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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I have irons in the fire. I won't deny that it got me down, and I know that's coming across. Thank you for the support, I really appreciate it.

Ok, well, here's how I'd approach it. There are three classes of companies: those that will ding you for your past, those that don't care about your past, and those that will embrace your past. One strategy is to try to hide your past, figuring it won't hurt you with the latter two and might incrementally help you with the former. I wouldn't adopt this strategy. Instead, assuming it truly is "minor," I'd own it. Writ…

I'm toeing the water here anonymously, if it's not obvious, and have thought of that precise thing. Perhaps a mailing list or advocacy group of engineers with problematic backgrounds, and assistance to companies that don't deal with this often.

This is a community of hackers in both senses of the word. Computer Tampering is a felony on the same level as manslaughter in one place I've lived. I like your thinking.

I've also e-mailed you, and appreciate your advice, yet again.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression you didn't read the part of my post where I said these algorithms are useful. The problem is expecting a candidate to have them memorized and be able to rattle off a particular algorithm from memory in a 15-30 minute interview window, when in the REAL WORLD if you don't remember the exact details of an algorithm, you look it up or grab it from a library instead of writing a busted implementation…

> The problem is expecting a candidate to have them memorized and be able to rattle off a particular algorithm from memory in a 15-30 minute interview window I get the feeling that we're talking past each other. It certainly seems that we have different kinds of interviews in mind. I'm referring to about an hour long session where a candidate is asked to solve a basic problem with a linked list. The candidate shouldn…

My PoV is that even if you have the hour or so that it should take for an average candidate to arrive at Floyd's algorithm or something, is that really the best use of the hour to screen the candidate? If your goal is simply to see whether they can solve problems using linked lists, that's noble, but making a candidate spend the majority of an interview trying to arrive at a solution for a new problem from scratch is a questionable decision, especially if each person in the interview pipeline is going to do the same thing with another problem.

For reference, the first time I saw the cycle detection problem it was in an interview, and I had to derive Floyd's algorithm myself. It indeed took about an hour, so your estimate's probably not that far off. The problem is that it's the least optimal environment to solve a new problem for the first time without any assistance or context, which is what you're basically requiring. The candidate is basically left swimming in the deep end of the pool and you watch them flail around and at the end of it, maybe they've come up with a solution to the problem. Maybe they're really close and haven't hit that flash of inspiration yet. Maybe you accidentally misstated one of the problem's constraints and they're never going to figure it out as a result. Pretty lame.

For basic stuff like reversing a LL I agree that no reference is needed to work out the optimal answer, but on the other hand I strongly believe those questions are worthless as a way of evaluating competence. The kind of LL stuff I've seen in interviews skews much more heavily towards Floyd's than simple stuff like list reversal, most likely because the simple stuff is easy.

A good interviewer can certainly detect that a candidate just isn't familiar with LLs, and move to a different problem. I think that's an adequate method too: Attempt to screen out the people who aren't competent at logic and recursion and similar concepts, but without filtering out people who have just never been exposed to a particular class of problems.

On the other hand, if you think having a candidate flail around for an hour (whether they solve the problem or not) is a good idea, there's no convincing you otherwise. I just think it's a pretty poor choice if your goal is to make the candidate and interviewer come out of the experience looking back on it positively with lots of useful information.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#283
post #117

I had a very similar experience. I work at an investment bank and was recruited by a large company that does proprietary trading including high frequency trading. I went for the interview which was scheduled to be an all-day thing. In addition to having been in IT for a very long time I am also very knowledgeable on capital markets having successfully taken CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) tests. The CFO of the comp…

$250K total comp is not going to scare off any hiring manager looking for a median seniority engineer at Google. Competitive, yes, but not doorslamming.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You shouldn't be expected to know Floyd's algorithm [1].

Bob Floyd had more than one algorithm named after him. I thought you were referring to his beautiful algorithm for sampling without replacement [1], described by Jon Bentley in his CACM "Programming Pearls" column in 1987 [2]. If you don't know that one, it's worth studying for the techniques it reveals.

[1] http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/178690/whats-the-pro...

[2] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315746&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID...

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company. On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or dis…

Because then your interviewer does a hatchet-job on you in a feedback form and you get shitlisted from interviewing at Google forever. That's the problem with large companies. There are companies where I would just walk out of an abusive interview, because the brokenness represents their whole company. Then you have massive, mega, ultra-sized companies like Google where even though this particular team is beating you…

As someone who's had to conduct some interviews, that's the opposite of my reaction.

If I show up to an interview slot (for which I'm spending my 15-30m), and the candidate speaks up about a mis-scheduling or whatever, and convinces me it's not worth our time to meet, I'll be happy to regain my time and complain to the HRbot/hiring manager about scheduling issues (aka please don't waste the my/company's time by messing up the scheduling).

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#286

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…

> Otherwise you're talking about a 3-6 month delay from when a seat opens to when there's an engineer sitting in it, which sucks.

Welcome to reality in most of large corporate america. I've seen insane 6-9 month interview processes at places like Cisco and that's not even a successful hire. Likewise at other large SV companies.

If you can get it down to 3 months, it's below par and better than the competition.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#287
The worst (actually, the one bad) job interview experience in my life was with Google. The interviewer was extremely unfriendly, had a thick unintelligible indian accent, and didn't try to hide the fact he had something more interesting to do than interviewing me.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I asked the HR Manager point blank if Google made a mistake here, waiting two months to act upon information available to them before they extended me an offer. She countered that I was the one who had made the mistake in 2007. I served my probation sentence and am beyond tired of being punished for the same thing. If hiring people are reading this and understanding just that last sentence that I typed, then I'm happ…

This. It's crazy, but criminal record can make or break us white collar workers. It's sad that people and corporations don't have a forgive and forget mentality towards convicts. I think that the only way out is to be your own boss. When people buy a product (software or better yet hardware) they are much more removed from the people producing it. I'd be interested in how you are handling all this. And how common you think this situation is among white collars. Good luck in your future.
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