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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#331

Post by sounds »

throwaway86 wrote: post #264
paganel wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, there isn't. Convicts are one of the last remaining class of people not protected by law. Every time any effort begins to make convicted folks a protected class, it makes politicians appear weak on crime and is quickly silenced.

For people who live outside the US, you may want to consider that "convicts" include random drug testing (medical marijuana, poppy seeds testing positive for opium, alcohol/diabetes issues, HIV) – and of course, sexual preference.

Yes, there are laws and court cases that should change the outcome, but that means a lawsuit.

In other words, US employment frequently comes with a lot of implicit assumptions about your lifestyle.

Edit to add: fortunately random drug tests aren't very common in the tech industry.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#332

Post by hippee-lee »

potatolicious wrote: post #80
JonFish85 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company. On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or dis…

Because then your interviewer does a hatchet-job on you in a feedback form and you get shitlisted from interviewing at Google forever. That's the problem with large companies. There are companies where I would just walk out of an abusive interview, because the brokenness represents their whole company. Then you have massive, mega, ultra-sized companies like Google where even though this particular team is beating you…

Ah, but you don't have to just walk out telling them they wasted your time. It only talkes a moment to check you muted phone and'OMG - there is an emergency at home/with my child/spouse etc. So very sorry but you have to leave right now to take care of it. Hopefully they understand and can reschedule after the emergency is taken care of."

End of story and if you catch them early enough in the interview you can be back at work happily coding the latest story in current sprint.

You should do what's best for you but understand why the folks on here are defending google; it's a big place and they are mostly powerless when it comes to direct influence or manipulation. Understand that and it will give you insight into how to hack their system for your benefit both before you are hired there AND after multiple interviews when you find that right team when but need to deal with ingrained systems; which rules must be followed and which rules everyone ignores, when to ask for forgiveness later and when and how to cover your ass from the start.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#333

Post by sounds »

VLM wrote: post #249
corresation wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Because if engineering takes over, you'll become like Google was before the Google+ initiative.

They were doing just fine making things like Google Reader.

I suppose now Google is more balanced and their stock is much more valuable but their long term direction has changed significantly. They can now be disrupted.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#334

Post by sounds »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #291
corresation wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, Microsoft eventually got sued by employees a couple of times, cleaned up their "HR initiatives", and are now generally known as a fairly nice place to work, even when they're not cutting-edge.

Microsoft is still doing stack ranking. I believe that was a major part of the HR scourge he was referring to

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#335

Post by kamaal »

praptak wrote: post #150
727374 wrote: 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.

>>Doing a year of such training would raise your actual skill.

Hardly,

Building something would be your actual skill. Taking a product from an idea, finishing it, having some real users use it. Selling the product, and monetizing.

Those are the skills that matter.

Coming to storing trivia in your brain. Any decent guy who gets things done can read and work on such stuff. Its an utter waste of time to spend years putting text book knowledge in your brain, unless your profession is teaching.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#336

Post by kamaal »

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…

If you look carefully most of these big companies have one thing in common. They have one major source of money, and everything else is either acquired or something trying hard but failing to be the mainstream revenue part.

Agreed there have been few home grown innovation from Google, those are all from early days.

Current achievements are all leveraging on their existing user base, and are not necessarily due to the merit of their products.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#337

Post by throwaway86 »

jpatokal wrote: post #329
throwaway86 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. Your mentor from your new team comes to collect you after orientation, and you find out then. You are also going nowhere for a long, long time.

This is true only if you are hired for a generic role. Most people are, but for sufficient specific jobs (like mine), you will know exactly what team you are joining. Also, with decent performance you can transfer after a year, occasionally even earlier if another team really wants you.

"Software Engineer" and "Site Reliability Engineer" are generic roles.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#338

Post by throwaway86 »

icedchai wrote: post #319
throwaway86 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breach of a nondisclosure is breaking a contract. Civil tort. Lawsuit. And so on.

I understand that can happen. But I doubt, very much, that it would happen over something as trivial as disclosing information about an interview.

You asked how they would enforce it. You did not ask for a likely outcome, you asked for possible outcomes. If you want specific answers, ask specific questions.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#339

Post by hrasyid »

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…

wait.. you have grandkids?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#340

Post by bjterry »

abalone wrote: post #321
abalone wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's just the maximum possible in a single day.

Your bigger problem is with this "trim the array" idea, which is definitely not an obvious solution. The way you've coded it you'd have to tally almost the entire days worth of deltas just to determine the trim point. And you may still exceed that single-day max memory, because you'd accumulate overruns in between trims. I'll leave you to think about that one. (Hint: google round robin database. You know, the solutio…

Interestingly, based on the explanation at [1] round robin databases actually don't precisely solve the question as described in the article. It sacrifices precision for larger increments, and the author was looking for an exact algorithm.

1: http://jawnsy.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/round-robin-databases...

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