No, I still don't want to work for Google

He's in the pocket of big tobacco, wall street and the health insurance industry, for one thing. http://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/

That link certainly seems reliable, well-researched, and unbiased.

So here's my experience with Google's recruiting process.

I exchanged a few mails with the recruiter, who offered a SWE position. Then two telephone interviews followed (with the recruiter and extensive interview with some developer), then they arranged an on-site interview. Apparently the 2nd tech phone interview wasn't needed.

For the on-site interview I got some paper-mail, where the position had been changed to SRE.. So I'm thinking to myself.. right, this is going to be interesting.

So I show up on-site, and 5 interviews follow, with a ~1hr lunch break in the middle. The 1st guy who interviewed me was a bit pompous [hey, he had a PhD!], but OK; the 2nd and 3rd guys were extremely arrogant; the 4th guy (my supposed team-leader) seemed to have had a bad day but was otherwise OK; the 5th guy was the ONLY with whom I felt I could build accord and have an engaging conversation. With him, it didn't feel like an "interview"; we were more like two equals talking about an interesting technical topic.

The guy who I had lunch with was... interesting. Suffice it to say that I had the impression that he was on the verge of explicitly telling me NOT to take the position I was interviewed for. (As in, crappy job and crappy place to live in.)

They tried to impress me with how every employee gets two big screens, a laptop of their own choice, how big systems they're working with, how good the food in cantina was, the fancy office space, etc.. Their attitude was in general as if they were interviewing a teenager whose "wet dream" was to work for google.

I never found out what kind of project I would be working on. Everybody's attitude during the interview was "you ask, and we'll tell you if it's not confidential". The SRE position was briefly described as "root on google.com".

It turned out that I'd also be required to be periodically on-call (since the position went from SWE to SRE underway), and that the people I'd be working with would be the same people who interviewed me.

So I got an offer, a contract came in paper-post and I found out that I'd only be having ~15 workdays of paid vacation per year. Incidentally, in the country I was supposed to move to, it was allowed by the law to work NNN hours unpaid overtime per year... Guess whether NNN matched (or maybe was even greater!) than the number of paid vacation days.

I didn't take the offer, and it turned out to be a damn good choice.

I'm rather sure that somebody without other hobbies or desires to have some free time to spend on things other than computers would have had a different subjective experience.

[This post is deliberately vague about some details in order not to reveal too much about the persons involved.]

As with most communications distances, that depends entirely on where the other person is sitting. I never use monads, for instance, and only use type-classes when they look really applicable. Still, if the person I'm talking to has never heard of a map() primitive outside of MapReduce, that causes issues.

And then the #1 thing that really causes friction is recursion. Most people interviewing on behalf of BigCo's seem to think recursive algorithms are dirty and will always/almost-always overflow your stack. I learned in second-semester of freshman year of college that with a little work, every recursive algorithm can be made tail-recursive can be made iterative, and that rejecting recursion wholesale is premature optimization.

The best interviewer I had on the topic (who couldn't offer me a job because I'm a hardcore algorithms/CS guy and he ended up needing front-end web developers, no harm no foul) accepted my recursive answer and then proceeded by asking me to make it iterative. That was the best, in my opinion, both because it shows a level of "academic" knowledge about recursion and iteration, but also because it was exactly what I would have to do in a real job situation: transform a theoretically correct algorithm into a usable implementation that can perform well.

The people I want to criticize are the ones who seem to believe, or want to believe, that no such usable implementations of functional or academic techniques can exist, categorically, and hence that anyone who answers a question with anything so "functional" as a recursive algorithm must be a stack-overflowing, head-in-the-clouds academic or simply an amateur. Hence why I bring up Scala and why I'm not much of a Haskell programmer: it's damn well readable and usable for people who aren't functional-programming gurus, you can write code in it that plays well with CPU and memory, you can use a wide ecosystem full of libraries, and it comes with just enough functional magic baked into itself in just the right way to make the "magic" parts (like the Option functor) easy to learn and use for people who don't care about functional programming theory.

The key to success at most companies is to please your boss's boss, indirectly of course.