161–170 of 422 posts
I love this, it sounds like something the judges in The Trial would do
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No, it really isn't: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
Ok let's say you make $300k/yr at a FAANG. Lose 40% to taxes and you're looking at $180k/yr. Living in SV your expenses will roughly be at least $45k/yr. So you save $135k/yr (180 - 45). That's great, but a far cry from being a millionaire in just a few years. Of course as you get promoted your comp increases, hitting $500k gross at L5, but that takes more than a couple years to achieve.
Also, stock appreciation. A $500k grant last year is worth $640k this year.
I was contacted by a Google recruiter a bit more than a year ago, as I was starting to look for a new job.
First had a phone call with an HR, which explained the whole process and asked me to grade myself on various skills. I was a bit surprised they explicitly told me to train on leetcode or similar (with a link and everything), since it seems to kinda defeat the point, but that seems par for the course.
Biggest surprise was how vague the job description was (software engineer), and that you have no idea what you will do. I get it, from the pov of Google, they want generally competent people that can easily switch to another role. It's hard to get motivated though; I personally really care about what I am working on (more than the technologies themselves), and the fact I might do all of this just to get assigned to something I do not want to do was a big turn off.
I ended up studying for about 8 hours before the phone screen interview. The person doing the interview was really nice and competent. I ended with a review of "great communicator but a bit slow", so the HR wanted me to do another round to tip the balance one way or another. They told me to use whatever time I wanted to study; all around the pace was rather slow, but you could set your own timing, which is great when you're just looking at options, but probably not ideal if you need a job quickly.
Second interview went the same as I had barely studied more. I am no genius, and there's no getting around the fact that I need to put in the hours if I want to succeed. I was turned down as expected, though the HR really wanted me to study hard and try again in 6 months. I found another job at a really nice place a few months later, so that was the end of it.
Ultimately, I felt the process was pretty decent and streamlined all around, though quite time-demanding, it just wasn't for me. Simply working at Google generally, or the salary/reputation weren't enough to motivate me to put the effort needed.
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My "lunch interviewer" complained about the bureaucracy and said he was looking for another job after being there for ~18 months. Actually (with that) he wasn't being an asshole; he was doing you a favor. In revealing to you, quite candidly, just how disappointing the Google experience evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
Bias up front: I work at Google. > evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers. I only see evidence that the experience was disappointing for a single Googler, the lunch interviewer, not "a considerable portion" of them. The interviewer's data point is certainly valid, but it's not clear to me how much you can generalize it.
The fact that someone in the interview chain is willing to tell you significant negative information dramatically raises the Bayesian prior.
An interview chain is normally extremely well vetted for people who are positive-only. The fact that this failed is a dramatic cause for concern.
I normally can solve algorithmic puzzles pretty well without studying much, and I'd be pretty fine with a weekend of studying.
But it sounds like a nightmare being strung along for months before being subjected to 5 rounds of 1 hour of being under scrutiny from another person.
Google doesn’t need you. They probably already have a clone of you. They have gobs of rank-and-file SWE effort on reserve should one of their key products fail.
The process is designed to entertain the hiring manager and certain key employees. They don’t want you for your productivity. They want you for the chance that you help surround one of their favorites with things they like so that this other guy doesn’t bounce elsewhere. This other Googler likely already has a competing offer— that’s how he got promoted last year.
At this stage, if Google hires you, you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else. You’re going straight for the bench.
Don’t prepare for months for just Google; prepare for your own future. Don’t let Google hijack your capacity for critical thinking.
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Bias up front: I work at Google. > evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers. I only see evidence that the experience was disappointing for a single Googler, the lunch interviewer, not "a considerable portion" of them. The interviewer's data point is certainly valid, but it's not clear to me how much you can generalize it.
Evidently, the interviewee didn't meet just any Googler, he met the outlier, the only one unhappy there! Humans don't work like that. That single data point and the experience he had allows quite some generalization. Maybe this isn't how you build a ML model, but that ML model won't work very well when interacting with other people.
Point blank: is it all worth it? Googlers and Xooglers alike, is going through all of this worth return? If it depends, what does it depend on?
Xoogler here: Yes. I'm mid/late career, and came into Google in 2013 and left in 2015 after more than doubling my pre-Google salary. IMHO, it has been worth it for the salary alone.
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> (although they seem to have nothing to do with what any developer does day-to-day) Depends on what you do at Google. Google Guava is a data-structure/algorithms-heavy great Java library. Dart and Golang are programming languages. I'd imagine you have to know how to write a compiler etc and the standard library definitely has sections for data-structure and algorithms. They pay tons of money and prefer people to sti…
> Depends on what you do at Google. I imagine they have multiple PhDs working on those projects. For your bog standard SDE these interviews have very little to do with the day-to-day job.
Separately, I'm sorry the original poster had a crappy experience: that does sound awful. It happens, unfortunately, and I'm glad they drew attention to it.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
The biggest WTF I got out of this was: Writing code and tests in a Google Doc. I can't think of a much less friendly environment to write code in, except perhaps Notepad. I did it once (for an intra-company interview), and it was nasty to deal with. The WTF in second place was a blind requirement to know the mechanics behind a somewhat niche game that was big two years ago.
one of my in-person interviewers at Google forgot they had to do this - I spent like 38 minutes of our interview whiteboarding and then he said, "oh crap you're supposed to do this on the computer" - i furiously typed for a few minutes to try to replicate what i'd done. when i later talked to HR there was no mention of this in the interviewer's report.