That whole “Google cares about GPA even for people
years out of college” thing? I supposed I can’t
speak for every hiring committee, but I never
remember my hiring committee discussing the GPA
of a professional candidate. For that matter,
we were never even given a candidate’s GPA unless
he/she elected to put it on their resume.
This doesn't jive with what I know of the process. Tom Galloway's response in the comments, however, does:
GPA/SAT/GRE: Perhaps not in Engineering so much, but
a *lot* of non-Eng HR and HCs did do cuts based on what
school someone attended and/or their GPA and test scores.
And I know for a fact that even Eng applicants who had
been out of school for over a decade were asked for such
on a regular basis. There were a number of us, mostly
older types, who semi-actively campaigned against Google
asking for such from folk who’d been out of school for a
while as we felt it 1) was useless relative to their
actual job performance and 2) it was embarrassing *to*
Google for us to ask for such irrelevant info and gave
up a bad impression/rep.
In my experience interviewing at Google, the article is accurate. Granted this was a handful of years ago and things may be different now, but I wasn't asked brain teasers and I was asked to code on the white board.
Where my experience does slightly differ than the article, was their use of your academic records. They didn't care about my GPA, mostly because I dropped out of college very quickly and I don't have a GPA to care about, but they did care I didn't have a college degree and used that to justify the offer I was given.
Found this incredibly interesting: xx let’s look at the very widely circulated “15 Google Interview Questions that will make you feel stupid” list. You want to believe these are real questions, given that Business Insider feels like such a reputable source. Except that they didn’t get this list from a direct source. They borrowed their questions from some blogger (I won’t link back here) who was posting fake question…
I'm not at all surprised that bloggers, then media, recycle garbage stories that get pageviews. "Bullshit laundering", as reddit recently coined it.
Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
That's been my experience as well. I had one phone-interview with a west coast firm looking for a local-to-my-area contractor that included coding. But as for every other interview I've done in and from the midwest, the closest they came to 'code' was one group asking obnoxious syntax questions.
From the other side of the table, the firm I'm with now only has a pseudo-code step in the interviewing process if and when I run it. The director for my group doesn't even put the question forward if I can't make an interview appointment. Even though he agreed that it was a great tool that did filter out a couple duds that might well have been hires without it, and likely would have filtered out the one spectacularly bad fit that made it through before my time.
Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
If you can comment, I would be interested on the standard of coding that successful candidates exhibit once employed.
Personally, if I could only ask a candidate one question, it would be something that involved writing code. Too many times I've seen candidates with impressive resumes, technical knowledge, or conversation skills, fail miserably to implement trivial (e.g. stricmp) functions.
From anecdotal but first-hand experience (went through a couple of interview rounds), Google interviewers indeed don't ask the questions on that list. But the questions they do ask are hard and often academic - as in, you have likely never run into them in a real-world scenario before and you likely never will. At first I was like 'wow, Google must be populated with demi-gods'. Then I spoke to some Googlers off the r…
probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all).
In any highly skilled profession, 95% of the time someone with very little of your skill could do your job. The valuable part is that you can also be counted on for that 5% as well.
Most of my time at Google hasn't involved any substantial theoretical work. One time though, I did have to come up with a algorithm for computing connected components that could run in reasonable parallel-time in mapreduce. The resulting algorithm ran in log n parallel time passing n log n messages over its lifetime. (This probably is in the literature somewhere considering that a coworker and I had to solve it for unrelated reasons and independently came up with the same thing.)
I'd like to expect my coworkers to be able to do that sort of work in a domain that they're familiar with, because it takes certain problems and moves them across the boundary from impossible to possible. Working at Google scale means that you'll inevitably have to solve some problems that have never been solved before, at least until a lot of universities find it worthwhile to build a thousand node cluster for research purposes.
I got to the onsite, day-long, interview stage at Google (about a year ago). It's been awhile, but I do remember they asked some VERY real world questions, ranging from lists related traversal questions, to "how would you implement xyz." Some running times questions, etc. The questions were challenging, but do-able, I suppose. My biggest issue was not so much with the questions, but rather with 1 or 2 of the interviewers who felt it was more of a pissing competition, always trying to undermine the answer. The rest of the people were just phenomenal -- super professional and a pleasure to talk with. In retrospect, it was the younger interviewers who were "problematic." I suppose it has to do with insecurity (I later found out that they weren't at Google for that long, nor were they such hotshots).
Lastly, I believe that none of the interviewers asked for any particular coursework or GPA, but the internal Google recruiter asked for either a transcript or flat out GPA, to send to the committee (who reads the interviewers' comments and makes a decision whether to continue further with the interviewee, or not).
Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
I met someone who complained about how he was required to write code to solve simple problems in an interview. He took that as an offense, saying that he was a websphere something something expert and shouldn't be bothered with little things like coding. I did waste my time trying to explain to him that small coding questions are often the easy way to weed out the people who pretend to have technical expertise and that these are more frequent that he'd think. I still think the coding questions are useful and I don't ind losing such a candidate.