Silicon Valley Code Camp : October 1 & 2, 2016

Gayle McDowell

CareerCup
About Gayle

Gayle Laakmann McDowell is the founder and CEO of CareerCup.com and the author of three books:

  • Cracking the Coding Interview (Amazon.com's #1 best-selling interview book)
  • Cracking the PM Interview (product manager)
  • Cracking the Tech Career
    She is an interview consultant, helping companies improve their interview process and coaching startups through acquisitions/acqui-hires. She is also an interview prep instructor, hired by Facebook to teach an interview prep class for external software developer candidates.

Gayle has worked as a Software Engineer for Google, Microsoft and Apple. She holds a BSE and MSE from UPenn in Computer Science, and an MBA from the Wharton School.

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Speaking Sessions

  • Be a Better Interviewer: How to Interview Like Google (or not)-But Better!

    Google is (in)famous for its tough algorithm questions, and then making candidates code on a whiteboard. Other companies are partial to behavioral questions, factual/knowledge questions, and big lofty architecture and design questions. We’ll discuss the different styles of technical and behavioral interviews for software developers. What’s right for your company? And how do you help candidates do their very best (and why is this so important)? How to keep your standards reasonable, but high and consistent? How do you limit your false negatives and false positives? Hiring managers and recruiters will learn how to create a better process. Interviewers will learn how to select and ask better questions. And candidates will get to explore what happens on the other side of the hiring table. This session will cover behavioral questions, coding questions, algorithm questions, knowledge questions, design questions, and code assessment/test tools.

  • Cracking the Coding Interview

    Programming interviews are a different breed from other interviews and, as such, require specialized skills and techniques. This talk will teach you how to prepare for coding interviews, what top companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft really look for, and how to tackle the toughest programming and algorithm problems. This is not a fluffy be-your-best talk; it is deeply technical and will discuss specific algorithm and data structure topics.