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

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

#101

Post by hugh3 »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #55
peregrine wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal is always to work with highly intelligent people. People always talk about the big fish in a little pond but I think there is more value in being a little fish in a big pond because their is more room for growth. I've noticed that if I'm not learning I'm not happy and its much easier to learn with smart people. Its generally known that Google hires smart people.

But are they happy smart people?

They wouldn't be very smart if they remained in a job that was making them unhappy, would they?

Seriously though, all the (limited sample) of google employees I know seem to be happy with it. I'm sure I'd rather work for Google in 2000 than Google in 2010, but it's still a much better place to work than a lot of other places.

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

#102

Post by sabat »

X-Istence wrote: post #95
sabat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture They understand that their process generates false negatives but they don't want any "crud." But quizzing on random trivia is irrelevant to the process of eliminating crud. It's quite likely that a cruddy performer will be able to rattle off all known sorting algorithms or all the option flags for GNU grep -- tha…

Ah, but this is not your normal unix trivia, the questions I were asked were stuff like what is an inode, where are inodes stored, what is a scheduler, what is the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem and other questions along those lines. This is not just flags to give to a process to make it do something, this is system internals. When I mentioned that I knew FreeBSD fairly well I was asked questions specifica…

the questions I were asked were stuff like what is an inode, where are inodes stored, what is a scheduler, what is the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem

Precisely what I mean by unix trivia. What's the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem? I think it's memory vs kernel reserved memory, but in my 16 years as a unix admin I have never once needed to know that. If I did, I'd go look it up. That is why I consider those questions trivial: they're not fundamental, although you can make them sound like they must be.

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

#103

Post by 124816 »

illumin8 wrote: post #78
zppx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SRE (Site Reliability Engineers) according to Tom Limoncelli (a Google's SRE) is a kind of sysadmin, I doubt that this would ever be the case.

Right. I interviewed for SRE at Google. It's basically a sysadmin job. You're expected to be proficient at scripting in some language (Python, Perl, bash, etc), but I would assume you're not expected to write code for most Google applications. I would think the senior SRE engineers know enough about the code base to poke around and make suggestions ("found a bug in module.py at line XYZ that causes bad performance wh…

> It just strikes me as a very broken interviewing system when you have developers interviewing sysadmins.

Sounds like your recruiter messed up.

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

#104

Post by bkhl »

Psyonic wrote: post #61
bkhl wrote: post #36

Personally, I think Google's recruiting process can become very long and tedious. I interviewed with Google 4 months before my graduation and went through 6 different interviews (all technical) for two different positions. The HR person told me that she would like to schedule another hour for interviews and took my availability for next 2-3 weeks. I got no response back. I contacted the HR person again, and she told…

My experience was much smoother. A phone interview, a day of in-person interviews (5), and then the decision. The whole process took a month or so, but I wouldn't say I was strung along.

Yea, that's what a recruit candidate would expect. It's just that I was one of unlucky ones to be in such loop along with some others. I also think the "reorgs" played some part there.

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

#105

Post by Psyonic »

bkhl wrote: post #104
Psyonic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience was much smoother. A phone interview, a day of in-person interviews (5), and then the decision. The whole process took a month or so, but I wouldn't say I was strung along.

Yea, that's what a recruit candidate would expect. It's just that I was one of unlucky ones to be in such loop along with some others. I also think the "reorgs" played some part there.

Ya, you're not the first such case I've heard of, so I know it happens. It is unfortunate, but I think you slipped through the cracks. I definitely don't think it was intended to go that way.

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

#106

Post by astrange »

rjurney wrote: post #100
shadowfox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are lots of companies offering better salaries and options with serious value, with similar challenges, that are going places Genuinely curious. What companies are you talking about?

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Zynga, etc.

Which places are they going?

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

#107

Post by adlep »

I had an honor of being interviewed in Mountain View CA for a basic in-house tech support person, but didn't make it. It was in May 2006. I was one of the finalist, but just not good enough. The experience however was fantastic and a huge ego booster. They flew me over to California for few days and gave me a tour of GooglePlex. I have to say that my interview process was consistent with the article. My "google question" was: "How would you fill out exact 4 liters in a Can of 5 liters and another Can of 3 liters, with unlimited supply of water?" I was able to answer it: Pour the content of the 3L can to the 5L one. Repeat the process again until the 5L can starts overfilling. So now you have 5L can full of water and 1L left in the 3L can. So now, empty the 5L can, and pour in it that 1L leftover water from the 3L can. Now you have 1L in the 5L can. Fill 3L can with water and pour it again in the 5L can. So 1L + 3L == 4L :) Still it wasn't enough for the job as I may have failed the regular expression part of my interview...

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

#109

Post by guelo »

jrockway wrote: post #92
Dornkirk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language(s), tech, framework is used for the software (web-apps? desktop? etc) at BoA?

There are something like 70,000 developers and 300,000 total employees, so it's hard to say anything other than "all of the above". I mostly use Haskell and Perl. The rest of the department is mostly Perl. Sometimes I do C. Other groups are Python-heavy. There is a big Java and C# presence, and of course a lot of people that think C++ is the only real programming language. There is some initiative to standardize on C…

You forgot to mention that you would be working for a giant corporate behemoth that is evil to its customers.

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

#110

Post by guelo »

rjurney wrote: post #35

Why would anyone want to work at Google at this point? They can't hold onto their people, have very high churn and dissatisfaction rates, etc. I could see maybe wanting to put in a year to learn the google stack, or if you have a particular area you've been researching and they will pay you to do exactly what you want, but beyond that... there are lots of companies offering better salaries and options with serious va…

Google is one of the top 5 software companies in the world, it is chok-a-ful of world class talent including many of the luminaries in computer science, they are changing the world with massive innovation every year, and to top it off they are famous for their employee perks and flexibility ...

but you'd rather go work for zynga making dumb games?

To each his own I guess.

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