How I (almost) got an internship at Google

It's not integer overflow that makes the problem difficult. It's off-by-one errors in the predicates (< vs. <=) and indexing operations (n/2 vs (n+1)/2).

There was a post a while ago on HN about how a very large of the people applying for a given job are in the bottom fraction of the total talent pool. Essentially, the good people get hired quickly (or are never looking for someone else to pay them in the first place), and don't apply for lots of jobs, whereas the people who don't get hired keep applying for other jobs, thus stinking up the statistics.

Same here. Twice in a row.

First time, I was told a manager would call me to explain me which team I was being matched with. I received the call to tell me I had an offer... two days after the deadline set by the University. And it is not like this deadline is unknown to employers.

Second time, again, I received an offer. This time, I had to call, one week before the deadline, after two weeks of hearing nothing from them. Two students in my class were in the same situation, one had to send a hate mail to finally get a reply. The other one got one only after the deadline.

To be honest, this really isn't the best way to go about it. Makes you fell like crap as an intern. I interned at fairly large and well known tech companies in the past (Facebook, heading to Bloomberg this Summer) and got offers from many more (Amazon, Microsoft, Zynga, EA, etc.) and my worst experiences were always with Google. As a freshman, Google looked like the dream internship, the company to aim for. Four internships later, it is now pretty low on my list.

Definitely not impressed by their recruitment process. And this all happened in the past 12 months.

> Why are Google so popular anyway?

I've been a Googler for a little less than a year and so far I absolutely love it. Compensation is good, the perks are fantastic, the caliber of people I work with is stellar, the work is challenging and interesting, and the culture and processes are the best I've seen.

> A long process of interviews like the ones I have heard about hints at more pain and no autonomy once you actually join.

I believe it's the opposite. You have to run the gauntlet to get in because once you do, you won't be closely monitored and you'll be given a lot of autonomy. The hiring process is stringent to try to reduce the number of internal gates you need once you get in.

@haberman, I've edited my initial post.

Not arguing with you as that gets many good people during interviews. But I'm going to provide some anecdotal evidence to the contrary ...

In binary search this problem comes from the length of an array, which is either odd or even, and then you're doing a division by 2, which should trigger alarms in your head all over. And just as when you were taught in your first CS class (either high-school or college) you pick 2 simple examples for both cases, and test with pen and paper (tools provided during any interview).

When I did interviews from the employer's side -- the people not doing this were either totally unprepared, failing most other questions, or brilliant (and lazy) people that considered the problem too easy to bother checking the implementation.

Surely, put into context it can provide a valuable filter, but it's not saying much about the top X% of the talent pool, which my post was about.