4 ms·

Congratulations on your new position. Could you give any insight on the interview process?

prospero 17y ago
It was long. The entire thing took almost two months, and about three weeks passed after my final on-site interview before I heard anything definitive, though there were a number of intermediate steps in between. My recruiter was really helpful. He kept in touch with me throughout the process, and let me know each time I passed a milestone. I've spent the last four years in a C# shop, and most of the interviewers he found for me had some background in C#. It ended up not really mattering, since most of the whiteboard problems only required pseudocode, but I definitely appreciated the effort. The questions were pretty much all data structure and algorithms. I wrote a lot of code on the whiteboard (or in Google Docs for my phone interview), and was asked to justify my choice of data structure, and explain what sort of dataset would make it a poor choice. Upon finishing my solution, which was usually for a very contrived problem, I was sometimes asked to figure out a real-life situation where it would be useful. I'm happy to have made it through, and am looking forward to starting my new job, but I do wonder a little bit about the interview process. I spent the last four years shipping a number of fairly substantial desktop applications, and have also been reasonably active in the Clojure community, and neither of these came up once after my initial conversation with my recruiter. It's possible that my resume said everything that was necessary on that subject, but it also seems possible that neither of those things mattered very much compared to my grasp of CS theory. I don't mind much one way or another, but it's a kind of funny that I can come out the other side of the process, and still not have much insight into their hiring criteria. Anyways, hope that helps. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask, though I can't guarantee I'll be able to answer.
- mncaudill 17y ago
  This is great. Thanks for spending the time to type this up! It does sound like a very involved process.
  - X-Istence 17y ago
    I got an email from Google's Recruiters, and went through a similar process, unfortunately I did not make it to the in person interview at the Google campus. I did have 5 different phone interviews for three different positions. With questions ranging from software engineering, to system administrator. I was really nervous, especially since I am just out of college and that may have led to my downfall. On my second phone interview the interviewer was hard to understand, lot of line noise, and he seemed to not understand me. I got all the different programming languages I know mixed up together into a bad psuedo code. This was my first over the phone programming questions. My second phone interview that contained programming went really well, the interviewer had done some reading on what I was into and helped me calm down and feel at ease. I got my programming right, got what I needed down on paper (Google Docs), and thought I did pretty well. Emailed both interviewers afterwards to thank them for their time, the guy from the second phone interview, which also happened to be my last, got back to me hoping that I would get to work together with him.

It was long. The entire thing took almost two months, and about three weeks passed after my final on-site interview before I heard anything definitive, though there were a number of intermediate steps in between. My recruiter was really helpful. He kept in touch with me throughout the process, and let me know each time I passed a milestone. I've spent the last four years in a C# shop, and most of the interviewers he found for me had some background in C#. It ended up not really mattering, since most of the whiteboard problems only required pseudocode, but I definitely appreciated the effort. The questions were pretty much all data structure and algorithms. I wrote a lot of code on the whiteboard (or in Google Docs for my phone interview), and was asked to justify my choice of data structure, and explain what sort of dataset would make it a poor choice. Upon finishing my solution, which was usually for a very contrived problem, I was sometimes asked to figure out a real-life situation where it would be useful. I'm happy to have made it through, and am looking forward to starting my new job, but I do wonder a little bit about the interview process. I spent the last four years shipping a number of fairly substantial desktop applications, and have also been reasonably active in the Clojure community, and neither of these came up once after my initial conversation with my recruiter. It's possible that my resume said everything that was necessary on that subject, but it also seems possible that neither of those things mattered very much compared to my grasp of CS theory. I don't mind much one way or another, but it's a kind of funny that I can come out the other side of the process, and still not have much insight into their hiring criteria. Anyways, hope that helps. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask, though I can't guarantee I'll be able to answer.

mncaudill 17y ago
This is great. Thanks for spending the time to type this up! It does sound like a very involved process.
- X-Istence 17y ago
  I got an email from Google's Recruiters, and went through a similar process, unfortunately I did not make it to the in person interview at the Google campus. I did have 5 different phone interviews for three different positions. With questions ranging from software engineering, to system administrator. I was really nervous, especially since I am just out of college and that may have led to my downfall. On my second phone interview the interviewer was hard to understand, lot of line noise, and he seemed to not understand me. I got all the different programming languages I know mixed up together into a bad psuedo code. This was my first over the phone programming questions. My second phone interview that contained programming went really well, the interviewer had done some reading on what I was into and helped me calm down and feel at ease. I got my programming right, got what I needed down on paper (Google Docs), and thought I did pretty well. Emailed both interviewers afterwards to thank them for their time, the guy from the second phone interview, which also happened to be my last, got back to me hoping that I would get to work together with him.