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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#121

Post by stinkypete »

ahk wrote: post #30

Curious about the 'official' answer to the counter question. I'd have thought just having something triggered daily to clear out increments older than a day would be enough.

I don't know about an official answer but using a simple variation on a round-robin database (RRD) ought to do the trick. Basically:

  day count = [last 23 hour buckets] + hour count
  hour count = [last 59 minute buckets] + minute count
  minute count = [last 59 second buckets] + second count
  second count =
You end up losing a small amount of accuracy, the worst being for keeping track of the second counts. You can avoid that by using an actual list of counter values for the seconds bucket and dumping those out when they get older than a second, or maybe by introducing another subdivision -- 1/10th of a second probably is good -- so that you actually have .9 seconds worth of data and can interpolate the last bit.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#122

Post by washedup »

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…

I feel for your friend. I went through two phone interviews, flown to Mountain View for all day interviews, and was told by the team that they wanted to hire me, but first my candidate packet had to be reviewed by three different hiring committees. I made it through the first two, but in the third hiring committee I was turned down because my GPA was not at the new 3.7+ hiring guideline.

I was heartbroken, and I am sure other people have experienced the same thing.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#123

Post by keithpeter »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #108
keithpeter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

Nice catch. I was actually going to bring this up. I have a lot of friends who are interview pros. They say if an interviewer decides earlier on you're not going to get hired, they basically fold up their sheets and ask non-related general questions to pass the rest of the time.

Guilty as charged :-)

As an interviewee, I have, more than once, thanked my hosts for their tea and cake and left early when I detected that the interview was turning into a chat.

Would a collegiate interviewing model not work better for an intellectually driven organisation like Google? Each team interviewing for their own positions, but with some form of 'tenure track' process for the longer term?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#124

Post by radiusq »

I got an in-house interview and did well until the final guy. He barely spoke english, and i've worked with many foreign co-workers in the past but his english was worse than anything i've heard before. I struggled trying to understand him while he explained the problem and he was noticeably upset. I wanted to call the HR person in to talk about it but I didn't want to risk making the situation worse. Didn't get the job, likely based on this interviewer.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#126

Post by bradleyjg »

throwaway86 wrote: post #82
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…

It's not any better if you get hired. Google recruiters will tell you whatever you want to hear, including things that are not necessarily true. I was assured that a minor issue in my background would not be an issue multiple times (I have email proving this), then Google hired me and let me work for more than two months. I got comfortable, I moved to Mountain View, began real honest work and set about making an impa…

You may have a legal case for moving expenses and lost wages. Something along the lines of fraudulent inducement -- especially in California. I'd talk to an employment lawyer if I were you.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#127

Post by dlib »

corin_ wrote: post #70
toddh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place"

For the sake of consistency I hope you have the same view when it comes to the NSA. For the sake of the rest of us, I hope you don't.

It was a quote by Eric Schmidt.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#128

Post by lightcatcher »

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"

As someone still in school (in a very theoretical CS program), I still like to skim over a good part of CLRS before before an interview that I expect to be over algorithmic stuff.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#129

Post by 727374 »

I had a google interview about a year ago. The thing I found strangest is that some interviewers would walk in the room and throw up a coding exercise without any introduction at all. They literally wouldn't give their names and what projects they worked on. You don't care that I've been working for almost 10 years in the real world and would rather judge me on my ability to solve a linked list problem? Really? If anything is "gameable" this is. Just spend a year playing topcoder in your spare time and you could ace any of the questions I got.

I have a good friend who works at google and compares the recruiting team to being "the hot girl in highschool" (no intended sexism). Since google recruiters are at one of the elite companies in the world, they can treat people disrespectfully. If you don't like it, there will be a million people more people to choose from. I actually didn't get this vibe from them, but I only dealt with a couple recruiters.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#130

Post by nilkn »

washedup wrote: post #122
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…

I feel for your friend. I went through two phone interviews, flown to Mountain View for all day interviews, and was told by the team that they wanted to hire me, but first my candidate packet had to be reviewed by three different hiring committees. I made it through the first two, but in the third hiring committee I was turned down because my GPA was not at the new 3.7+ hiring guideline. I was heartbroken, and I am s…

I thought the GPA requirements were done away with a while ago?
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