A Wretched Google Interview Experience • Hacker News Board

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#111

Post by rybosome » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:12 PM UTC

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…

That's an easy solution in any language, frankly; have a shared queue of the requests, and the servers simply pull from the queue whenever they aren't processing a request. I'm sure that this is easier to implement in Go than a lot of other languages, but I think this actually defeats the purpose of the question. The hard part of the question is how to assign work to the servers rather than letting the servers pick the work themselves.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#112

Post by at-fates-hands » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:13 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #66

Google's recruiting seems like it must be at least partially the responsibility of short-tenure contractors. Every time I've dealt with people from their recruiting department, even the very nice ones seemed forgetful, inattentive and poor at communication. The actual Google employees who do the interviewing are on average very bright, good at actively interviewing candidates (instead of just rattling off questions),…

>>> but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus.

The crazy thing is they don't give feedback, then call back in a few months and ask if you want to interview again for the same position like the OP said. Talk about completely confusing people. . .

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#113

Post by furconit » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:13 PM UTC

csbrooks wrote: post #102

mattzito wrote: post #34

An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any…

This made more sense after I figured out MTV was Mountain View, not Music Television. O_o

lol

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#114

Post by ghc » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:14 PM UTC

I interviewed at the New York office for an SRE job a few months ago. It took about 10 months for the whole process to play out. In the end, after a full day interview, I was supposed to get the written up feedback from every interviewer regardless of whether I got the position or not.

Instead, my last communication with Google was a phone call where I was told that one of the interviewers still hadn't handed in their written review. It's now three months later, and that's the last I heard.

That left a sour taste in my mouth. I wasn't expecting to get the job, and really it was just a backup plan in case Algorithmic.ly didn't work out, but you'd think they'd have the common courtesy to get back to me. I'm sort of expecting that 6 months from now I'll hear from them out of the blue...that's how disorganized the process is.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#115

Post by Scene_Cast2 » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

In my experience, my Google recruiter simply did not respond to emails. The only way to get in touch with him was to email HR. Scheduling the first round of interviews? Email HR, wait for the recruiter to email me. Scheduling the second round? HR. Finding out results - you guessed it, emailing HR to get the recruiter to call me. This stretched my process to two whole months.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#116

Post by throwaway86 » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:14 PM UTC

thetrb wrote: post #107

mattzito wrote: post #34

An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any…

And they can do all of that just because everybody still wants to work at Google. Let's say the have 100 applicants for a position, out of which 10 are qualified for it. Then they can still screw 9 of them and hire the one person that for one reason or the other had the luck of interviewing with the right people and talking to the right recruiters.

Ding! Google hires more people every week than were employed in total at the Series D startup I worked at before them.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#117

Post by 300bps » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:15 PM UTC

I had a very similar experience. I work at an investment bank and was recruited by a large company that does proprietary trading including high frequency trading. I went for the interview which was scheduled to be an all-day thing.

In addition to having been in IT for a very long time I am also very knowledgeable on capital markets having successfully taken CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) tests. The CFO of the company that interviewed me was shocked that someone in IT passed those tests. The IT people, it was all algorithms and programming minutia. After the interview, they strung me along for weeks and then I just stopped calling them to check up on status and they stopped calling me. Then they would call me every few months asking me to interview again. I finally asked them to stop calling me.

The reason I bring this up is because I think sometimes candidates are excellent candidates for a $100,000 to $150,000 salary position. The only problem is the candidate is already making $250,000 and the prospective employer knows it after you fill out the application. I may be just thinking this to make myself feel better but I just thought the issue with the company was that I made too much. I probably would've had to literally walk on water and bring their dead relatives back to life to justify what they would've had to pay me to steal me from my current company.

Maybe that's the problem Google had with you?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#118

Post by Balgair » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:16 PM UTC

My brother had an interview for their X division. He said it was really strange. They were very very secretive. My brother has a TS clearance and he said Google was beyond the US gov.'s paranoia even. It made it a really tough interview too. He said it felt like they couldn't tell him anything so the interviewers were trying to psychicly communicate with him. Then they took him to lunch on campus which was ok and then sat him in front of another guy who was nicer but still mum. Also they apparently can't talk about the google glasses even though some lady had just walked out the door with them. Its like : 'Dude, you can see them right there.' It seems they need to get hungry again, not be complacent in their domination of our lives.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#119

Post by chris_mahan » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:16 PM UTC

druiid wrote: post #87

chris_mahan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a subtle form of age discrimination?

Not sure how it could be considered age discrimination though. You tend to forget 'knowledge' like this fairly quickly. I know for my part at least I generally have to brush up on this kind of learning about every six months (or even less perhaps), if I wanted to retain it.

That's why I said subtle.

It would be like requiring you to recite all the marks you received on all your assignments in all your classes in your last semester of your senior year of college. I assume that if you had just graduated, this would be easy, but if you had graduated 10 years prior, this would be hard (feasible if you'd kept the paperwork--but hard).

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#120

Post by michaelhoffman » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 6:16 PM UTC

Coincoin wrote: post #103

johnyzee wrote: post #57

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Funny, that cached version is not loading either on my machine.

Try the text-only version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...