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Google: My interview experience

gilvegliach.it

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Re: Google: My interview experience

#21

Post by sulam »

gil_vegliach wrote: post #17
powera wrote: post #12

For those of you not familiar with what a "2.7" means on the Google hiring scale, the rough scale is: 1 - I will resign if Google hires this person. 2 - I don't think this person should be hired, but I could be convinced otherwise. 3 - I think this person should be hired, but I could be convinced otherwise. 4 - This person should definitely be hired. (interviewers can use decimal scores)

Right, with 4 being basically impossible to get, and scores being normalized wrt the history of the interviewer.

I haven't worked at Google, but I have interviewed with and reviewed feedback from Xooglers, and 4's are not impossible -- but they are rare and you have to essentially be smarter than your interviewer about the particular problem to get one. This can be pretty hard, since many interviewers pick problems that they are extremely familiar with.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#22

Post by akinalci »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #10
akhilcacharya wrote: post #7

I'm becoming convinced that the only way to get into Google is to get in as an intern or new grad if OP studied for 6 months and still didn't get an offer. It doesn't seem that way at other top companies like FB, Amazon and MS from the people I've talked to.

Meh, just try again in a year. High variance.

"Just try again in a year" is a good option when you're young. But it gets less attractive as you get older, especially if it means abandoning an interesting project or senior role you accepted after "Company X" rejected you. There are too many good opportunities out there to get hung up on any one company.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#23

Post by geggam »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #7

I'm becoming convinced that the only way to get into Google is to get in as an intern or new grad if OP studied for 6 months and still didn't get an offer. It doesn't seem that way at other top companies like FB, Amazon and MS from the people I've talked to.

Think of working with people who are of the opinion this sort of hiring process is good. It attracts a certain type of personality.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#24

Post by hackbinary »

c0achmcguirk wrote: post #2

I didn't see you mention this, but the point of the coding interview is not to see how optimal your solution is (although it helps). It's also to see if you're a good person to work with. If you nail the problem right away but you don't talk it through with the interviewer you'll be scored lower. They want to see if you'd be a person they'd like to work with on the team, not the quiet person that never collaborates.

I concur with this. You might be best coder/analyst/techie in the universe, but it is impossible to work with you, then you are useless.

Your interface with the machine is only a part of the equation, and your interface with the team is so important.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#25

Post by trimbo »

gil_vegliach wrote: post #9
ender7 wrote: post #5

As always, remember that even technical interviews like this one have an incredible amount of random chance built into the hiring process. This is especially true at a big company like Google (where I work and do interviews). Do they happen to have positions open right now? Did you happen to get asked questions that clicked with you? Was the hiring committee feeling grouchy that day? Did you get an especially harsh i…

I agree with the noise of the process. Actually, the whole experience was a good one for me, maybe I didn't express it in the post? Anyway, I got a job in Amazon UK at the end, so not too bad.

"not too bad"? Understatement of the year! ;) Congratulations on the job.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#26

Post by duiker101 »

c0achmcguirk wrote: post #2

I didn't see you mention this, but the point of the coding interview is not to see how optimal your solution is (although it helps). It's also to see if you're a good person to work with. If you nail the problem right away but you don't talk it through with the interviewer you'll be scored lower. They want to see if you'd be a person they'd like to work with on the team, not the quiet person that never collaborates.

The point of the coding interview is whatever the interviewer thinks it is. Sure, it SHOULD be to see if you are a good person to work with, but that's not always the case, if the interviewer thinks that you should produce a working and optimal solution(for whatever reason), that's what you will be judge on. Unfortunately not everyone uses the tools at their disposal in the best way. And it might not even be a case of intentionally doing it wrong, it might be that the interviewer doesn't know any better. If you take an experienced dev and you put him to make interviews he will not always know the best practices to interview someone.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#27

Post by employee8000 »

At google, I was given some code that manipulated some bits and the interviewer, in inexplicably terrible English, kept asking me what the purpose of this code was for. He has a very thick Eastern European accent which was not understandable and I don't know how he was able to get into interviews. I could tell it was doing some sort of overflow detection but other than that I had no idea. I hadn't done anything with bits since college. He kept insisting that I keep trying to understand what the code was doing even though it was obvious I had no idea. After a 40 min, excruciatingly awkward conversation we moved onto his next question which I also couldn't understand due to his terrible English. What a complete waste of time.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#28

Post by eatsleepmonad »

I had a similar experience my first time, but I applied again a year later and passed. I did study algorithms (mostly DP and graph stuff) via HackerRank for two weeks before each onsite, but I never did fully succeed with any of the algorithms questions.

The second time, I think I was just lucky with questions I liked. I don't think my programming ability changed drastically in the year between.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#29

Post by petters »

employee8000 wrote: post #27

At google, I was given some code that manipulated some bits and the interviewer, in inexplicably terrible English, kept asking me what the purpose of this code was for. He has a very thick Eastern European accent which was not understandable and I don't know how he was able to get into interviews. I could tell it was doing some sort of overflow detection but other than that I had no idea. I hadn't done anything with…

I'm sorry that this happened to you.

But don't you think you could have prepared better? Understanding code others have written is important and in my opinion asking about bits is not unreasonable.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#30

Post by Terr_ »

yoandy wrote: post #4

At least they give you some feedback in the end. I had the experience to be rejected after an onsite interview at Amazon, and they did not take the time to give a word of feedback, after I even asked for it. I see the past interviews were of great help to you to finally get the position at Amazon. I am looking forward to read your third post. Complimenti collega!

I never got any feedback from a Google onsite, is that new?
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