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Google: My interview experience

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Re: Google: My interview experience

#111

Post by thesmallestcat »

EmployedRussian wrote: post #108
thesmallestcat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work for Google? I hate that I have to ask this, but Googlers are known to come out to defend their employer on HN, for better or worse.

> Do you work for Google? I do. I've also done 200+ interviews. > Googlers are known to come out to defend their employer on HN Well, sure. It's not because Google tells us to defend it though, but rather to state the facts as we see them.

On the other hand, I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company. Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk. Google's certainly not alone in having clauses like that, but the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf. So that's where my cynicism comes from.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#112

Post by leothekim »

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…

> There's a decent amount that you can do to prepare for one of these things, but there's also an incredible amount you don't have control over.

This is where I call bullshit. This person prepared for six months. You can't tell someone to not take something personally if he or she took six months of their life to study up, only to hit a dead end because your company didn't find it within themselves to take control of the things they could have.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#114

Post by tertius »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #110
tertius wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what he was trying to say is that there is a large factor of chance involved with interviews. Therefore it should not be a signal. Not getting a job because of an interview does not mean that you are not a qualified engineer. It may mean that though. But it's not as if it's a 100m sprint where you can very easily measure results between Olympian and couch potato. > https://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-…

There is a large factor of chance if you're a marginal candidate. But if you're very bad, there's no chance, and if you're very good, there's a very high chance.

Good at interviews? Then yes...

Re: Google: My interview experience

#115

Post by EmployedRussian »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #111
EmployedRussian wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you work for Google? I do. I've also done 200+ interviews. > Googlers are known to come out to defend their employer on HN Well, sure. It's not because Google tells us to defend it though, but rather to state the facts as we see them.

On the other hand, I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company. Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk. Google's certainly not alone in having clauses like that, but the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf. So that's where my cynicism comes from.

> I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company.

You understand this based on what?

Out of curiosity, I just went through my employment agreement, and did not find any such clauses.

> Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk.

Or due to the fact that they rarely happen (I am not disputing that they do sometimes happen).

> the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf.

Like I said earlier, since you are dead set to never apply, you'll never find out what (if anything) you've missed.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#116

Post by EmployedRussian »

steelframe wrote: post #106
EmployedRussian wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no such incentives. When writing feedback, you simply look back at 20 other interviews where you asked the same question, and write "candidate X's performance on this question was was in {top,bottom} {5,25,50}% of ... at this level". You also have no idea how other interviewers will score, and if your score is 1.5 when everyone else's is a 3.9, it's likely that the HC will ignore you. The HCs do see multipl…

My hires are uniformly distributed across the score spectrum. Not sure how the HCs "adjust" me. I have gotten props for the quality of my written feedback though.

It doesn't matter how your candidates are distributed across the spectrum (and I do hope that your hires are not uniformly distributed ;-)

What matters is how your scores compare to other interviewers scores on the given slate.

> Not sure how the HCs "adjust" me.

Maybe they don't. Maybe you are the most precise and best-calibrated interviewer on every slate, and never make a bad call. Good for you ;-)

Re: Google: My interview experience

#117

Post by thesmallestcat »

EmployedRussian wrote: post #115
thesmallestcat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company. Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk. Google's certainly not alone in having clauses like that, but the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf. So that's where my cynicism comes from.

> I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company. You understand this based on what? Out of curiosity, I just went through my employment agreement, and did not find any such clauses. > Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk. Or due to the fact that they rarely happen (I am not disputing that they do sometimes happen). > the volume of Googl…

Seriously? Maybe you're an exception, but it's not like a search for "google employee nda" returns nothing. It's been discussed on HN as well.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#118

Post by gibsjose »

chronic910 wrote: post #82
noonespecial wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a decent amount that you can do to prepare for one of these things, but there's also an incredible amount you don't have control over. This is super important. Don't take it personally at all. They're using the randomness as a flow control. They are always attracting more talent than they actually need purposely to keep the reservoir full and just running the extra through the spill gates. Just taking a rid…

> If you don't get the job, it's not a signal regarding your quality as an engineer and you shouldn't interpret it as such (however tempting it may be to do so). Of course "not getting a job" is a "signal regarding your quality as an engineer". We need to keep this toxic mindset out of tech and silicon valley. The idea that everyone is smart, special, and deserves a job at Google, is completely false. There are peopl…

I was rejected from Google when I first graduated from college. Now I work at NASA and I'm very thankful I didn't get that job.

Saying that the hiring process is flawed isn't the same thing as saying everyone is special and deserves a job there.

From my anecdotal experience, I felt that they focus too much on algorithms and give the same interview to every candidate regardless of their experience or desired job. I made it very clear I wanted to work in embedded systems and write code for microcontrollers and they asked me questions about graph theory. Algorithms are not everything, especially for a company with such diversified technology opportunities. If I'm working on search, then sure. But embedded software? Can't they take the time to focus the interview even the slightest bit?

Not a big deal though. I know they have an endless supply of candidates and thankfully we as software engineers have a pretty good selection of places to work.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#119

Post by joshvm »

Terr_ wrote: post #56
ma2rten wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should never ever happen. How long ago was this? I work at Google. I can try to follow up for you.

If you mean communication over the process, don't worry, I got the "regretfully decline to proceed"-type phone call afterwards. What I meant is that I can't recall any feedback like "personable, but algorithms needs work" or "code too messy" or "couldn't answer domain questions" etc. Just a general "sorry, please try again later." To be fair, this was a verbal conversation from 7 months ago, so it may be there was so…

I did get (prompt) feedback. I got an initial email with the rejection, and my recruiter scheduled a follow up call.

I wasn't given anything specific, but I was given fairly strong hints like "I think you know that the 3rd and 5th interviews were your best". I was told that they thought my communication was clear, and that while they didn't have any issues with my code, I could have been faster and a bit more fluent converting my solutions into code.

Probably boils down to what your recruiter is willing to give you, and how much you can correlate what they say to your interviews.

All in all a pleasant experience, though the luck of the draw part became very obvious. Were I to go for it again, I know exactly how I'd prepare for it. The key (in my experience) is to be able to hammer out that first coding problem in under 25 minutes. If you get to the 'second stage' where you're chatting to your interviewer and trying some additional toy problems, you're doing well.

Re: Google: My interview experience

#120

Post by bit_logic »

It seems many acknowledge that the Google process (and other similar ones) is very flawed with a high false negative rate, but it's considered ok because there's a flood of talent always applying to Google.

Maybe this used to be true, but I don't think it's true anymore. It's very likely still true in the fresh graduate to early 20's age range of candidates. But at this point, senior engineers know what this process is about. And I think many are deciding to just avoid this process since it's very biased against senior engineers (who are rusty on DS and algorithms and don't have time to study it like a second job). So the flood of senior talent is probably less now than it used to be. But Google doesn't care. The main reason is, success hides all failures. They're still generating billions in revenue every quarter. Until those numbers change, no one is going to care about fixing a broken process like this.

Next time I look for a new job, I'm going to start with this list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards and give priority to companies that don't have this type of process. I hope more companies recognize that they can get a big competitive advantage for senior engineering talent by not copying the Google process.

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