Debunking the Google Interview Myth
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Debunking the Google Interview Myth
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Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#2Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#3Found this incredibly interesting: xx let’s look at the very widely circulated “15 Google Interview Questions that will make you feel stupid” list. You want to believe these are real questions, given that Business Insider feels like such a reputable source. Except that they didn’t get this list from a direct source. They borrowed their questions from some blogger (I won’t link back here) who was posting fake questions. Now, I don’t know that said blogger was intentionally lying – he probably borrowed them from someone else. Whatever the original source is, these questions are fake. Fake fake fake. xx
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#4Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
Every interview I've gone through that lasted more than about fifteen minutes involved writing out code.
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#5This comment does a better job of explaining things than the article i think:
http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-goog...
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#6From anecdotal but first-hand experience (went through a couple of interview rounds), Google interviewers indeed don't ask the questions on that list. But the questions they do ask are hard and often academic - as in, you have likely never run into them in a real-world scenario before and you likely never will.
At first I was like 'wow, Google must be populated with demi-gods'. Then I spoke to some Googlers off the record and it turns out that those interview questions have little to do with the reality within Google.
Not that Google isn't a company lousy with smart people. They are.
And it's not that Google doesn't work on hard problems. They do.
It's just that the interviews are an extremely efficient dud filter, probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all).
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#7Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
I know this attitude won't win very many friends, but I wouldn't accept a position where I wasn't asked to write code during the interview.
I'm going to be writing code for money and they don't want me to prove that I can before hand? That's like hiring a "farmer" from the inner-city.
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#8Google's online application asks for your SAT scores. That always struck me as odd.
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#9Yeah, the Business Insider questions were certainly not real. I actually got several questions from family members and friends about it after that article ran. The reality is at once much more pedestrian and more interesting (if you consider algorithm or system design questions more interesting than brain teasers like I do).
Re: Debunking the Google Interview Myth
#10For a first round phone interview for an engineering internship at Google, I was asked to solve a reasonably challenging question (I don't want to give it away, but it was algorithmic in nature and involved no code). When I got it right, the interviewer asked me to write an inductive proof of my solution and email it to him.
I like doing stuff like that so I wasn't upset in the least, but I can understand why many people would find that scary and I certainly think Google's interview process is more extreme than others'. I've interviewed successfully with Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and Microsoft (among others) so that's to whom I'm comparing them.