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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#21

Post by mathattack »

Two thoughts:

1) Larger companies get away with inefficient recruiting because they can. If the same company abuses you twice, and you go back a third time, what's that say about you? It certainly goes a long way to explain why they can do it.

2) If you're considering going back on an offer, or interviewing just days after starting a new job, you don't have much room to complain about bad behavior on the company's part.

Perhaps another reason that Google contacts many people the same time is their heuristics. They have analyzed what good potential hires look like, and instruct their recruiters (who all use the same few online resources) to screen for it.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#22

Post by morkfromork »

I interviewed at Google earlier this year. It was a complete waste of my time. The questions were unrelated to my skills and the position I was looking for. You go in there assuming they know what they are doing because they are the great Google. They don't. It's completely random.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#23

Post by timburus »

cromwellian wrote: post #17
zerr wrote: post #5

Even 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.

I cannot make general statements, but it's really hard to move when you are assigned to a project where you unhappy. I tried to transfer to several other teams in my area of expertise. I was quite close in a couple of places, but they usually run out of 'head count' at the last moment. There was just one team that could have taken me, but it was the same kind of boring custom coded BI I was doing in my project. Finally, I just had to give up. The bad part is that I did many 20% projects for these other teams, which hurt my chances for promotion.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#24

Post by colmvp »

cromwellian wrote: post #12

I 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,…

"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."

Unfortunately, I've read similar anecdotes on HN. Pretty disrespectful of the candidates time.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#25

Post by jbooth »

AznHisoka wrote: post #10

"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…

It sounded like he aced all of the questions except for the distributed computing ones, where he put up some reasonable answers but not the exact ones they're looking for.

I'd note that when Google was first solving those problems, their luminaries who are now untouchable at the company probably tried those exact same reasonable answers at first until iterating on them into their current form.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#26

Post by Aqueous »

cromwellian wrote: post #17
zerr wrote: post #5

Even 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.

It seems like everything they do are CRUD apps, in the sense that they are concerned with creating, updating, reading, and destroying database records. They are just massively parallelized on the backend to deal with all the traffic.

Sometimes I wonder what all these engineers do every day. Their main apps are not getting exponentially better, and they have fewer of them. Why is all this algorithmic knowledge really needed? Do they spend all day optimizing or engineering and planning new features?

Not trying to insult Google, but I'm not seeing a ton of new features that would justify this kind of indepth theoretical knowledge. The ability to actually code, to do so efficiently and quickly, and to properly unit test and profile it, seems more important than any algorithmic knowledge. Mastery of the toolchain and the language, and that comes down to - "What have you produced?"

Maybe this is why Google hasn't had a new hit product in what seems like awhile. It doesn't need one as long as they maintain their position as search leader, but it doesn't seem like they have one.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#27

Post by bloat »

I don't know why people get so bent up over this and write these screeds.

Surely everyone knows the drill by now. If Google interview you, you'll get a bunch of random algorithm questions and you either get hired or you don't and they won't tell you why. Your CV and your experience only serve to get a foot in the door. After that its all down to those algo questions. This is not a secret - I think they are pretty up front about the way it works.

PS - I didn't get hired.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#28

Post by Zimahl »

AznHisoka wrote: post #15
smackfu wrote: post #11

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".

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"

Hah, I must be pretty dumb. After over 10 years working on anything from startup to BigCorp, I doubt I could answer a single one of those questions right now.

I did learn that in my last round of interviewing (about a year ago) that to play the game you need to review the junk that you'll never need to keep in your brain, that you know but don't have at command. Sure, you'll most likely never use it at the position you apply for, but that's the rub.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#29

Post by Yascade »

The obvious reason for this approach to me is that Google is leveraging their reputation in order to solve difficult problems rather than actually looking to hire anyone. The answers this particular interviewer appeared to answer seem to be the kinds of things that a developer would want to know but might not be able to see the answer to.

The idea here that Google might be leveraging knowledge from a hopeful dupe, is echoed by their annual code challenges. The company wants to know things. It's hungry for knowledge.

My feeling that leading on applicants is the best way to be ignored when you need one because when you cry wolf, only the wolves answer the call eventually.

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