Let me sum up my response to the article in 2 words: Their loss.
A Wretched Google Interview Experience
131–140 of 359 posts
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And blacklist myself entirely from this career? This throwaway comment is pushing it already in terms of burning bridges, not to mention getting fired from Google itself after my extended network congratulated me on the position. Who, in this incestuous valley, would hire the guy that sued Google for an employment issue?
I've seen it happen, no way. Right to work, too, sigh.
To be clear I moved from the Oakland area down here, so it's not like I came here from Cleveland. Also, I have no ill will for Google and just hope I can move on with my life, while warning people what they're getting into.
I've dreamed of working at Google since I was a teenager. Finally my career trajectory lined up and I got there. Then I have to come to terms with my dream company acting like an incompetent fast food chain in terms of HR. Tough enough without a lawsuit.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y…
I recently interviewed at a medium-sized tech company in Palo Alto that only had recent graduates on my interview schedule. I really don't know if I could have expected them to ask questions other than standard CS / data structures / algorithms questions.
Why those employees would be put in a position to interview with such a short time frame of professional experience, let alone recruiting experience, is beyond me.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In that case apologies for the mis-assumption. But maybe better to label quotes to better indicate whether you are quoting in agreement or disagreement for people who don't remember the quote.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#135To 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 tri…
>>>>You're interviewing the workplace as much as they're interviewing you.
Not nearly enough people realize this. If they're asking you corny questions in the interview, how does that reflect on their company? OP said they didn't even ask him questions about his resume - just these corny trivia questions. If I was there, I would've asked how someone thinks this is relevant to doing my job at Google.
After the past three years I've done a ton of interviewing and have learned the only way to know if the company is good fit is to grill the interviewer on stuff that matters to you. I've had interviews at fortune 50 companies with people who had no idea who their competition was or where they wanted their IT department to be in 5 years. If you're not invested in your company, what makes you think I should??
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think you're right. Note taken.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#137Two 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 pa…
>> Larger companies get away with inefficient recruiting because they can.
I would disagree. I interviewed with MS, Google & Amazon multiple times. MS & Amazon are definitely much more organized and very prompt in following up with decision.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#138Yikes, this story and HN comments sound like disasters.
As a sorta balancing out here, my experience interviewing with Google(June 2012) was fantastic IMHO. We agreed right off the beginning what role exactly I'm interviewing for(Test Engineer), different from what I applied for(SDET) and went with it. Note, that I was holding them off for about 2 years. They'd email/call me every 6-8 months, and I'd say "Hold on, gimme a few more months". Eventually stuff happened that caused me to email them back and say "Okay, let's do this." I had the first typical phone-screening, talking about myself 'n such, why I'm looking for another job, why Google, etc. They gave me a bunch of blog links to "Life as a TE at Google" 'n stuff. 2nd phone screening was a programming thing that was kinda hard but not out-of-bounds PhD stuff. I was a bit intimidated by the fact I spent the whole hour on a question that was labeled "Question#1". I asked about it, the SoftEng. told me "Oh, don't worry about that". I asked if there were more questions, he said again not to worry... hmm. I did talk a lot though so he knew what I was thinking while trying to code. Anyways, a week later I get an email from a Google recruiter saying the SoftEng thought I knew what I was doing so we set up the MTV visit with 5 or 6 people. I was super-excited I made it to the on-site visit. Did you know Google Maps on mobile behaves differently if you're on campus? :) Everything happened on time. The interview questions and conversations we had for those 6 hours were great, eye-opening for me. I will say that I went into this whole Google thing with an open mind and with the assumption that all these people had more intelligence in their toe-nail than I'd ever obtain in my life. In the end, 2 weeks later, I was told that they "wouldn't be going forward with me". Of course I was bummed, I didn't even tell my family I was interviewing with Google. I wanted it to be a surprise. But, they showed me my weaknesses and I fixed 'em. Now I have an awesome job(SDET2) and I think the only reason I was able to get through this job's interview process is because Google's interview improved me significantly.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#139Earlier 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.
The post you were replying to was a quote of something Eric Schmidt, then Google CEO, once said.
Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It would certainly make more sense. Sure, have one or two screening calls, but the main interviews should really be done by the team you're going to be on. Not some expert in algorithms who deems your solution to a question not good enough. I mean, how many times have you heard an engineer say, "It's not pretty, but it gets the job done." ??
The 'tenure track' is a great idea. How would you implement it though? Just curious.