My Google Interview Experience

Since the interview process doesn't include any sort of personal question or assessments other than one's ability to memorize algorithms and such, How do you measure "culture fit"?

I've been through a couple of Google interviews. My last one, I didn't even apply for, they contacted me a couple of months ago, asking if I wanted to interview. Why the heck not. I guess my previous interview was good enough such that they didn't require a phone interview, so I skipped that. Although it's perfectly reasonable to think that they were just trying to hurry the process up for everyone so that's why they had me skip the phone interview, and there was nothing particularly special about me.

I had 5 interviews, and I didn't end up getting the job. I didn't do that great, and I knew it. I spent 2 weeks preparing and covered what I thought were my weak points, and still of the 5 interviews, 1 I nailed, 2 I did pretty good, and 2 I did just okay on, but not horrible.

I can understand why this got me rejected, though. I'm not whining that it's not fair, because obviously they have a particular type of person they want to hire, and I didn't fulfill the qualifications. I think I'm pretty smart with pretty good experience, but nothing entitles me to a job anywhere, especially at Google. The questions were extremely hard, but fair, because as I said, I guess they're trying to hire candidates who can answer them.

The thing I didn't like, however, was how some of the interviews were conducted. One in particular was a guy who asked me a fairly hard question, something that I hadn't seen before, and I was stumped for a bit, so I wanted a couple of minutes to think it through in my head. As I was trying to answer it on the whiteboard, he kept interrupting me, and kept steering me to HIS solution, not my solution. So because it wasn't my solution, I kept on trying to guess at what he was trying to say, and because of that I didn't have the benefit of having thought through it completely. This meant that I had a couple of bugs in my solution, because I spent most of the time trying to figure out where he was steering me to, and I didn't get the benefit of having thought through the process in my own way, where I probably would have caught the bugs.

It was also obvious from his tone that he was annoyed at having to provide me with the answer that he wanted to hear me say. This left a rather bitter taste in my mouth.

I would rather have finished the interview with a completely blank whiteboard because I was totally stumped, rather than play mind-reader and trying to guess at what the interview was pushing me towards. At least a blank whiteboard would have been a more accurate portrayal of my answer, instead of some half-baked solution because the interviewer kept pushing me towards a solution that I didn't get enough time to think through.

As an interviewer, to indicate things are going well, you can smile, nod, give happy words of encouragement, get excited, etc.

When things are going poorly, you can frown, say "not quite", give sour words of encouragement, linger on the same unsolved problem, etc.

While HR / Legal usually have policies prohibiting direct feedback ("You're a 5 of 10 and we have 30 candidates who are all better than you. Also you went to Yale and that's lame."), there are many ways to provide feedback to the interview candidate without opening the company up to legal trouble. There are no laws against being human during an interview.

That's not true at all. Very few candidates are being considered for positions known in advance.

Applicants' real competition is not other applicants, but other Google employees. As Peter Norvig detailed[0], the bar is set by the Google employees: as interviewers, we should reject any candidate who isn't clearly better than the average googler. And, in my experience, that's a pretty high bar.

[0] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg... "First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to."

Imagine this from the perspective of an interviewer. Alice is interviewing Eve for a job at FooCorp. Eve rocks the interview. Alice is happy and gives Eve a high-five and some glowing feedback.

Then Bob interviews with Alice. Bob goes belly up. Never before has an interviewee done so poorly. Given the established precedent of providing feedback, what is Alice to do? We have a precedent in play. Would you want your employees telling candidates that they did a rubbish job? If she declines to tell Bob how he did, he'll interpret it as a negative. If she tells Bob that everything was dandy, it will set Bob's expectations.

The only reasonable choice is to bar your employees from providing feedback. Any other course of action is unfair to them.