9 ms·

My Job Interview at Google

86 points by pkrumins 18y ago

epi0Bauqu 18y ago
He seems pretty excited for not getting the job.
- pkrumins 18y ago
  Life goes on, why should I worry!
  - jsmcgd 18y ago
    So why do you think you didn't get the job?
    - kylec 18y ago
      This is probably just interview #9 - seeing if he'll break NDA or trash talk Google after finding out he didn't get the job. You have to know how your employees will handle stress and frustration. ;)
      - immad 18y ago
        "I got the green light from Google to publish this article"
    - pkrumins 18y ago
      No idea, pal.
  - epi0Bauqu 18y ago
    I hear ya. Perhaps you should just tone down the exclamation points, though. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Elaine used too many exclamation points in the manuscript she was editing.
  - cdr 18y ago
    Up until now, I thought your name was Mat Caton.
    - pkrumins 18y ago
      haha :)
- virtualdarwin 18y ago
  Enough with the exclamation points. People at Google already sound so absurdly fake on a daily basis that it's nauseating. btw: They gave a BS reason for rejection -- they're in a hiring freeze now. Just look at the stock chart.
- j2d2 18y ago
  This particular writer seems to always be stoked on life. A solidly curious mind.
- nickb 18y ago
  SREs are on call. That means they carry a pager/cell phone and must be accessible at all times. He should be happy he didn't get picked ;).
  - llimllib 18y ago
    > must be accessible at all times Nope, just when they're on call. I was snowboarding in Montana for a week last winter with my google SRE buddy, so I'm pretty sure about this :)
    - nickb 18y ago
      So he's not on call when he's on vacation and on a ski hill. Ask him about getting late night calls while with family during regular workdays! When you work for a big company and you're getting paid a corporate salary, being on call just plain sucks. Period. I worked one job like that and hated it. I'd never do it again. If you work for your self or your own startup, well... then that's different :).
      - llimllib 18y ago
        They have a call schedule, and only get called when they're on call. The size of google makes that a more solid rule than it is at smaller companies, I think. Plus they have a more lax work schedule when they're on call, to try and compensate. I've worked jobs where you really are on 24x7x365 call, and it does suck, and google SRE is not like that. And hey, it could be worse! Doctors can get called any time, by their most hypochondriac patients...
sireat 18y ago
I think sometimes even the very well qualified (and Peter should be) do not survive the interview grind. Would be simply silly if that off by one error was the cause for rejection.
- Maro 18y ago
  Could be they didn't have any more H1B slots left. In my experience large companies just call in people for interviews, and only afterwards do they think about how/when they could hire them.
  - jcl 18y ago
    If that were the case, I suppose his big mistake was specifically requesting the Mountain View campus. It looks like they asked that question up front so that they could figure out which teams he should interview with; he might have stood a better chance at another campus.
josefresco 18y ago
The "I got interviewed by Google" articles are getting old for me. I just don't care, and their process isn't that interesting anymore.
- gaius 18y ago
  Agreed. They have, what, 20,000 employees now? It's as exciting as getting an interview at HP or IBM.
  - minoko0000 18y ago
    This is my recent job interview with one of the above comapany . Aug - 1st Interview Sep - We really like you but can you wait for 2 months? Oct - I have another job offering .. I called the Hiring manager to confirm if he is really going to hire me. his exact words :" Yes of coz , reject the other company . It's confirm we'll start in the new FY. Don't you trust me? End Oct - hey , I need you to meet up w another dept hiring manager .. and when I spoke to the new hiring manager I found out that the role is totally different and doesn't fit my profile and my experience Later did I know he hired someone else for the role. Too big a company , too many employess , to value you is not the 1st thing in mind.
- nailer 18y ago
  My interview at Google: First basic recruiter basic questions. Second part, call from Mountain View to London. They couldn't organize a VOIP line that didn't sound underwater. They tried calling again and the line was still bad. They proceeded anyway. I spent 5 minutes answering a basic question about deploying some changes across a thousand machines, then the interviewer mentioned he'd heard part of it, but how would I deploy it across a thousand machines? I talked about things stored in inodes, including POSIX attributes, he asked for an example, I mentioned immutable. Google: WHAT? Me: IMMUTABLE. Google: WHAT? Me: IMMUTABLE. INDIGO MIKE MIKE UMBRELLA ... The whole call went along those lines and was generally a massive waste of time. Apparently they were going to organize a second interview with a working phone line. They haven't gotten back to me in the two weeks since.
  - 18y ago
alecco 18y ago
Google isn't hiring anymore out of top management or very specific exceptions.
- andr 18y ago
  Citation needed.
  - alecco 18y ago
    I thought it was on the front page http://www.webguild.org/2008/11/google-layoffs-10000-workers-affected.php http://www.webguild.org/2008/11/google-layoffs-10000-workers... Similar leaks are being posted every other day.
    - alecco 18y ago
      It seems today it got broader attention. http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4AO1LI20081125 http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4AO1LI20081125 http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/11/25/afx5737988.html http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/11/25/af... And everybody mentions WSJ as source but couldn't find the original, perhaps it's offline only. Yeah, no mention of (mostly) not hiring but I am very sure of that, too.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- lacker 18y ago
  Not true.
  - jimbokun 18y ago
    Citation needed. (Seriously, two totally contradictory opinions on this, wondering if there is any actual evidence either way.)
    - nostrademons 18y ago
JesseAldridge 18y ago
"The questions were about Linux systems administration, algorithms, computer architecture and C programming." Couldn't you just Google for the answers to these questions in order to bring yourself up to speed where necessary? I'm not sure I see the value in trying to keep vast libraries of arcana in your head at all times.
- bjelkeman-again 18y ago
  Certain things goes a lot faster if you don't have to look them up evertime you have to do them. But then I haven't read the article, so what would I know? :o
- nostrademons 18y ago
  They ask common questions as a proxy for experience in those fields. If you work with something daily, you will end up memorizing certain facts even if you don't consciously try to. It follows, then, that if you don't have those facts memorized, you haven't been working with that technology daily.
  - Retric 18y ago
    I stopped memorizing syntax a long time ago. It's been a few years and an the only thing I can recall about C's pointer syntax is ^ and & but the specifics are long gone. Not that long ago I had to look up the conditional shorthand (expression)? true: false in java etc. I have used around 12 different languages and I try and forget the stuff I am not using or I will mix and match syntax that does not work for the language I am programming in. PS: I was classified with a learning disability back in school so this could just be me.
    - nostrademons 18y ago
      It's actually * and &. ;-) Don't interview for positions in languages you've forgotten, then, or brush up and re-learn stuff before the interview. It's like riding a bike...it comes back to you. Not being able to remember pointer syntax is a serious problem if you're being hired to program in C. I can understand why they'd want to weed out anyone who can't get that, particularly given how many candidates they have.
matt1 18y ago
What are the likely reasons that he did not get hired? Seems like a brilliant programmer, but for whatever reason that wasn't enough.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  It's not clear whether they actually hired anyone for the position (there are contradictory opinions in this thread as to whether or not Google is hiring at all right now).
  - paulgb 18y ago
    Possibly meaningless anecdotal evidence: I know a number of people who have had internship offers from Google in the last couple months. I don't think any of them accepted though, so maybe they aren't paying as well as they used to. Also, I don't know what hiring interns says about hiring regular employees.
- j2d2 18y ago
  I'm curious too. I've enjoyed his blog posts ever since they first appears on Hacker News.
truebosko 18y ago
I've seen this guys articles get posted on reddit/hacker news over the course of the past few years and he just seems like a tome of knowledge that keeps expanding at a rapid pace Buddy, you have a lot of time on your hands and you're using it well, keep chugging along, looks like you're close to your dream job
- greendestiny 18y ago
  About time to see the light and decide to start up his own company I'd think :) You always have to ask yourself whether a dream job is really about doing the work, or is it about being validated by the cool kids.
- alecco 18y ago
  And yet Google didn't hire this guy for a lowly SRE position... Clearly their process doesn't work or they are just bluffing on interviewing people to cover their stock from falling and losing mojo with techies.
khangtoh 18y ago
What I would really like to read is "My Job Interview at X" X - any startups like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, Kashless. etc
simplegeek 18y ago
Worry not, take that as an opportunity. I'm sure you're a talented hacker. I've been reading your articles and I guess you like to learn a lot on your own. Match made in heaven for a startup guy. I sense that had you been employed by Google you might have left it after some time to start something on your own. Why not now :)
globalrev 18y ago
Could anyone point me on how to solve this(either a solution or preferrably a pointer on how to get to it): "Q: Given a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 5, write a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 7." First I thought it was simple but the I got stuck, maybe I'm just tired. No matter how I twsit and turn it I seem to get only an even distribution over 5 numbers.
- sfk 18y ago
  The elegant solution escapes me for now, but you could treat the odds and evens from the 1-5 function as a biased bit stream, apply a von Neumann corrector and then use the resulting stream.
  - jbm 18y ago
    Now I remember why we computer scientists always looked up to the Math majors...
- hhm 18y ago
  Execute f 7 times, add all numbers, call that x. Then you do mod(x,7)+1, and you get a random number between 1 and 7. If the original function was unbiased, this one is going to be unbiased too.
  - deadsy 18y ago
    This won't work. f gives 1 to 5. 7 * f gives 7 to 35. But 7 to 35 will not be evenly generated. Think about it: There are more ways to get a 20 than there are to get a 7 or a 35. Same thing with rolling 2 die.
    - nostrademons 18y ago
      That was my second thought too (my first thought was to upvote the comment), but at least in the 2-die case, the modulus takes care of it. If you work out the probabilities, the chance of getting 0mod2 = 1/36 (2) + 3/36 (4) + 5/36 (6) + 5/36 (8) + 3/36 (10) + 1/36 (12) = 18/36 = 1/2. Same goes for getting 1mod2. So you end up with a fair result even though the chances for each individual outcome are biased. I didn't want to go through all 5^7 possibilities for the 7-die case, but I figured it's likely enough that he's right that I'd keep my mouth shut.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
webwright 18y ago
Isn't this level of interviewing kind of excessive and time-expensive? If I were Google, I would do the following: 1) Have the first interviewer be the best/most-appropriate interviewer for the position (manager, lead dev, whatever). Have them write down in a sealed envelope a "hire" or "no hire" statement after the interview. 2) At the end of the assorted interviews, measure how often the first interviewer is correct in his hire/no hire assessment. My theory is that interviewing is a great opportunity for "thin-slicing" (a la Blink) and that you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested. Related anecdote (from gladwell dot com): One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain. Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in "Blink" where that simply isn't true. There's a wonderful phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in "Blink" on how unbelievably powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.
- Rexxar 18y ago
  I think people can be convinced of this by explaining this is a signal to noise ratio problem. If we have a lot of sources of information but if a lot of them have a lot of noise, it's useless.
- andreyf 18y ago
  you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested. Hard to say. The economics of hiring aren't intuitive - a bad hire can do a lot of damage, esp. if it's a management position (which this wasn't, I know). It's probably better to nicely turn down 10 people (and nicely ask them to re-apply in 6 months) than to let in 1 charming, but conniving and free-riding bullshitter into your team.
brandonkm 18y ago
Seems like the engineer in the comments section summed it up the best. You were probably really close to getting the job, but a few to many mistakes tipped it against you.
fakeslimshady 18y ago
Looks like you just dodged a bullet given the layoff announcement
bootload 18y ago
"... Then I found all the other blog posts about interviews and interview questions at Google ... She told me she was working at Google for two years and was very happy about it ... We went to Asian food restaurant (located in Googleplex) and I had all kinds of delicious foods. All free! ..." I'm still wondering, who's trying to game who?
known 18y ago
There are 2 types of interviewers in corporate environment. 1. One who hires 2. One who recommends to hire Avoid getting interviewed by 2.

86 points by pkrumins 18y ago

epi0Bauqu 18y ago

He seems pretty excited for not getting the job.

pkrumins 18y ago
Life goes on, why should I worry!
- jsmcgd 18y ago
  So why do you think you didn't get the job?
  - kylec 18y ago
    This is probably just interview #9 - seeing if he'll break NDA or trash talk Google after finding out he didn't get the job. You have to know how your employees will handle stress and frustration. ;)
    - immad 18y ago
      "I got the green light from Google to publish this article"
  - pkrumins 18y ago
    No idea, pal.
- epi0Bauqu 18y ago
  I hear ya. Perhaps you should just tone down the exclamation points, though. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Elaine used too many exclamation points in the manuscript she was editing.
- cdr 18y ago
  Up until now, I thought your name was Mat Caton.
  - pkrumins 18y ago
    haha :)
virtualdarwin 18y ago
Enough with the exclamation points. People at Google already sound so absurdly fake on a daily basis that it's nauseating. btw: They gave a BS reason for rejection -- they're in a hiring freeze now. Just look at the stock chart.
j2d2 18y ago
This particular writer seems to always be stoked on life. A solidly curious mind.
nickb 18y ago
SREs are on call. That means they carry a pager/cell phone and must be accessible at all times. He should be happy he didn't get picked ;).
- llimllib 18y ago
  > must be accessible at all times Nope, just when they're on call. I was snowboarding in Montana for a week last winter with my google SRE buddy, so I'm pretty sure about this :)
  - nickb 18y ago
    So he's not on call when he's on vacation and on a ski hill. Ask him about getting late night calls while with family during regular workdays! When you work for a big company and you're getting paid a corporate salary, being on call just plain sucks. Period. I worked one job like that and hated it. I'd never do it again. If you work for your self or your own startup, well... then that's different :).
    - llimllib 18y ago
      They have a call schedule, and only get called when they're on call. The size of google makes that a more solid rule than it is at smaller companies, I think. Plus they have a more lax work schedule when they're on call, to try and compensate. I've worked jobs where you really are on 24x7x365 call, and it does suck, and google SRE is not like that. And hey, it could be worse! Doctors can get called any time, by their most hypochondriac patients...

sireat 18y ago

I think sometimes even the very well qualified (and Peter should be) do not survive the interview grind. Would be simply silly if that off by one error was the cause for rejection.

Maro 18y ago
Could be they didn't have any more H1B slots left. In my experience large companies just call in people for interviews, and only afterwards do they think about how/when they could hire them.
- jcl 18y ago
  If that were the case, I suppose his big mistake was specifically requesting the Mountain View campus. It looks like they asked that question up front so that they could figure out which teams he should interview with; he might have stood a better chance at another campus.

josefresco 18y ago

The "I got interviewed by Google" articles are getting old for me. I just don't care, and their process isn't that interesting anymore.

gaius 18y ago
Agreed. They have, what, 20,000 employees now? It's as exciting as getting an interview at HP or IBM.
- minoko0000 18y ago
  This is my recent job interview with one of the above comapany . Aug - 1st Interview Sep - We really like you but can you wait for 2 months? Oct - I have another job offering .. I called the Hiring manager to confirm if he is really going to hire me. his exact words :" Yes of coz , reject the other company . It's confirm we'll start in the new FY. Don't you trust me? End Oct - hey , I need you to meet up w another dept hiring manager .. and when I spoke to the new hiring manager I found out that the role is totally different and doesn't fit my profile and my experience Later did I know he hired someone else for the role. Too big a company , too many employess , to value you is not the 1st thing in mind.
nailer 18y ago
My interview at Google: First basic recruiter basic questions. Second part, call from Mountain View to London. They couldn't organize a VOIP line that didn't sound underwater. They tried calling again and the line was still bad. They proceeded anyway. I spent 5 minutes answering a basic question about deploying some changes across a thousand machines, then the interviewer mentioned he'd heard part of it, but how would I deploy it across a thousand machines? I talked about things stored in inodes, including POSIX attributes, he asked for an example, I mentioned immutable. Google: WHAT? Me: IMMUTABLE. Google: WHAT? Me: IMMUTABLE. INDIGO MIKE MIKE UMBRELLA ... The whole call went along those lines and was generally a massive waste of time. Apparently they were going to organize a second interview with a working phone line. They haven't gotten back to me in the two weeks since.
- 18y ago

alecco 18y ago

Google isn't hiring anymore out of top management or very specific exceptions.

andr 18y ago
Citation needed.
- alecco 18y ago
  I thought it was on the front page http://www.webguild.org/2008/11/google-layoffs-10000-workers-affected.php http://www.webguild.org/2008/11/google-layoffs-10000-workers... Similar leaks are being posted every other day.
  - alecco 18y ago
    It seems today it got broader attention. http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4AO1LI20081125 http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4AO1LI20081125 http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/11/25/afx5737988.html http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/11/25/af... And everybody mentions WSJ as source but couldn't find the original, perhaps it's offline only. Yeah, no mention of (mostly) not hiring but I am very sure of that, too.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
lacker 18y ago
Not true.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  Citation needed. (Seriously, two totally contradictory opinions on this, wondering if there is any actual evidence either way.)
  - nostrademons 18y ago

JesseAldridge 18y ago

"The questions were about Linux systems administration, algorithms, computer architecture and C programming." Couldn't you just Google for the answers to these questions in order to bring yourself up to speed where necessary? I'm not sure I see the value in trying to keep vast libraries of arcana in your head at all times.

bjelkeman-again 18y ago
Certain things goes a lot faster if you don't have to look them up evertime you have to do them. But then I haven't read the article, so what would I know? :o
nostrademons 18y ago
They ask common questions as a proxy for experience in those fields. If you work with something daily, you will end up memorizing certain facts even if you don't consciously try to. It follows, then, that if you don't have those facts memorized, you haven't been working with that technology daily.
- Retric 18y ago
  I stopped memorizing syntax a long time ago. It's been a few years and an the only thing I can recall about C's pointer syntax is ^ and & but the specifics are long gone. Not that long ago I had to look up the conditional shorthand (expression)? true: false in java etc. I have used around 12 different languages and I try and forget the stuff I am not using or I will mix and match syntax that does not work for the language I am programming in. PS: I was classified with a learning disability back in school so this could just be me.
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    It's actually * and &. ;-) Don't interview for positions in languages you've forgotten, then, or brush up and re-learn stuff before the interview. It's like riding a bike...it comes back to you. Not being able to remember pointer syntax is a serious problem if you're being hired to program in C. I can understand why they'd want to weed out anyone who can't get that, particularly given how many candidates they have.

matt1 18y ago

What are the likely reasons that he did not get hired? Seems like a brilliant programmer, but for whatever reason that wasn't enough.

jimbokun 18y ago
It's not clear whether they actually hired anyone for the position (there are contradictory opinions in this thread as to whether or not Google is hiring at all right now).
- paulgb 18y ago
  Possibly meaningless anecdotal evidence: I know a number of people who have had internship offers from Google in the last couple months. I don't think any of them accepted though, so maybe they aren't paying as well as they used to. Also, I don't know what hiring interns says about hiring regular employees.
j2d2 18y ago
I'm curious too. I've enjoyed his blog posts ever since they first appears on Hacker News.

truebosko 18y ago

I've seen this guys articles get posted on reddit/hacker news over the course of the past few years and he just seems like a tome of knowledge that keeps expanding at a rapid pace Buddy, you have a lot of time on your hands and you're using it well, keep chugging along, looks like you're close to your dream job

greendestiny 18y ago
About time to see the light and decide to start up his own company I'd think :) You always have to ask yourself whether a dream job is really about doing the work, or is it about being validated by the cool kids.
alecco 18y ago
And yet Google didn't hire this guy for a lowly SRE position... Clearly their process doesn't work or they are just bluffing on interviewing people to cover their stock from falling and losing mojo with techies.

khangtoh 18y ago

What I would really like to read is "My Job Interview at X" X - any startups like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, Kashless. etc

simplegeek 18y ago

Worry not, take that as an opportunity. I'm sure you're a talented hacker. I've been reading your articles and I guess you like to learn a lot on your own. Match made in heaven for a startup guy. I sense that had you been employed by Google you might have left it after some time to start something on your own. Why not now :)

globalrev 18y ago

Could anyone point me on how to solve this(either a solution or preferrably a pointer on how to get to it): "Q: Given a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 5, write a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 7." First I thought it was simple but the I got stuck, maybe I'm just tired. No matter how I twsit and turn it I seem to get only an even distribution over 5 numbers.

sfk 18y ago
The elegant solution escapes me for now, but you could treat the odds and evens from the 1-5 function as a biased bit stream, apply a von Neumann corrector and then use the resulting stream.
- jbm 18y ago
  Now I remember why we computer scientists always looked up to the Math majors...
hhm 18y ago
Execute f 7 times, add all numbers, call that x. Then you do mod(x,7)+1, and you get a random number between 1 and 7. If the original function was unbiased, this one is going to be unbiased too.
- deadsy 18y ago
  This won't work. f gives 1 to 5. 7 * f gives 7 to 35. But 7 to 35 will not be evenly generated. Think about it: There are more ways to get a 20 than there are to get a 7 or a 35. Same thing with rolling 2 die.
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    That was my second thought too (my first thought was to upvote the comment), but at least in the 2-die case, the modulus takes care of it. If you work out the probabilities, the chance of getting 0mod2 = 1/36 (2) + 3/36 (4) + 5/36 (6) + 5/36 (8) + 3/36 (10) + 1/36 (12) = 18/36 = 1/2. Same goes for getting 1mod2. So you end up with a fair result even though the chances for each individual outcome are biased. I didn't want to go through all 5^7 possibilities for the 7-die case, but I figured it's likely enough that he's right that I'd keep my mouth shut.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

webwright 18y ago

Isn't this level of interviewing kind of excessive and time-expensive? If I were Google, I would do the following: 1) Have the first interviewer be the best/most-appropriate interviewer for the position (manager, lead dev, whatever). Have them write down in a sealed envelope a "hire" or "no hire" statement after the interview. 2) At the end of the assorted interviews, measure how often the first interviewer is correct in his hire/no hire assessment. My theory is that interviewing is a great opportunity for "thin-slicing" (a la Blink) and that you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested. Related anecdote (from gladwell dot com): One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain. Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in "Blink" where that simply isn't true. There's a wonderful phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in "Blink" on how unbelievably powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.

Rexxar 18y ago
I think people can be convinced of this by explaining this is a signal to noise ratio problem. If we have a lot of sources of information but if a lot of them have a lot of noise, it's useless.
andreyf 18y ago
you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested. Hard to say. The economics of hiring aren't intuitive - a bad hire can do a lot of damage, esp. if it's a management position (which this wasn't, I know). It's probably better to nicely turn down 10 people (and nicely ask them to re-apply in 6 months) than to let in 1 charming, but conniving and free-riding bullshitter into your team.

brandonkm 18y ago

Seems like the engineer in the comments section summed it up the best. You were probably really close to getting the job, but a few to many mistakes tipped it against you.

fakeslimshady 18y ago

Looks like you just dodged a bullet given the layoff announcement

bootload 18y ago

"... Then I found all the other blog posts about interviews and interview questions at Google ... She told me she was working at Google for two years and was very happy about it ... We went to Asian food restaurant (located in Googleplex) and I had all kinds of delicious foods. All free! ..." I'm still wondering, who's trying to game who?

known 18y ago

There are 2 types of interviewers in corporate environment. 1. One who hires 2. One who recommends to hire Avoid getting interviewed by 2.