I think this is very clever. Assuming this is something to do with recruitment (as the other comments suggest), then of course I find it intensely irritating and it confirms my pre-existing notion that I would never want to work for a company like Google. But, on the other hand, the people who devised this puzzle are clearly people who would be enticed by a puzzle like it, and would therefore think it was a good way to find like-minded people - and they are probably correct in that assumption.
Why do you find it intensely irritating? Google's a massive company that employees all sorts of different professions and types of people. This puzzle isn't targeting you, seems successful to me.
Well, that's rather my point - the kind of people who would find it irritating are almost certainly not the kind of people they would be targeting with such a puzzle anyway.
Why do I find it irritating? Because it seems both elitist and adolescent, in a child-like "secret society" sort of way.
I would agree, if this was the only method of getting job offers from Google. But since the "traditional" methods via the Careers page, recruiters, etc, are all still perfectly available, this doesn't bother me at all.
That pretty much sums up the people I have met that work in Google engineering. I have only met a few at conferences, but thanks for putting words to the initial feelings I got from them all.
Why is this irritating? Google won't hire you iff you solve the puzzle, this is nothing more than a very popular way for institutions to generate free PR.
Disclaimer: my opinions are my own and not representing those of my employer or co-workers. I have no direct relationship to this project and haven't looked it up internally.
Has it occurred to any of you that we might do these things for sheer fun, because doing that is not only allowed but celebrated?
Once again a reminder that Google is, er, a company, whose aim is to, er, make money.
I'm not signed in to Google as a matter of course, and I block their ads, so I provide them very little value. As a result, I won't be able to use "foobar", whatever the hell it is.
Seems fair. Isn't really that irritating, is it? :-)
What about people that uses Google Apps accounts? Are they subject to this (corporate)? What about people just use those accounts personally for their own domain? Are they out?
The people making the big picture decisions are by far and large not the people who would be enticed by such a puzzle. Hence the dissonance you're observing. (applies to most large companies)
I've done a few exercises in the site. While recruitment seems most likely, I haven't seen anything that explicitly mentions applying to work at Google or anything like that. There are coding challenges and a gamified leveling system based on how many coding challenges you complete within the time limit, but no mention of applications.
Google is self-selecting to employ those people who are fine with the idea of Google recording everything they do. This does not bode well for the rest of us.
You’d be amazed by the amount of doublethink that even very smart people are capable of, and the extreme and convoluted arguments they give for their position.
Yeah, just look at everyone who works for Google. The company is fundamentally about centralizing all of the information in the world. By working for them you support that goal and everything it implies.
<- Author of that thread.
The site is an interactive shell with progressively harder (but fun) coding challenges to complete. It's made to look like a *nix shell and has the basic commands built-in.
If I remember, I was blanking on the exact Python lambda syntax, so I Google'd "python lambda". I bet it had something to do with other searches I'd done in that session as well though, and I don't remember what they are.
Very interesting but I wonder what the legal implications are. Some companies might file a lawsuit claiming that Google gains an unfair advantage if they continue to seek potential employees this way. I'm not saying I agree with this view but Google does have a HUGE potential in matching employees with their potential employers and might just turn the recruitment services industry on its head.
Is there a law which specifies which advantage is fair and what is not?
Why should any company be forbidden from utilizing assets their employees legally developed, especially when they want to use that asset in pursuit of a key objective ("hire more smart people")? Should a large newspaper be forbidden from advertising their openings in the printed newspaper itself just because other newspapers failed to acquire comparable audience?
Lawsuits are sometimes filed for competitive rather than legal reasons. I just feel like Google could cause a huge disruption for traditional employment agencies. I mean if this helps in finding future Google employees then this could work for almost any tech company. Imagine finding an employee for a very specific machine learning project: You could just filter all persons which searched for a certain paper. That also puts Google+ into perspective - you get a better chance at actually identifying that person.
The legal question is if there is a disparate impact.
On a personal level, I really don't like "we hire Python devs if you search on Google for python topics," but that's separate from saying there is a legal challenge here.
I had the "You speak our language..." message pop up while searching for some Python info and send me to Foobar a few days ago. So far I've just done one of the challenges. I'm sure it's a recruiting thing, but they seem like fun puzzles and it's obviously not the only way to get a job with Google, so good for them for building something fun.
i searched "python lambda" and it gave me the challenge. :) I was also randomly searching things like "NLP Python" and stuff earlier, to try and trigger it. I'm not a python programmer, so I don't have much related to this in my overall search history.
Taking a look at the CSS code included on the page I see things related to "terminal-output" and "editor". This corresponds with what the poster says the page does. There seem to be "question_options" also; likely some sort of quiz. Also see reference to a countdown timer of some sort.
Note also that the application bounces you to /_ah/logout on deny. That is an admin URL within Google App Engine applications. I figure everything on "withgoogle.com" is hosted by GAE?
I checked waybackmachine for mirrors of older versions of the site, perhaps when it had more clues. Nothing. I did direct it to archive foobar.withgoogle.com though, since they did not yet have it cached.
Funny. Two years ago I had an on-site interview with Google. My recruiter understood that I was looking for a "data science" type position, and although I have Java and C experience, I preferred Python. He told me to expect interviewing in Python.
When I arrived, not a single one of the 5 technical interviewers I dealt with used Python and seemed to think I was crazy to be interviewing with Python. Needless to say, I did not receive an offer.
I think google should make a system where you can play these puzzles by simply asking to and then agreeing not to share your solutions with anyone.
That way, any hacker news people who would like to do so can.
Sure people could enable google search history and google random python stuff, but any privacy minded hackers will have that disabled permanently ( as I do ). I'd like to note that I actually googled python lambda's myself recently, attempting to ascertain whether "lambda:0" is really the shortest way to make an empty object in python...
The fact that google themselves hasn't commented on this hacker news thread itself is somewhat disappointing to me.
Specifically I was in need of making an "object" that could have attributes set on it. You can either use lambda:anything_syntax_ok or an empty class. The empty class is much bigger. Lambda is an ugly hack but it works...
I'm guessing in order to successfully log-in, you've to trigger yourself as someone who's eligible? Otherwise, it looks like everyone else is wondering how to make it work.
That sounds right, which implies that you have to be logged in to a google account and searching interesting terms to them. They'll redirect you to that and you can carry on.
I Google Python-related things all the time from work, including yesterday and today, but I prefer not to login to any of my Google accounts when doing so. I've not yet received any kind of popup or redirection to foobar.
> I Google Python-related things all the time from work, including yesterday and today, but I prefer not to login to any of my Google accounts when doing so.
Same thing here... I'm guessing that Google figures anyone cynical enough not to trust Google implicitly is a less desirable potential hire.
hmmm well I have a Python app running on GAE and I dont think I have been allowed access. With all the languages I work in they must be seeking something very specific.
I have search history disabled in my Google account settings. I guess that probably disables the login for me as well. I search for Python related stuff dozens of times a day.
Based on comments above, I:
1) Turned on google search history
2) searched for 'python lambda syntax' and 'mutex lock'
3) got the invite that opened the foo.bar UI
You get a terminal, from the terminal you request coding challenges. They have a minimal IDE to code in. Choice of language is Java or python. Only tried one challenge. YMMV
I got the invite a couple days ago but didn't "play" because I don't have the time or inclination, but I have to say the transition revealing the invite was pretty cool. Although I'm an app developer, based on my search history, I would say getting the invite is not based on how much or how often you search coding-related terms or your history of searching, but how nerdy your terms are, which alone is enough to overcome the barrier of entry (like the people here who triggered the invite searching for "python lambda" and "mutex lock"). So, after you get the invite and accept it, then you can log in on Foobar. The reason the HN link is so confusing is because the it goes to the Foobar login page, which assumes you already got the invite.
Though there is definitely some semblance of it being a game, the iframe contains a reference to CSS file called rhgame.css.
There doesn't seem to be any avenue to log yourself in, by the looks of it they first send people to a registration URL of some description (probably a redirect from a specific set of search terms or something similar).
I am not really one for doing the kinds of puzzles where you just shoot in the dark for a while.. if there were actually clues/riddles hidden in the HTML/JS/CSS or similar then I would have alot more fun with it.
The puzzle is not figuring out how to log in. You get an invite, then you get the challenges: http://i.imgur.com/xtCdf94.png
They are story problems. The first one is cycle detection for a singly-linked list. After solving that, you can request another (time remaining is reset). In the math category, its a subset sum problem: http://pastebin.com/SEZXhKHY
My guess is that they have set up some pattern matching or keyword matching against search queries for some particular programming questions related to whatever they are hiring for. NLP, maybe?
I got an invitation a couple days ago when I searched "mutex lock". Not sure whether search history makes a difference, but it worked for the gf too a couple minutes later: http://i.imgur.com/l4rGps5.png
Reminds me of HackThisSite & notpron. I have many happy memories of my peers sweating at the thought of not solving those puzzles. +1 to Google HR department, they know what they're doing.
It'd be amusing if it was a social experiment to see how many devs/wannabe devs frantically searched for Python topics after this foobar site was discovered. Like a contrast MRI to illuminate the people who wanted a job at Google.
Have you not heard the stories? Captain Barbossa and his crew of miscreants sail from the dreaded Isla de Muerta. It's an island that cannot be found except by those who already know where it is. http://pirates.wikia.com/wiki/Isla_de_Muerta
Isla Muerta is a piece of continental earth which has been slowly drifting away from the continent for generations. The guide's ancestry has lived there since before the island was an island.
How did his parents get to the island? Were they born there as well? If so, how did the first settler found it? Or is this island the origin of life on Earth?
With a little help from, umm, Dr. Google, seems that a song called "Been Here Before" by Jeremy Engik was included as an MP3 in winamp. Random coincidence? Evil plot? Artful noodling? You decide. Here's the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQQydvAjVYI.
I got in to foobar a few days ago off of a search where the invitation window came up. It's a terminal interface were you can solve some challenges in python or java. I solved the first one right away, but then didn't have time to keep going until today. I can still log in, but it says my invitation has expired and I need to continue searching.
If it is, then it isn't a very well designed experiment because Google is a reputable and trusted (?) entity, so it isn't much of a leap to give access (especially when one already has gmai, gcal, etc. running in other tabs).
I'll go with this theory as well. Anyone have google glass and an augmented reality app from google? That login logo seems like an AR trigger waiting for someone to look at it the right way.
I believe they track our search results and they check if some keywords are there.. I just made a crawler (again) to get some Python related sentences from the web and automatically append them to the search query with the ei=XKZAJDKLJ code... Let's see if that makes sense....
You're assuming that's the only thing it will ever do. Just because you saw that particular code doesn't mean that's the same code served for every possible user.
It's strange that the <span> in the login object is never used. Also that the handleAuth function uses the existence of 'logoutUrl' to decide wether it should refresh or redirect, but uses it for nothing else.
I searched for "foobar login" in the search box and the first result was login to Hackerrank.com for Foobar contest. But it says the contest has ended.
When you click the login button, the following function is called:
launchPopup=function(){
window.open("/login/","AppLogin","resizable,scrollbars,status,width=600,height=400")}
Heh, I see that all the time! Oddly, this time not so much, but I permit cookies from *.google.com (perhaps you don't). But the "withgoogle.com" domain causes a redirect loop in the login popup…
I believe the point of appending them to the name is a kind of versioning: one'd want to be able to change these files and cause everyone to drop their cached version. This way when one changes a file, the filename changes too (most likely), so the cached old version will not be used.
Given that it's Veteran day, and the term "foobar" is thought to be borrowed from military term "FUBAR," I am guessing that it is Google's attempt to recruit Tech-savvy Veterans.
In the article you linked to, there is even a short discussion of the possible connection between "foo bar" and FUBAR. If your comment was meant as a rebuttal, it failed.
I'm not trolling when I say this, nor am I some sort of hater...
But, isn't Google the same company that we're always reading about, the one shaping up to be one of the most evil entities humanity has ever seen? After all, they pretend to protect net neutrality until it's their turn to play ball. They pretend to be pro-freedom, anti-big-brother (maybe you should read a bit about what Julian Assange has to say about Larry Page and Google in general, in case you missed all that), and anything else that will help them gain traction in the minds of the public, especially the techy youth.
They always just want to help, don't they. They're so thoughtful... Now, Google wants to put tiny electronics in our blood... what's next?
My point is, why would anyone want to support such a company? I suppose humanity had supported many bad things. Maybe my convictions don't match up well with the rest of the US anymore.
