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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#41

Post by cromwellian »

Aqueous wrote: post #26
cromwellian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is being relatively unfair in assessment. Google hasn't had a hit product in a while? Search and Ads are dominant. Android is the #1 mobile smartphone OS with 80% of the market. Chrome is now the #1 browser. Google Maps is the #1 mapping application. Gmail is now #1 in active users. G+ now has 190 million active posters now monthly now (Twitter only has 110 million active posters) YouTube is the top video site.

Most of these apps listed above are not CRUD apps. The service based ones have significant and non-trivial data processing on the backend, lots of machine-learning, or algorithmic data processing.

Google apps have been getting better over the years, but Google updates them almost continuously and incrementally because they are web based, and so most of the changes go unnoticed like a frog slowly being boiled in water.

Is Google Search the same as it was 5 years ago? No, it has Google Instant, voice search, Knowledge Graph, direct answers, better spam filtering, it's index is far fresher, etc. For example, just the interactive chart knowledge panels (https://www.google.com/#fp=9a975e048e4bd6d6&q=population+of+...)

Google Maps has gotten radically better, and the latest beta maps is probably the most complex and sophisticated web application ever engineered.

Google search within G+ and Drive actually does object recognition with neural networks. (http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/06/improving-photo-s...) This is a huge improvement in image search, and most people are totally unaware of it. It just works and they don't notice that it found it image without even needing descriptive text or tags.

Google apps are slowly getting smarter each and everyday but there's no "Jobsnote" to laud them, so the improvements are invisible.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#42

Post by coldpie »

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,…

My recruiter failed to call me at the scheduled time. Twice. I wasn't too terribly dismayed, as I was already home at the time anyway, but that put me in a pretty bad mood to begin with.

I failed the first phone interview spectacularly because he asked about data structures and estimating powers of two, and I haven't done any of that after 4 years in the industry. I guess fair enough; if that's what they expect of their employees, I'm not their man.

Overall, a disappointing experience.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#43

Post by mahyarm »

Aqueous wrote: post #26
cromwellian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WebRTC, Hangouts, Chrome, Android, distcc, etc. All very useful non CRUD projects. Google+, the search engine, analytics & advertising have 2nd order projects that are not CRUD.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#44

Post by freework »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #18

I 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 phon…

I did a phone interview with Google last week. I was given the exact same counter problem as mentioned in the article. I can verify that I was not asked to sign any NDA at any point.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#45

Post by keithpeter »

JonFish85 wrote: post #31
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,…

Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company. On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or dis…

I am not a programmer. The OP mentioned that in a number of the scheduled interviews that he had face to face, the interview finished quickly, and the interviewer talked about working at Google. Does this strike anyone else as 'palliative interview'?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#46

Post by cromwellian »

timburus wrote: post #23
cromwellian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Final…

It could be that the type of project one is one influences. I'm pretty sure if I tried to join the maps team, I'd be rejected, I have no experience in geo/gis.

But I have had the experience of co-workers transferring off my team to other teams and semi-regular turnover, so it may be a matter of finding the right place at the right time.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#49

Post by maddddddddddddd »

colmvp wrote: post #24
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 wro…

a "software engineer" should have a strong understanding of networking and systems administration. perhaps the candidate shouldn't have disrespected the interviewers time and applied for a junior developer position.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#50

Post by jnbiche »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #35

Just playing, but "If you have n servers that take requests, and server Sᵢ can take a request every tᵢ seconds, and you need to distribute requests to them as efficiently as possible, how do you do it?" can be done very easily in Go. You have a shared channel which contains the pending requests, and a goroutine per server that simply loops doing: read from the shared channel, perform the request, wait for the sleep p…

Wow, I've really got to look into Go. Sounds so easy.
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