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Thanks Cletus for taking the time to write that up. That really makes me feel better and provides somewhat more insight into the process. My 5 years of experie

Thanks Cletus for taking the time to write that up. That really makes me feel better and provides somewhat more insight into the process. My 5 years of experience was actually divided like 3 between Masters and Bachelors and 2 after Masters here in US, so I thought my Masters grade would matter. My interviews were 3 before lunch and 2 after. Lunch was good :). The interview conductor asked for references multiple times, but although I knew some people working in Google, but they had never closely worked with me, so I didn't want to make up references just for the sake of it. EDIT: "As far as releasing interview scores goes, that isn't going to happen for good reason. A score, by itself, is meaningless. Interviewers are calibrated against other interviews they've done and other interviewers. This is all in an attempt to make a fair assessment of the candidate. If a particular interviewer gives high marks to candidates where all the other interviewers don't, that gets calibrated. And vice versa." So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. I surely didn't feel like that after the interview, but who knows, since I still don't have a way to know if that is the case. Then this really sucks.

mdwrigh2 15y ago
> So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. I surely didn't feel like that after the interview, but who knows, since I still don't have a way to know if that is the case. Then this really sucks. No, I don't believe that's what he's saying at all. All he's saying is that without knowing the past scoring of the interviewers, and the scores of other interview candidates, the numbers are meaningless. I could rate you a 6 on a scale of 1 - 10. This seems fairly average at first glance, but perhaps my median interview score is a 3. Now it's starting to look pretty good. Nowhere in there did he say that you have to do poorly with all interviewers, or even most, just that they won't release numbers because without extra information those numbers are meaningless.
btilly 15y ago
So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. You are talking as if the default is hire. That isn't so. The default result is not hire. If a couple of people gave you mediocre results, you won't be hired.
jemfinch 15y ago
"So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. I surely didn't feel like that after the interview, but who knows, since I still don't have a way to know if that is the case. Then this really sucks." Just a comment from another Google engineer who does interviews (and didn't do yours, since I haven't done any for a couple months now): your own feeling at the end of an interview may not at all reflect your actual performance in the interview, because you have no visibility into what questions weren't asked. I like to interview candidates by asking them to solve a simple programming problem and then modifying the specification little by little, having them adjust their solution to implement new functionality. There are about 8 steps in my question, and frequently I'm gauging the quality of the candidate by how long it takes him to get through the first N stages; we fix bugs in earlier stages before moving on to the next stage. To calibrate myself, I've tried this question on several of my coworkers, and they were universally able to get about halfway through the question with bug-free code in about 10 minutes. Only one required prompting on my part to fix a bug. Most every candidate I've interviewed has taken 20-30 minutes to get to the same halfway point; by that time I've only got 15-25 minutes left in my interview, and the candidate seems so far like a "no hire", so I move to a different question to find out if the candidate has other strengths to counterbalance his weakness at solving this (simple) coding problem. From the candidate's perspective, he only sees me ask a series of programming questions which he answers satisfactorily with a little prompting from me. If he answers another question or two satisfactorily, he may think he's done well, but he doesn't know that I wanted to delve more deeply into every question I asked him, and just didn't have time because the pace of his solutions was too slow. I wish I could give this feedback to the people I've interviewed, but sadly, I can't.

mdwrigh2 15y ago

> So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. I surely didn't feel like that after the interview, but who knows, since I still don't have a way to know if that is the case. Then this really sucks. No, I don't believe that's what he's saying at all. All he's saying is that without knowing the past scoring of the interviewers, and the scores of other interview candidates, the numbers are meaningless. I could rate you a 6 on a scale of 1 - 10. This seems fairly average at first glance, but perhaps my median interview score is a 3. Now it's starting to look pretty good. Nowhere in there did he say that you have to do poorly with all interviewers, or even most, just that they won't release numbers because without extra information those numbers are meaningless.

btilly 15y ago

So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. You are talking as if the default is hire. That isn't so. The default result is not hire. If a couple of people gave you mediocre results, you won't be hired.

jemfinch 15y ago

"So what you are saying is that for me to not have made it through I must have equally messed all my interviews or at least a majority of them. I surely didn't feel like that after the interview, but who knows, since I still don't have a way to know if that is the case. Then this really sucks." Just a comment from another Google engineer who does interviews (and didn't do yours, since I haven't done any for a couple months now): your own feeling at the end of an interview may not at all reflect your actual performance in the interview, because you have no visibility into what questions weren't asked. I like to interview candidates by asking them to solve a simple programming problem and then modifying the specification little by little, having them adjust their solution to implement new functionality. There are about 8 steps in my question, and frequently I'm gauging the quality of the candidate by how long it takes him to get through the first N stages; we fix bugs in earlier stages before moving on to the next stage. To calibrate myself, I've tried this question on several of my coworkers, and they were universally able to get about halfway through the question with bug-free code in about 10 minutes. Only one required prompting on my part to fix a bug. Most every candidate I've interviewed has taken 20-30 minutes to get to the same halfway point; by that time I've only got 15-25 minutes left in my interview, and the candidate seems so far like a "no hire", so I move to a different question to find out if the candidate has other strengths to counterbalance his weakness at solving this (simple) coding problem. From the candidate's perspective, he only sees me ask a series of programming questions which he answers satisfactorily with a little prompting from me. If he answers another question or two satisfactorily, he may think he's done well, but he doesn't know that I wanted to delve more deeply into every question I asked him, and just didn't have time because the pace of his solutions was too slow. I wish I could give this feedback to the people I've interviewed, but sadly, I can't.