6 ms·
Google is an enormous company. Well over 100,000 employees. The answer to any question in the vein of, "Does X happen at Google?", or "Does Google do X?" is alm
by compiler-guy 7y ago
Google is an enormous company. Well over 100,000 employees. The answer to any question in the vein of, "Does X happen at Google?", or "Does Google do X?" is almost surely yes: Somewhere at the company, some team is probably doing that.
Google's interview process is notoriously bad for some folks, and that is absolutely true and something Google tries to fix. And there are absolutely plenty of unhappy people. Even if the odds are very low that any particular person is unhappy (and they aren't), the total probability across the company is quite high.
On the other hand, you don't hold on thousands of workers--most of whom has many, many choices of place to work--if you aren't doing _something_ right.
So the experience is valid, but generalizing is tricky.
- cheez 7y agoNumbers on both sides. Just because they have thousands of employees out of billions of people means nothing special about their process/culture. There are likely to be thousands of people in the world who are fine with it.
- mav3rick 7y agoIf things were truly bad they can just go work for other FAANG. That is not the case. Since it's HN.."Google must be bad but people are just lazy"
- cheez 7y agoYou're missing the point. But that's OK.
- mav3rick 7y agoDo you know how many people apply to Google ? There are clearly many many millions who would be happy to work here. Including many in this thread who claim to say otherwise.
- cheez 7y agoAre you deliberately missing the point? The point is that in this world of billions, there are enough who will like the way Google works to imply that Google is NOT doing anything special.
- mav3rick 7y agoWhat a stupid point. Then there must be no special things in the world. Because if something truly is special, more people will like it. When it becomes popular enough you'd say "Oh it's just a numbers game". What a specious argument.
- cheez 7y agoDon't get mad because it adequately explains the truth.
- mav3rick 7y agoIt's an asinine argument because it undermines any great thing in the world even when it may be great objectively.
- cheez 7y agoKeep in mind we're talking about a company's culture. It's completely plausible that what I'm saying is a better explanation than it being "objectively great".
- dunkelheit 7y agoOne thought that I had after reading the article was just how average his experience was. This is really the bog-standard "how my Google interview went" post and not some kind of outlier. One complaint that I have seen over and over (even in this thread) is his frustrating moment #3: "Google doesn't respect your time". That's of course entirely subjective and many people may be ok with months of preparation, days of interviews and weeks of waiting for feedback (with recruiters occasionally going dark for months). But many folks are justifiably irked.
- kelnos 7y agoA problem with the long, drawn-out process is that often people are interviewing at multiple companies, and might have to make a choice between shutting the door on Google and accepting another offer now, or pushing through the murky, very-uncertain Google process, and possibly allowing other offers to expire (even if a reasonable company won't have an "expiring"/"exploding" offer, they're not going to wait forever for you to make up your mind).
- ehsankia 7y agoI don't really understand how Google doesn't respect your time? Can you provide more specific? How much people decide to study is up to them, Google doesn't force anyone to study for months, nor do I really think you need to if you're generally good at problem solving and walking through a problem, which is the skills they are looking for. Most people think you have to go in and regurgitate a solution you memorized, but really most interviewers are looking to see your process working through the problem. They do an initial quick screener, and then a one day interview. Not really sure how much more they could do to respect your time.
- halbritt 7y agoI've interviewed with Google 3-4 times over the years. Every time they've contacted me, they've asserted they've changed and will respect my time. Most recently was this past June and I have to say that while the process was protracted, they did do a pretty good job of keeping me informed along the way. Eventually, I accepted an offer elsewhere as it seemed like they intended to under-level me and the choosing the team after the fact really doesn't work for me.