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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#181

Post by [deleted] »

ScottBurson wrote: post #152
throwaway86 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And blacklist myself entirely from this career? This throwaway comment is pushing it already in terms of burning bridges, not to mention getting fired from Google itself after my extended network congratulated me on the position. Who, in this incestuous valley, would hire the guy that sued Google for an employment issue? I've seen it happen, no way. Right to work, too, sigh. To be clear I moved from the Oakland area…

If you have the evidence you say you have, I'd bet a good attorney could get mid-five figures out of them along with an agreement not to disclose the settlement. I don't see what harm there would be in getting a professional opinion, anyway.

[deleted]

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#182

Post by VladRussian2 »

washedup wrote: post #122
mattzito wrote: post #34

An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any…

I feel for your friend. I went through two phone interviews, flown to Mountain View for all day interviews, and was told by the team that they wanted to hire me, but first my candidate packet had to be reviewed by three different hiring committees. I made it through the first two, but in the third hiring committee I was turned down because my GPA was not at the new 3.7+ hiring guideline. I was heartbroken, and I am s…

> three different hiring committees.

Hiring by committee :)

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#183

Post by WalterBright »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #159
praptak wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"I cheated on the test by studying really hard"

I've often been bemused that people will expend more effort finding ways to cheat than if they just learned the material.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#184

Post by jfarmer »

throwaway86 wrote: post #132
bradleyjg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have a legal case for moving expenses and lost wages. Something along the lines of fraudulent inducement -- especially in California. I'd talk to an employment lawyer if I were you.

And blacklist myself entirely from this career? This throwaway comment is pushing it already in terms of burning bridges, not to mention getting fired from Google itself after my extended network congratulated me on the position. Who, in this incestuous valley, would hire the guy that sued Google for an employment issue? I've seen it happen, no way. Right to work, too, sigh. To be clear I moved from the Oakland area…

No, any settlement would almost certainly include a mutual non-disclosure agreement and mutual non-disparagement agreement. Complaining about it here makes it more difficult to get those, though, and any settlement in general.

Moreover, that's not how it works in SV. Assuming you do good work, nobody will care if you sued Google and settled except perhaps Google. I know plenty of engineers who were fired from companies like Facebook and Twitter for perfectly legitimate reasons and are now working at similarly-awesome companies as engineers. And this is a situation where the termination was 100% warranted and broadly known in "the incestuous Valley."

I would have fired them had they done the same and I would have also hired them at another company, assuming they learned their lesson and otherwise seemed like people with integrity.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#185

Post by api »

washedup wrote: post #122
mattzito wrote: post #34

An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any…

I feel for your friend. I went through two phone interviews, flown to Mountain View for all day interviews, and was told by the team that they wanted to hire me, but first my candidate packet had to be reviewed by three different hiring committees. I made it through the first two, but in the third hiring committee I was turned down because my GPA was not at the new 3.7+ hiring guideline. I was heartbroken, and I am s…

Same exact thing here. Overall the experience was okay, but I ended up getting mixed signals at the end. Yes? No? Huh?

Was never asked about GPA. I have no idea why the "no" in committee, but I get the impression that they approve more people than they hire. Moral of the story is probably that the initial approval is not a yes but it just means you passed the technical test.

I have mixed feelings. Would have been a cool place to work, but there are lots of alternatives.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#186

Post by zorpner »

throwaway86 wrote: post #82
mattzito wrote: post #34

An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any…

It's not any better if you get hired. Google recruiters will tell you whatever you want to hear, including things that are not necessarily true. I was assured that a minor issue in my background would not be an issue multiple times (I have email proving this), then Google hired me and let me work for more than two months. I got comfortable, I moved to Mountain View, began real honest work and set about making an impa…

Appalling behavior on Google's part. Amazingly, I know two other people to whom this exact thing has happened (neither of which are you based on details in your story). One was so determined to work for Google that she reapplied after getting the incident expunged from her record (and got rehired -- based on their hiring practices who knows if they had any idea she was the same person).

I'm moving out to the Bay Area next year (for non-work-related reasons) and while I hear plenty of good things about working for Google, I would never do it. For me personally, choosing to work for them would be an implicit endorsement of their hiring/personnel/privacy/politcal practices, which I can't abide.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#187

Post by eyeareque »

index billions of web sites, stock around 850+/share... but their recruiters/interviewers can't return a call/email or show up to give an interview on time. This something that small and large companies have been doing successfully for ages.

They seriously need to work on their culture in this aspect. It seems like such a trivial problem to fix inside of google. What is the hold up? I'm certain there are more good interviewing experiences than bad interviewing processes, but it does seem to be a common theme over there.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#188

Post by jrockway »

AaronFriel wrote: post #161
eterm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how does Go do it . Google is probably more interested in hiring people who can answer that rather than your answer. "There's a library for that" is a great answer for 99.9% of businesses out there, but google's problems aren't that of the 99.9%. (Nor in fact are they in the 99.9% of the remaining 0.1%)

Although I don't work at Google, I feel like this just patently is not the case. I firmly believe the vast majority of devs at Google aren't writing the next massive distributed and concurrent datastore with strong guarantees on transaction sequencing, aka F1 on top of Spanner. The vast majority of people aren't writing the things that get, or would get if they were publicly available, research papers at Google. They…

I'm pretty sure that storing emails or displaying ads is not nearly as generic or as easy as you think.

My justification for asking algorithmic interview questions is because I believe that engineers using libraries should understand exactly how they work, so they know what design compromises the implementation chose and how that affects their higher-level application. Just because you aren't going to be writing a database doesn't mean you shouldn't know the various levels of transaction isolation that exist.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#189

Post by doktrin »

zorpner wrote: post #186
throwaway86 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not any better if you get hired. Google recruiters will tell you whatever you want to hear, including things that are not necessarily true. I was assured that a minor issue in my background would not be an issue multiple times (I have email proving this), then Google hired me and let me work for more than two months. I got comfortable, I moved to Mountain View, began real honest work and set about making an impa…

Appalling behavior on Google's part. Amazingly, I know two other people to whom this exact thing has happened (neither of which are you based on details in your story). One was so determined to work for Google that she reapplied after getting the incident expunged from her record (and got rehired -- based on their hiring practices who knows if they had any idea she was the same person). I'm moving out to the Bay Area…

If you're at liberty to share : did your acquaintances also disclose the incidents during the hiring process, only to be terminated randomly once employed? If so, that is utterly appalling.

Bad enough that it should happen once (to the parent), but repeated incidents would point to some gross organizational dysfunction.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#190

Post by ArekDymalski »

thetrb wrote: post #107
mattzito wrote: post #34

An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any…

And they can do all of that just because everybody still wants to work at Google. Let's say the have 100 applicants for a position, out of which 10 are qualified for it. Then they can still screw 9 of them and hire the one person that for one reason or the other had the luck of interviewing with the right people and talking to the right recruiters.

Whenever a company shows a too-big-to-care-about-candidate-experience attitude it's a symptom of their weakness not power. It's the sad aspect of scaling the organization without establishing a strong culture.
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