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A Wretched Google Interview Experience

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Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#31

Post by JonFish85 »

cromwellian wrote: post #12

I think this is very unfortunate. I've seen a lot of good candidates get rejected for no obvious reasons. The lack of communication seems driven I think by the sheer deluge of the number of resumes/interviews going on at Google, and what appears to be, a reliance on temps and contractors as part of the process. I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years,…

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 disagree with the interview style, comments like that would piss me off to no end. Start a game of needling and insults? You know what, I've had enough.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#32

Post by jlees »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #14

I think Google prefers false negatives over false positives. I know a few extremely smart people who didn't "pass" their Google interviews. Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe.

Vibe or culture fit, whatever you call it, simply being extremely smart is not sufficient and far too many people think it is. :)

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#34

Post by mattzito »

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 idea how to interview product managers, so I'm going to ask you calculus questions", and proceeded to start to write equations on the board. The fifth interview was the first and only that happened AND dealt with product management.

When they got back to NY, this person was notified that they'd been rejected, then notified this was a mistake and they'd have to come back to MTV to redo all of the interviews, including the two that had happened.

Obviously, at this point they told Google to go scratch and went on to do really good work elsewhere.

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.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#35

Post by JulianMorrison »

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 period, and continue the loop.

And that's all. Each server will get requests as fast as it can consume them.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#36

Post by cromwellian »

AznHisoka wrote: post #19
cromwellian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of interesting projects going on at Google and an internal system for applying to other teams, and usually no shortage of teams asking for people. There's not a lot of CRUD apps with the exception of Corp-IT stuff.

Google Webmaster Tools - CRUD Adwords console - CRUD Google+ pages - CRUD Google Analytics dashboard - CRUD Google Merchants console - CRUD DoubleClick dashboard - CRUD

Tiny sliver. Hangouts, Chrome, Android, DevTools, Dart/GWT/Closure/Go, V8, Search/Knowledge, Google Maps, Google Now, Gmail, Docs, G+ photo processing, Shopping Express, etc

Even if you take Google's ad platforms, they use machine learning techiques on the backend, as does YouTube.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#37

Post by bengrunfeld »

Large companies often fall into the trap of lack of communication between departments and individual employees. They get so big they trip over their own feet. I used to work for Melbourne IT, a behemoth with hundreds of employees spanning multiple countries. Customer relations was a disaster, with each customer being told conflicting things by different sales people and customer service reps. Sorry you had such a bad experience.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#38

Post by ahk »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #14

I think Google prefers false negatives over false positives. I know a few extremely smart people who didn't "pass" their Google interviews. Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe.

If that's the only kind of people they hire, where the heck do these kind of interviewers come from?

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#39

Post by druiid »

Zimahl wrote: post #28
AznHisoka wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they tell people too. It's great if you just graduated from a formal CS program because the algorithms stuff is fresh in your brain. Whereas working 5-10 years in a boring bigcorp, doing CRUD apps will kinda make you more "dumb"

Hah, I must be pretty dumb. After over 10 years working on anything from startup to BigCorp, I doubt I could answer a single one of those questions right now. I did learn that in my last round of interviewing (about a year ago) that to play the game you need to review the junk that you'll never need to keep in your brain, that you know but don't have at command. Sure, you'll most likely never use it at the position y…

I genuinely don't understand how it's useful to interview someone this way. It basically makes it a game of 'Show us what you remember from CS101/MAE101/etc'. Really why should interviews for people established in the industry be like that? Sure you should know how to do basic algorithms and optimization type questions, but having minute detail style programming questions that every engineer not fresh out of college will have forgotten since their core discipline classes is just silly.

Re: A Wretched Google Interview Experience

#40

Post by guard-of-terra »

scotth wrote: post #33

Does anyone know a good answer for the RealTimeCounter question?

- have a counter for every bigger interval asnd the last timestamp

If the timestamp is same second as last increment everything, if not increment where appropriate and rotate everything else to 0.

What am i missing?

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