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How I (almost) got an internship at Google

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Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#91

Post by sminnee »

kenjackson wrote: post #69
PatrickTulskie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone isn't working on something in their spare time, it's a big red flag to me. You need to have the hunger. I'm more turned on by what you have in your github account than whether or not you can do a binary search in your choice of languages.

In my spare time I'm working on making the next million for my company. Oh, when I'm not working for my company? I'm with my family or friends. I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc.... It seems really odd to actually penalize someone who leaves it all on the floor. It…

Your analogy breaks down because the NBA is televised. If you're allowed to show some of your daytime work to an interviewer, by all means do that.

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#92

Post by wiredfool »

sh4na wrote: post #83
Daniel14 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google receives around 20000 resumes per day. If you've got that kind of interest (and what I've heard, justified interest) you'll have to turn most people down (ie. >99%). I don't have inside knowledge about the Google hiring process, but with that many people applying, you're bound to have some false negatives.

The problem is that they do the exact same thing for people that they reach out to. Their recruiters go out to mailing lists and linkedin and harvest emails, then contact those people and offer them positions. If you say yes, they start you on the exact same anonymous interview process, the interviewers having no clue that you didn't apply yourself and treating you just like any other generic wannabe. That's why a lo…

They've contacted me twice, 5 years apart for SRE positions, which aren't really a great match to my experience. I've never actually applied.

First time, first phone screen, not that bad. Second interview, they push on bash, and I said, essentially, that I wouldn't use bash, I'd use python. So much for that process.

Second time, same phone screen, same self evaluate, same damn questions on the first part. This time, of course, I know the answers to the tricky questions, because they asked me the same damn questions the last time.

This time though, the process has taken nearly a month for about three calls, including the one actual phone screen. Nothing more for a couple weeks, then the "sorry, not gonna happen, and were not going to tell you why".

I'm a little confused. They call me, looking for something that I'm not a good fit for, again. I do better this time. I'd really like to know if it's me, or if their ai is just that whacked.

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#93

Post by kwantam »

sh4na wrote: post #83
Daniel14 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google receives around 20000 resumes per day. If you've got that kind of interest (and what I've heard, justified interest) you'll have to turn most people down (ie. >99%). I don't have inside knowledge about the Google hiring process, but with that many people applying, you're bound to have some false negatives.

The problem is that they do the exact same thing for people that they reach out to. Their recruiters go out to mailing lists and linkedin and harvest emails, then contact those people and offer them positions. If you say yes, they start you on the exact same anonymous interview process, the interviewers having no clue that you didn't apply yourself and treating you just like any other generic wannabe. That's why a lo…

     The problem is that they do the exact same thing for people that they reach out to.
As someone who does technical interviews for a technology company, your "they"s have two different antecedents.

HR goes through resumes and reaches out to people. Engineering does technical interviews. I my experience, I have seen very low correlation between "HR liked this candidate" and "candidate was good."

A few keywords in your resume will get you reached out to by the vast majority of recruiters. Those same keywords do nothing for the guy asking you to solve a problem on a whiteboard and finding your answer wanting.

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#94

Post by eel »

I was disappointed by my interview process earlier this month for a potential summer internship at Google. I'm sure part of it is driven by the result (I didn't get past the phone screens.) My main complaints are

- Every step of the process involved a new person. Overall, I had to be handed off through 4 different people, each one wanting a bit more information or a filled out form, until I was scheduled for the phone interviews. This was especially confusing when I had a recruiter assigned to me, and I was being emailed by both her and someone with whom she worked with at the same point in the process.

- The first interviewer was apparently a fill-in for the intended one, which is unfortunate, because he and I were a complete mismatch. He seemed to be a C/C++ guy and I have more high-level language experience, and we ended up doing what I would consider advanced bit manipulation / number theory. (The second interview was much more reasonable, and it is my own fault if I did not pass it.)

- The amount of time time that it took from the "Hi, we would like you to apply online" email to the you are not "a close enough match" email was over a month, which is much too long for simple back-to-back phone interviews. Waiting for their responses was the most frustrating and nerve-racking part of the process. I am glad at least the OP had quick responses.

Should I go through the process again, I would strongly consider asking them to expedite it in one way or another.

On a more optimistic note, I do feel like the interviews do help highlight weaknesses in your programming skills and resume presentation skills.

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#95

Post by biot »

PatrickTulskie wrote: post #57
Udo wrote: post #51

I expected better from a company like Google. Asking candidates for pre-canned code snippets to cutesy little CS problems on the whiteboard is miserable and the outcome depends too much on what the candidate studied in the last few weeks before the interview. It actually tells you very little about the kind of programmer a person is and the interview itself can get quite horrible on a personal level very fast. A whil…

If someone isn't working on something in their spare time, it's a big red flag to me. You need to have the hunger. I'm more turned on by what you have in your github account than whether or not you can do a binary search in your choice of languages.

I think it depends on what someone's day job is. If their day job involves really interesting programming challenges which are interesting and require creativity to solve, a programmer's passion and creativity can be invested in that.

If, however, a programmer's day job is maintaining a legacy system that doesn't involve a lot of creativity then there's a greater likelihood that they have untapped passion which will express itself in a side project... and ultimately with them finding a new job that does require creativity.

Judging someone based on their side projects is the wrong approach -- judge them on their creativity and passion. Some are fortunate to have a job which gives them the ability to be creative and passionate during work hours. Others aren't as fortunate and need to express their creativity and passion outside of work hours. The big red flag to not hire is when someone has neither creativity nor passion inside or outside of work hours.

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#96

Post by endtime »

jlees wrote: post #61
renaudb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And it is not like this deadline is unknown to employers. Sadly the recruiter who knows this deadline and the managers who have "Look for suitable interns" as one of very many todo list items are not one and the same. I did an internship at Microsoft and now work at Google; the MS internship hiring process (in 2002) was awesome and very, very fast. Your comments about Google's relative standing are definitely interes…

>Your comments about Google's relative standing are definitely interesting and clearly not an anomaly, the issue is fixing them =)

Why is that an issue? I know from experience that Amazon and Microsoft have the problem pretty much solved. Just do what they do.

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#97

Post by kenjackson »

sminnee wrote: post #91
kenjackson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my spare time I'm working on making the next million for my company. Oh, when I'm not working for my company? I'm with my family or friends. I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc.... It seems really odd to actually penalize someone who leaves it all on the floor. It…

Your analogy breaks down because the NBA is televised. If you're allowed to show some of your daytime work to an interviewer, by all means do that.

Only part of sport is televised. You don't see camp or practice, which is a big part of the game too. The game you watch on TV is like the shipping product. The code is like the practices, camp, training, etc...

My point is the lead dev for Angry Birds ends up at your desk and it seems almost pompous to say, "Where's your GitHub app?" This person broke his neck to ship, upgrade, and maintain a product that you can look at (the NBA game), yet a lot of people still seem to be saying, "w/o seeing your code (your practice sessions) I need the GitHub repo" (I need to watch you play at the park).

I guess as an employer this works to my advantage if more startups require GitHub accounts, since I can pick off proven talent that doesn't have this requirement. So yeah... it's a great idea! :-)

EDIT: And I should add that I was responding to someone who said that if you aren't working on something in your spare time that this is a red flag. So according to that poster, simply having great code from my "daytime" job isn't sufficient. Kobe Bryant NBA footage isn't sufficient. If he doesn't also play pickup games there must be a problem?!

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#98

Post by famousactress »

kenjackson wrote: post #69
PatrickTulskie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone isn't working on something in their spare time, it's a big red flag to me. You need to have the hunger. I'm more turned on by what you have in your github account than whether or not you can do a binary search in your choice of languages.

In my spare time I'm working on making the next million for my company. Oh, when I'm not working for my company? I'm with my family or friends. I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc.... It seems really odd to actually penalize someone who leaves it all on the floor. It…

is that the guy you want on your team? The guy who will tell his next employer, "Company XYZ paid the bills, but my real cool work is this GitHub project I did on the side"

I'll bite. Yeah. I want that guy. I want that guy because he's got energy and enthusiasm to burn, and I'm confident I can give him a place to use it.. Additionally, we'd love to see more open source projects come out of what we're working on..

I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc....

Awesome, if this was how it works, but it's not. The people that get itchy enough to bang out these projects on the side need to keep building stuff. Great stuff. I burn out on bug fixes, and automation.. and sometimes I feel like working on something different, so I bang on a new cache library for Django, or write something a little tangential to what we're currently iterating on. In my case, I'm really stoked with all of the problems we have that need doing, so none of my 'side-projects' are totally sideways to the values of our company... but lots of them aren't exactly high priorities :)

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#99

Post by mnutt »

Stormbringer wrote: post #53
brown9-2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd have to try pretty hard to consciously design a worse intern recruitment process than this.

Getting them to write code is actually pretty good. As for binary search, I wouldn't necessarily be able to bang it out in two hours in C, but I'd easily be able to bang it out in that time for any language I use regularly. And with sufficient testing I'd take a good stab at converting to C. Though I agree sometimes it can be a coin toss. Once I was asked to write some code that would take dates as inputs and do some…

By "other forms of testing" do you mean something like integration testing or do you mean manually checking things?

If you run their code and within 10-30 seconds of looking at the result you can spot something wrong with it, then besides being poor coders, they're also poor testers. Since presumably the result that you're looking for is what they should be testing.

A while back I worked on a web app with developers who used TDD exclusively. In the entire time they worked there they never viewed the web app locally, but they had complete confidence in their changes and almost never broke anything. It was a bit extreme, but it worked for them and they were very effective.

Re: How I (almost) got an internship at Google

#100

Post by damncabbage »

binxbolling wrote: post #60
jrockway wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell would you want to work a company that runs you through the gauntlet like this, only to give you the chance that maybe you'll get hired? I mean, this is obviously a really skilled guy who has lots of prospects. Because at this point in your career, you have no degree, no experience, and no income? He's a sophomore in college, not someone with 30 years of industry experience. In my experience, though, I wo…

> The number of people that can start with a blank file and start writing a computer program is probably somewhere around 5% of programmers. What?! There's no way this is true... is there?

I'd wager it's more "5% of people currently interviewing for jobs" than 5% of all programmers.

(Joel puts it well in this article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html )

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