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

A Wretched Google Interview Experience

symbo1ics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 359 posts

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#191

Post by AnIrishDuck »

kevingadd wrote: post #163
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.

The skills being evaluated in Google interviews (and on topcoder) are of minimal use in most real problem-solving environments. They're a proxy for skill - something many skilled candidates happen to have alongside the skills you actually want. Linked list questions are a favored choice of this class of interviewer despite the fact that 90%+ of programmers will never have a good reason to write a linked list - or eve…

> Linked list questions are a favored choice of this class of interviewer despite the fact that 90%+ of programmers will never have a good reason to write a linked list - or even use one, for that matter.

If you can't write basic algorithms to manipulate linked lists (traversal, reversal, etc) on demand, you almost certainly aren't a good coder. These kinds of questions are a good weed-out pass. They don't correlate with many necessary skills of a good programmer (organization, communication, thoroughness), but at least can detect lack of critical thinking or basic coding chops. They also lead to good follow-up questions that further explore a prospect's critical thinking skills.

These questions shouldn't be used to find human compilers. Oversights like minor syntax errors and the like should be ignored. Answers should be interpreted generously. Even then, you might be surprised how many candidates I've seen that were beyond incorrect. They weren't even in the right ballpark.

You shouldn't be expected to know Floyd's algorithm [1]. But reversing a linked list? Come on, the solution is 50-100 lines of code, 90% of it boilerplate.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Tortoise_and_ha...

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#192

Post by myko »

Interviewing at Google can be terrible. I was an intern who had high scores in my reviews (my host rated me just below 'superstar', whatever that means - I'm not really a superstar and just assume that was some rating jargon they used at Google).

Anyway when it came to my conversion interviews the person who was supposed to interview me wasn't at the office. I ended up waiting around for someone to interview me, and when they came in 15 minutes late we had to trek across campus to get a room. I was asked a fairly difficult problem and botched it pretty hard, and of course didn't have the complete time to attempt to solve it.

I thought I nailed the next interview though! After I answered a couple pretty complex problems the interviewer literally said there is no way you're not getting an offer, and we just ended up chatting a bit.

I got rejected a few days later, not totally unexpected as I knew I botched that first interview. When I asked my host about it later he said the second interview wasn't even on record.

C'est la vie, I guess. I'd still love to try again, I had a lot of fun working there, the people are top notch - even of the hiring process is extremely hit or miss.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#193

Post by throwaway1979 »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #112
kevingadd wrote: post #66

Google's recruiting seems like it must be at least partially the responsibility of short-tenure contractors. Every time I've dealt with people from their recruiting department, even the very nice ones seemed forgetful, inattentive and poor at communication. The actual Google employees who do the interviewing are on average very bright, good at actively interviewing candidates (instead of just rattling off questions),…

>>> but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus. The crazy thing is they don't give feedback, then call back in a few months and ask if you want to interview again for the same position like the OP said. Talk about completely confusing people. . .

Ha! I thought I was the only one this happened to.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#194

Post by zorpner »

doktrin wrote: post #189
zorpner wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of them did, I know, unsure on the other. I'll inquire to see if they're interested in providing that information or joining this discussion.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#195

Post by pasbesoin »

WalterBright wrote: post #171
throwaway86 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminal, and that is the extent that I will follow up. I will also reiterate "minor".

I'm sad that that's the way things are. I think that once someone has paid their debt to society through the justice system, that this should be acceptable to society.

Another incident demonstrating that "the system" (more than just the criminal justice system, as it extends to subsequent civil and commercial life) is neither about justice nor about rehabilitation.

A further corruption: I've read that, even when there is a will to "take a chance" (aka employ and treat as a member of society) people with a criminal record, businesses can face obstacles -- sometimes insurmountable, for a smaller business -- to do so. One particular one: Insurance companies audit for such employees, and either cancel insurance or raise it to unaffordable rates.

America: Land of hypocrisy.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#196

Post by anon1385 »

jrockway wrote: post #155
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've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories. I'm not defending this practice at all, but I think I can understand it. It sounds like the typical problems involved in scheduling 10 people to all perform together at once. Nobody can prevent people from getting sick. Going out of t…

It's interesting to see that the Google employees commenting in this thread are OK with people being treated this way. It reveals a lot about the culture. No wonder you fail so badly at customer service.

Maybe you have been at Google so long that you don't realise it, but this is not a normal or decent way to treat somebody. I can't think of anybody I know who would want to work there after going through that interview process even if they did get a job offer.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#197

Post by RougeFemme »

corresation wrote: post #165
thetrb wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many people don't want to work at Google. Yes, they can fill their spots, but the reality is that hiring bullshit means that over time their candidate pool progressively filters to "the people who will put up with bullshit", and while it takes years to filter through, in the end you up becoming Microsoft. There was a time when Microsoft was the bee's knees and was the elusive dream employer. Then they started various…

I agree that HR is often a scourge. . .however, in my previous job I was elated with the way HR improved the hiring process in my department. First, they looked at the incredibly high - and quick - turnover in our department. They actually paid attention to the exit interviews/surveys. They told the management that people were leaving in droves because the jobs/roles/responsibilities/autonomy described during the interviews were radically different from what employees actually experienced - and employees were not happy about that. HR forced more "truth-in-advertising" and "truth-in-recruiting". HR forced them to include more SMEs in the process and to require that all of the interviewers - especially the non-SMEs and managers - to know best - or at least better - practices for interviewing. . .

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#198

Post by eropple »

jnbiche wrote: post #50
JulianMorrison wrote: post #35

Just playing, but "If you have n servers that take requests, and server Sᵢ can take a request every tᵢ seconds, and you need to distribute requests to them as efficiently as possible, how do you do it?" can be done very easily in Go. You have a shared channel which contains the pending requests, and a goroutine per server that simply loops doing: read from the shared channel, perform the request, wait for the sleep p…

Wow, I've really got to look into Go. Sounds so easy.

What he's described is pretty trivially done in most modern languages/frameworks. I can write the same in C#, Scala or C++11--swapping greenlets for standard threads, which honestly is unlikely to be a perf concern--pretty trivially.

The hardest of the above would be C++, because boost::threadpool isn't officially part of Boost--though it works fine--and otherwise you'd have to get a little creative with boost::thread_group (but in doing so it'd probably be only slightly more complex than the Go version).

I mean, it's a nice feature, albeit bolted to a language with a lot of issues. But unless you have pressing reasons to look at Go, something like that sounding easy probably won't really trip your trigger. =)

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#199

Post by RogerL »

tomkarlo wrote: post #173
keithpeter wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guilty as charged :-) As an interviewee, I have, more than once, thanked my hosts for their tea and cake and left early when I detected that the interview was turning into a chat. Would a collegiate interviewing model not work better for an intellectually driven organisation like Google? Each team interviewing for their own positions, but with some form of 'tenure track' process for the longer term?

Amazon does things this way (the hiring team does the interviewing) but there are some major drawbacks to it as well. If your team is grossly shorthanded (say, 30% of seats open), you have your team doing a ton of interviews rather than covering for the headcount shortage, which means you're even more underwater or behind schedule. (And you might have to screen dozens of candidates to fill a seat.) Also, there's a st…

Okay, that just makes a ton of sense. I've never worked for a big company like that, and hadn't considered the latency issue that can be worked around by general interviewing.

With that said, it doesn't change my opinion of it being a time waste for me. I have a career, I know, more or less, what I want to work on next, and I have no interest in devoting a month (seriously, Google recommended taking that long to come up to speed on interview questions) of study to interview for who knows what position, especially when the whole system is gamed towards rejecting false negatives.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#200

Post by colanderman »

cromwellian wrote: post #41
Aqueous wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like everything they do are CRUD apps, in the sense that they are concerned with creating, updating, reading, and destroying database records. They are just massively parallelized on the backend to deal with all the traffic. Sometimes I wonder what all these engineers do every day. Their main apps are not getting exponentially better, and they have fewer of them. Why is all this algorithmic knowledge really…

I think this is being relatively unfair in assessment. Google hasn't had a hit product in a while? Search and Ads are dominant. Android is the #1 mobile smartphone OS with 80% of the market. Chrome is now the #1 browser. Google Maps is the #1 mapping application. Gmail is now #1 in active users. G+ now has 190 million active posters now monthly now (Twitter only has 110 million active posters) YouTube is the top vide…

> most of the changes go unnoticed like a frog slowly being boiled in water.

Believe me, I notice. GMail and GMaps get slower and slower every day. I can't actually use GMail anymore; clicking anything takes several seconds. Wasn't this way in 2005, and I had a crappier computer then.

Post reply on HN