merely that it is tough. I am also a professional software developer and know a bunch of algorithms, but also am wholly ignorant of many others. Thus it is easy to ask me (or anyone else) questions they can’t answer. I am (for instance) an expert on sort/merging, and partial text matching, really useful for big data, wholly useless for UX.
So if you ask about an obscure algorithm or brain teaser that is too hard you don’t measure their ability, but their luck in happening to know that algo or having seen the answer to a puzzle. More importantly how likely are they to need it ?
This is a tricky problem for interviewers, if you know that a certain class of algorithms are necessary for a job, then if you’re a competent s/w dev manager then odds are that you’ve already put them in and they just have to integrate or debug them. Ah, so I’ve now given away one of my interview techniques. We both know that debugging is more of our development effort than writing code. Quicksort (for instance) is conceptually quite easy being taught to 16 year old Brits or undergraduate Americans, but it turns out that some implementations can go quadratic in space and/or time complexity and that comparison of floating point numbers is a sometimes thing and of course some idiot may have put = where he should have put == or >= when > is appropriate.
Resolving that is a better test, not complete of course, but better.
For instance I know more about integrating C++ with Excel than 99.9% of programmers. I can ask you why there are a whole bunch of INT 3’s laying around a disassembly of Excel, yes I have disassembled Excel, and yes my team was at one point asked to debug the damned thing for Microsoft. I can ask about LSTRs, and why SafeArrays are in fact really dangerous. I can even ask you how to template them. That’s not easy, trust me on this.
Are you impressed by my knowledge of this ?
I sincerely hope not.
Do you think it would help me build a competent search engine, something that the coders at LinkedIn are simply unable to do ?
No.
I also know a whole bunch of numerical methods for solving PDEs. Do you know what a PDE even is ? This can be really hard as well. Do you care if you can’t do this ? Again not relevant to fixing the formless hell of LI code. fire up the developer mode of your browser and see what it thinks of Linkedin’s HTML, I’ve never seen a debugger actually vomit in my face before.
A good interview is a measure not just of ability but of the precise set of skills you bring to the team. A good interviewer is not looking for the best, but the best fit.
Sadly some interviewers see it as an ego thing that they can ask hard questions. So can I, but it’s not my job. My job is identfying those that can deliver most, hard questions that you can’t answer are far less illuminating that questions you struggle with because I get to see the quality of your thinking in terms of complexity, insight, working with incomplete and misleading information and determination not to give up because it is going badly.
Do you as a candidate ask questions well ? If I say something wrong, do you a) notice, b) have the soft skills to put it to me politely, c) have the courage to do so ?
Courage is an under-rated attribute that superior programmers have and failed projects have too little of.
Yes, some people have too much courage, which is a deeper point, where for many things there is an optimum amount and the right mix for your team at this time. I once had to make real time un-reversible changes to a really important database whilst something very very bad happened on TV news screens above my head. Too much or too little bravery would have had consequences. Most coding ain’t that dramatic, but the superior programmer has judgement, when to try the cool new language/framework feature in production code, when to optimise for speed, or for space and when for never ever crashes even when memory is corrupted by external effects. When does portability matter or not ? Some code will only be used once and we both know some of it will literally never be executed in live, do we obsess about it’s quality in terms of performance and maintainability .
The right answer is it depends, and that is a lot more important to hiring the best than curious problems in number theory or O(N Log(N)) for very specific code paths that rarely execute.
Also programming is a marathon, not a sprint, or perhaps more like a long distance obstacle course, stretches of plodding along with occasional walls. Writing a better search engine than LinkedIn “programmers” manage is a wall, I know this because my (then) 15 year old son took several weeks, at 15, he was only 2 or 3 times better than the best at LinkedIn, but he’s 18 now and as a professional grade programmer, him working for LinkedIn would be like putting the head of the Vulcan Science Academy in among a room of Gwyneth Paltrow clones.
And that ultimately may be the problem.
Good people have more options and if you have a bad recruitment process then they often will reject your offer. We spend more of our lives with the people we work with than sleep with and if at interview management is seen as pompous or arrogant then they won’t get the best people.
There’s now a Careers advice space on Quora, you might find it interesting.
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What are the best alternatives to G-Suite now Google Workspace?
There are several alternatives to G Suite (now known as Google Workspace) that businesses and individuals use for email, document creation, and collaboration. Some popular alternatives include:
Microsoft 365: This suite includes Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as email and calendar through Outlook, and other collaboration tools like Teams.
Zoho Workplace: This suite includes email, document creation and editing, and collaboration tools, and also includes a range of other business applications like CRM and HR software.
Slack: This is a popular communication and collaboration tool that is often used as an alternative to email for teams.
Asana: This is a project management tool that helps teams organize and track their work, and can be used as an alternative to Google Docs for document collaboration.
Notion: This is a productivity and organization tool that allows users to create and share notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
It’s important to consider the specific needs of your business or organization when selecting a productivity suite. It’s also a good idea to try out several different options before making a decision, so that you can find the one that best fits your workflow and communication needs.
Office 365 suite is an alternative, with similar features.For about $79 per year (or $6.99 per month), Office 365 Personal will allow a customer to install and use Microsoft Office on one Windows or Mac PC, plus one tablet. It also includes all of the other benefits of Office 365, including 20 GB of additional OneDrive cloud storage and 60 minutes per month of Skype calls. Office 365 Suite Features and plans. To get a professional email with Office 365, you need to get your domain name from a domain provider like DjamgaWeb or Godaddy.
LibreOpenOffice:
LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite, a project of The Document Foundation. LibreOffice suite comprises programs for word processing, the creation and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 110 languages.
Apache Open Office:
is an open-source office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony.[5] It is a close cousin of LibreOffice and NeoOffice.
It contains a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation application (Impress), a drawing application (Draw), a formula editor (Math), and a database management application (Base).
I currently use both G suite and Office 365 and from my personal experience G suite is far superior in design, simplicity and usability.
Office 365 interface is heavy and confusing and opens several tabs on the browser.
