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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#241

Post by paganel »

pasbesoin wrote: post #195
WalterBright wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sad that that's the way things are. I think that once someone has paid their debt to society through the justice system, that this should be acceptable to society.

Another incident demonstrating that "the system" (more than just the criminal justice system, as it extends to subsequent civil and commercial life) is neither about justice nor about rehabilitation. A further corruption: I've read that, even when there is a will to "take a chance" (aka employ and treat as a member of society) people with a criminal record, businesses can face obstacles -- sometimes insurmountable, f…

> One particular one: Insurance companies audit for such employees, and either cancel insurance or raise it to unaffordable rates.

Never been to the States, but shouldn't there be a law against this?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#242

Post by bloat »

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…

Agreed - I enjoyed my Google interview. HR showed me around the building when I arrived. All the interviewers were friendly and not intense at all. In each interview we did the random algorithm question, and then had 10 minutes or so of talking through my questions. Lunch was good. It was a long day - the whole experience was basically tiring but I wouldn't call it stressful.

Most importantly HR told me in advance exactly what to expect, and that is what happened. I wasn't expecting much discussion of my experience or previous projects - but the algorithm questions turned up right on schedule, and they were on the topics I'd been told to review.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#243

Post by VLM »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #203
VLM wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea popped into my head... If candidate is not going to ask good questions about the job and experiences and responsibilities and challenges and the company, should the interviewer torture the candidate with random pages from Knuth until candidate either asks a good question or breaks or runs out of time. (say yes! say yes!) The other idea that popped into my head is we could develop a new "secret geek c…

> Interesting idea popped into my head... If candidate is not going to ask good questions about the job and experiences and responsibilities and challenges and the company, should the interviewer torture the candidate with random pages from Knuth until candidate either asks a good question or breaks or runs out of time. (say yes! say yes!) General etiquette for this sort of sitch seems to be to allow the person with…

"allow the person with more leverage to lead"

Hmm... I'm unemployed that means they have leverage, I'm employed and looking that means I have the leverage?

Now that I think back over the years, as a stereotypical break the ice event is at the start of an interview, they usually thank me for taking the time off from work, at which point I mention I burned a vacation day to meet them and I've only got X left this year, at which point I tend to feel a little arrogant, I'm burning a rare limited day off for these guys, they'd best make it worth my while...

I know they're just fishing to see if I'm ethical enough to burn vacation instead of calling in sick, or maybe lying about being currently employed...

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#244

Post by ok_craig »

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…

It may have been a good idea to try to get them to acknowledge your prior issue as insufficient grounds for firing in your contract.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#245

Post by washedup »

api wrote: post #185
washedup wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same exact thing here. Overall the experience was okay, but I ended up getting mixed signals at the end. Yes? No? Huh? Was never asked about GPA. I have no idea why the "no" in committee, but I get the impression that they approve more people than they hire. Moral of the story is probably that the initial approval is not a yes but it just means you passed the technical test. I have mixed feelings. Would have been a c…

Yea, I agree with you. "Yes" to "you are able to work here" but no "you're hired!"

I don't care about it anymore, but 5 years ago when this was my first job prospect out of school, I was really excited.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#246

Post by Aqueous »

cromwellian wrote: post #41
Aqueous wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like everything they do are CRUD apps, in the sense that they are concerned with creating, updating, reading, and destroying database records. They are just massively parallelized on the backend to deal with all the traffic. Sometimes I wonder what all these engineers do every day. Their main apps are not getting exponentially better, and they have fewer of them. Why is all this algorithmic knowledge really…

I think this is being relatively unfair in assessment. Google hasn't had a hit product in a while? Search and Ads are dominant. Android is the #1 mobile smartphone OS with 80% of the market. Chrome is now the #1 browser. Google Maps is the #1 mapping application. Gmail is now #1 in active users. G+ now has 190 million active posters now monthly now (Twitter only has 110 million active posters) YouTube is the top vide…

I would consider Maps, Gmail, and G+, CRUD applications. What does it take to not be a CRUD application? I'm not sure. I think every web-based application in which enormous amounts of data are stored and manipulated qualifies as a CRUD application, even if they involve lots of intelligence and batch processing on the backend. Many of them are CRUD with a Big "R," as they mostly involve consuming data. Maybe my definition of CRUD is too broad.

Knowledge graph and instant search are amazing feats, but with thousands of engineers working all day at Google, each of these products seem to be only incrementally improving, as you say, and I would almost expect quantum leaps forward in terms of new products. But Google probably has all sorts of things in their pipeline.

These products were already incredibly impressive, as well as huge hits, and I use them every day, so I'm not really dissing them so much as I'm noticing a lack of new, hit products.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#247

Post by paganel »

jrockway wrote: post #155
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'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…

> As for the calculus interview, that sounds like fair game. PMs are supposed to have some PM interviews and some SWE interviews, and math is a perfectly acceptable area to ask SWE candidates

I upvoted you because it's not fair to down-vote people who are on topic, but you're not correct when you assume that of all things calculus (!?) should have anything to do with hiring a PM.

I honestly fail to see how solving some Cauchy sequence-related stuff 10+ years after you finished your studies has anything to do with managing a bunch of programmers. And I'm not saying this as an I-hate-maths guy, in fact the only A+ I got in college was in calculus, but were I to be given such a question during an interview I would have just left.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#248

Post by anonymoushn »

AnIrishDuck wrote: post #191
kevingadd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

> 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. If you can't write basic algorithms to manipulate linked lists (traversal, reversal, etc) on demand, you almost certainly aren't a good coder. These kinds of questions are a good weed-out pass. They don't correlate…

50-100 lines? How horrifying.

  function mklist(v, ...)
    if v==nil then return nil end
    return {value=v, next=mklist(...)}
  end

  function listeq(a,b)
    if a==nil or b==nil then return a==b end
    if a.value==b.value then return listeq(a.next, b.next) end
    return false
  end

  function revlist(list, sofar)
    if list == nil then return sofar end
    local next = list.next
    list.next = sofar
    return revlist(next, list)
  end

  function test()
    assert(mklist(1,2,3).next.next.value==3)
    assert(mklist(1,2,3).next.next.next==nil)
    assert(listeq(mklist(1,2,3),mklist(1,2,3)))
    assert(not listeq(mklist(1,2,3),mklist(1,2,5)))
    assert(not listeq(mklist(1,2,3),mklist(1,2)))
    assert(listeq(mklist(1,2,3), revlist(mklist(3,2,1))))
    assert(not listeq(mklist(1,2,3), revlist(mklist(1,2,3))))
  end

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#249

Post by VLM »

corresation wrote: post #165
thetrb wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Balance... HR taking over is a disaster, but equally if sales takes over, or marketing takes over, or IT takes over, or engineering takes over...

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#250

Post by bduerst »

deong wrote: post #226
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),…

> 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. I had a Google recruiter contact me once when I was actively looking for a job. Her initial email was just the basic, "we saw your CV and thought your skills in…

Is this something that may be unique to the bay area though?

I went through several rounds of interviews with a couple different startups, and two of them were non-responsive to the point it was annoying. I can understand startups being less "professional", but some of them treat you more like a number than some of the bigger corporates I've worked for.

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