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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#71

Post by speeder »

Heh.

I interviewed with Amazon once, I reached only the phone part and failed (most part for my own reason... I fumbled a lot)

But I was really bothered, that they setup "X" to interview me, and when I got the call, it was "Y" because "X" travelled, and that "Y" was not related to the position I applied at all, AND was a newbie at Amazon and thus failed to answer the questions I had about it, AND did not knew any languages I knew, making the coding part of the interview very weird.

I also saw similar stories here in HN many times... I wonder, wazzup with those companies that setup interviews and then send the interviewers somewhere else?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#72

Post by [deleted] »

freework wrote: post #44
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.

[deleted]

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#73

Post by chris_mahan »

druiid wrote: post #39
Zimahl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

I genuinely don't understand how it's useful to interview someone this way. It basically makes it a game of 'Show us what you remember from CS101/MAE101/etc'. Really why should interviews for people established in the industry be like that? Sure you should know how to do basic algorithms and optimization type questions, but having minute detail style programming questions that every engineer not fresh out of college…

Maybe it's a subtle form of age discrimination?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#74

Post by Me1000 »

freework wrote: post #44
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.

Phone screenings do not require signing an NDA (just a "we explicitly ask you not to share the questions you're asked"), but if they bring you on site you will be asked to sign one.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#75

Post by rlpb »

scotth wrote: post #52
guard-of-terra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- have a counter for every bigger interval asnd the last timestamp If the timestamp is same second as last increment everything, if not increment where appropriate and rotate everything else to 0. What am i missing?

My reading of the API is that getCountInLastSecond returns the count from the last billion nanoseconds, not the count from the previous second bucket (as the clock ticks). So when he mentions he can't bound memory, it's because he can't easily discretize the counters.

I feel that this is an important ambiguity. When I read the article, my first question was whether this interpretation is correct, or the other one. I am surprised that he didn't clarify this in the article, and wonder if this is a problem.

Seeing ambiguities in specifications is an important part of software engineering.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#76

Post by reikonomusha »

leokun wrote: post #20
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #14

I 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.

With proper code review, I don't think bad code is difficult to discover. I also don't think dismissal is very expensive for large corps. For smaller companies or start-ups, the game is entirely different.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#77

Post by mosesschwartz »

freework wrote: post #44
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.

When I interviewed they did not ask for an NDA during the phone interviews, but they did have me sign one before the on-site interview.

For what it's worth, I had an overall positive experience interviewing with Google.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#78

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

coldpie wrote: post #42
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 th…

> My recruiter failed to call me at the scheduled time. Twice.

Out of curiosity, was there a reason you decided to continue the interview process after this?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#79

Post by VLM »

GBKS wrote: post #59

To counter some of the negative sentiment here, I had a great interview experience at Google. The only big negative was that the whole process took 5 months. But every step involved was very organized and the people were professional and thoughtful. The in-person interviews were also great and the questions were all appropriate. I did not take the offer for personal reasons at the time, but the process was great (exc…

"questions were all appropriate"

I was asking myself while reading the article, my god, what kind of job was he applying for, AP test author, programing language standard library author, puzzle book author, or what exactly?

I haven't gone into a cold interview in many years; its always previous relationship based now. Are cold interviews where no one already knows anyone, like that now, focused on weird algos and trivia questions and nothing to do with the actual job?

You're interviewing the workplace as much as they're interviewing you, and I'm smart but I have no idea how to evaluate a possible employer based on their selection of weird trivia questions. Something that at least vaguely relates to the actual job would be interesting.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#80

Post by potatolicious »

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…

Because then your interviewer does a hatchet-job on you in a feedback form and you get shitlisted from interviewing at Google forever.

That's the problem with large companies. There are companies where I would just walk out of an abusive interview, because the brokenness represents their whole company. Then you have massive, mega, ultra-sized companies like Google where even though this particular team is beating you with the interview bat, you may still want to work for other teams.

This is probably confirmation bias speaking, but by far I hear the most "primadonna interviewer" stories come out of Google. I'm not sure if that's just my impression or if there's really something going on there.

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