Google FooBar

June 6th, 2020

There I was, studying for and completing my Metis program pre-requisite materials to be completed before the program begins later this month, when an innocent enough Google search to try to get a more in-depth understanding of list comprehensions triggered a Google browser easter egg I’d never heard of before — Google foo.bar. The usual page of search results tilted forward into the screen, revealing an enticing and mysterious invitation… of course I accepted, dead curious as I was. I’m loaded into a shell environment and given a sci-fi themed prompt asking for my help in completing a challenge, should I accept. At this point, not knowing anything about this, I go ahead and Google what this easter egg might be — and lo and behold its a quite reputable back-door invitation into interviewing to work at Google itself! Apparently, since of course they have your entire search history, they extend the invitation when your searches seem indicate proficiency or literacy in the types of skills they’re looking to hire for, and gets ‘triggered’ by certain search terms like my looking for list comprehension information.

There are 5 levels to the challenges, and I’ve just spent the last day completing the first. It involved prime numbers and — go figure — list comprehension (optionally, of course — it could surely have been completed with nested for loops and in fact that was my first approach as proof of concept). It was so fun!! Not terribly challenging but with several steps to work and think through. It served as a really nice refresher on math and number theory, showed me the advantages (processing power and runtime) of list comprehensions over for-loops in a really tangible way, and allowed me the chance to take a highly hands-on approach to more difficult programming and apply the concepts I’ve been learning to what feels more like the real world. At the very least it’s been a huge motivator! More updates to come…