Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Google Interview Experience

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–88 of 88 posts

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#81

Post by alok-g »

kjackson wrote: post #55
cletus wrote: post #12

Hi, I am a Google engineer and have gone through the process twice (the first time unsuccessfully). It can be a frustrating and even exhausting experience so I certainly understand why you're bummed it didn't work out (I was the first time) but let me clear up a few things. You don't need to go to an Ivy League or otherwise top school (actually most of the Ivies aren't in the top CS schools). I certainly didn't. I di…

I would love it if Google spent some time re-interviewing a bunch of their current employees, to see how good their interview process is compared to random chance. I know their best employees would likely pass the interview with flying colors, but my hunch is that there would be a large percentage of their employees that would fail. If they did a thorough analysis, my hunch is that their hiring process is likely dete…

I have interviewed over 100 candidates for my current company, thereby participated in post-interview meetings hearing other interviewers views on the candidate. I definitely feel that the selection process would fail many of the current, even some high-performing, employees.

I have no data-points for Google, but do recall an open aptitude test they had made available with a few problems so challenging that I felt nearly 100% sure that many of the current Google employees could not solve. Folks from Wolfram Research (the company behind wolfram-alpha) showed how to solve the problems [1] using Mathematica, their flagship product. (Turns out Google themselves had one of things incorrect!)

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2004-10-13/google/

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#82

Post by jemfinch »

RuggeroAltair wrote: post #71
jemfinch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm sure that most of the times the hiring mechanism is quite compartmented...It's not like the people who interview you are interviewing you for the entire Google." Absolutely, utterly incorrect. This has all been covered publicly by Peter Norvig[0]. Quoth he, "Another hiring strategy we use is no hiring manager. Whenever you give project managers responsibility for hiring for their own projects they'll take the be…

This is from 2006, 6 years ago. If you work at Google maybe you can say more about your experience. But what I know for sure it's not like that necessarily anymore, since I talked to many people about their interviews at google and I know some googlers as well that confirmed what I said (which is the reason I wrote it). Even when I talked to google myself, it was for an individual group, not the entire company (in my…

I do work at Google, and I'm saying that Norvig's description is still accurate. It was true when I was hired in 2010, and it's true now for the candidates I interview now.

I'm not sure why it's relevant that Google has sometimes hired sub-standard people. Of course it has. Interviewing isn't perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes.

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#83

Post by RuggeroAltair »

jemfinch wrote: post #82
RuggeroAltair wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from 2006, 6 years ago. If you work at Google maybe you can say more about your experience. But what I know for sure it's not like that necessarily anymore, since I talked to many people about their interviews at google and I know some googlers as well that confirmed what I said (which is the reason I wrote it). Even when I talked to google myself, it was for an individual group, not the entire company (in my…

I do work at Google, and I'm saying that Norvig's description is still accurate. It was true when I was hired in 2010, and it's true now for the candidates I interview now. I'm not sure why it's relevant that Google has sometimes hired sub-standard people. Of course it has. Interviewing isn't perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes.

No, sorry, I didn't meant it in a provokative way. I was just saying it in relation to Norvig's statement.

Although I really like Google and most things about how you guys work, I can't hide that I think it's becoming a common joke how broke the interview process is at Google.

One of my friends told me that they needed, really needed a person, but it still took four months to fill up the position. Another friend was contacted for a PhD software engineer position, and even though he had told the HR person that he was also interviewing for another company, he had time to go through the whole interview process with the other company (consisting on several meetings), and by the time he had an offer, Google still hadn't had the phone interview with him.

I'm just saying that I had the impression that the hiring system isn't not amongst the best ones out there, but I have big respect for how the company works.

Specifically, I think it's great, for example, that they aren't afraid of trying a million things and shut them down when they're not happy. Most companies are afraid of switching and are extremely slow at making any decent change.

But so, just to understand if you want to say something about it, do you really interview a person without a position? Just for the whole company? Or do you mean that if the candidate is good you say 'hire, but for a different position'? Or do you mean something else?

Thanks!

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#84

Post by jemfinch »

RuggeroAltair wrote: post #83
jemfinch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do work at Google, and I'm saying that Norvig's description is still accurate. It was true when I was hired in 2010, and it's true now for the candidates I interview now. I'm not sure why it's relevant that Google has sometimes hired sub-standard people. Of course it has. Interviewing isn't perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes.

No, sorry, I didn't meant it in a provokative way. I was just saying it in relation to Norvig's statement. Although I really like Google and most things about how you guys work, I can't hide that I think it's becoming a common joke how broke the interview process is at Google. One of my friends told me that they needed, really needed a person, but it still took four months to fill up the position. Another friend was…

I wouldn't call the interview process at Google broken. While some of my coworkers are better than others, I've yet to encounter any that truly aren't at the top of our field. Whatever we're doing, however we may fail in other areas, the primary goal of interviewing--to find and hire highly qualified people--is something we're achieving.

Yes, we may be rejecting highly qualified people who would do well at Google, but interview poorly. As has been noted in the comments here and elsewhere[0] it's far better to reject a qualified candidate than accept an unqualified candidate. Though we'd all be happier with a higher true positive rate, we're not willing to accept a higher false positive rate to achieve that.

What we're not good at, and what we get lampooned for so frequently (e.g., this story) is that in our pursuit of minimizing our false positive rate, we come off as arrogant, sometimes condescending, and a number of procedural and legal problems exacerbate that appearance. I've interviewed people that were right on the threshold between "hire" and "no hire", and like Joel advises, I wrote down "no hire". I'd love to tell these people what would have swung my opinion and ask them apply again in a year, but I just can't: it's too dangerous.

As far as interactions with recruiters goes, I can't really speak to those issues, since my experience in the hiring process was atypical (though not at all distinct in the ways we've discussed here so far, e.g. being hired for a company and finding a position after an offer has been extended).

Now, to answer your question, I have never interviewed anyone for a specific position. Every single person I've interviewed has been for engineering as a whole. People get interviewed for specific job ladders (e.g. SWE, SRE, SET, etc.) but the specific teams/projects a person will work on is decided after they've accepted an offer, as I understand it (and experience it myself).

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#85

Post by jemfinch »

throwawayttt wrote: post #15
cletus wrote: post #12

Hi, I am a Google engineer and have gone through the process twice (the first time unsuccessfully). It can be a frustrating and even exhausting experience so I certainly understand why you're bummed it didn't work out (I was the first time) but let me clear up a few things. You don't need to go to an Ivy League or otherwise top school (actually most of the Ivies aren't in the top CS schools). I certainly didn't. I di…

Thanks Cletus for taking the time to write that up. That really makes me feel better and provides somewhat more insight into the process. My 5 years of experience was actually divided like 3 between Masters and Bachelors and 2 after Masters here in US, so I thought my Masters grade would matter. My interviews were 3 before lunch and 2 after. Lunch was good :). The interview conductor asked for references multiple tim…

"So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. I surely didn't feel like that after the interview, but who knows, since I still don't have a way to know if that is the case. Then this really sucks."

Just a comment from another Google engineer who does interviews (and didn't do yours, since I haven't done any for a couple months now): your own feeling at the end of an interview may not at all reflect your actual performance in the interview, because you have no visibility into what questions weren't asked.

I like to interview candidates by asking them to solve a simple programming problem and then modifying the specification little by little, having them adjust their solution to implement new functionality. There are about 8 steps in my question, and frequently I'm gauging the quality of the candidate by how long it takes him to get through the first N stages; we fix bugs in earlier stages before moving on to the next stage. To calibrate myself, I've tried this question on several of my coworkers, and they were universally able to get about halfway through the question with bug-free code in about 10 minutes. Only one required prompting on my part to fix a bug. Most every candidate I've interviewed has taken 20-30 minutes to get to the same halfway point; by that time I've only got 15-25 minutes left in my interview, and the candidate seems so far like a "no hire", so I move to a different question to find out if the candidate has other strengths to counterbalance his weakness at solving this (simple) coding problem.

From the candidate's perspective, he only sees me ask a series of programming questions which he answers satisfactorily with a little prompting from me. If he answers another question or two satisfactorily, he may think he's done well, but he doesn't know that I wanted to delve more deeply into every question I asked him, and just didn't have time because the pace of his solutions was too slow.

I wish I could give this feedback to the people I've interviewed, but sadly, I can't.

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#86

Post by RuggeroAltair »

jemfinch wrote: post #84
RuggeroAltair wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sorry, I didn't meant it in a provokative way. I was just saying it in relation to Norvig's statement. Although I really like Google and most things about how you guys work, I can't hide that I think it's becoming a common joke how broke the interview process is at Google. One of my friends told me that they needed, really needed a person, but it still took four months to fill up the position. Another friend was…

I wouldn't call the interview process at Google broken. While some of my coworkers are better than others, I've yet to encounter any that truly aren't at the top of our field. Whatever we're doing, however we may fail in other areas, the primary goal of interviewing--to find and hire highly qualified people--is something we're achieving. Yes, we may be rejecting highly qualified people who would do well at Google, bu…

Thanks for your explanation!

By the way, just to clarify because maybe it wasn't really clear, when I said broken I didn't mean at all that the interview process at Google fails at hiring good candidates, I just meant that sometimes it takes literally months and that's too long, and that often people in the meanwhile receive other offers. For many of them it's not possible to say no to another offer just because maybe they will get an offer from Google in two months (and career wise it's not serious to jump around and leave a place after two months unless the position is a lot better).

That's all, and I think it's cool that you interview that way. Maybe I've had a biased opinion given what happened to the people that I directly talked to. Thanks again for clarifying these points.

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#87

Post by jemfinch »

RuggeroAltair wrote: post #86
jemfinch wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call the interview process at Google broken. While some of my coworkers are better than others, I've yet to encounter any that truly aren't at the top of our field. Whatever we're doing, however we may fail in other areas, the primary goal of interviewing--to find and hire highly qualified people--is something we're achieving. Yes, we may be rejecting highly qualified people who would do well at Google, bu…

Thanks for your explanation! By the way, just to clarify because maybe it wasn't really clear, when I said broken I didn't mean at all that the interview process at Google fails at hiring good candidates, I just meant that sometimes it takes literally months and that's too long, and that often people in the meanwhile receive other offers. For many of them it's not possible to say no to another offer just because mayb…

Note that we do expedite the process for people who receive competing offers; I had an offer from another company the day after my Google interview; I told my recruiter about it and she had me an offer from Google within a week.

I explained in another thread here[0] one of the biggest sources of discontent from people who interview here, in case you're curious.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636746

Re: My Google Interview Experience

#88

Post by harlanlewis »

bhickey wrote: post #60
velshin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I off in thinking it's horrible for the interviewers to not provide feedback during the interview? I'd also be curious how much throwawayttt probed for feedback during the interview process. It always hurts to not get something you work hard for -- sorry mate!

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 em…

This implies that feedback can't be provided throughout the interview. Reduce feedback loops, etc etc.

In some of the 'worst' interviews I've conducted, it would become clear with 45 minutes to go that the candidate was a pass for technical reasons. After exploring for other strengths beyond the expected skillset, I focus the rest of these sessions on the really important things the candidate should know before their next interview with some other company. This is easy to present as standard interview questions, but with more explanation and context worked in to setup and 'next step' in multiparty questions. With no explicit "you've failed" ever stated, you have an opportunity to maintain a positive conversation, do the candidate a service and a favor by educating on what they need to learn next, and if you're really lucky discover that the candidate is a fast and eager learner who would be a great addition to the team despite current deficiencies.

Worst case, it's clear to the candidate where they're lacking without ever needing to state is as such. And who doesn't learn a little bit themselves every time they teach?

Post reply on HN