Via a riveting thread on Twitter, Mekka Okereke discusses getting hired at a company like Google. The hiring rate, apparently, for Stanford grads two years ago was much higher than for some other colleges and universities.

I asked the Google SWE:

👨🏿: Did you know that there is literally a class in Stanford’s CS curriculum, that is basically “How to pass Google’s Interview?”

👨🏼: Wait… what?! Really?

👨🏿: Yep! They spend the semester practicing.

👨🏿: Stanford students also have ready access to Googlers for doing mock interviews. Ready access to SV tech workers also humanizes these mythical Google and Amazon engineers, into “kids I took classes with” or “my research teammate.”

👨🏼: That all makes sense…

Here’s the course details: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/ 

Of course Stanford’s course summary does not mention any company by name:

This course will prepare students to interview for software engineering and related internships and full-time positions in industry. Drawing on multiple sources of actual interview questions, students will learn key problem-solving strategies specific to the technical/coding interview. Students will be encouraged to synthesize information they have learned across different courses in the major. Emphasis will be on the oral and combination written-oral modes of communication common in coding interviews, but which are an unfamiliar settings for problem solving for many students.

So what did Mekka and colleagues do?