Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

dondodge.typepad.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 130 posts

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#11

Post by ddodge »

brown9-2 wrote: post #6
known wrote: post #2

This interview process sounds like searching for reasons to reject a candidate

They are very clear that they feel it is better to have false negatives rather than false positives, I don't think this should be a surprise.

Exactly. The process is designed to reduce false positives. The downside is there will be some false negatives.

It is not 100% accurate and it can take months to get through the process, but if we do it right we will be spending years together. So, it is worth the investment in time.

Don

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#13

Post by dstein »

city41 wrote: post #4

> Google offers are very competitive, some might say generous, and very thorough. Interesting, I've always heard Google doesn't pay very well. Similar to game companies, they can take advantage of the fact people really want to work there and know candidates will accept lower pay because of it. I've heard that from several Google employees past and present. Perhaps things have changed?

I think Google is past the point where it can attract talent on reputation alone. They're already public AND their stock has probably peaked which makes stock options worthless. I imagine Google, like other companies, are having trouble attracting and retaining the top talent. There's a lot more opportunity right now in building a startup, and all the top developers know it.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#14

Post by willscott »

city41 wrote: post #4

> Google offers are very competitive, some might say generous, and very thorough. Interesting, I've always heard Google doesn't pay very well. Similar to game companies, they can take advantage of the fact people really want to work there and know candidates will accept lower pay because of it. I've heard that from several Google employees past and present. Perhaps things have changed?

As a recent Google hire, I think the article gets this point right, the offer was competitive if not generous. At the new-grad level at least I'm in the high-end of what I was expecting to be making.

I know that the reason I wanted to work at Google was to learn how to solve problems involving scale and massive parallelism. There really isn't anywhere else that can teach you that stuff as well.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#15

Post by nerfhammer »

Just went through a recruiter screen myself. Contrary to what I've always heard, they said they don't care that I don't have a relevant degree given enough years of experience, though I'm intimidated by the prospect of what kind of grilling I'm going to get from the actual interview.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#16

Post by nerfhammer »

jbarham wrote: post #7
known wrote: post #2

This interview process sounds like searching for reasons to reject a candidate

Given that the final hire rate is less than one half of one percent of received resumes, they can probably afford to.

Hmm that makes me wonder what the funnel analysis is between each of those steps...

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#17

Post by Retric »

ddodge wrote: post #11
brown9-2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are very clear that they feel it is better to have false negatives rather than false positives, I don't think this should be a surprise.

Exactly. The process is designed to reduce false positives. The downside is there will be some false negatives. It is not 100% accurate and it can take months to get through the process, but if we do it right we will be spending years together. So, it is worth the investment in time. Don

They still get a lot of false positives.

However, the real problem is the amount of bias they introduce into the process. Few Google products have a lot of polish and they really don't get the social networking side of the web. Conceder how much effort it would take for a standalone version of gmail that could easily replace outlook everywhere and make Google a ridicules amount of money.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#18

Post by amichail »

bnoordhuis wrote: post #8

I interviewed with Google for a SRE position earlier this year and their screening process sure is tedious: Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture, like how to write good, maintainable software. I like nerding about graph traversal algos as much as the next guy, but not for 90 minutes on the phone after a long day of work. I'm sure the screening proce…

Maybe they didn't have people readily available to interview you on topics more relevant to your position.

Or maybe they care more about IQ and the sort of interview you got is better at estimating IQ.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#19

Post by harryh »

bnoordhuis wrote: post #8

I interviewed with Google for a SRE position earlier this year and their screening process sure is tedious: Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture, like how to write good, maintainable software. I like nerding about graph traversal algos as much as the next guy, but not for 90 minutes on the phone after a long day of work. I'm sure the screening proce…

False positives are way worse for most companies than false negatives. Interviews processes are generally designed around this principle.

Re: How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

#20

Post by shin_lao »

brown9-2 wrote: post #9
shin_lao wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google didn't pay well in 2007. A friend and me went very far in the recruitment process and it stopped as soon as we explained we expected more money.

Meaning that you received offers?

We didn't get any formal offer, it stopped when the recruiter was testing the waters.

I won't discuss my personal story as I'm not anonymous here.

For my friend everything was very sweet until he mentioned that taking the job would require his wife to drop hers resulting in an income loss and he was concerned about this. Maybe he wasn't very subtle about it, but the minute he told that to the recruiter everything went black (got a "thank you mail" the next morning).

That being said the recruitment experience was very nice and I got a lot of good interview questions out of it.

Post reply on HN