Live data from Hacker News

A Wretched Google Interview Experience

symbo1ics.com

161–170 of 359 posts

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#161
post #54

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…

Yes, but how does Go do it . Google is probably more interested in hiring people who can answer that rather than your answer. "There's a library for that" is a great answer for 99.9% of businesses out there, but google's problems aren't that of the 99.9%. (Nor in fact are they in the 99.9% of the remaining 0.1%)

Although I don't work at Google, I feel like this just patently is not the case. I firmly believe the vast majority of devs at Google aren't writing the next massive distributed and concurrent datastore with strong guarantees on transaction sequencing, aka F1 on top of Spanner.

The vast majority of people aren't writing the things that get, or would get if they were publicly available, research papers at Google.

They're using those things, written by the 1% of the 1%, to do things really, really generic, like display advertisements or store emails. There are some people in language development (Dart, Go, probably some others and some DSLs), there are some people doing hardcore database design, they probably have some people working on hard problems in their datacenters, from reducing latency on commodity hardware to networking infrastructure.

Are the majority of Google employees writing things that only the 0.1% of the 0.1% can solve? No, they don't even employ enough software engineers for that to be the case.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#162
post #70
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.

[deleted]

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#163
post #129

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 an…

> Just spend a year playing topcoder in your spare time and you could ace any of the questions I got. I wouldn't call this gaming the system. Doing a year of such training would raise your actual skill.

The skills being evaluated in Google interviews (and on topcoder) are of minimal use in most real problem-solving environments. They're a proxy for skill - something many skilled candidates happen to have alongside the skills you actually want.

Linked list questions are a favored choice of this class of interviewer despite the fact that 90%+ of programmers will never have a good reason to write a linked list - or even use one, for that matter. It's a CS fundamental and it's important to understand, just like other data structures, but evaluating a candidate's ability to rattle off a particular linked list algorithm on the board doesn't tell you anything about their ability to solve problems customers care about.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#164
post #114

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 thei…

That sucks. Send me an email if you'd like me to figure out what happened. (jrockway AT google.com)

One thing though; the interview feedback from each interviewer is only for the hiring committee, never for the candidate.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#165
post #107

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.

Many people don't want to work at Google.

Yes, they can fill their spots, but the reality is that hiring bullshit means that over time their candidate pool progressively filters to "the people who will put up with bullshit", and while it takes years to filter through, in the end you up becoming Microsoft.

There was a time when Microsoft was the bee's knees and was the elusive dream employer. Then they started various HR initiatives and it became a place that only a certain type of person wanted to work, and the result is the malaise and technology lack of leadership that Microsoft now evidences.

HR as a profession is often a scourge, and the more influence HR has at a company, the more inertia pushes towards decline.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#166

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've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories. I'm not defending this practice at all, but I think I can understand it. It sounds like the typical problems involved in scheduling 10 people to all perform together at once. Nobody can prevent people from getting sick. Going out of t…

you say flaky, I say assholes who don't respect others' time. And way to move the goalposts re: your friend would be happy comment. I think what would have made his friend happy is to be treated with respect. Similarly with your bitterness comment; it's not bitter, it's letting the world know you and your colleagues believe it's right to treat people this way (because if you all didn't think this was ok, then you wouldn't do it).

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#167
post #104

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,…

> Given the sheer size of Google Microsoft has more employees and the three times I interviewed with them (and got accepted) it was a great experience, with perfect communication from their recruiters and interviewers. The one time I interviewed with Google (and got accepted, but I rejected them for MS) I pretty much went through a similar experience as the blog post, although the interviews themselves weren't bad, j…

I'll second this; Microsoft, for all the flak they get re: corporate culture, their products etc, have a great, smooth interview process.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#168
Just to add my experience with Google to the pile:

After the initial screenings and interviews with two different recruiters (one from Dublin and the second one from Switzerland) I finally get to the first technical interview. I struggled a bit with some questions, but I did get to the optimal solution in the end. I felt I could do better, but the second recruiter assured me that I did really well. He even sort of apologized because he needed to schedule a second phone interview, before inviting me on site.

The second interview, as far as I can tell, went the same as the first. I made some mistakes along the way, but I did get to an optimal solution at the end. The interviewer told me I'll get the results by the end of the week. Two weeks pass and still no word from Google. I decided to send an email to the recruiter, asking for an update. Still nothing. After a month I decided to send a friendly email to my first recruiter asking for an update - I didn't know what else to do. The second recruiter replied the next day telling me it was a "close call" and that I should re-apply in 12 months. No thanks :)

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#169

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've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories. I'm not defending this practice at all, but I think I can understand it. It sounds like the typical problems involved in scheduling 10 people to all perform together at once. Nobody can prevent people from getting sick. Going out of t…

You're focusing on the details. The huge, blaring point is that some person was flown across the country, probably took time off work, etc. for an interview that was utterly hopeless from the outset and thus pointless. It's Kafkaesque in its absurdity. Make no mistake, this sort of conduct is a black mark on Google.

Funny how the only people in this thread defending it are people currently employed by Google. The world viewed through Google Glasses sounds awfully distorted.

Post reply on HN