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I've been taking a "break" and am finishing up work on my own project. I got one of these emails from a Google recruiter last week.
I had applied to Google back in 2009, but chickened and canceled the interview after I read about the useless and non-trivial theoretical questions they ask.
After reading this, I think I'll still pass. But for different reasons :).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you're using WordPress - are you using any type of caching plugins? W3 Total Cache is what I currently use on the smallest Linode server available (512MB). I'm running Nginx and Debian 6.
Sadly running apache without any caching plugins.
Thanks for writing this. I've been taking a "break" and am finishing up work on my own project. I got one of these emails from a Google recruiter last week. I had applied to Google back in 2009, but chickened and canceled the interview after I read about the useless and non-trivial theoretical questions they ask. After reading this, I think I'll still pass. But for different reasons :).
If it makes you feel better, our technical phone interviews + onsites are better; the engineers who you'd talk to care more about you being a smart candidate than trying to get you to rank yourself lower. I'm sure there are some people who scoff at candidates who, say, don't have the CS Ph.D that they do, but we honestly do have an interviewer feedback system that tells those people to knock it off.
It is funny that this recruiter guy "reserves" 10 for the inventor of the programming language. If I wrote the English dictionary and grammar system, would you assume I could write like Shakespeare?
Wow, that sounds terrible - sorry that one of our guys (in this case, really sounds like a recruiter than an actual engineer) expected you to know a bunch of random technical facts. If it makes you feel better, our technical phone interviews + onsites are better; the engineers who you'd talk to care more about you being a smart candidate than trying to get you to rank yourself lower. I'm sure there are some people wh…
The first time was for a role I actually applied for. I was honoured to even be considered, but when the interview went similarly to how you describe I was rather gutted.
The second time I received an email and a subsequent phonecall out of the blue. Again I was excited and told that it'd be an 'informal chat regarding opportunities here at Google'. The call started off great - being told that you could work from any office all over the world, employee benefits, exciting-sounding projects, etc. etc.
Then I was asked to rate myself on a "scale of 1-10, where 1-5 you have some knowledge on the subject, 6-7 you're considered an expert, 8-9 you've published work in this area such as a book, and 10 you're the person who wrote the language or you're considered a world authority on the subject." And from then on in it just descended into madness.
How does an average, even an above average person, ever rate themselves - if they're being reasonably modest - above 4? "I see you're keen on Python, how do you rate yourself there? By the way, you know the guy who invented Python? Yeah, he works here, heh heh" and so on. Following on from that little taster (which made me feel approx. 1" tall) we then had a 'quick fire' round of relatively obscure questions. A held my own here but given how my confidence was undermined at this point I don't think it was especially representative of myself technically.
And that was that. The only thing that I can take away from these is that I'm not the 'type' of person Google are looking for. Good luck to anyone who is.