Since publishing ABC: Always Be Coding - How to Land an Engineering Job, many have asked how I got an engineering job at Google without a college degree. Here’s my story, your mileage may vary.
I had every intention of going to college. My college of choice was UCLA. Unfortunately, I had an embarrassingly low high school GPA (2.45) and so didn’t exactly have my pick of the university litter. Instead, I took computer science classes at Purdue Calumet, a satellite of Purdue University, with the intention of eventually transferring, or finding another way out. Nearly two semesters in, the latter happened in the form of an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Step #1: Fake it ‘til you make it. While in college, I worked for a small company in Griffith, Indiana building websites for local businesses at $12/hour. The job wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I imagined my future career, but it could have been worse.
I kept my head down, under-promised and over-delivered on several projects. This built a lot of credit. And the company made a hefty margin off of my hourly rate. Meanwhile, I was trying to create a game in my spare time, which I didn’t have much of. So, I went for a hail mary and asked management to give me three months to build my game on their dime and sell it online. I drew up fancy spreadsheets and colorful graphs showing them how the shareware model worked and how they were sure to turn a profit. I had little idea what I was doing yet somehow they bought into it, perhaps it was the pretty colors.
Two months into development, I released a demo online. A fledgling startup in California called CodeFire took notice as they were essentially making the same damn game, a top-down space shooter, similar to SubSpace except in 3D. Unfortunately, they communicated this to me in the form of a cease-and-desist letter. There was only one response I could give, “Sure, I’ll stop — if you hire me to work on yours instead.” They replied with an offer. And so I picked up and went.
Note: The company retained the rights to the original game. I gave three weeks notice and parted on good terms.
Step #2: Befriend a master. This is the probably one of the most important things you can do. Find someone that is a master at your craft, make them your mentor, and never stop learning. While working at Double Helix that master was Nathan Hunt, one of the smartest and most humble guys I had ever met. And he was extremely patient with all of my questions no matter how elementary. I must have walked into his office thousands of times to ask random questions like, “how can I smoothly interpolate from one rotation matrix to another?” or “how should I implement moving capsule-to-cylinder collision detection?” Years later, he would join Google one month after me.
Each of my mentors changed something about the way I approached problems or viewed the world. And there are only a small handful.
Step #3: Fill in the gaps. Because I didn’t have a formal CS degree, I knew I lacked a lot of fundamental knowledge. For example, I implemented a physics engine but never solved a dynamic programming problem. To fill these gaps, I implemented nearly all of the most common data structures and algorithms that I heard or read about. The information you need is out there in spades, but there’s a chasm between knowinghow something works by observing it, and knowing why something works by building it.
Over time, do the following:
- Master at least one of C, C++, Objective-C, Java, PHP, Python or Ruby. Become fluent in at least one of the other languages and become familiar with Scala, Haskell or Lisp.
- Learn your data structures. Implement most of them. Understand their time complexities.
- Solve programming problems. Read this and solve many of these.
- Build your portfolio of (un)finished projects (e.g., programming frameworks, mobile or web apps, small games, and so on).
Step #4: Find confidence. Six years after leaving Indiana, I had shipped about six games across multiple platforms. I was getting bored and needed a new challenge. I applied to Google and felt that if I were hired, I’d be a “real engineer,” something I struggled with since I didn’t have that coveted piece of paper. But, I never heard back and I wasn’t surprised.
One year later, I resubmitted my resume. Except this time I took the “Education” section out of it altogether. Ironically, a recruiter called me and scheduled a technical phone-screen interview. I asked if we could schedule it for two weeks later and she agreed. I needed that time. I used it to cram as many algorithms and data structures into my head as humanly possible. I coded 12-14 hours a day and solved hundreds of problems. I was literally obsessed and wouldn’t stop until my fear of the Google interview turned into confidence and excitement.
I remember every single one of my interviews at Google and had a blast with all of them. The interviewers were fun to talk to, and I believe they could see that I was excited to be there and welcomed their problems.
Some of the problems given to me were:
1) Given a set of 2-dimensional points, compute a skyline. This was easy. I drew upon a common data structure known as a max heap. There are several solutions, here is a good one.
2) Design Microsoft Paint. This was by far the most fun problem. I started by drawing up interfaces and a class diagram. I made mention of a Paint Bucket and the interviewer asked me to implement it. Luckily, I knew how to implement an iterative, breadth-first traversal with my eyes closed thanks to TopCoder.
3) Describe your software virtues. This was an “open-ended” discussion interview. I talked about the types of testing and when they are valuable (e.g., unit, integration, acceptance). I talked about consistent style for maintainability of code. And so on. Things you would find in books like Code Complete or Effective Java.
I was genuinely enjoying each round of interviews and solving the problems thrown at me. Had I not prepared the way I did, I am certain things would be very different. After the interviews, I had a very good feeling. But, I had heard even if the hiring committees agreed to move forward with an offer, that Larry himself would have to sign off on it. I feared that as soon as he saw my lack of education, I was toast.
But that didn’t happen, and one day while I was eating sushi for lunch in Santa Clara, I got the call and enthusiastically accepted the offer. On that day, I knew for certain that I wasn’t ever going back to school.
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
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After an amazing five years of learning and growing as an engineer, I no longer work at Google.