My Nightmare Interviews With Google
businessinsider.com
My Nightmare Interviews With Google
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Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#2"Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job." Uh, maybe for a second job- but when you are still a senior in school your GPA is one (admittedly crude) measure of how well you were doing at your last occupation (student).
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#3These were just questions for a position as Associate Product Marketing Manager. During my senior-year interviews with Google for a Software Engineer position, there were 3 rounds, each getting increasingly harder, chock full of nothing but technical questions: some trivia (name all standard network port associations), some implementation (design a chat server), some theory (what is the big-O runtime advantage of doubling an array size upon copy over just adding new entries linearly), etc, etc...
Each time they said "this interview will take about 30 minutes," but each one ended up being around 1.5 hours.
It was grueling, but fun. I'm not sure what happened because I didn't hear back after the 3rd interview. It was at least a nice feeling to know that all of my classes in school had helped me with the answers.
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#4I wouldn't really say nightmare per se, although it probably felt like that at the time. She just wasn't very practiced at estimating and making reasonable assumptions.
Back when I was in my final year of uni I interviewed for a set of blue-chip graduate recruiters who threw similar questions at me. I distinctly remember sitting in a Data Connection office somewhere trying to work out how many petrol stations were in the UK. I was terrible. But there are ways to get better at this and it's really no secret that Google asks these kinds of questions. I think they reveal two things about the candidate - how good they are instinctively, and how well they prepare.
Obviously Google asks candidates who get past a certain point to sign a NDA, but there's still a surprising amount of information out there. I was recently helping a friend (and have previously helped an ex) with interviews and preparing for the logic and theoretical comp.sci. parts was actually quite a lot of fun. Maybe because I didn't have the pressure!
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#5[deleted]
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#6Her last answer really did her in, I think. She said she was "wishing [the number of graduating seniors] was higher" since she was amid a job search. That would mean more competition for jobs. That indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#7"Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job." Uh, maybe for a second job- but when you are still a senior in school your GPA is one (admittedly crude) measure of how well you were doing at your last occupation (student).
As a hiring manager, I'll take internship or side-project coding experience over GPA anyday.
Sure, a good GPA is good. But if you back it up with experience, you are ahead.
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#8The questions mentioned in the article don't seem particularly odious. They sound like standard "think-on-your-feet" case-based questions that management consultants and bankers also love. Demonstrating creativity and problem solving grit is more important than producing a correct number.
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#9[deleted]
> I'm sorry but if you think that Gmail earns only
She qualifies it with "a real number?" comment and I think she was wondering if they wanted a "solid number"
> I suspect not at Google though.
I dunno but it's a big corporation now. Anyone can float through such a place without really working hard if they can find the right niche. I don't see why google would be magical or special about this.
Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google
#10Her last answer really did her in, I think. She said she was "wishing [the number of graduating seniors] was higher" since she was amid a job search. That would mean more competition for jobs. That indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.
It was a joke. I think what doomed her more than anything was a lack of comprehension skills from the first interviewer, and a lack of humor from the second.