13 ms·

A note to Google recruiters (and on Google hiring practices)

232 points by ajdecon 15y ago

radley 15y ago
It's actually funnier when non-Google people try to give the Google interview, but can't articulate the questions well enough to elicit clever solutions...
- mkrecny 15y ago
  I had a one such really bad interview with google - I'm pretty sure the interviewer was not a Google engineer, though she claimed to be (weird). Here's the interview: http://www.mkrecny.com/entry/7/ http://www.mkrecny.com/entry/7/
cies 15y ago
i'd have answered: 1) i would generally not implement that myself -- i like ruby-land's nokigiri for this -- but 2) i can think of some ways how to implement that if i had (time+incentive) to do so: 2a) - i could use regexps (easy to code) 2b) - i could write a litte parser (potentially much faster) 3) in case you want me to write the algorithm i will pick the regexps for sake of brevity
- joshu 15y ago
  You'd have failed, because they aren't talking about HTML entities or whatever.
- drats 15y ago
  Someone's down-voted you without explanation, which is rather poor form. Entities in this case means extracting the text of the page - with nokogiri for example, or a variant of readability to get just the article - and then extracting things that are named in that text. I used a modded version of readability and a simple entity extractor in python on the article and got: 'Sudoku', 'Search', 'Google', 'SRE', 'Stanford', 'Freebase', 'OpenCalais', 'SWE', 'Metaweb', 'MIT', 'Wrong', 'HTML', 'Developer Relations', 'Interest', 'DON', 'True', 'CPU'. A great introduction to all this is the O'Reilly book Natural Language Processing with Python (free online[1]). [1]http://www.nltk.org/book http://www.nltk.org/book
  - zwily 15y ago
    I would have assumed they were asking about HTML entities. Like &, etc.
    - nostrademons 15y ago
      A bunch of people assumed that, but it doesn't make sense given Skud's background at Metaweb and her reference to OpenCalais.
- danieldk 15y ago
  2b) - i could write a litte parser (potentially much faster) Since XML entity references can be described with a regular language, there is an equivalent deterministic finite state acceptor. So, any parser you will write, will probably be slower. Anyway, I think that the interviewer referred to named entity recognition.
djtumolo 15y ago
I interviewed there for a Product Manager position, and it was by far the most technical interview I've ever had, and like the OP said, featured a lot of computer science type questions. I know very few product managers that would have done even as poorly as I did (I have a cs degree, but its been a while since I've really used it). If I could have changed anything, I would have loved to have been told that I would be asked CS questions in the interview.
- cesar 15y ago
  I don't think you should feel any regrets. I was just thinking, it's just a very hypothetical, but suppose that Steve Jobs was going through the same hiring process for product manager, would he have fared better than you? I doubt it, why would a product manager have to know CS algorithms. Maybe stats algorithms/functions, but CS algorithms?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
chubs 15y ago
I would have thought the easiest way to land a job at google these days would be to start a blog, become a 'thought leader', start a few important open source projects, etc, that kind of thing.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  That gets you an interview. Blogs let you know you're a good writer, but that's about it. Open source contributions can say a lot, but may not. DarkShakira's work, for example, probably darn near gets him a job. 99% of what I see on GitHub probably doesn't.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    Though ironically, not a Google+ account. ;-) (Side note: who's DarkShakira? A search for [darkshakira github] yielded only this comment.)
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      Spelled his name wrong: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DarkShikari http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DarkShikari He's lead dev on x264. Very impressive contributions. I have trouble believing Google would push back much if they oould get him working on WebM.
throwaway878 15y ago
I passed the software engineering intern interview process but wasn't matched with a host (I assume because I applied late). I then reapplied for the fall and am back at the host matching stage. I have lots of high-quality programming experience, a MS from Stanford, and am now wrapping up a PhD. 4.0/4.0 GPA. If you work at Google and want a fall intern who will work his ass off for you, please email me: stevebanders@gmail.com (not my real name - will reply with my real name - don't want it associated with this post :) My recruiter recently indicated that I should try to reach out to Googlers as it might help draw attention to my application. Edit: For the past two years I have been building search interfaces and programming tools. However, I'm flexible - happy to work on just about anything!
- javert 15y ago
  The fact that people in the host-maching process at Google have resorted to begging on Hacker News, points to the abysmal state of that process.
  - carbonica 15y ago
    Did you notice that you were responding to a MS+PhD applicant? Placing him is going to be orders of magnitude harder than placing someone working on their bachelor's. If Google wanted to have him churn out features on Google Docs for a couple months, they could, but that'd be an enormous waste of a PhD.
    - throwaway878 15y ago
      Maybe, but I'd be happy to do it! I can always parlay the experience into something larger.
      - jjm 15y ago
        If Google doesn't hit you up, dude I would surely look at some startups. In fact, I believe Fresh Plum is looking for some really good people!
    - 15y ago
birken 15y ago
The people who do Google interviews do not spend any time looking at a candidates past work or blog or skills because that is not what Google engineers evaluate when it comes to hiring you. They are supposed to ask technical questions and evaluate how a candidate answers those questions. That is it... No analysis of their open source code, no mentions of an insightful blog post they had written, just the information gleaned in the 45 minute interview (at least in 2009, I don't know if this has changed since then). Engineers actually took great pride in providing a good and welcoming interview with thoughtful questions. There was even an internal forum where people would discuss the merits of certain interview questions and ban bad questions. Recruiters however have a completely different job. They go around the internet looking for candidates who look like they are pretty smart (insightful blog posts, open source contributions, etc), however they don't always have the deep technical ability to differentiate people who would and would not be a good fit for Google. That is why you get into situations where a recruiter excitedly encourages people to apply for a job, and then the interview is upsetting for the candidate because it isn't what they were expecting. When interviewing people for my current job, I do a lot more of looking at a persons blog or open source contributions if they have them when doing diligence about potential hires, but I also expect them to perform, write code and solve technical problems during the interview. I feel it does give me a better overall sense of the candidate and allows me to make better hiring decisions. However, at Google scale this just doesn't make sense, as when you have tens of thousands of ultra-qualified candidates beating down the door to work at your company, missing some people would have been good employees just isn't that big a deal if that means your engineers can save a lot of time in the hiring process.
- djb_hackernews 15y ago
  I just went through the same exact process a few days ago, so not much has changed since 2009.
- econgeeker 15y ago
  "They go around the internet looking for candidates who look like they are pretty smart (insightful blog posts, open source contributions, etc), however they don't always have the deep technical ability to differentiate people who would and would not be a good fit for Google." I once created a LinkedIn account to see someone's profile. It was meant to be a throwaway but I didn't delete it. The account had no activity, no "insightful blog posts", no open source contributions, nothing but a single job listing under a previous position. Not being a real person, nobody contacted this account... except google recruiters. And they did it persistently. It was right out of glengarry glenross. They were very smug, which I thought was amusing because, well, they were chasing a non-existent entity. (even if I didn't have my own startup, I have no interest in ever working for google.) When I didn't answer the first recruiter, after many emails, I was handed off to another guy who felt this event was significant enough to send me, yet another email about it. In it one of the things he said was: "I identify top-tier engineers for Google" Of course, when looking at his profile, his background is in recruiting, not engineering, and his degree is in accounting, not engineering. (No disrespect to accountants.) I'm completely burned out on recruiter hyperbole, and absolutely have spent the last conversation I'll ever have with a non-technical recruiter whose trying to "evaluate" me. Here's how the last one went (before I started refusing to deal with recruiters, which, by the way, produced better job leads and better jobs.) Her: Do you have oracle experience? (having not told me anything about the job, other than it was a "coder" job.) Me: Well, I was writing java that generated SQL dynamically to talk to an oracle database. The SQL had to be dynamic because... Her: (interrupting) which oracle? Me: Uh, the one from Oracle corporation. Her: What was the version number Me: (just because I'd happened to see it in passing) 8i I believe. Her: OH, sorry, the client wants 9i experience. (9i, I later discovered had been released within the previous 3 months.) I'll keep you in mind and let you know if I find anything that matches your level of qualifications. (From tone of voice, it was obvious I wasn't "up to speed" in her eyes.) Later I was awarded a patent as sole inventor for the technology I'd tried to describe in her question. Anyway, getting tired of constant emails from google recruiters, and irritated at this non-engineers belief that he "identifies" "top flight" engineers, I asked him what he looks for in a phone interview. Here's a direct quote of his answer. Because this is obvious nonsense (he can't evaluate any of these things from the perspective of an accountant) he's clearly just playing buzzword bingo, and in the hopes of getting other engineers past this fake "evaluation" to talk to real engineers, this is all you have to say: "The l things I look for when I'm having a phone conversation with an engineer (at a high level): - What big problems are they solving (large scalability and storage issues, advanced algorithms, etc...) - Involvement in complete product development (are they shipping products or are mainly doing integration) - Technical coding, % of time they spend coding, languages they're coding in. - use of data structures and algorithm writing. - Educational background and motivation for making a change." Note that "I got tired of being harassed by google recruiters" is probably not a good answer for the last one. From the original article: "I guess that’s why when I interviewed for my transfer, I was told I was “not technical enough” to do the job I’d been doing for 3 years already, supporting the Freebase community." Google literally told this guy he was not capable of doing the job he was already doing, and given that it was a startup, a job he had likely created himself. "There are plenty of fresh-faced kids from Stanford and MIT and whatever other elite universities are on Google’s preferred list, who can solve stupid puzzles and tell you the O notation of anything you want." Well, when your founders were graduate students at Stanford, and they implemented a hiring policy right out of school, it shouldn't be surprising that they have an arbitrary filter like that, and a focus on identifying personalities that are nearly identical to the founders. Finding people like yourself is orthogonal to finding good employees who will find the best position. In the worst case it can result in a monoculture where literally every employee is blind to a solution that would be obvious to at least somebody if you had more diversity. I've not worked with google, so obviously I'm just giving my impressions based on my experiences being recruited by them (and this has happened ore than once, the LinkedIn example was just the most recent.)
KevinMS 15y ago
It will be interesting to see how a company that hires with a strong academic bias competes in the long run. I'm not sure but I suspect Apple is the opposite, and look how they are doing. Update: is this not a relevant comment? What would motivate somebody to down vote it? I'm curious because I care about the quality of HN, and I don't want to see it become something like reddit where up/down votes are actually like/dislike votes
- Kylekramer 15y ago
  You assume something that is pretty illogical with no evidence (Google may have a stronger academic bias than most, but Silicon Valley in general has an education bias, Apple included). Also, the concept that Apple is doing well and they don't have a academic bias, so that must be correct is correlation = causation. For example, I hear Google has a strong academic bias, and look at how they are doing.
  - KevinMS 15y ago
    I would be shocked to find that apple had the same kind of comp-sci bias that google had. They must have a huge number of developers who have been with that company since the 80's and 90's, a time when much of the industry was being created by people with very diverse backgrounds.
    - mhewett 15y ago
      The company most similar to Google in hiring bias is early Oracle. In the mid-1980s they were hiring every Stanford graduate they could get hold of.
      - cHalgan 15y ago
        Oracle still tries to keep up with standard. Getting hired to work in 400 building (RAC, ExaData, etc.) is still much harder than getting into Google.
    - ZephyrP 15y ago
nightski 15y ago
Have we really reached a point in industry where asking a candidate to go through the process of problem solving is frowned upon? Where "I don't need to solve that because I have Google!" is really the right answer? I mean the question seriously wasn't that difficult. What if there isn't an open source library to cover your every need? Are you screwed? Critical thinking and problem solving are important in any position. If you are unwilling to perform this simple task then I would probably not want you on my team either, no matter how many blog posts you had written. I am sorry but extracting html elements is not crazy algorithms, hardcore theoretical computer science, or nearly as "academic" as everyone is screaming.
- redcap 15y ago
  The author talks about being asked a question regarding web elements when he was leaving the Search team for the Developer Relations team. A commenter talks about being asked algorithm questions despite being interviewed for a sysadmin role. Another commenter talks about telling the interviewers that she is not a coder and then is asked a bunch of coding questions despite interviewing for a testing position and having written a book on testing and having years of domain experience. If you are just wanting algorithm people then surely they're going to be lacking in other areas (e.g. Google Wave, designed by algorithmers). The objections raised here seem to be along the lines of that the questions are not related to the jobs people are interviewing for. This has two impacts: - people are not being asked questions about their domain (it seems incredibly stupid not to ask questions about testing if the interviewer is a tester) - you will cut down on the diversity of your staff if you just want algorithmists (which means that you are more likely to produce more Google Waves).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - econgeeker 15y ago
      "Developer Advocate is a highly technical role [1]." Doesn't appear to be from the link you gave. From your link: "You will be an evangelist for our newest technologies in the outside world, as well as a vocal advocate for developers' needs within Google. You will be an engineer who thrives on the cutting edge of technology and loves seeing exciting, new applications and business that other developers are building. Your job is to drive momentum for exciting new technologies such as Chrome, Android, App Engine, Google Wave, Google Maps API, HTML5, and our core Google Apps and Ads APIs. " Guy Kawasaki was one of the first evangelists. He was a jeweler previously. Of course Guy has a great many talents, but I don't think anyone would call him "highly technical." Notice the middle sentence says "you will be an engineer", but the rest of it talks about being an "Advocate" and "your job is to drive momentum", etc. The requirements don't seem to be highly technical either. (most of the languages are scripting languages, for instance.) From the description: BA/BS in Computer Science or a similar technical degree preferred. Experience blogging and writing technical articles, ideally with an existing follower base. Strong command of web application or mobile application development landscapes. Experience working directly with large partners, or with press and bloggers preferred. Considerable success as a software developer, architect, technology evangelist, CTO, or consultant working with web or mobile technologies. Strong command of web application or mobile application development landscapes. Solid programming abilities in one or more of the following languages: Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, JavaScript.
yaroslavvb 15y ago
This approach can go both ways, I was hired despite just having a Bachelor's from a 3rd tier US university
voyvf 15y ago
I lucked out; when a Google recruiter contacted me, I had just gotten a job (had been doing contract work for a year prior.) I'm pretty happy not being Google material - I have no degree, and I'll be the first to admit that there are many Comp. Sci. graduates who can code circles around me. I think that's awesome - I've reaped the benefits of the work of many others before, and from the looks of it will continue to reap them (I'm looking at you, PyPy team. Keep up the wonderful work! Let me be lazy, and not have to write an extension in C or C++. :D) The most advanced work I've done thus far would be writing out a somewhat decent decision-tree system in C++ (I know, mind-bogglingly advanced! (: ) There's plenty of room in the mediocre to almost-above-average scale.
- lawnchair_larry 15y ago
  PyPy is amazing, and actually a relevant counterpoint (vs Unladen Swallow) to "the Google way."
cletus 15y ago
Has it been two weeks already (since, you know, the last thread complaining about Google's hiring processes)? You can know a library that does exactly what the question wants, if anything that's a plus, but you should roughly know how something like that actually works. Our process isn't problem-free. We gets hundreds of thousands of applications a year. Who else has that scale of a recruitment problem? There are a lot of myths about our interview process. Take this post: he says he doesn't have a degree from an "elite university". Neither do I and neither do most of my coworkers. Having no degree at all is a problem but not an insurmountable one. As for us allegedly not being interested in your open source contributions, nothing could be further from the truth. Recently the guy who did Firebug just got hired to work on Chrome developer tools. Do you really think his Firebug work had nothing to do with this? As for what team you'll be working on, you as a candidate have a lot of power in that regard. You can specify you're only interested in working on something in particular or you can simply communicate some preferences. Those preferences affect the allocation process. Our predilection for simple coding problems and requiring a certain level of algorithms knowledge is nothing new. What constantly surprises me is how many people I see go through the process that obviously haven't just picked up a copy of Skiena's book and brushed up on the fundamentals. I can understand the motivation of people not to go through the process a second time. I was in the same boat. It can be a frustrating process. It's imperfect. Occasionally I'll hear people say they will never go through it because of what they've heard. As Homer puts it, "trying is the first step to failing". I'll leave you with three recommendations for anyone interested in applying here: 1. Go through the first half of Skiena's algorithm book (the last half is applications, which, while interesting, isn't as crucial). If you're not comfortable with graphs and dynamic programming, sorry but you just haven't prepared; 2. Practice some code problems on a whiteboard; and 3. Go through recruitment with a referrer. You're MUCH better off with a recommendation from someone who already works here. Even if they don't necessarily know you (and thus can't provide a strong reference), they can chase up what's happening with your application with the recruiter and probably get more information than you, as an external applicant, can. EDIT: let me add a fourth piece of advice: Treat your career at Google, if you're fortunate enough to have one, as a marathon not a sprint. If you're really unhappy on whatever project you end up on or with the team you're with, that can all be changed. A lot of effort is made to make people happy. So you can express your concerns and disappointment with your manager, your manager's manager, HR or whatever is most appropriate. Additionally, the ramp-up time at Google can be significant. 3-6 months. Possibly longer. Another approach is to do what project you end up, learn our tools, build system, processes, etc. In that time make connections to other teams. Find out what else is going on and what you're interested in doing. There is an awful lot of internal mobility that's possible.
null_para 15y ago
Little bit off-topic; at least you get interview call from GOOG. I've never had that privilege of interviewing with Google. Though I've always applied for their design positions. And I was always referred by someone working at Google (and that too stellar recommendations). I've interviewed with all the biggies (including some of the hottest companies) but never with Google. P.S. By the way, I have undergrad in CS too
- rosser 15y ago
  I think part of the problem with Google's hiring process is the attitude you're demonstrating here, where somehow even just interviewing with them is some sort of "privilege". Yes, I know they have to deal with a stupendous number of applications, and much of their process is a direct result of that sheer volume, but so long as people walk around with that kind of attitude towards them, they're given all the excuse they need to be imperious about it, to boot.
  - null_para 15y ago
    Agreed. By the way I remember talking with Google recruiter when recently I was in school (one of the west coast elites) doing my masters; he told me the best way to get into Google is via internship. I was interested in working at startup for internship and told him the same. He bluntly told me that its impossible for me to get a job at Google then.. :) P.S. His prediction was true and I never interviewed at Google. However, I got job offer from one of their biggest rival :)
- mindcrime 15y ago
  I've never had that privilege of interviewing with Google. GOOG is just another company... it's not some special privilege to interview with them. In fact, not everybody would want to work for them... I, for one, turned down a chance to interview with them a few months ago. I don't see much that strikes me as particularly appealing about working for Google, especially compared to the opportunity of doing a startup of my own. If anything, based on sheer size, I'm fairly confident that I wouldn't enjoy working at Google. Some of us just like smaller companies, with less bureaucracy and what-not.
ChristianMarks 15y ago
Reminds me of calls I receive from top flight hedge funds. "You'll be working with astronomically smart people who use crystalline cohomology to obtain the best polynomial time approximation algorithms for intractable problems. The engineer who did this taught himself calculus within ten to the negative sixty-seven seconds of conception." "Is that the work you have in mind for me?" "No. You'll be cleaning the group's digital bed pans." "That's OK. Perhaps you should recruit a Nobel Laureate for that role."
thadeus_venture 15y ago
Frankly, even a developer relations position can be a technical position. I personally think a developer relations person who does understand the inner workings of the code base he represents, or at least demonstrates the ability to understand it given time, will be much better at his job than someone who doesn't. So really, I agree with Google here in their decision. There are a number of jobs at google that although do not involve writing code, are closely coupled with the technology google is working on - developer relations actually being a very good example. I think they are keeping the bar high in these instances for valid reasons. I'm sure there are positions where technical background is less crucial, graphic design comes to mind, but that's to be judged on a case by case basis. Everybody wants to work there, so they can demand very high standards, but in most instances i've heard about the standards are not incorrect, just high. EDIT: And probably another reason is they simply want to keep the particular technical culture throughout the company.
poink 15y ago
Can't you just tell them to stop contacting you? Works for me thus far.
econgeeker 15y ago
Here's the thing that I think some of the engineers in this discussion might be missing: A company shouldn't consist of only engineers. Don't get me wrong: I'm a software developer, and I'm a bit of a software snob. I have trouble (though I've mostly overcome it) seeing Managers, CEOs, marketing people, sales people, "designers", etc. as doing "real work" because they're not engineers. Maybe designers feel the same way about me. They should. But the reality is, good companies need good designers, and with experience I've discovered that designers can really blow your mind sometimes. But the hiring process for a designer is not the same as the hiring process for an engineer. One area where I've personally been very dissatisfied with google is the lack of customer support. I can't imagine asking programming questions to a customer support person who was expected to help people with their adwords account. The person being interviewed here, and who wrote this blog post is one of those "customer support" type people. Not pretending to be an engineer. If you only hire engineers and your hiring process is engineer focused, you're going to miss out on a lot of really good people, and you're going to have non-engineering roles staffed by engineers who just want google on their resume so they can go get an engineering job later. And these are not the people you want helping others with their adwords account. (Of course I'm not familiar with the internal structure of google, so I'm giving examples meant to be representative of the problem, but that might not actually be true.)
jrockway 15y ago
True story: in my interview I was asked how I would extract entities from an HTML page. I suggested using OpenCalais. So you're interviewing for a job as a programmer for a search engine, and your answer to a simple parsing / text processing question is, "I'm going to use some proprietary black-box third-party API to do the parse", and then you refuse (on moral grounds?) to elaborate on how that service could possibly be implemented? What? I could understand something like, "Oh, I did that last week, and we used the OpenViagra API." OK, cool, but the follow up question is going to be, "but if you had to do it yourself, how would you do it?" This is a good question for many reasons: for one, it's a basic "how do you handle parsing" question. Parsing comes up all the time in programming, and it's good to know if the candidate knows about regular expressions, parser generators, parser combinator libraries, etc. It's not about "do you know how to get HTML entities", it's about "do you know about parsing". There's also something weird about relying on third-party APIs for simple programming tasks. Sure, if you need to know your current location, you have to depend on a bunch of orbiting satellites with precisely-set atomic clocks. But if all you need to do is /&([^&;]+);/g, then write that one fragment of code and move on with your life. The simplicity is well worth not having to set up a TCP connection, wait for it to be established, generate a request, send it over the network, wait for a response, time out and throw an error if you don't get one, parse the response, and finally return the answer to the calling code. Think of all the bugs you're going to have to fix with this approach! I'm going to start asking this question, just to see where it leads. If the answer is more than one sentence, it will give me valuable insight into how the candidate solves programming problems. If they answer, "well, I refuse to do that", then that's valuable insight, too. All in all, a great interview question! So anyway, technical interview questions are not about getting things done, they're about thinking through problems. Parsing HTML is a solved problem, and of course you're going to delegate to a library. But tomorrow, you're going to have a very similar problem to solve that is more nuanced and difficult to explain in 30 seconds. And that's what the question is really getting at; if you can parse HTML, you can parse the weird config file format you invent tomorrow. Google's interview process makes me want to work at Google!
- picardo 15y ago
  The position she was applying for was not a programmer job; it was a community manager position, and doesn't involve any programming apparently. So your arguments, while valid, are besides the point.
flocial 15y ago
Every interview process sucks. I interviewed and got a job at a company that modeled their hiring on Google's asking me puzzle type questions. I can do really good with those. Doesn't say a thing about my coding skills. I feel sorry for the companies that model their process on Google's, especially the small startups because you need the exceptional engineers that fall through such cracks to really boost your business. It's not so much the rationale of this interview process, reading the response from other Googlers seems to show that this selection process does a good job of maintaining a cultural fit for those that make the cut. The problem is that it seems to make enemies of people without a hardcore technical background when a simple review of their background would help both sides from pain.
motters 15y ago
I can sympathize with the algorithm pop quiz tests. I've done a few of them in various interviews over the last year, and I have to say that in every case they bear precisely zero relevance to any software engineering that I've done in the last 15 years. In one recent case I've even had an interviewer standing and pointing over my shoulder at pieces of paper. It was pretty farcical, and somewhat intimidating. In the real world, this isn't what writing software is about.
- paganel 15y ago
  > I've done a few of them in various interviews over the last year, and I have to say that in every case they bear precisely zero relevance to any software engineering that I've done in the last 15 years. In one recent case I've even had an interviewer standing and pointing over my shoulder at pieces of paper. That's when I would have gotten out of the room and said "thank you, I don't think we'd be a good match" :)
  - motters 15y ago
    Something similar did in fact occur.
cpeterso 15y ago
My friend works at Google. The interview process is far from efficient, yet the people involved genuinely felt the inefficiency was a good thing, some sort of initiation to test candidates' perseverance. From first contact to offer letter took about three months. He had four phone interviews, a video chat interview, two email questionnaires, and two recruiters before he met a human being. Google is also unusually fixated on GPAs. My friend has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MS from another school. Because his undergrad GPA (from 20 years ago!) was not 4.0, the Google hiring managers wanted to know how many hours per week he had worked during his undergrad to account for his 3.5 GPA.
skrebbel 15y ago
A story like this gives me the impression that even if you want to clean the floor at Google, you need to know when to mergesort and when to bubblesort[1]. Why does Google find this important? Why do people who will not do programming at all need to know (relatively) low-level software optimizations? To be sure, if I'd ever apply at Google (which I doubt), I'd probably apply for a programming position and totally expect such questions. I'm asking about the non-programming jobs. [1]: not too far off though: http://web.archive.org/web/20050208031623/http://preacher.stc.cx/cleaningalgorithms.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050208031623/http://preacher.st...
mak120 15y ago
I recently interviewed at Google and got an offer. I live in Bangladesh and I am pretty sure no one involved in the interview process ever heard the name of my university or cared what my CGPA was. So, the part about coming from an elite school does not make a lot of sense to me. The interviews were intense but all the interviewers were very friendly. I got stuck at several problems but was given a lot of hints. And even when I completely missed an answer, the interviewer was nice enough to point it out without sounding rude or arrogant - or making me feel like an idiot. I must say this was unexpected since I did make quite a few mistakes. The way I see it, knowing about the right tool to use is important and useful in our day to day work. But the guys at Google often have to create the tools themselves (or better versions of them) for the scale at which they work. Also, I got the feeling they want their engineers to be aware about what actually goes on inside the framework/tool/database etc. instead of just using it like a black box.
roldon332 15y ago
I also was rejected after 'failing' a technical interview. What was annoying to me is that I told the recruiter that I am rusty on my CS theory. I wish he has just said; "We are only interested in people that could do very well on a senior CS final exam right now"
roldon332 15y ago
I was surprised at how CS Theory oriented they are in hiring. My technical interview went like a CS final exam. I don't expect that I will apply to Google again. If I was interested in CS Theory I would have got a masters in CS. They have to weed people out somehow though.

232 points by ajdecon 15y ago

It's actually funnier when non-Google people try to give the Google interview, but can't articulate the questions well enough to elicit clever solutions...

mkrecny 15y ago
I had a one such really bad interview with google - I'm pretty sure the interviewer was not a Google engineer, though she claimed to be (weird). Here's the interview: http://www.mkrecny.com/entry/7/ http://www.mkrecny.com/entry/7/

cies 15y ago

i'd have answered: 1) i would generally not implement that myself -- i like ruby-land's nokigiri for this -- but 2) i can think of some ways how to implement that if i had (time+incentive) to do so: 2a) - i could use regexps (easy to code) 2b) - i could write a litte parser (potentially much faster) 3) in case you want me to write the algorithm i will pick the regexps for sake of brevity

joshu 15y ago
You'd have failed, because they aren't talking about HTML entities or whatever.
drats 15y ago
Someone's down-voted you without explanation, which is rather poor form. Entities in this case means extracting the text of the page - with nokogiri for example, or a variant of readability to get just the article - and then extracting things that are named in that text. I used a modded version of readability and a simple entity extractor in python on the article and got: 'Sudoku', 'Search', 'Google', 'SRE', 'Stanford', 'Freebase', 'OpenCalais', 'SWE', 'Metaweb', 'MIT', 'Wrong', 'HTML', 'Developer Relations', 'Interest', 'DON', 'True', 'CPU'. A great introduction to all this is the O'Reilly book Natural Language Processing with Python (free online[1]). [1]http://www.nltk.org/book http://www.nltk.org/book
- zwily 15y ago
  I would have assumed they were asking about HTML entities. Like &, etc.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    A bunch of people assumed that, but it doesn't make sense given Skud's background at Metaweb and her reference to OpenCalais.
danieldk 15y ago
2b) - i could write a litte parser (potentially much faster) Since XML entity references can be described with a regular language, there is an equivalent deterministic finite state acceptor. So, any parser you will write, will probably be slower. Anyway, I think that the interviewer referred to named entity recognition.

djtumolo 15y ago

I interviewed there for a Product Manager position, and it was by far the most technical interview I've ever had, and like the OP said, featured a lot of computer science type questions. I know very few product managers that would have done even as poorly as I did (I have a cs degree, but its been a while since I've really used it). If I could have changed anything, I would have loved to have been told that I would be asked CS questions in the interview.

cesar 15y ago
I don't think you should feel any regrets. I was just thinking, it's just a very hypothetical, but suppose that Steve Jobs was going through the same hiring process for product manager, would he have fared better than you? I doubt it, why would a product manager have to know CS algorithms. Maybe stats algorithms/functions, but CS algorithms?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

chubs 15y ago

I would have thought the easiest way to land a job at google these days would be to start a blog, become a 'thought leader', start a few important open source projects, etc, that kind of thing.

kenjackson 15y ago
That gets you an interview. Blogs let you know you're a good writer, but that's about it. Open source contributions can say a lot, but may not. DarkShakira's work, for example, probably darn near gets him a job. 99% of what I see on GitHub probably doesn't.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  Though ironically, not a Google+ account. ;-) (Side note: who's DarkShakira? A search for [darkshakira github] yielded only this comment.)
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Spelled his name wrong: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DarkShikari http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DarkShikari He's lead dev on x264. Very impressive contributions. I have trouble believing Google would push back much if they oould get him working on WebM.

throwaway878 15y ago

I passed the software engineering intern interview process but wasn't matched with a host (I assume because I applied late). I then reapplied for the fall and am back at the host matching stage. I have lots of high-quality programming experience, a MS from Stanford, and am now wrapping up a PhD. 4.0/4.0 GPA. If you work at Google and want a fall intern who will work his ass off for you, please email me: stevebanders@gmail.com (not my real name - will reply with my real name - don't want it associated with this post :) My recruiter recently indicated that I should try to reach out to Googlers as it might help draw attention to my application. Edit: For the past two years I have been building search interfaces and programming tools. However, I'm flexible - happy to work on just about anything!

javert 15y ago
The fact that people in the host-maching process at Google have resorted to begging on Hacker News, points to the abysmal state of that process.
- carbonica 15y ago
  Did you notice that you were responding to a MS+PhD applicant? Placing him is going to be orders of magnitude harder than placing someone working on their bachelor's. If Google wanted to have him churn out features on Google Docs for a couple months, they could, but that'd be an enormous waste of a PhD.
  - throwaway878 15y ago
    Maybe, but I'd be happy to do it! I can always parlay the experience into something larger.
    - jjm 15y ago
      If Google doesn't hit you up, dude I would surely look at some startups. In fact, I believe Fresh Plum is looking for some really good people!
  - 15y ago

birken 15y ago

The people who do Google interviews do not spend any time looking at a candidates past work or blog or skills because that is not what Google engineers evaluate when it comes to hiring you. They are supposed to ask technical questions and evaluate how a candidate answers those questions. That is it... No analysis of their open source code, no mentions of an insightful blog post they had written, just the information gleaned in the 45 minute interview (at least in 2009, I don't know if this has changed since then). Engineers actually took great pride in providing a good and welcoming interview with thoughtful questions. There was even an internal forum where people would discuss the merits of certain interview questions and ban bad questions. Recruiters however have a completely different job. They go around the internet looking for candidates who look like they are pretty smart (insightful blog posts, open source contributions, etc), however they don't always have the deep technical ability to differentiate people who would and would not be a good fit for Google. That is why you get into situations where a recruiter excitedly encourages people to apply for a job, and then the interview is upsetting for the candidate because it isn't what they were expecting. When interviewing people for my current job, I do a lot more of looking at a persons blog or open source contributions if they have them when doing diligence about potential hires, but I also expect them to perform, write code and solve technical problems during the interview. I feel it does give me a better overall sense of the candidate and allows me to make better hiring decisions. However, at Google scale this just doesn't make sense, as when you have tens of thousands of ultra-qualified candidates beating down the door to work at your company, missing some people would have been good employees just isn't that big a deal if that means your engineers can save a lot of time in the hiring process.

djb_hackernews 15y ago
I just went through the same exact process a few days ago, so not much has changed since 2009.
econgeeker 15y ago
"They go around the internet looking for candidates who look like they are pretty smart (insightful blog posts, open source contributions, etc), however they don't always have the deep technical ability to differentiate people who would and would not be a good fit for Google." I once created a LinkedIn account to see someone's profile. It was meant to be a throwaway but I didn't delete it. The account had no activity, no "insightful blog posts", no open source contributions, nothing but a single job listing under a previous position. Not being a real person, nobody contacted this account... except google recruiters. And they did it persistently. It was right out of glengarry glenross. They were very smug, which I thought was amusing because, well, they were chasing a non-existent entity. (even if I didn't have my own startup, I have no interest in ever working for google.) When I didn't answer the first recruiter, after many emails, I was handed off to another guy who felt this event was significant enough to send me, yet another email about it. In it one of the things he said was: "I identify top-tier engineers for Google" Of course, when looking at his profile, his background is in recruiting, not engineering, and his degree is in accounting, not engineering. (No disrespect to accountants.) I'm completely burned out on recruiter hyperbole, and absolutely have spent the last conversation I'll ever have with a non-technical recruiter whose trying to "evaluate" me. Here's how the last one went (before I started refusing to deal with recruiters, which, by the way, produced better job leads and better jobs.) Her: Do you have oracle experience? (having not told me anything about the job, other than it was a "coder" job.) Me: Well, I was writing java that generated SQL dynamically to talk to an oracle database. The SQL had to be dynamic because... Her: (interrupting) which oracle? Me: Uh, the one from Oracle corporation. Her: What was the version number Me: (just because I'd happened to see it in passing) 8i I believe. Her: OH, sorry, the client wants 9i experience. (9i, I later discovered had been released within the previous 3 months.) I'll keep you in mind and let you know if I find anything that matches your level of qualifications. (From tone of voice, it was obvious I wasn't "up to speed" in her eyes.) Later I was awarded a patent as sole inventor for the technology I'd tried to describe in her question. Anyway, getting tired of constant emails from google recruiters, and irritated at this non-engineers belief that he "identifies" "top flight" engineers, I asked him what he looks for in a phone interview. Here's a direct quote of his answer. Because this is obvious nonsense (he can't evaluate any of these things from the perspective of an accountant) he's clearly just playing buzzword bingo, and in the hopes of getting other engineers past this fake "evaluation" to talk to real engineers, this is all you have to say: "The l things I look for when I'm having a phone conversation with an engineer (at a high level): - What big problems are they solving (large scalability and storage issues, advanced algorithms, etc...) - Involvement in complete product development (are they shipping products or are mainly doing integration) - Technical coding, % of time they spend coding, languages they're coding in. - use of data structures and algorithm writing. - Educational background and motivation for making a change." Note that "I got tired of being harassed by google recruiters" is probably not a good answer for the last one. From the original article: "I guess that’s why when I interviewed for my transfer, I was told I was “not technical enough” to do the job I’d been doing for 3 years already, supporting the Freebase community." Google literally told this guy he was not capable of doing the job he was already doing, and given that it was a startup, a job he had likely created himself. "There are plenty of fresh-faced kids from Stanford and MIT and whatever other elite universities are on Google’s preferred list, who can solve stupid puzzles and tell you the O notation of anything you want." Well, when your founders were graduate students at Stanford, and they implemented a hiring policy right out of school, it shouldn't be surprising that they have an arbitrary filter like that, and a focus on identifying personalities that are nearly identical to the founders. Finding people like yourself is orthogonal to finding good employees who will find the best position. In the worst case it can result in a monoculture where literally every employee is blind to a solution that would be obvious to at least somebody if you had more diversity. I've not worked with google, so obviously I'm just giving my impressions based on my experiences being recruited by them (and this has happened ore than once, the LinkedIn example was just the most recent.)

KevinMS 15y ago

It will be interesting to see how a company that hires with a strong academic bias competes in the long run. I'm not sure but I suspect Apple is the opposite, and look how they are doing. Update: is this not a relevant comment? What would motivate somebody to down vote it? I'm curious because I care about the quality of HN, and I don't want to see it become something like reddit where up/down votes are actually like/dislike votes

Kylekramer 15y ago
You assume something that is pretty illogical with no evidence (Google may have a stronger academic bias than most, but Silicon Valley in general has an education bias, Apple included). Also, the concept that Apple is doing well and they don't have a academic bias, so that must be correct is correlation = causation. For example, I hear Google has a strong academic bias, and look at how they are doing.
- KevinMS 15y ago
  I would be shocked to find that apple had the same kind of comp-sci bias that google had. They must have a huge number of developers who have been with that company since the 80's and 90's, a time when much of the industry was being created by people with very diverse backgrounds.
  - mhewett 15y ago
    The company most similar to Google in hiring bias is early Oracle. In the mid-1980s they were hiring every Stanford graduate they could get hold of.
    - cHalgan 15y ago
      Oracle still tries to keep up with standard. Getting hired to work in 400 building (RAC, ExaData, etc.) is still much harder than getting into Google.
  - ZephyrP 15y ago

nightski 15y ago

Have we really reached a point in industry where asking a candidate to go through the process of problem solving is frowned upon? Where "I don't need to solve that because I have Google!" is really the right answer? I mean the question seriously wasn't that difficult. What if there isn't an open source library to cover your every need? Are you screwed? Critical thinking and problem solving are important in any position. If you are unwilling to perform this simple task then I would probably not want you on my team either, no matter how many blog posts you had written. I am sorry but extracting html elements is not crazy algorithms, hardcore theoretical computer science, or nearly as "academic" as everyone is screaming.

redcap 15y ago
The author talks about being asked a question regarding web elements when he was leaving the Search team for the Developer Relations team. A commenter talks about being asked algorithm questions despite being interviewed for a sysadmin role. Another commenter talks about telling the interviewers that she is not a coder and then is asked a bunch of coding questions despite interviewing for a testing position and having written a book on testing and having years of domain experience. If you are just wanting algorithm people then surely they're going to be lacking in other areas (e.g. Google Wave, designed by algorithmers). The objections raised here seem to be along the lines of that the questions are not related to the jobs people are interviewing for. This has two impacts: - people are not being asked questions about their domain (it seems incredibly stupid not to ask questions about testing if the interviewer is a tester) - you will cut down on the diversity of your staff if you just want algorithmists (which means that you are more likely to produce more Google Waves).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - econgeeker 15y ago
    "Developer Advocate is a highly technical role [1]." Doesn't appear to be from the link you gave. From your link: "You will be an evangelist for our newest technologies in the outside world, as well as a vocal advocate for developers' needs within Google. You will be an engineer who thrives on the cutting edge of technology and loves seeing exciting, new applications and business that other developers are building. Your job is to drive momentum for exciting new technologies such as Chrome, Android, App Engine, Google Wave, Google Maps API, HTML5, and our core Google Apps and Ads APIs. " Guy Kawasaki was one of the first evangelists. He was a jeweler previously. Of course Guy has a great many talents, but I don't think anyone would call him "highly technical." Notice the middle sentence says "you will be an engineer", but the rest of it talks about being an "Advocate" and "your job is to drive momentum", etc. The requirements don't seem to be highly technical either. (most of the languages are scripting languages, for instance.) From the description: BA/BS in Computer Science or a similar technical degree preferred. Experience blogging and writing technical articles, ideally with an existing follower base. Strong command of web application or mobile application development landscapes. Experience working directly with large partners, or with press and bloggers preferred. Considerable success as a software developer, architect, technology evangelist, CTO, or consultant working with web or mobile technologies. Strong command of web application or mobile application development landscapes. Solid programming abilities in one or more of the following languages: Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, JavaScript.

yaroslavvb 15y ago

This approach can go both ways, I was hired despite just having a Bachelor's from a 3rd tier US university

voyvf 15y ago

I lucked out; when a Google recruiter contacted me, I had just gotten a job (had been doing contract work for a year prior.) I'm pretty happy not being Google material - I have no degree, and I'll be the first to admit that there are many Comp. Sci. graduates who can code circles around me. I think that's awesome - I've reaped the benefits of the work of many others before, and from the looks of it will continue to reap them (I'm looking at you, PyPy team. Keep up the wonderful work! Let me be lazy, and not have to write an extension in C or C++. :D) The most advanced work I've done thus far would be writing out a somewhat decent decision-tree system in C++ (I know, mind-bogglingly advanced! (: ) There's plenty of room in the mediocre to almost-above-average scale.

lawnchair_larry 15y ago
PyPy is amazing, and actually a relevant counterpoint (vs Unladen Swallow) to "the Google way."

cletus 15y ago

Has it been two weeks already (since, you know, the last thread complaining about Google's hiring processes)? You can know a library that does exactly what the question wants, if anything that's a plus, but you should roughly know how something like that actually works. Our process isn't problem-free. We gets hundreds of thousands of applications a year. Who else has that scale of a recruitment problem? There are a lot of myths about our interview process. Take this post: he says he doesn't have a degree from an "elite university". Neither do I and neither do most of my coworkers. Having no degree at all is a problem but not an insurmountable one. As for us allegedly not being interested in your open source contributions, nothing could be further from the truth. Recently the guy who did Firebug just got hired to work on Chrome developer tools. Do you really think his Firebug work had nothing to do with this? As for what team you'll be working on, you as a candidate have a lot of power in that regard. You can specify you're only interested in working on something in particular or you can simply communicate some preferences. Those preferences affect the allocation process. Our predilection for simple coding problems and requiring a certain level of algorithms knowledge is nothing new. What constantly surprises me is how many people I see go through the process that obviously haven't just picked up a copy of Skiena's book and brushed up on the fundamentals. I can understand the motivation of people not to go through the process a second time. I was in the same boat. It can be a frustrating process. It's imperfect. Occasionally I'll hear people say they will never go through it because of what they've heard. As Homer puts it, "trying is the first step to failing". I'll leave you with three recommendations for anyone interested in applying here: 1. Go through the first half of Skiena's algorithm book (the last half is applications, which, while interesting, isn't as crucial). If you're not comfortable with graphs and dynamic programming, sorry but you just haven't prepared; 2. Practice some code problems on a whiteboard; and 3. Go through recruitment with a referrer. You're MUCH better off with a recommendation from someone who already works here. Even if they don't necessarily know you (and thus can't provide a strong reference), they can chase up what's happening with your application with the recruiter and probably get more information than you, as an external applicant, can. EDIT: let me add a fourth piece of advice: Treat your career at Google, if you're fortunate enough to have one, as a marathon not a sprint. If you're really unhappy on whatever project you end up on or with the team you're with, that can all be changed. A lot of effort is made to make people happy. So you can express your concerns and disappointment with your manager, your manager's manager, HR or whatever is most appropriate. Additionally, the ramp-up time at Google can be significant. 3-6 months. Possibly longer. Another approach is to do what project you end up, learn our tools, build system, processes, etc. In that time make connections to other teams. Find out what else is going on and what you're interested in doing. There is an awful lot of internal mobility that's possible.

null_para 15y ago

Little bit off-topic; at least you get interview call from GOOG. I've never had that privilege of interviewing with Google. Though I've always applied for their design positions. And I was always referred by someone working at Google (and that too stellar recommendations). I've interviewed with all the biggies (including some of the hottest companies) but never with Google. P.S. By the way, I have undergrad in CS too

rosser 15y ago
I think part of the problem with Google's hiring process is the attitude you're demonstrating here, where somehow even just interviewing with them is some sort of "privilege". Yes, I know they have to deal with a stupendous number of applications, and much of their process is a direct result of that sheer volume, but so long as people walk around with that kind of attitude towards them, they're given all the excuse they need to be imperious about it, to boot.
- null_para 15y ago
  Agreed. By the way I remember talking with Google recruiter when recently I was in school (one of the west coast elites) doing my masters; he told me the best way to get into Google is via internship. I was interested in working at startup for internship and told him the same. He bluntly told me that its impossible for me to get a job at Google then.. :) P.S. His prediction was true and I never interviewed at Google. However, I got job offer from one of their biggest rival :)
mindcrime 15y ago
I've never had that privilege of interviewing with Google. GOOG is just another company... it's not some special privilege to interview with them. In fact, not everybody would want to work for them... I, for one, turned down a chance to interview with them a few months ago. I don't see much that strikes me as particularly appealing about working for Google, especially compared to the opportunity of doing a startup of my own. If anything, based on sheer size, I'm fairly confident that I wouldn't enjoy working at Google. Some of us just like smaller companies, with less bureaucracy and what-not.

ChristianMarks 15y ago

Reminds me of calls I receive from top flight hedge funds. "You'll be working with astronomically smart people who use crystalline cohomology to obtain the best polynomial time approximation algorithms for intractable problems. The engineer who did this taught himself calculus within ten to the negative sixty-seven seconds of conception." "Is that the work you have in mind for me?" "No. You'll be cleaning the group's digital bed pans." "That's OK. Perhaps you should recruit a Nobel Laureate for that role."

thadeus_venture 15y ago

Frankly, even a developer relations position can be a technical position. I personally think a developer relations person who does understand the inner workings of the code base he represents, or at least demonstrates the ability to understand it given time, will be much better at his job than someone who doesn't. So really, I agree with Google here in their decision. There are a number of jobs at google that although do not involve writing code, are closely coupled with the technology google is working on - developer relations actually being a very good example. I think they are keeping the bar high in these instances for valid reasons. I'm sure there are positions where technical background is less crucial, graphic design comes to mind, but that's to be judged on a case by case basis. Everybody wants to work there, so they can demand very high standards, but in most instances i've heard about the standards are not incorrect, just high. EDIT: And probably another reason is they simply want to keep the particular technical culture throughout the company.

poink 15y ago

Can't you just tell them to stop contacting you? Works for me thus far.

econgeeker 15y ago

Here's the thing that I think some of the engineers in this discussion might be missing: A company shouldn't consist of only engineers. Don't get me wrong: I'm a software developer, and I'm a bit of a software snob. I have trouble (though I've mostly overcome it) seeing Managers, CEOs, marketing people, sales people, "designers", etc. as doing "real work" because they're not engineers. Maybe designers feel the same way about me. They should. But the reality is, good companies need good designers, and with experience I've discovered that designers can really blow your mind sometimes. But the hiring process for a designer is not the same as the hiring process for an engineer. One area where I've personally been very dissatisfied with google is the lack of customer support. I can't imagine asking programming questions to a customer support person who was expected to help people with their adwords account. The person being interviewed here, and who wrote this blog post is one of those "customer support" type people. Not pretending to be an engineer. If you only hire engineers and your hiring process is engineer focused, you're going to miss out on a lot of really good people, and you're going to have non-engineering roles staffed by engineers who just want google on their resume so they can go get an engineering job later. And these are not the people you want helping others with their adwords account. (Of course I'm not familiar with the internal structure of google, so I'm giving examples meant to be representative of the problem, but that might not actually be true.)

jrockway 15y ago

True story: in my interview I was asked how I would extract entities from an HTML page. I suggested using OpenCalais. So you're interviewing for a job as a programmer for a search engine, and your answer to a simple parsing / text processing question is, "I'm going to use some proprietary black-box third-party API to do the parse", and then you refuse (on moral grounds?) to elaborate on how that service could possibly be implemented? What? I could understand something like, "Oh, I did that last week, and we used the OpenViagra API." OK, cool, but the follow up question is going to be, "but if you had to do it yourself, how would you do it?" This is a good question for many reasons: for one, it's a basic "how do you handle parsing" question. Parsing comes up all the time in programming, and it's good to know if the candidate knows about regular expressions, parser generators, parser combinator libraries, etc. It's not about "do you know how to get HTML entities", it's about "do you know about parsing". There's also something weird about relying on third-party APIs for simple programming tasks. Sure, if you need to know your current location, you have to depend on a bunch of orbiting satellites with precisely-set atomic clocks. But if all you need to do is /&([^&;]+);/g, then write that one fragment of code and move on with your life. The simplicity is well worth not having to set up a TCP connection, wait for it to be established, generate a request, send it over the network, wait for a response, time out and throw an error if you don't get one, parse the response, and finally return the answer to the calling code. Think of all the bugs you're going to have to fix with this approach! I'm going to start asking this question, just to see where it leads. If the answer is more than one sentence, it will give me valuable insight into how the candidate solves programming problems. If they answer, "well, I refuse to do that", then that's valuable insight, too. All in all, a great interview question! So anyway, technical interview questions are not about getting things done, they're about thinking through problems. Parsing HTML is a solved problem, and of course you're going to delegate to a library. But tomorrow, you're going to have a very similar problem to solve that is more nuanced and difficult to explain in 30 seconds. And that's what the question is really getting at; if you can parse HTML, you can parse the weird config file format you invent tomorrow. Google's interview process makes me want to work at Google!

picardo 15y ago
The position she was applying for was not a programmer job; it was a community manager position, and doesn't involve any programming apparently. So your arguments, while valid, are besides the point.

flocial 15y ago

Every interview process sucks. I interviewed and got a job at a company that modeled their hiring on Google's asking me puzzle type questions. I can do really good with those. Doesn't say a thing about my coding skills. I feel sorry for the companies that model their process on Google's, especially the small startups because you need the exceptional engineers that fall through such cracks to really boost your business. It's not so much the rationale of this interview process, reading the response from other Googlers seems to show that this selection process does a good job of maintaining a cultural fit for those that make the cut. The problem is that it seems to make enemies of people without a hardcore technical background when a simple review of their background would help both sides from pain.

motters 15y ago

I can sympathize with the algorithm pop quiz tests. I've done a few of them in various interviews over the last year, and I have to say that in every case they bear precisely zero relevance to any software engineering that I've done in the last 15 years. In one recent case I've even had an interviewer standing and pointing over my shoulder at pieces of paper. It was pretty farcical, and somewhat intimidating. In the real world, this isn't what writing software is about.

paganel 15y ago
> I've done a few of them in various interviews over the last year, and I have to say that in every case they bear precisely zero relevance to any software engineering that I've done in the last 15 years. In one recent case I've even had an interviewer standing and pointing over my shoulder at pieces of paper. That's when I would have gotten out of the room and said "thank you, I don't think we'd be a good match" :)
- motters 15y ago
  Something similar did in fact occur.

cpeterso 15y ago

My friend works at Google. The interview process is far from efficient, yet the people involved genuinely felt the inefficiency was a good thing, some sort of initiation to test candidates' perseverance. From first contact to offer letter took about three months. He had four phone interviews, a video chat interview, two email questionnaires, and two recruiters before he met a human being. Google is also unusually fixated on GPAs. My friend has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MS from another school. Because his undergrad GPA (from 20 years ago!) was not 4.0, the Google hiring managers wanted to know how many hours per week he had worked during his undergrad to account for his 3.5 GPA.

skrebbel 15y ago

A story like this gives me the impression that even if you want to clean the floor at Google, you need to know when to mergesort and when to bubblesort[1]. Why does Google find this important? Why do people who will not do programming at all need to know (relatively) low-level software optimizations? To be sure, if I'd ever apply at Google (which I doubt), I'd probably apply for a programming position and totally expect such questions. I'm asking about the non-programming jobs. [1]: not too far off though: http://web.archive.org/web/20050208031623/http://preacher.stc.cx/cleaningalgorithms.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050208031623/http://preacher.st...

mak120 15y ago

I recently interviewed at Google and got an offer. I live in Bangladesh and I am pretty sure no one involved in the interview process ever heard the name of my university or cared what my CGPA was. So, the part about coming from an elite school does not make a lot of sense to me. The interviews were intense but all the interviewers were very friendly. I got stuck at several problems but was given a lot of hints. And even when I completely missed an answer, the interviewer was nice enough to point it out without sounding rude or arrogant - or making me feel like an idiot. I must say this was unexpected since I did make quite a few mistakes. The way I see it, knowing about the right tool to use is important and useful in our day to day work. But the guys at Google often have to create the tools themselves (or better versions of them) for the scale at which they work. Also, I got the feeling they want their engineers to be aware about what actually goes on inside the framework/tool/database etc. instead of just using it like a black box.

roldon332 15y ago

I also was rejected after 'failing' a technical interview. What was annoying to me is that I told the recruiter that I am rusty on my CS theory. I wish he has just said; "We are only interested in people that could do very well on a senior CS final exam right now"

roldon332 15y ago

I was surprised at how CS Theory oriented they are in hiring. My technical interview went like a CS final exam. I don't expect that I will apply to Google again. If I was interested in CS Theory I would have got a masters in CS. They have to weed people out somehow though.