From those questions, it sure seems like their interview process is aimed at choosing among recent grads whose resumes are all essentially the same "B.S. Computer Science from School X".
A Wretched Google Interview Experience
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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#12I think this is very unfortunate. I've seen a lot of good candidates get rejected for no obvious reasons. The lack of communication seems driven I think by the sheer deluge of the number of resumes/interviews going on at Google, and what appears to be, a reliance on temps and contractors as part of the process.
I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule.
Given the sheer size of Google however, I'd expect lots of false positives and negatives in their filters.
Also recognize that regular Googlers are selected to do these interviews, and some of them have little training in giving interviews. If you're unlucky, you might get a bad interviewer. I consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc)
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#13"Aside from being terrible at communication, Google implicitly rejected, without appeal, someone with offers for a PhD and someone who owns two checks from Knuth. " I'm glad that Google doesn't just blindly look at credentials alone. If you got a PhD, and got featured in a CS publication, but couldn't answer their questions, then you probably shouldn't be accepted. That said, OP just had bad bad luck. My phone screen…
Of course, history, credentials, and current technical know-how should be balanced.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#14I think Google prefers false negatives over false positives. I know a few extremely smart people who didn't "pass" their Google interviews. Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#15From those questions, it sure seems like their interview process is aimed at choosing among recent grads whose resumes are all essentially the same "B.S. Computer Science from School X".
That's what they tell people too. It's great if you just graduated from a formal CS program because the algorithms stuff is fresh in your brain. Whereas working 5-10 years in a boring bigcorp, doing CRUD apps will kinda make you more "dumb"
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#16I had a very similar experience with Google London and Google Zurich. It took them longer than a year to arrange an interview. Quite disappointing -- I'm actually glad I decided not to join them.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#17Even in case of success and receiving an offer, I personally have a feeling that you need to be very very lucky to get the really interesting work in these BigCo's. I know a couple of googlers, talented programmers, but they ended up as "yet another CRUD" python devs there.
There's lots of interesting projects going on at Google and an internal system for applying to other teams, and usually no shortage of teams asking for people. There's not a lot of CRUD apps with the exception of Corp-IT stuff.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#18I do enjoy this author's flagrant disregard for Google's NDA they require you to sign and promise not to discuss the interview questions. I'm curious if they'll enforce it.
For what it's worth, my one experience with Google recruiting last year was the polar opposite. They were curious and professional, of more knowledgeable recruiters I've dealt with, and timely in scheduling interviews. I had my first and only phone interview within a couple weeks if contract (which I needed and used to go through the extensive list of prep material they provided). Then I had an onsite interview a couple weeks later. Bam. Done.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#19Even in case of success and receiving an offer, I personally have a feeling that you need to be very very lucky to get the really interesting work in these BigCo's. I know a couple of googlers, talented programmers, but they ended up as "yet another CRUD" python devs there.
There's lots of interesting projects going on at Google and an internal system for applying to other teams, and usually no shortage of teams asking for people. There's not a lot of CRUD apps with the exception of Corp-IT stuff.
Google Webmaster Tools - CRUD
Adwords console - CRUD
Google+ pages - CRUD
Google Analytics dashboard - CRUD
Google Merchants console - CRUD
DoubleClick dashboard - CRUD
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#20I think Google prefers false negatives over false positives. I know a few extremely smart people who didn't "pass" their Google interviews. Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe.
That's probably the right attitude to take in hiring. Bad code is difficult and expensive to discover and fix and a bad hire is difficult and expensive to let go.