6 ms·

> Guidance is expected; a great interview should be more of a conversation than a one-sided question and one-sided answer. I had a particularly awful interview

• piinecone 4y ago
  Google notoriously hire Megatron supporters. You should have known!
• ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  I want to believe this is satire but I know it's not even an egregious example.
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Really sounds like the guy wanted to talk about himself instead of actually interview you. I hope you were able to send some feedback to his superior, since they missed a hire because of his shit.
  • leetrout 4y ago
    They were well aware of how he acted. I was warned by another interviewer earlier. "Whats the rest of your day?" <shows schedule> "Oh. X is from Google and he still does their style of interviewing"
    • fnimick 4y ago
      Then having him still in the interview chain is an organization failure and a great signal to the interviewee (you) that team dynamics are going to be a problem.
• bodge5000 4y ago
  I remember being told once in an interview "I'll be your google, your stackoverflow, so anything you'd usually search for on there ask me". Eventually I got to the point where I forgot how to do something simple where you'd usually just google it to refresh your memory. I decided to take his advice seriously and asked him, to which he responded to me basically by rephrasing my question as another question back to me. I can tell you now there is no chance Stackoverflow would be as big as it is if the responses you got back where riddles.
  • falcor84 4y ago
    I agree in principle, but also see how the interviewer might have felt that there's a good opportunity there to assess your reasoning skills about that thing. I actually like it when an interview takes some small detours.
  • AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    A more realistic answer would have been, "[duplicate] Closed 4 seconds ago."
  • DonHopkins 4y ago
    At least the person who wanted to be your google didn't collect all your personal information then serve you targeted ads. That sounds like a lame pick-up line, and they sound like a crazy stalker!
  • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
    I had an interviewer say something very similar to that to me once during a live pair coding session. I got to a point where I asked him a question about how javascript worked and he said "Hmm, I don't know. Let's see!" We spent the rest of the interview trying to figure out if javascript did indeed work that way. I didn't get the job.
• atoav 4y ago
  In such situations I tend to ask that question directly: "It was my understanding that you looking for someone who will help you with Django tooling. I can do that. Although number theory sounds interesting, I never felt the need of diving into it in order to solve any Django-related issue. I would be happy to learn more about how you think number theory relates to Django tooling should I start working here." When people try to be important like that, it is paramount to take them at face value. In a lot of geek environments this happens all the time. People trying to push that one niche topic they really know about, because this is their comfort zone. The problem is: that one niche topic will rarely be a natural fit for any given conversation. More often than not just asking how they think this relates to the conversation at hand is enough to tame them a little bit. Many times the stuff people say will contradict with the stated (or implicit) goals of a conversation. in this case the chosen topic was one with which the interviewer felt at home. So another approach would have been to make it even more about them by e.g. instead of answering their question showing that you did your research: "Ah number theory! I saw you majored in number theory, I admittedly never had the need to dive too much into it — what role does number theory play in $Companyname?"
  • _the_inflator 4y ago
    Great answer. Connect with the current position. I would add here, that you may ask in a polite way, how number theory relates to the position at hand, here Django. This way, the interviewer has to open up specifically. There might be something, that could be important and interesting or simply a bluff.
    • NalNezumi 4y ago
      Not exactly the same situation, but from a snarky interviewer I've gotten the answer equivalent to "lol I was told you were the Django expert? According to your resume? Are you not supposed to know that?" Still it does tell you that you have to work with this massive asshole, so it's a worthwhile approach to get more info about the workplace you'll be in.
      • mlatu 4y ago
• sarchertech 4y ago
  The fact that the twitter interviewer introduced themselves as a xoogler is absurd.
  • solardev 4y ago
    What the heck is a xoogler? Sounds like some sci fi slime mold monster.
    • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      Xoogler is a slang term for someone who used to work at Google (ex-googler).
      • DonHopkins 4y ago
        And MeToogler is a slang term for someone who used to work under Andy Rubin at Google, and won part of the $310 sexual harassment lawsuit settlement. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/googles-310-million-sexual-misconduct-settlement-details.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/googles-310-million-sexual-m... https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/google-employees-walk-out-in-protest-of-sexual-misconduct-handling.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/google-employees-walk-out-in...
    • dougmn 4y ago
      Here ya go: https://www.quora.com/In-Google-recruiting-what-does-Ex-Googler-Xoogler-mean https://www.quora.com/In-Google-recruiting-what-does-Ex-Goog...
  • zzyzxd 4y ago
    You would be surprised how common this is. Lots of startup companies also love to brag about how many xooglers they have recruited. I once interviewed at a startup and the CTO introduced himself as "xoogler". After the interview I checked his Linkedin profile and he had a summer internship at Google 7 years ago.
    • porknubbins 4y ago
• delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  Oh, this is hilarious. Well done for the 'Autobots roll out'! :D
• newshorts 4y ago
  My google coding interview was much l33t. He asked me a graph search question. However at the time I didn’t know what a graph was. I’m self taught. But I did understand the ask, which was to find a path through a series of locations. I also happened to have some experience with slime mold finding optimal paths and once even tried to simulate it using a genetic algorithm. That was the best solution I could come up with, a genetic algorithm that would optimize a path through a series of locations based on a reward system. However, I did not say the word “graph” and its not an optimal solution. I didn’t pass. I view the situation as both “I wasn’t prepared” and “google missed an opportunity to hire someone who might approach things a bit differently”.
  • cbozeman 4y ago
    > and its not an optimal solution. Therein lies your problem, and you can see it writ large on everything Google does. Because they're so dominate at so many things (search, video hosting / streaming, etc.), anything that doesn't fall under "optimal solution" and "immediately profitable" goes to the waste bin near immediately. There are entire websites dedicated to how fast Google kills a project that could have been really great with a year or two of love and care. They've come to expect overnight success because it's been so dramatic for the past two decades. This blinds them to a lot of opportunities, and it comes, pretty much, from the top down and has filtered into nearly everyone. > “google missed an opportunity to hire someone who might approach things a bit differently”. That isn't what they want. See above. Optimal solutions, instant / near-instant profitability.
    • kweingar 4y ago
      As a counterpoint to this, I interviewed at Google and was sure I had flunked. On every one of the follow-up questions, I didn't produce a working solution, let alone an optimal one. I still got the offer. Truthfully I do attribute much of it to luck. From what I have heard, most people had more difficult questions than I did, often with more strict interviewers. It's a high variance process for sure. If I were to interview for the same position now, I would most likely not pass the interviews.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ZiiS 4y ago
  Whist number theory may never come up in Django tooling. "Something you don't know" always will; it is valid to try and determine how people respond to questions they don't know the answer too.
  • manfre 4y ago
    If the candidate says they don't know a topic, that is a valid response. It's not worthwhile to ask detailed questions about the topic. That's a sign of an inexperienced and/or unprepared interviewer.
    • pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Asking someone "how many prime numbers are there?" seems pretty valid to me. It's an easy question. The two valid answers are: "a lot" or "infinite" (with "more than 10" also being a fine answer IMO). I'm not sure the interviewer was expecting the actually correct answer here (infinite) - lots of programmers don't know that there are infinite prime numbers - I think he was trying to set up for an explanation of an algorithms problem. By saying "Optimus Prime," OP has shown that he prefers to cover up gaps in his technical knowledge with snark and being an asshole rather than taking a stab at it and working in good faith. That answer would have disqualified him in my opinion. Even respectfully saying "I thought I was intervieweing for a Django tooling position" would have opened the door to further conversation.
      • Verdex 4y ago
        If the job had been some sort of super low level position requiring a lot of hand written advanced data structures, then I might agree with you. Hashes, priority queues, skip lists, etc all rub up against more math heavy topics (number theory, statistics), so you would expect a candidate to at least have some familiarity with prime numbers. However, for a web framework? Like, primes are pretty simple, but they're also pretty niche. What range of 'easy' questions that are not directly or indirectly related to the job are allowed to be asked? Can we ask questions about the correct leavening agents to use for different types of bread? I mean technically we're just trying to see how they cover up gaps in their technical knowledge. And all questions are 'easy' for the right people. If you lure someone into a place with the promise of gainful employment and then waste their time with niche questions that are unrelated but you happen to have warm fuzzies about, then you should probably expect to get a bit of snark.
• AzzieElbab 4y ago
  Well what do you expect from a person who majored in number theory but makes a living working on django tooling in a company that doesn’t really use django to begin with? Delay and reschedule interviews until you get an interviewer whose LN profile does not clearly indicate a mismatch
• seer-zig 4y ago
  Do you think they blacklisted you from twitter after that encounter? :P