26 ms·

A Wretched Google Interview Experience

293 points by reikonomusha 13y ago

bbguitar 13y ago
Fascinating reading - makes me realise just how rusty my theoretical CS knowledge is (I haven't used lisp or some of that sets notation since 1990!) However IMHO the author should have told them NO, and why, much earlier. Shame on you google - take dozen emu eggs, break into a bowl, whip up and apply to face.
- reikonomusha 13y ago
  Saying "no" is a hard stance to take. Google undoubtedly does have some very smart people and some very interesting work, so it's difficult to throw that away because one perceives them as brain damaged when it comes to relationships and interviewing. And of course there's always the "if you say 'no', there's always someone who will take your spot happily."
  - smrtinsert 13y ago
    I dunno. They seem acquire more than they build. The success stories at Google seem to always be in spite of Google rather than because of them.
spotman 13y ago
Unfortunately your experience is all too common. I personally interviewed two times at google. The first time I never made it to their offices, but made it through 4 phone interviews, that all went well. After I had gone through the 2nd phone interview, I had started interviewing at another company (well, I needed a job afterall). Within 3 weeks the new company had given me an offer. I meanwhile went to two more google interviews over the phone, and had been stalling on accepting the other job offer, because the prospect of working at google, was exciting. Well 2 more weeks went by, and finally the job offer at the new company was going to expire, so I had no choice but to take it. At this point I didn't see the point of continuing the interview with google, which my internal recruiter at google said would easily last 4 more weeks, as I had not been onsite yet. Fast forward 3 years, and I had another poor interview experience with google. I flew up there this time, and got to interview in person. It was fun to see the google plex. I had 5 interviews in person scheduled. I felt like I ace'd 3 of them, 1 of them I did OK, and 1 I bombed. 2 days later google informed that that I was not a "culture fit". I am not sure what the deal was. I felt like I had rapport with all of the interviewers, and I also had 2 internal recommendations. So, maybe that was some canned response way of saying no. Or maybe it was literal. At any rate, I will never try to apply to google again, even though I too am contacted by a google recruiter no less than every 6 months. Sigh.
zerr 13y ago
Even in case of success and receiving an offer, I personally have a feeling that you need to be very very lucky to get the really interesting work in these BigCo's. I know a couple of googlers, talented programmers, but they ended up as "yet another CRUD" python devs there.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  There's lots of interesting projects going on at Google and an internal system for applying to other teams, and usually no shortage of teams asking for people. There's not a lot of CRUD apps with the exception of Corp-IT stuff.
  - AznHisoka 13y ago
    Google Webmaster Tools - CRUD Adwords console - CRUD Google+ pages - CRUD Google Analytics dashboard - CRUD Google Merchants console - CRUD DoubleClick dashboard - CRUD
    - cromwellian 13y ago
      Tiny sliver. Hangouts, Chrome, Android, DevTools, Dart/GWT/Closure/Go, V8, Search/Knowledge, Google Maps, Google Now, Gmail, Docs, G+ photo processing, Shopping Express, etc Even if you take Google's ad platforms, they use machine learning techiques on the backend, as does YouTube.
    - jmduke 13y ago
      This is an obtuse way of proving that "CRUD app" and "interesting problem/opportunity" are not two separate sets.
  - timburus 13y ago
    I cannot make general statements, but it's really hard to move when you are assigned to a project where you unhappy. I tried to transfer to several other teams in my area of expertise. I was quite close in a couple of places, but they usually run out of 'head count' at the last moment. There was just one team that could have taken me, but it was the same kind of boring custom coded BI I was doing in my project. Finally, I just had to give up. The bad part is that I did many 20% projects for these other teams, which hurt my chances for promotion.
jff 13y ago
So, did you not sign the NDA where you agree not to discuss the content of the interviews, or are you just throwing caution to the wind here?
- smackfu 13y ago
  Practically speaking, Google isn't going to do anything besides blacklisting. Can you imagine the stories in the tech press if they sued someone for breaking an interview NDA?
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    Better to be blacklisted then get Google recruiters spamming you every few months!
- angersock 13y ago
  Who gives a fuck? Seriously, if a company I interview at is genuinely threatened by me talking about my interview and questions, maybe they should reconsider their viability as a business--things being so precarious and all. NDAs for employees generally seem to be bad signs for places worth doing business at.
- toddh 13y ago
  "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place"
  - corin_ 13y ago
    For the sake of consistency I hope you have the same view when it comes to the NSA. For the sake of the rest of us, I hope you don't.
    - dlib 13y ago
      It was a quote by Eric Schmidt.
AznHisoka 13y ago
"Aside from being terrible at communication, Google implicitly rejected, without appeal, someone with offers for a PhD and someone who owns two checks from Knuth. " I'm glad that Google doesn't just blindly look at credentials alone. If you got a PhD, and got featured in a CS publication, but couldn't answer their questions, then you probably shouldn't be accepted. That said, OP just had bad bad luck. My phone screen question was FAR easier (I still messed up on it, and got to the on-site too). Disclaimer: I went to a Google interview last week (got rejected)
- reikonomusha 13y ago
  Of course, history, credentials, and current technical know-how should be balanced.
- jbooth 13y ago
  It sounded like he aced all of the questions except for the distributed computing ones, where he put up some reasonable answers but not the exact ones they're looking for. I'd note that when Google was first solving those problems, their luminaries who are now untouchable at the company probably tried those exact same reasonable answers at first until iterating on them into their current form.
smackfu 13y ago
From those questions, it sure seems like their interview process is aimed at choosing among recent grads whose resumes are all essentially the same "B.S. Computer Science from School X".
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  That's what they tell people too. It's great if you just graduated from a formal CS program because the algorithms stuff is fresh in your brain. Whereas working 5-10 years in a boring bigcorp, doing CRUD apps will kinda make you more "dumb"
  - Zimahl 13y ago
    Hah, I must be pretty dumb. After over 10 years working on anything from startup to BigCorp, I doubt I could answer a single one of those questions right now. I did learn that in my last round of interviewing (about a year ago) that to play the game you need to review the junk that you'll never need to keep in your brain, that you know but don't have at command. Sure, you'll most likely never use it at the position you apply for, but that's the rub.
    - druiid 13y ago
      I genuinely don't understand how it's useful to interview someone this way. It basically makes it a game of 'Show us what you remember from CS101/MAE101/etc'. Really why should interviews for people established in the industry be like that? Sure you should know how to do basic algorithms and optimization type questions, but having minute detail style programming questions that every engineer not fresh out of college will have forgotten since their core discipline classes is just silly.
      - chris_mahan 13y ago
        Maybe it's a subtle form of age discrimination?
        13y ago
cromwellian 13y ago
I think this is very unfortunate. I've seen a lot of good candidates get rejected for no obvious reasons. The lack of communication seems driven I think by the sheer deluge of the number of resumes/interviews going on at Google, and what appears to be, a reliance on temps and contractors as part of the process. I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule. Given the sheer size of Google however, I'd expect lots of false positives and negatives in their filters. Also recognize that regular Googlers are selected to do these interviews, and some of them have little training in giving interviews. If you're unlucky, you might get a bad interviewer. I consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc)
- colmvp 13y ago
  "I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule." Unfortunately, I've read similar anecdotes on HN. Pretty disrespectful of the candidates time.
  - maddddddddddddd 13y ago
    a "software engineer" should have a strong understanding of networking and systems administration. perhaps the candidate shouldn't have disrespected the interviewers time and applied for a junior developer position.
- JonFish85 13y ago
  Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company. On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or disagree with the interview style, comments like that would piss me off to no end. Start a game of needling and insults? You know what, I've had enough.
nakedrobot2 13y ago
I think Google prefers false negatives over false positives. I know a few extremely smart people who didn't "pass" their Google interviews. Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe.
- leokun 13y ago
  That's probably the right attitude to take in hiring. Bad code is difficult and expensive to discover and fix and a bad hire is difficult and expensive to let go.
  - reikonomusha 13y ago
    With proper code review, I don't think bad code is difficult to discover. I also don't think dismissal is very expensive for large corps. For smaller companies or start-ups, the game is entirely different.
- jlees 13y ago
  Vibe or culture fit, whatever you call it, simply being extremely smart is not sufficient and far too many people think it is. :)
- ahk 13y ago
  If that's the only kind of people they hire, where the heck do these kind of interviewers come from?
- iyulaev 13y ago
  Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe. You know, sometimes, I feel like that's a personality trait that's often under-rated.
bestest 13y ago
I had a very similar experience with Google London and Google Zurich. It took them longer than a year to arrange an interview. Quite disappointing -- I'm actually glad I decided not to join them.
tobyjsullivan 13y ago
I do enjoy this author's flagrant disregard for Google's NDA they require you to sign and promise not to discuss the interview questions. I'm curious if they'll enforce it. For what it's worth, my one experience with Google recruiting last year was the polar opposite. They were curious and professional, of more knowledgeable recruiters I've dealt with, and timely in scheduling interviews. I had my first and only phone interview within a couple weeks if contract (which I needed and used to go through the extensive list of prep material they provided). Then I had an onsite interview a couple weeks later. Bam. Done.
- freework 13y ago
  I did a phone interview with Google last week. I was given the exact same counter problem as mentioned in the article. I can verify that I was not asked to sign any NDA at any point.
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - tobyjsullivan 13y ago
    The phone interviews are not but the in person ones are. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that you are onsite and may oversee confidential information but they explicitly stated to me that it covered the interview questions.
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - Me1000 13y ago
    Phone screenings do not require signing an NDA (just a "we explicitly ask you not to share the questions you're asked"), but if they bring you on site you will be asked to sign one.
    - zxer 13y ago
      Except when not. When I was interviewing they didn't make me sign one. They rejected me for the original position, but later occasionally called me with some alternate options. These calls usually went like: - We would be interested in having you at/as ... but before the specifics, you signed an NDA, right? - No, I have not. - Oh, then good luck, bye.
mathattack 13y ago
Two thoughts: 1) Larger companies get away with inefficient recruiting because they can. If the same company abuses you twice, and you go back a third time, what's that say about you? It certainly goes a long way to explain why they can do it. 2) If you're considering going back on an offer, or interviewing just days after starting a new job, you don't have much room to complain about bad behavior on the company's part. Perhaps another reason that Google contacts many people the same time is their heuristics. They have analyzed what good potential hires look like, and instruct their recruiters (who all use the same few online resources) to screen for it.
- VLM 13y ago
  Honestly I think GOOG (and some others) sometime interview people to fill time. I was contacted years ago; You want me to do what? What I wanted to ask was "what could possibly inspire you to think that has anything to do with me?" but instead I just said k thx bye. Not a effective way to hire, but a rather effective way to get focused attention. Even though I was kind of laughing, it certainly got my attention and got me thinking, which is great PR.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    They're much too busy to do that. In fact they've recently shrunk the amount of interviews per candidate to free up time. The issue you're describing sounds like a recruiter that doesn't understand the subject that they're recruiting for.
- gummadi 13y ago
  >> Larger companies get away with inefficient recruiting because they can. I would disagree. I interviewed with MS, Google & Amazon multiple times. MS & Amazon are definitely much more organized and very prompt in following up with decision.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    True. It's not all large companies. Maybe it's more accurate to say Google does because it can. It would be interesting to see if any of their recent VIP hires had similar headaches, or if this is just junior employees. As I said elsewhere, this is surprising because everyone I know there is very straightforward.
morkfromork 13y ago
I interviewed at Google earlier this year. It was a complete waste of my time. The questions were unrelated to my skills and the position I was looking for. You go in there assuming they know what they are doing because they are the great Google. They don't. It's completely random.
bloat 13y ago
I don't know why people get so bent up over this and write these screeds. Surely everyone knows the drill by now. If Google interview you, you'll get a bunch of random algorithm questions and you either get hired or you don't and they won't tell you why. Your CV and your experience only serve to get a foot in the door. After that its all down to those algo questions. This is not a secret - I think they are pretty up front about the way it works. PS - I didn't get hired.
Yascade 13y ago
The obvious reason for this approach to me is that Google is leveraging their reputation in order to solve difficult problems rather than actually looking to hire anyone. The answers this particular interviewer appeared to answer seem to be the kinds of things that a developer would want to know but might not be able to see the answer to. The idea here that Google might be leveraging knowledge from a hopeful dupe, is echoed by their annual code challenges. The company wants to know things. It's hungry for knowledge. My feeling that leading on applicants is the best way to be ignored when you need one because when you cry wolf, only the wolves answer the call eventually.
ahk 13y ago
Curious about the 'official' answer to the counter question. I'd have thought just having something triggered daily to clear out increments older than a day would be enough.
- stinkypete 13y ago
  I don't know about an official answer but using a simple variation on a round-robin database (RRD) ought to do the trick. Basically: day count = [last 23 hour buckets] + hour count hour count = [last 59 minute buckets] + minute count minute count = [last 59 second buckets] + second count second count = <running count cleared every 1 second> You end up losing a small amount of accuracy, the worst being for keeping track of the second counts. You can avoid that by using an actual list of counter values for the seconds bucket and dumping those out when they get older than a second, or maybe by introducing another subdivision -- 1/10th of a second probably is good -- so that you actually have .9 seconds worth of data and can interpolate the last bit.
  - informatimago 13y ago
    The last hour now goes back from 22:45:03.435123897 (remember, nanosecond timer, but now it is from 22:46:07.223981453. Unless you can round the time when the last second, the last minute, etc start, you have to keep the full history of increment events up to the nanosecond for the last 24 hours. That's O(246060*1e9).
    - abalone 13y ago
      But if you do round the time to an acceptable degree of accuracy (say, to within 1ms of the second count and 1m of the day count) then it does work within a fixed amount of memory. It's probably the best solution. It's a lovely exercise in algorithm tradeoffs. In this case it's mainly accuracy vs. memory, with lots of opportunity to explore implementation optimizations.
  - deleted 13y ago
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scotth 13y ago
Does anyone know a good answer for the RealTimeCounter question?
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  - have a counter for every bigger interval asnd the last timestamp If the timestamp is same second as last increment everything, if not increment where appropriate and rotate everything else to 0. What am i missing?
  - scotth 13y ago
    My reading of the API is that getCountInLastSecond returns the count from the last billion nanoseconds, not the count from the previous second bucket (as the clock ticks). So when he mentions he can't bound memory, it's because he can't easily discretize the counters.
    - rlpb 13y ago
      I feel that this is an important ambiguity. When I read the article, my first question was whether this interpretation is correct, or the other one. I am surprised that he didn't clarify this in the article, and wonder if this is a problem. Seeing ambiguities in specifications is an important part of software engineering.
      - scotth 13y ago
        I think you're right. Note taken.
    - reikonomusha 13y ago
      This is the correct interpretation. Imagine an infinite time line, with a marker moving across the line at the speed of time. Every time increment is called, that marker is saved on the timeline. When getCountInLastX is called, one must return the number of marks on the timeline from the current time to the current time minus X.
    - 13y ago
mattzito 13y ago
An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any idea how to interview product managers, so I'm going to ask you calculus questions", and proceeded to start to write equations on the board. The fifth interview was the first and only that happened AND dealt with product management. When they got back to NY, this person was notified that they'd been rejected, then notified this was a mistake and they'd have to come back to MTV to redo all of the interviews, including the two that had happened. Obviously, at this point they told Google to go scratch and went on to do really good work elsewhere. I've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories.
- throwaway86 13y ago
  It's not any better if you get hired. Google recruiters will tell you whatever you want to hear, including things that are not necessarily true. I was assured that a minor issue in my background would not be an issue multiple times (I have email proving this), then Google hired me and let me work for more than two months. I got comfortable, I moved to Mountain View, began real honest work and set about making an impact. One Monday, I had just finished a feature for an internal monitoring tool and was discussing it with a teammate. HR scheduled a meeting 30 minutes in the future on my calendar, then informed me that my employment had been terminated because of the issue in my background. You remember, the one I disclosed and discussed repeatedly during the hiring process, before I even signed the offer. Two people in upper management at Google who had never met me fired me because of something seven years in my background, two months after hiring me with the assurance that it wouldn't be a problem. I bet my teammate wonders where I went. I didn't get a chance to explain because they threatened me if I told anybody on my team what happened while I was collecting my things. The same woman had a hearty laugh earlier in the firing meeting after joking, "I bet you didn't expect your afternoon to go like this, huh?" Felt like I was back in grade school. Two weeks after firing me, a Google recruiting coordinator attempted to connect with me on LinkedIn. Read into a company's competence what you will based on that. I can never, ever recommend that anybody subject themselves to working at Google based on my experience. And that's even before discovering the absolutely clueless direction that company is taking. You think G+ is annoying now? Just wait. The real victim in this is my family. I've never subjected them to no insurance coverage in my career. Thanks, Google.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
Just playing, but "If you have n servers that take requests, and server Sᵢ can take a request every tᵢ seconds, and you need to distribute requests to them as efficiently as possible, how do you do it?" can be done very easily in Go. You have a shared channel which contains the pending requests, and a goroutine per server that simply loops doing: read from the shared channel, perform the request, wait for the sleep period, and continue the loop. And that's all. Each server will get requests as fast as it can consume them.
- jnbiche 13y ago
  Wow, I've really got to look into Go. Sounds so easy.
  - eropple 13y ago
    What he's described is pretty trivially done in most modern languages/frameworks. I can write the same in C#, Scala or C++11--swapping greenlets for standard threads, which honestly is unlikely to be a perf concern--pretty trivially. The hardest of the above would be C++, because boost::threadpool isn't officially part of Boost--though it works fine--and otherwise you'd have to get a little creative with boost::thread_group (but in doing so it'd probably be only slightly more complex than the Go version). I mean, it's a nice feature, albeit bolted to a language with a lot of issues. But unless you have pressing reasons to look at Go, something like that sounding easy probably won't really trip your trigger. =)
    - millstone 13y ago
      You don’t need a thread pool or threads at all. Just schedule a timer for each server. You could do it in JavaScript. I’d even guess that a JavaScript implementation would be more efficient than Go. A goroutine has an overhead measured in kilobytes; a JavaScript timer is presumably smaller.
    - jnbiche 13y ago
      Yeah, I realize you can accomplish the same result in almost any language, but not nearly as easily. It's the syntactic sugar that impressed me, and the fact that's it's such an integral part of the language.
bengrunfeld 13y ago
Large companies often fall into the trap of lack of communication between departments and individual employees. They get so big they trip over their own feet. I used to work for Melbourne IT, a behemoth with hundreds of employees spanning multiple countries. Customer relations was a disaster, with each customer being told conflicting things by different sales people and customer service reps. Sorry you had such a bad experience.
Patient0 13y ago
Site seems down - is it cached anywhere?
illial 13y ago
The blog seems to be down. Cache: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fsymbo1ics.com%2fblog%2f%3fp%3d2055&d=767376103032&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=ZVYjbjNPJjg8u9ICXsxOeMkg5cb6JCt1 http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fsymbo1ics.com%...
aberatiu 13y ago
It's down right now. See Google Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=2055 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:symbo1i...
johnyzee 13y ago
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=2055 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- 300bps 13y ago
  Thanks for the MIRROR (to aid anyone else looking for a mirror that didn't search for cache)
  - pwnee 13y ago
    AND THANK YOU for typing the word MIRROR
- Coincoin 13y ago
  Funny, that cached version is not loading either on my machine.
  - michaelhoffman 13y ago
    Try the text-only version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://symbo1ics.com/blog/%3Fp%3D2055&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
GBKS 13y ago
To counter some of the negative sentiment here, I had a great interview experience at Google. The only big negative was that the whole process took 5 months. But every step involved was very organized and the people were professional and thoughtful. The in-person interviews were also great and the questions were all appropriate. I did not take the offer for personal reasons at the time, but the process was great (except for those 5 months). As with all big companies though, there is a bit of luck of the draw involved, as the other stories in this thread show.
- VLM 13y ago
  "questions were all appropriate" I was asking myself while reading the article, my god, what kind of job was he applying for, AP test author, programing language standard library author, puzzle book author, or what exactly? I haven't gone into a cold interview in many years; its always previous relationship based now. Are cold interviews where no one already knows anyone, like that now, focused on weird algos and trivia questions and nothing to do with the actual job? You're interviewing the workplace as much as they're interviewing you, and I'm smart but I have no idea how to evaluate a possible employer based on their selection of weird trivia questions. Something that at least vaguely relates to the actual job would be interesting.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    >>>>You're interviewing the workplace as much as they're interviewing you. Not nearly enough people realize this. If they're asking you corny questions in the interview, how does that reflect on their company? OP said they didn't even ask him questions about his resume - just these corny trivia questions. If I was there, I would've asked how someone thinks this is relevant to doing my job at Google. After the past three years I've done a ton of interviewing and have learned the only way to know if the company is good fit is to grill the interviewer on stuff that matters to you. I've had interviews at fortune 50 companies with people who had no idea who their competition was or where they wanted their IT department to be in 5 years. If you're not invested in your company, what makes you think I should??
okaram 13y ago
Interesting, especially since I've just started working for Microsoft, in Bing Ads, and a big factor in deciding to come was the interview process. The phone interview involved writing code in a shared environment, the in-person interviews were all nice (hard questions, non-threatening ways to ask), and I (and the other 4 guys who interviewed in my time slot) were told yes/no right after the interview ended. I assume experiences at large companies vary widely depending on the group, but I was definitely impressed with Bing's interviewing process.
kevingadd 13y ago
Google's recruiting seems like it must be at least partially the responsibility of short-tenure contractors. Every time I've dealt with people from their recruiting department, even the very nice ones seemed forgetful, inattentive and poor at communication. The actual Google employees who do the interviewing are on average very bright, good at actively interviewing candidates (instead of just rattling off questions), and open to answering questions, even if a couple of them were clearly inexperienced and uninterested in doing interviews. I'd say the actual experience of the interview can be a good thing, but the process as a whole is a huge waste of the candidate's time - especially if you don't fit the stereotypical niche of what a Google employee is (4+ years of CS education, thinks writing linked lists and trees is exciting, etc. etc.) Their decision to intentionally avoid giving any feedback to candidates probably stops people from gaming the interview process, but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus. They refuse to interview candidates for a position or a role beyond generalizations like 'software engineer', despite the huge breadth and depth of problems solved at Google - if you're lucky they'll quiz you on the stuff you actually know, but most likely they won't, and the questions will be very mundane. This despite the fact that actual hiring choices ARE partitioned to some degree (as much as they seem to want to pretend they aren't). Most of the time interviewing with a good company is a 'why not' scenario: The only thing you have to lose is some time, and you'll learn some useful things from most interview experiences (even if occasionally the only thing you learn is 'this company is awful'). Google's interview process feels precisely engineered to avoid letting candidates learn anything whatsoever. Companies like Microsoft or Amazon or Zynga all at least have a pretense of evaluating a candidate's specific strengths and weaknesses to figure out whether they're useful - if you're a compiler engineer MS will probably have some Visual Studio/DevDiv people grill you with compiler engineering questions, if you're a games dev Amazon will have you talk to people from their games department, and if you're a database guy Zynga isn't going to ask you game design questions. For Google interviews it seems entirely one-size-fits-all, despite the fact that they have core products that obviously depend on niche knowledge and experience.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  >>> but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus. The crazy thing is they don't give feedback, then call back in a few months and ask if you want to interview again for the same position like the OP said. Talk about completely confusing people. . .
epoxyhockey 13y ago
Are we doing this to ourselves? If we are willing to continually subject ourselves to hours (and days) of interviewing, followed-up by abusive responses (or non-response), it seems like this recruiting behavior will continue.
wizzard 13y ago
A friend of mine got a call from Google and set up a phone interview. They never called. The recruiter called again a few days later and apologized, and set up another phone interview. Once again, no call. The recruiter called again and my friend told them he was no longer interested.
- devanti 13y ago
  Same thing happened to me with Facebook
speeder 13y ago
Heh. I interviewed with Amazon once, I reached only the phone part and failed (most part for my own reason... I fumbled a lot) But I was really bothered, that they setup "X" to interview me, and when I got the call, it was "Y" because "X" travelled, and that "Y" was not related to the position I applied at all, AND was a newbie at Amazon and thus failed to answer the questions I had about it, AND did not knew any languages I knew, making the coding part of the interview very weird. I also saw similar stories here in HN many times... I wonder, wazzup with those companies that setup interviews and then send the interviewers somewhere else?
- VLM 13y ago
  "did not knew any languages I knew" I was the surprise interviewer in the exact same scenario (well, not at Amazon, but same general idea) and was later cross examined, mostly by HR, about how well I thought he'd be able to help me if I came to him. The HR cross examination about his ability was all touchy-feely questions not technical (did what he say sound nice, not, did what he say make logical sense when passed thru the well known engineer BS filter). Position had one of those estimates of 25% helping other people with problems and group work, and he would have been hanging out near me although somewhat different kind of work, so it seemed fair for me to ask him noob questions about his expertise, just to see how he would talk to someone on the team from a different background. He was an expert in C++ if I recall correctly. All went pretty well with me, although they didn't hire him (donno why) The part of the story that was weird is I was an old-timer at that employer not a noob. Why they'd assign a noob to evaluate indicates either extreme trust or extreme desperation WRT the noob. Or he was playing you. If you really needed a question answered HR would take care of it.
mathattack 13y ago
The irony of all this conversation is that the people I know at Google are some of the sharpest, most well adjusted people that I know. It's almost like they got in and thrived despite the recruiting process. None of them are the type to stand people up, gloss over interviewing, or be anything other than decent hard working individuals.
freework 13y ago
I did the same problem during my Google interview last week. Here was my solution to the counter problem: https://gist.github.com/priestc/6284678 https://gist.github.com/priestc/6284678
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cmollis 13y ago
My interview at Google was a disaster. I passed the phone screens (easy), and then they flew me out to Mountain View. Now, the job was actually programming python for YouTube.. which I could have done in my sleep. I've done similar things for years, for many other companies (even some in the Valley, even though I live on the East Coast). So whatever, I thought it was going ok, and then they asked me a bunch of puzzle questions (which I sucked at.. at least I'm pretty sure I did). (You know, the typical mindless puzzle questions that are completely unrelated to anything remotely resembling the work you you'd be doing). I'm sure it sounds like I'm bitter (I'm not), and I'm sure there are many smarter than I am that do well at those things. But I couldn't help thinking that they should've asked me something related to what I'd be doing, or what I'd done. I didn't get the job, but now Google keeps calling me for interviews. I keep telling them no, that I'm not 'Google material' whatever the fuck that is. Not me. Love Google, awesome tools, great stuff.. don't think I could work there.
j2d3 13y ago
Just to pile on here, I interviewed at Google in Santa Monica in 2007. I didn't get hired. The experience was okay, not awful and not incredibly drawn out. Anyway, I brushed it off and moved on. Then, just this April, I received an email from a Google recruiter noting that I'd interviewed in 2007, complementing me on my work since then, and asking whether I'd like to re-engage in a conversation about working with Google. I wrote back saying sure, I'd like to discuss the opportunity. I never heard anything back again. Six weeks later, I wrote again, asking whether there was some issue, and saying it was strange to reach out to me, for me to reply, and then to hear nothing... but still... nothing. No response. Then, a few weeks ago, shortly after I'd accepted a new position that I'm actually quite happy with, I received another similar email from a different Google recruiter. I wrote her back and told her about the other recruiter that had recently reached out to me and then went silent after I responded. She promptly called me and we talked. She agreed it was strange, said she didn't see anything in the system about it, but she did apologize and - we had a discussion about Google, the interview process and what it's like now (as opposed to 2007). If anything, it sounded like it would be incredibly long, bureaucratic, drawn out, and fairly ridiculous. I said I'd keep in touch with her if indeed I did want to re-apply to google, but I think I do not.
- cdjk 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the recruiters are all contractors, and are all fairly independent. I think that's the only think that explains stories like this, as well as some experiences I've had with them.
aliston 13y ago
Google sucks. I had a pretty similar experience interviewing there. Strange, late interviewers. One guy who barely spoke English and another who literally asked one question, then said nothing for the rest of the "interview." Then, a pointless "feedback" call in which they told me they "can't provide feedback on specific candidates." Overall, just a really poor experience. F- 'em, move on.
ghc 13y ago
I interviewed at the New York office for an SRE job a few months ago. It took about 10 months for the whole process to play out. In the end, after a full day interview, I was supposed to get the written up feedback from every interviewer regardless of whether I got the position or not. Instead, my last communication with Google was a phone call where I was told that one of the interviewers still hadn't handed in their written review. It's now three months later, and that's the last I heard. That left a sour taste in my mouth. I wasn't expecting to get the job, and really it was just a backup plan in case Algorithmic.ly didn't work out, but you'd think they'd have the common courtesy to get back to me. I'm sort of expecting that 6 months from now I'll hear from them out of the blue...that's how disorganized the process is.
- jrockway 13y ago
  That sucks. Send me an email if you'd like me to figure out what happened. (jrockway AT google.com) One thing though; the interview feedback from each interviewer is only for the hiring committee, never for the candidate.
300bps 13y ago
I had a very similar experience. I work at an investment bank and was recruited by a large company that does proprietary trading including high frequency trading. I went for the interview which was scheduled to be an all-day thing. In addition to having been in IT for a very long time I am also very knowledgeable on capital markets having successfully taken CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) tests. The CFO of the company that interviewed me was shocked that someone in IT passed those tests. The IT people, it was all algorithms and programming minutia. After the interview, they strung me along for weeks and then I just stopped calling them to check up on status and they stopped calling me. Then they would call me every few months asking me to interview again. I finally asked them to stop calling me. The reason I bring this up is because I think sometimes candidates are excellent candidates for a $100,000 to $150,000 salary position. The only problem is the candidate is already making $250,000 and the prospective employer knows it after you fill out the application. I may be just thinking this to make myself feel better but I just thought the issue with the company was that I made too much. I probably would've had to literally walk on water and bring their dead relatives back to life to justify what they would've had to pay me to steal me from my current company. Maybe that's the problem Google had with you?
- ryandrake 13y ago
  Honest question, I'm really curious. If you're actually making $250,000 why would you want to work anywhere else?
  - yazmeya 13y ago
    Plenty of such jobs are mind-numbing, soul-crushing and lead nowhere.
  - 300bps 13y ago
    I went on the subject interview two years ago when I was at the 4 year mark of my current employer. The reason I was looking is because my current employer was being acquired and all of us received a letter stating, "We will tell you in x months whether you have a job or not." It turned out about 80% of my coworkers got laid off but I did not. But I didn't know it was going to turn out that way at the time. I'm not interviewing now, but honestly they're just trying to figure out a way to cut me out of the picture without torpedoing the business I support. Eventually they'll find a way though realistically it's another year away. I have one fall back company I can go to in a snap at equal pay and I do side consulting about 15-20 hours per week so I'm not worried enough at this point to be interviewing.
Balgair 13y ago
My brother had an interview for their X division. He said it was really strange. They were very very secretive. My brother has a TS clearance and he said Google was beyond the US gov.'s paranoia even. It made it a really tough interview too. He said it felt like they couldn't tell him anything so the interviewers were trying to psychicly communicate with him. Then they took him to lunch on campus which was ok and then sat him in front of another guy who was nicer but still mum. Also they apparently can't talk about the google glasses even though some lady had just walked out the door with them. Its like : 'Dude, you can see them right there.' It seems they need to get hungry again, not be complacent in their domination of our lives.
radiusq 13y ago
I got an in-house interview and did well until the final guy. He barely spoke english, and i've worked with many foreign co-workers in the past but his english was worse than anything i've heard before. I struggled trying to understand him while he explained the problem and he was noticeably upset. I wanted to call the HR person in to talk about it but I didn't want to risk making the situation worse. Didn't get the job, likely based on this interviewer.
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727374 13y ago
I had a google interview about a year ago. The thing I found strangest is that some interviewers would walk in the room and throw up a coding exercise without any introduction at all. They literally wouldn't give their names and what projects they worked on. You don't care that I've been working for almost 10 years in the real world and would rather judge me on my ability to solve a linked list problem? Really? If anything is "gameable" this is. Just spend a year playing topcoder in your spare time and you could ace any of the questions I got. I have a good friend who works at google and compares the recruiting team to being "the hot girl in highschool" (no intended sexism). Since google recruiters are at one of the elite companies in the world, they can treat people disrespectfully. If you don't like it, there will be a million people more people to choose from. I actually didn't get this vibe from them, but I only dealt with a couple recruiters.
- praptak 13y ago
  > Just spend a year playing topcoder in your spare time and you could ace any of the questions I got. I wouldn't call this gaming the system. Doing a year of such training would raise your actual skill.
  - tobyjsullivan 13y ago
    "I cheated on the test by studying really hard"
    - WalterBright 13y ago
      I've often been bemused that people will expend more effort finding ways to cheat than if they just learned the material.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      I cheated on my ACTs/GREs by using prep material and studying really hard. Got really good scores, didn't learn a damn thing. You can always game a test that you know ahead of time by prepping, it has no correlation on your non-prepping abilities though.
joyeuse6701 13y ago
Let me sum up my response to the article in 2 words: Their loss.
smtddr 13y ago
Yikes, this story and HN comments sound like disasters. As a sorta balancing out here, my experience interviewing with Google(June 2012) was fantastic IMHO. We agreed right off the beginning what role exactly I'm interviewing for(Test Engineer), different from what I applied for(SDET) and went with it. Note, that I was holding them off for about 2 years. They'd email/call me every 6-8 months, and I'd say "Hold on, gimme a few more months". Eventually stuff happened that caused me to email them back and say "Okay, let's do this." I had the first typical phone-screening, talking about myself 'n such, why I'm looking for another job, why Google, etc. They gave me a bunch of blog links to "Life as a TE at Google" 'n stuff. 2nd phone screening was a programming thing that was kinda hard but not out-of-bounds PhD stuff. I was a bit intimidated by the fact I spent the whole hour on a question that was labeled "Question#1". I asked about it, the SoftEng. told me "Oh, don't worry about that". I asked if there were more questions, he said again not to worry... hmm. I did talk a lot though so he knew what I was thinking while trying to code. Anyways, a week later I get an email from a Google recruiter saying the SoftEng thought I knew what I was doing so we set up the MTV visit with 5 or 6 people. I was super-excited I made it to the on-site visit. Did you know Google Maps on mobile behaves differently if you're on campus? :) Everything happened on time. The interview questions and conversations we had for those 6 hours were great, eye-opening for me. I will say that I went into this whole Google thing with an open mind and with the assumption that all these people had more intelligence in their toe-nail than I'd ever obtain in my life. In the end, 2 weeks later, I was told that they "wouldn't be going forward with me". Of course I was bummed, I didn't even tell my family I was interviewing with Google. I wanted it to be a surprise. But, they showed me my weaknesses and I fixed 'em. Now I have an awesome job(SDET2) and I think the only reason I was able to get through this job's interview process is because Google's interview improved me significantly.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  Ha, I didn't tell anyone in my family, including my SO I went to interview with the Big G either. Didn't want them to see how disappointed I would be if they rejected me.
  - AndyKelley 13y ago
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incision 13y ago
My experience with Google corroborates some of this. Particularly the unpredictable callbacks and repeated contacts despite being within the 18 month period and complete lack of feedback post-interview. Additionally, there was plenty of confusion about which position I was being asked to interview for. Initially, it was something completely outside my skill set, later it was a bit more refined, but not at all specific. I did encounter some questioning where the interviewer seemed to be looking for one rather specific answer, but nothing nearly as bad as "I wanted you to use a priority queue. We will just move to another question." or "Time's up. Maybe you can ask your friend there what the answer is." Amusingly, a friend of mine who interviewed there not too long ago ended up receiving and declining an offer only to be called and asked about his "start date" months later. That said, my experience was generally positive and I'd do it again given the chance as most of my difficulties came from the recruiting end.
ensmotko 13y ago
Just to add my experience with Google to the pile: After the initial screenings and interviews with two different recruiters (one from Dublin and the second one from Switzerland) I finally get to the first technical interview. I struggled a bit with some questions, but I did get to the optimal solution in the end. I felt I could do better, but the second recruiter assured me that I did really well. He even sort of apologized because he needed to schedule a second phone interview, before inviting me on site. The second interview, as far as I can tell, went the same as the first. I made some mistakes along the way, but I did get to an optimal solution at the end. The interviewer told me I'll get the results by the end of the week. Two weeks pass and still no word from Google. I decided to send an email to the recruiter, asking for an update. Still nothing. After a month I decided to send a friendly email to my first recruiter asking for an update - I didn't know what else to do. The second recruiter replied the next day telling me it was a "close call" and that I should re-apply in 12 months. No thanks :)
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astrodust 13y ago
There's something odd with this page that causes Safari to jam up and use 100% CPU. It shows up as "Processing Math 0%" in the lower left corner while doing this. Is there some kind of renegade JavaScript going on here?
- reikonomusha 13y ago
  It's for processing the typesetting of mathematical expressions. See MathJax.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    Well, it would be nice if it actually worked instead of jamming up Chrome and Safari completely.
eyeareque 13y ago
index billions of web sites, stock around 850+/share... but their recruiters/interviewers can't return a call/email or show up to give an interview on time. This something that small and large companies have been doing successfully for ages. They seriously need to work on their culture in this aspect. It seems like such a trivial problem to fix inside of google. What is the hold up? I'm certain there are more good interviewing experiences than bad interviewing processes, but it does seem to be a common theme over there.
myko 13y ago
Interviewing at Google can be terrible. I was an intern who had high scores in my reviews (my host rated me just below 'superstar', whatever that means - I'm not really a superstar and just assume that was some rating jargon they used at Google). Anyway when it came to my conversion interviews the person who was supposed to interview me wasn't at the office. I ended up waiting around for someone to interview me, and when they came in 15 minutes late we had to trek across campus to get a room. I was asked a fairly difficult problem and botched it pretty hard, and of course didn't have the complete time to attempt to solve it. I thought I nailed the next interview though! After I answered a couple pretty complex problems the interviewer literally said there is no way you're not getting an offer, and we just ended up chatting a bit. I got rejected a few days later, not totally unexpected as I knew I botched that first interview. When I asked my host about it later he said the second interview wasn't even on record. C'est la vie, I guess. I'd still love to try again, I had a lot of fun working there, the people are top notch - even of the hiring process is extremely hit or miss.
Yourfags 13y ago
I don't agree with the fact that they were rude, which is what is it to not respond in these cases, but they didn't do anything particularly offensive except for leaving him in the dark. All he needed to do was take a job offer, if Google really wanted him, they could fix their mistake(s) of waiting so long. The comments though for this article are pretty egregious, it's too bad interviewers are that awful.
abalone 13y ago
Ok, the RealTimeCounter problem got me thinking. It's a great question. It seems very simple, but as the author notes even PhD's are stumped by it. Here my solution. One very important purpose it serves is to see how well you can identify problems in algorithms. Probably I'm guessing it's not even important that you get it perfect, just that you can recognize and talk through the challenges. One challenge relates to understanding the requirements. It needs to return the count for the preceding period of duration N, whether N is a second or a day. It could and usually does start in the middle of the preceding second, day, etc. It's a constantly moving window. That means if you just reset the counter each time you pass the absolute boundary of the next N (1:00, 1:01, etc.), you lose accuracy. So that suggests that you might have to track each individual increment() somehow. But there's the next challenge, memory usage. If you just store all the timestamps, that's linear memory growth every time increment() is called. So it seems to me like the solution is a tradeoff between memory usage and accuracy. If you don't call increment() very much or have a lot of memory, you can get perfect accuracy. So that's the "theory". Now here's where it gets more interesting from an engineering perspective. Optimal implementations. Here's what I came up with in about 15 minutes. First you minimize memory usage by storing offsets instead of the complete timestamp. Do this in 2 arrays, one for the preceding interval and one for the current one. This makes it easy to exploit our knowledge of when we've crossed the interval boundary, e.g. via now().getSecond(), to clear out old data. (I am only considering one type of interval like seconds here.. you could extend this to minutes, hours, days by duplicating this method, or perhaps theres some way to consolidate more optimally.) Anyway, increment() takes the offset from the fixed start of the current interval, i.e. the nanoseconds since the start of the current second, and appends it to the Current array. It also checks if we've passed into the next interval, in which case it reassigns the Current array to the Preceding array and starts a new Current array. The getter functions also do this. To get the count, the getter simply 1) Finds the nearest offset in the Preceding array to the current offset (could just loop over it, start in the middle, etc.) 2) Subtracts that index from the array length to count the number of in-scope increments from that preceding interval (this works because the array is naturally sorted) 3) Adds that to the length of the Current array (because everything in the current array is in-scope) SO, that should be a pretty fast way to do it with minimal memory requirements. If memory's going to be a problem, A) you could spend a little more computation to do a kind of garbage collection. In step 2, resize the array to clear out the out-of-scope indexes. (Maybe you'd want a more optimized kind of data structure than a vanilla array for this.) B) reduce accuracy by quantizing the offsets. Ok am I hired yet? I'll go wait by the phone. Just kidding, I'm sure this is wrong in many ways. But the point I'm trying to make is that it's a great problem for exploring tradeoffs, yet easy to understand what's being asked and requires no special technical knowledge.
sebnukem2 13y ago
The worst (actually, the one bad) job interview experience in my life was with Google. The interviewer was extremely unfriendly, had a thick unintelligible indian accent, and didn't try to hide the fact he had something more interesting to do than interviewing me.
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bane 13y ago
Before anybody goes to try and get hired at a "hot" company, please please please check out glassdoor's interview experiences and ratings. You'd be surprised at how shitty some companies treat people during the hiring process. I've experienced it myself a couple of times.
mzs 13y ago
I had similar situation many years ago for a different large company. Two before lunch interviews, and I bombed one. Then the rest of the day's interviews seemed easier and I did splendidly. I felt great. A few days later, two job offers from that company, but not from the group I had originally hoped for. I passed and took another job I was more excited about the group I would be with. Later I knew a friend that worked there, he told me that they used the first two interviews to decide which track of second interviews you get after lunch. So then you are with other candidates for other jobs if you have not done in the top of the first round. Something like this may have happened to this fellow, just that the other candidates in the secondary track won out over him making an even better impression.

293 points by reikonomusha 13y ago

Fascinating reading - makes me realise just how rusty my theoretical CS knowledge is (I haven't used lisp or some of that sets notation since 1990!) However IMHO the author should have told them NO, and why, much earlier. Shame on you google - take dozen emu eggs, break into a bowl, whip up and apply to face.

reikonomusha 13y ago
Saying "no" is a hard stance to take. Google undoubtedly does have some very smart people and some very interesting work, so it's difficult to throw that away because one perceives them as brain damaged when it comes to relationships and interviewing. And of course there's always the "if you say 'no', there's always someone who will take your spot happily."
- smrtinsert 13y ago
  I dunno. They seem acquire more than they build. The success stories at Google seem to always be in spite of Google rather than because of them.

spotman 13y ago

Unfortunately your experience is all too common. I personally interviewed two times at google. The first time I never made it to their offices, but made it through 4 phone interviews, that all went well. After I had gone through the 2nd phone interview, I had started interviewing at another company (well, I needed a job afterall). Within 3 weeks the new company had given me an offer. I meanwhile went to two more google interviews over the phone, and had been stalling on accepting the other job offer, because the prospect of working at google, was exciting. Well 2 more weeks went by, and finally the job offer at the new company was going to expire, so I had no choice but to take it. At this point I didn't see the point of continuing the interview with google, which my internal recruiter at google said would easily last 4 more weeks, as I had not been onsite yet. Fast forward 3 years, and I had another poor interview experience with google. I flew up there this time, and got to interview in person. It was fun to see the google plex. I had 5 interviews in person scheduled. I felt like I ace'd 3 of them, 1 of them I did OK, and 1 I bombed. 2 days later google informed that that I was not a "culture fit". I am not sure what the deal was. I felt like I had rapport with all of the interviewers, and I also had 2 internal recommendations. So, maybe that was some canned response way of saying no. Or maybe it was literal. At any rate, I will never try to apply to google again, even though I too am contacted by a google recruiter no less than every 6 months. Sigh.

zerr 13y ago

Even in case of success and receiving an offer, I personally have a feeling that you need to be very very lucky to get the really interesting work in these BigCo's. I know a couple of googlers, talented programmers, but they ended up as "yet another CRUD" python devs there.

cromwellian 13y ago
There's lots of interesting projects going on at Google and an internal system for applying to other teams, and usually no shortage of teams asking for people. There's not a lot of CRUD apps with the exception of Corp-IT stuff.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  Google Webmaster Tools - CRUD Adwords console - CRUD Google+ pages - CRUD Google Analytics dashboard - CRUD Google Merchants console - CRUD DoubleClick dashboard - CRUD
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    Tiny sliver. Hangouts, Chrome, Android, DevTools, Dart/GWT/Closure/Go, V8, Search/Knowledge, Google Maps, Google Now, Gmail, Docs, G+ photo processing, Shopping Express, etc Even if you take Google's ad platforms, they use machine learning techiques on the backend, as does YouTube.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    This is an obtuse way of proving that "CRUD app" and "interesting problem/opportunity" are not two separate sets.
- timburus 13y ago
  I cannot make general statements, but it's really hard to move when you are assigned to a project where you unhappy. I tried to transfer to several other teams in my area of expertise. I was quite close in a couple of places, but they usually run out of 'head count' at the last moment. There was just one team that could have taken me, but it was the same kind of boring custom coded BI I was doing in my project. Finally, I just had to give up. The bad part is that I did many 20% projects for these other teams, which hurt my chances for promotion.

jff 13y ago

So, did you not sign the NDA where you agree not to discuss the content of the interviews, or are you just throwing caution to the wind here?

smackfu 13y ago
Practically speaking, Google isn't going to do anything besides blacklisting. Can you imagine the stories in the tech press if they sued someone for breaking an interview NDA?
- yapcguy 13y ago
  Better to be blacklisted then get Google recruiters spamming you every few months!
angersock 13y ago
Who gives a fuck? Seriously, if a company I interview at is genuinely threatened by me talking about my interview and questions, maybe they should reconsider their viability as a business--things being so precarious and all. NDAs for employees generally seem to be bad signs for places worth doing business at.
toddh 13y ago
"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place"
- corin_ 13y ago
  For the sake of consistency I hope you have the same view when it comes to the NSA. For the sake of the rest of us, I hope you don't.
  - dlib 13y ago
    It was a quote by Eric Schmidt.

AznHisoka 13y ago

"Aside from being terrible at communication, Google implicitly rejected, without appeal, someone with offers for a PhD and someone who owns two checks from Knuth. " I'm glad that Google doesn't just blindly look at credentials alone. If you got a PhD, and got featured in a CS publication, but couldn't answer their questions, then you probably shouldn't be accepted. That said, OP just had bad bad luck. My phone screen question was FAR easier (I still messed up on it, and got to the on-site too). Disclaimer: I went to a Google interview last week (got rejected)

reikonomusha 13y ago
Of course, history, credentials, and current technical know-how should be balanced.
jbooth 13y ago
It sounded like he aced all of the questions except for the distributed computing ones, where he put up some reasonable answers but not the exact ones they're looking for. I'd note that when Google was first solving those problems, their luminaries who are now untouchable at the company probably tried those exact same reasonable answers at first until iterating on them into their current form.

smackfu 13y ago

From those questions, it sure seems like their interview process is aimed at choosing among recent grads whose resumes are all essentially the same "B.S. Computer Science from School X".

AznHisoka 13y ago
That's what they tell people too. It's great if you just graduated from a formal CS program because the algorithms stuff is fresh in your brain. Whereas working 5-10 years in a boring bigcorp, doing CRUD apps will kinda make you more "dumb"
- Zimahl 13y ago
  Hah, I must be pretty dumb. After over 10 years working on anything from startup to BigCorp, I doubt I could answer a single one of those questions right now. I did learn that in my last round of interviewing (about a year ago) that to play the game you need to review the junk that you'll never need to keep in your brain, that you know but don't have at command. Sure, you'll most likely never use it at the position you apply for, but that's the rub.
  - druiid 13y ago
    I genuinely don't understand how it's useful to interview someone this way. It basically makes it a game of 'Show us what you remember from CS101/MAE101/etc'. Really why should interviews for people established in the industry be like that? Sure you should know how to do basic algorithms and optimization type questions, but having minute detail style programming questions that every engineer not fresh out of college will have forgotten since their core discipline classes is just silly.
    - chris_mahan 13y ago
      Maybe it's a subtle form of age discrimination?
      - 13y ago

cromwellian 13y ago

I think this is very unfortunate. I've seen a lot of good candidates get rejected for no obvious reasons. The lack of communication seems driven I think by the sheer deluge of the number of resumes/interviews going on at Google, and what appears to be, a reliance on temps and contractors as part of the process. I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule. Given the sheer size of Google however, I'd expect lots of false positives and negatives in their filters. Also recognize that regular Googlers are selected to do these interviews, and some of them have little training in giving interviews. If you're unlucky, you might get a bad interviewer. I consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc)

colmvp 13y ago
"I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule." Unfortunately, I've read similar anecdotes on HN. Pretty disrespectful of the candidates time.
- maddddddddddddd 13y ago
  a "software engineer" should have a strong understanding of networking and systems administration. perhaps the candidate shouldn't have disrespected the interviewers time and applied for a junior developer position.
JonFish85 13y ago
Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company. On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or disagree with the interview style, comments like that would piss me off to no end. Start a game of needling and insults? You know what, I've had enough.

nakedrobot2 13y ago

I think Google prefers false negatives over false positives. I know a few extremely smart people who didn't "pass" their Google interviews. Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe.

leokun 13y ago
That's probably the right attitude to take in hiring. Bad code is difficult and expensive to discover and fix and a bad hire is difficult and expensive to let go.
- reikonomusha 13y ago
  With proper code review, I don't think bad code is difficult to discover. I also don't think dismissal is very expensive for large corps. For smaller companies or start-ups, the game is entirely different.
jlees 13y ago
Vibe or culture fit, whatever you call it, simply being extremely smart is not sufficient and far too many people think it is. :)
ahk 13y ago
If that's the only kind of people they hire, where the heck do these kind of interviewers come from?
iyulaev 13y ago
Most likely because they didn't have that "totally positive effortlessly nice and socially easy" vibe. You know, sometimes, I feel like that's a personality trait that's often under-rated.

bestest 13y ago

I had a very similar experience with Google London and Google Zurich. It took them longer than a year to arrange an interview. Quite disappointing -- I'm actually glad I decided not to join them.

tobyjsullivan 13y ago

I do enjoy this author's flagrant disregard for Google's NDA they require you to sign and promise not to discuss the interview questions. I'm curious if they'll enforce it. For what it's worth, my one experience with Google recruiting last year was the polar opposite. They were curious and professional, of more knowledgeable recruiters I've dealt with, and timely in scheduling interviews. I had my first and only phone interview within a couple weeks if contract (which I needed and used to go through the extensive list of prep material they provided). Then I had an onsite interview a couple weeks later. Bam. Done.

freework 13y ago
I did a phone interview with Google last week. I was given the exact same counter problem as mentioned in the article. I can verify that I was not asked to sign any NDA at any point.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tobyjsullivan 13y ago
  The phone interviews are not but the in person ones are. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that you are onsite and may oversee confidential information but they explicitly stated to me that it covered the interview questions.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Me1000 13y ago
  Phone screenings do not require signing an NDA (just a "we explicitly ask you not to share the questions you're asked"), but if they bring you on site you will be asked to sign one.
  - zxer 13y ago
    Except when not. When I was interviewing they didn't make me sign one. They rejected me for the original position, but later occasionally called me with some alternate options. These calls usually went like: - We would be interested in having you at/as ... but before the specifics, you signed an NDA, right? - No, I have not. - Oh, then good luck, bye.

mathattack 13y ago

Two thoughts: 1) Larger companies get away with inefficient recruiting because they can. If the same company abuses you twice, and you go back a third time, what's that say about you? It certainly goes a long way to explain why they can do it. 2) If you're considering going back on an offer, or interviewing just days after starting a new job, you don't have much room to complain about bad behavior on the company's part. Perhaps another reason that Google contacts many people the same time is their heuristics. They have analyzed what good potential hires look like, and instruct their recruiters (who all use the same few online resources) to screen for it.

VLM 13y ago
Honestly I think GOOG (and some others) sometime interview people to fill time. I was contacted years ago; You want me to do what? What I wanted to ask was "what could possibly inspire you to think that has anything to do with me?" but instead I just said k thx bye. Not a effective way to hire, but a rather effective way to get focused attention. Even though I was kind of laughing, it certainly got my attention and got me thinking, which is great PR.
- mathattack 13y ago
  They're much too busy to do that. In fact they've recently shrunk the amount of interviews per candidate to free up time. The issue you're describing sounds like a recruiter that doesn't understand the subject that they're recruiting for.
gummadi 13y ago
>> Larger companies get away with inefficient recruiting because they can. I would disagree. I interviewed with MS, Google & Amazon multiple times. MS & Amazon are definitely much more organized and very prompt in following up with decision.
- mathattack 13y ago
  True. It's not all large companies. Maybe it's more accurate to say Google does because it can. It would be interesting to see if any of their recent VIP hires had similar headaches, or if this is just junior employees. As I said elsewhere, this is surprising because everyone I know there is very straightforward.

morkfromork 13y ago

I interviewed at Google earlier this year. It was a complete waste of my time. The questions were unrelated to my skills and the position I was looking for. You go in there assuming they know what they are doing because they are the great Google. They don't. It's completely random.

bloat 13y ago

I don't know why people get so bent up over this and write these screeds. Surely everyone knows the drill by now. If Google interview you, you'll get a bunch of random algorithm questions and you either get hired or you don't and they won't tell you why. Your CV and your experience only serve to get a foot in the door. After that its all down to those algo questions. This is not a secret - I think they are pretty up front about the way it works. PS - I didn't get hired.

Yascade 13y ago

The obvious reason for this approach to me is that Google is leveraging their reputation in order to solve difficult problems rather than actually looking to hire anyone. The answers this particular interviewer appeared to answer seem to be the kinds of things that a developer would want to know but might not be able to see the answer to. The idea here that Google might be leveraging knowledge from a hopeful dupe, is echoed by their annual code challenges. The company wants to know things. It's hungry for knowledge. My feeling that leading on applicants is the best way to be ignored when you need one because when you cry wolf, only the wolves answer the call eventually.

ahk 13y ago

Curious about the 'official' answer to the counter question. I'd have thought just having something triggered daily to clear out increments older than a day would be enough.

stinkypete 13y ago
I don't know about an official answer but using a simple variation on a round-robin database (RRD) ought to do the trick. Basically: day count = [last 23 hour buckets] + hour count hour count = [last 59 minute buckets] + minute count minute count = [last 59 second buckets] + second count second count = <running count cleared every 1 second> You end up losing a small amount of accuracy, the worst being for keeping track of the second counts. You can avoid that by using an actual list of counter values for the seconds bucket and dumping those out when they get older than a second, or maybe by introducing another subdivision -- 1/10th of a second probably is good -- so that you actually have .9 seconds worth of data and can interpolate the last bit.
- informatimago 13y ago
  The last hour now goes back from 22:45:03.435123897 (remember, nanosecond timer, but now it is from 22:46:07.223981453. Unless you can round the time when the last second, the last minute, etc start, you have to keep the full history of increment events up to the nanosecond for the last 24 hours. That's O(246060*1e9).
  - abalone 13y ago
    But if you do round the time to an acceptable degree of accuracy (say, to within 1ms of the second count and 1m of the day count) then it does work within a fixed amount of memory. It's probably the best solution. It's a lovely exercise in algorithm tradeoffs. In this case it's mainly accuracy vs. memory, with lots of opportunity to explore implementation optimizations.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

scotth 13y ago

Does anyone know a good answer for the RealTimeCounter question?

guard-of-terra 13y ago
- have a counter for every bigger interval asnd the last timestamp If the timestamp is same second as last increment everything, if not increment where appropriate and rotate everything else to 0. What am i missing?
- scotth 13y ago
  My reading of the API is that getCountInLastSecond returns the count from the last billion nanoseconds, not the count from the previous second bucket (as the clock ticks). So when he mentions he can't bound memory, it's because he can't easily discretize the counters.
  - rlpb 13y ago
    I feel that this is an important ambiguity. When I read the article, my first question was whether this interpretation is correct, or the other one. I am surprised that he didn't clarify this in the article, and wonder if this is a problem. Seeing ambiguities in specifications is an important part of software engineering.
    - scotth 13y ago
      I think you're right. Note taken.
  - reikonomusha 13y ago
    This is the correct interpretation. Imagine an infinite time line, with a marker moving across the line at the speed of time. Every time increment is called, that marker is saved on the timeline. When getCountInLastX is called, one must return the number of marks on the timeline from the current time to the current time minus X.
  - 13y ago

mattzito 13y ago

An acquaintance of mine applied for a product management job, did two interviews in NY that went fine, then was flown out to MTV for a series of interviews. When this person got there, two of the people they were supposed to meet with were traveling on business and hadn't notified the recruiter. A third was out sick. The supposed-to-be fourth, now first interview walked into the room and said, "Look, I don't have any idea how to interview product managers, so I'm going to ask you calculus questions", and proceeded to start to write equations on the board. The fifth interview was the first and only that happened AND dealt with product management. When they got back to NY, this person was notified that they'd been rejected, then notified this was a mistake and they'd have to come back to MTV to redo all of the interviews, including the two that had happened. Obviously, at this point they told Google to go scratch and went on to do really good work elsewhere. I've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories.

throwaway86 13y ago
It's not any better if you get hired. Google recruiters will tell you whatever you want to hear, including things that are not necessarily true. I was assured that a minor issue in my background would not be an issue multiple times (I have email proving this), then Google hired me and let me work for more than two months. I got comfortable, I moved to Mountain View, began real honest work and set about making an impact. One Monday, I had just finished a feature for an internal monitoring tool and was discussing it with a teammate. HR scheduled a meeting 30 minutes in the future on my calendar, then informed me that my employment had been terminated because of the issue in my background. You remember, the one I disclosed and discussed repeatedly during the hiring process, before I even signed the offer. Two people in upper management at Google who had never met me fired me because of something seven years in my background, two months after hiring me with the assurance that it wouldn't be a problem. I bet my teammate wonders where I went. I didn't get a chance to explain because they threatened me if I told anybody on my team what happened while I was collecting my things. The same woman had a hearty laugh earlier in the firing meeting after joking, "I bet you didn't expect your afternoon to go like this, huh?" Felt like I was back in grade school. Two weeks after firing me, a Google recruiting coordinator attempted to connect with me on LinkedIn. Read into a company's competence what you will based on that. I can never, ever recommend that anybody subject themselves to working at Google based on my experience. And that's even before discovering the absolutely clueless direction that company is taking. You think G+ is annoying now? Just wait. The real victim in this is my family. I've never subjected them to no insurance coverage in my career. Thanks, Google.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

Just playing, but "If you have n servers that take requests, and server Sᵢ can take a request every tᵢ seconds, and you need to distribute requests to them as efficiently as possible, how do you do it?" can be done very easily in Go. You have a shared channel which contains the pending requests, and a goroutine per server that simply loops doing: read from the shared channel, perform the request, wait for the sleep period, and continue the loop. And that's all. Each server will get requests as fast as it can consume them.

jnbiche 13y ago
Wow, I've really got to look into Go. Sounds so easy.
- eropple 13y ago
  What he's described is pretty trivially done in most modern languages/frameworks. I can write the same in C#, Scala or C++11--swapping greenlets for standard threads, which honestly is unlikely to be a perf concern--pretty trivially. The hardest of the above would be C++, because boost::threadpool isn't officially part of Boost--though it works fine--and otherwise you'd have to get a little creative with boost::thread_group (but in doing so it'd probably be only slightly more complex than the Go version). I mean, it's a nice feature, albeit bolted to a language with a lot of issues. But unless you have pressing reasons to look at Go, something like that sounding easy probably won't really trip your trigger. =)
  - millstone 13y ago
    You don’t need a thread pool or threads at all. Just schedule a timer for each server. You could do it in JavaScript. I’d even guess that a JavaScript implementation would be more efficient than Go. A goroutine has an overhead measured in kilobytes; a JavaScript timer is presumably smaller.
  - jnbiche 13y ago
    Yeah, I realize you can accomplish the same result in almost any language, but not nearly as easily. It's the syntactic sugar that impressed me, and the fact that's it's such an integral part of the language.

bengrunfeld 13y ago

Large companies often fall into the trap of lack of communication between departments and individual employees. They get so big they trip over their own feet. I used to work for Melbourne IT, a behemoth with hundreds of employees spanning multiple countries. Customer relations was a disaster, with each customer being told conflicting things by different sales people and customer service reps. Sorry you had such a bad experience.

Patient0 13y ago

Site seems down - is it cached anywhere?

illial 13y ago

The blog seems to be down. Cache: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fsymbo1ics.com%2fblog%2f%3fp%3d2055&d=767376103032&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=ZVYjbjNPJjg8u9ICXsxOeMkg5cb6JCt1 http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fsymbo1ics.com%...

aberatiu 13y ago

It's down right now. See Google Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=2055 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:symbo1i...

johnyzee 13y ago

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=2055 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

300bps 13y ago
Thanks for the MIRROR (to aid anyone else looking for a mirror that didn't search for cache)
- pwnee 13y ago
  AND THANK YOU for typing the word MIRROR
Coincoin 13y ago
Funny, that cached version is not loading either on my machine.
- michaelhoffman 13y ago
  Try the text-only version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://symbo1ics.com/blog/%3Fp%3D2055&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

GBKS 13y ago

To counter some of the negative sentiment here, I had a great interview experience at Google. The only big negative was that the whole process took 5 months. But every step involved was very organized and the people were professional and thoughtful. The in-person interviews were also great and the questions were all appropriate. I did not take the offer for personal reasons at the time, but the process was great (except for those 5 months). As with all big companies though, there is a bit of luck of the draw involved, as the other stories in this thread show.

VLM 13y ago
"questions were all appropriate" I was asking myself while reading the article, my god, what kind of job was he applying for, AP test author, programing language standard library author, puzzle book author, or what exactly? I haven't gone into a cold interview in many years; its always previous relationship based now. Are cold interviews where no one already knows anyone, like that now, focused on weird algos and trivia questions and nothing to do with the actual job? You're interviewing the workplace as much as they're interviewing you, and I'm smart but I have no idea how to evaluate a possible employer based on their selection of weird trivia questions. Something that at least vaguely relates to the actual job would be interesting.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  >>>>You're interviewing the workplace as much as they're interviewing you. Not nearly enough people realize this. If they're asking you corny questions in the interview, how does that reflect on their company? OP said they didn't even ask him questions about his resume - just these corny trivia questions. If I was there, I would've asked how someone thinks this is relevant to doing my job at Google. After the past three years I've done a ton of interviewing and have learned the only way to know if the company is good fit is to grill the interviewer on stuff that matters to you. I've had interviews at fortune 50 companies with people who had no idea who their competition was or where they wanted their IT department to be in 5 years. If you're not invested in your company, what makes you think I should??

okaram 13y ago

Interesting, especially since I've just started working for Microsoft, in Bing Ads, and a big factor in deciding to come was the interview process. The phone interview involved writing code in a shared environment, the in-person interviews were all nice (hard questions, non-threatening ways to ask), and I (and the other 4 guys who interviewed in my time slot) were told yes/no right after the interview ended. I assume experiences at large companies vary widely depending on the group, but I was definitely impressed with Bing's interviewing process.

kevingadd 13y ago

Google's recruiting seems like it must be at least partially the responsibility of short-tenure contractors. Every time I've dealt with people from their recruiting department, even the very nice ones seemed forgetful, inattentive and poor at communication. The actual Google employees who do the interviewing are on average very bright, good at actively interviewing candidates (instead of just rattling off questions), and open to answering questions, even if a couple of them were clearly inexperienced and uninterested in doing interviews. I'd say the actual experience of the interview can be a good thing, but the process as a whole is a huge waste of the candidate's time - especially if you don't fit the stereotypical niche of what a Google employee is (4+ years of CS education, thinks writing linked lists and trees is exciting, etc. etc.) Their decision to intentionally avoid giving any feedback to candidates probably stops people from gaming the interview process, but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus. They refuse to interview candidates for a position or a role beyond generalizations like 'software engineer', despite the huge breadth and depth of problems solved at Google - if you're lucky they'll quiz you on the stuff you actually know, but most likely they won't, and the questions will be very mundane. This despite the fact that actual hiring choices ARE partitioned to some degree (as much as they seem to want to pretend they aren't). Most of the time interviewing with a good company is a 'why not' scenario: The only thing you have to lose is some time, and you'll learn some useful things from most interview experiences (even if occasionally the only thing you learn is 'this company is awful'). Google's interview process feels precisely engineered to avoid letting candidates learn anything whatsoever. Companies like Microsoft or Amazon or Zynga all at least have a pretense of evaluating a candidate's specific strengths and weaknesses to figure out whether they're useful - if you're a compiler engineer MS will probably have some Visual Studio/DevDiv people grill you with compiler engineering questions, if you're a games dev Amazon will have you talk to people from their games department, and if you're a database guy Zynga isn't going to ask you game design questions. For Google interviews it seems entirely one-size-fits-all, despite the fact that they have core products that obviously depend on niche knowledge and experience.

at-fates-hands 13y ago
>>> but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus. The crazy thing is they don't give feedback, then call back in a few months and ask if you want to interview again for the same position like the OP said. Talk about completely confusing people. . .

epoxyhockey 13y ago

Are we doing this to ourselves? If we are willing to continually subject ourselves to hours (and days) of interviewing, followed-up by abusive responses (or non-response), it seems like this recruiting behavior will continue.

wizzard 13y ago

A friend of mine got a call from Google and set up a phone interview. They never called. The recruiter called again a few days later and apologized, and set up another phone interview. Once again, no call. The recruiter called again and my friend told them he was no longer interested.

devanti 13y ago
Same thing happened to me with Facebook

speeder 13y ago

Heh. I interviewed with Amazon once, I reached only the phone part and failed (most part for my own reason... I fumbled a lot) But I was really bothered, that they setup "X" to interview me, and when I got the call, it was "Y" because "X" travelled, and that "Y" was not related to the position I applied at all, AND was a newbie at Amazon and thus failed to answer the questions I had about it, AND did not knew any languages I knew, making the coding part of the interview very weird. I also saw similar stories here in HN many times... I wonder, wazzup with those companies that setup interviews and then send the interviewers somewhere else?

VLM 13y ago
"did not knew any languages I knew" I was the surprise interviewer in the exact same scenario (well, not at Amazon, but same general idea) and was later cross examined, mostly by HR, about how well I thought he'd be able to help me if I came to him. The HR cross examination about his ability was all touchy-feely questions not technical (did what he say sound nice, not, did what he say make logical sense when passed thru the well known engineer BS filter). Position had one of those estimates of 25% helping other people with problems and group work, and he would have been hanging out near me although somewhat different kind of work, so it seemed fair for me to ask him noob questions about his expertise, just to see how he would talk to someone on the team from a different background. He was an expert in C++ if I recall correctly. All went pretty well with me, although they didn't hire him (donno why) The part of the story that was weird is I was an old-timer at that employer not a noob. Why they'd assign a noob to evaluate indicates either extreme trust or extreme desperation WRT the noob. Or he was playing you. If you really needed a question answered HR would take care of it.

mathattack 13y ago

The irony of all this conversation is that the people I know at Google are some of the sharpest, most well adjusted people that I know. It's almost like they got in and thrived despite the recruiting process. None of them are the type to stand people up, gloss over interviewing, or be anything other than decent hard working individuals.

freework 13y ago

I did the same problem during my Google interview last week. Here was my solution to the counter problem: https://gist.github.com/priestc/6284678 https://gist.github.com/priestc/6284678

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

cmollis 13y ago

My interview at Google was a disaster. I passed the phone screens (easy), and then they flew me out to Mountain View. Now, the job was actually programming python for YouTube.. which I could have done in my sleep. I've done similar things for years, for many other companies (even some in the Valley, even though I live on the East Coast). So whatever, I thought it was going ok, and then they asked me a bunch of puzzle questions (which I sucked at.. at least I'm pretty sure I did). (You know, the typical mindless puzzle questions that are completely unrelated to anything remotely resembling the work you you'd be doing). I'm sure it sounds like I'm bitter (I'm not), and I'm sure there are many smarter than I am that do well at those things. But I couldn't help thinking that they should've asked me something related to what I'd be doing, or what I'd done. I didn't get the job, but now Google keeps calling me for interviews. I keep telling them no, that I'm not 'Google material' whatever the fuck that is. Not me. Love Google, awesome tools, great stuff.. don't think I could work there.

j2d3 13y ago

Just to pile on here, I interviewed at Google in Santa Monica in 2007. I didn't get hired. The experience was okay, not awful and not incredibly drawn out. Anyway, I brushed it off and moved on. Then, just this April, I received an email from a Google recruiter noting that I'd interviewed in 2007, complementing me on my work since then, and asking whether I'd like to re-engage in a conversation about working with Google. I wrote back saying sure, I'd like to discuss the opportunity. I never heard anything back again. Six weeks later, I wrote again, asking whether there was some issue, and saying it was strange to reach out to me, for me to reply, and then to hear nothing... but still... nothing. No response. Then, a few weeks ago, shortly after I'd accepted a new position that I'm actually quite happy with, I received another similar email from a different Google recruiter. I wrote her back and told her about the other recruiter that had recently reached out to me and then went silent after I responded. She promptly called me and we talked. She agreed it was strange, said she didn't see anything in the system about it, but she did apologize and - we had a discussion about Google, the interview process and what it's like now (as opposed to 2007). If anything, it sounded like it would be incredibly long, bureaucratic, drawn out, and fairly ridiculous. I said I'd keep in touch with her if indeed I did want to re-apply to google, but I think I do not.

cdjk 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that the recruiters are all contractors, and are all fairly independent. I think that's the only think that explains stories like this, as well as some experiences I've had with them.

aliston 13y ago

Google sucks. I had a pretty similar experience interviewing there. Strange, late interviewers. One guy who barely spoke English and another who literally asked one question, then said nothing for the rest of the "interview." Then, a pointless "feedback" call in which they told me they "can't provide feedback on specific candidates." Overall, just a really poor experience. F- 'em, move on.

ghc 13y ago

I interviewed at the New York office for an SRE job a few months ago. It took about 10 months for the whole process to play out. In the end, after a full day interview, I was supposed to get the written up feedback from every interviewer regardless of whether I got the position or not. Instead, my last communication with Google was a phone call where I was told that one of the interviewers still hadn't handed in their written review. It's now three months later, and that's the last I heard. That left a sour taste in my mouth. I wasn't expecting to get the job, and really it was just a backup plan in case Algorithmic.ly didn't work out, but you'd think they'd have the common courtesy to get back to me. I'm sort of expecting that 6 months from now I'll hear from them out of the blue...that's how disorganized the process is.

jrockway 13y ago
That sucks. Send me an email if you'd like me to figure out what happened. (jrockway AT google.com) One thing though; the interview feedback from each interviewer is only for the hiring committee, never for the candidate.

300bps 13y ago

I had a very similar experience. I work at an investment bank and was recruited by a large company that does proprietary trading including high frequency trading. I went for the interview which was scheduled to be an all-day thing. In addition to having been in IT for a very long time I am also very knowledgeable on capital markets having successfully taken CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) tests. The CFO of the company that interviewed me was shocked that someone in IT passed those tests. The IT people, it was all algorithms and programming minutia. After the interview, they strung me along for weeks and then I just stopped calling them to check up on status and they stopped calling me. Then they would call me every few months asking me to interview again. I finally asked them to stop calling me. The reason I bring this up is because I think sometimes candidates are excellent candidates for a $100,000 to $150,000 salary position. The only problem is the candidate is already making $250,000 and the prospective employer knows it after you fill out the application. I may be just thinking this to make myself feel better but I just thought the issue with the company was that I made too much. I probably would've had to literally walk on water and bring their dead relatives back to life to justify what they would've had to pay me to steal me from my current company. Maybe that's the problem Google had with you?

ryandrake 13y ago
Honest question, I'm really curious. If you're actually making $250,000 why would you want to work anywhere else?
- yazmeya 13y ago
  Plenty of such jobs are mind-numbing, soul-crushing and lead nowhere.
- 300bps 13y ago
  I went on the subject interview two years ago when I was at the 4 year mark of my current employer. The reason I was looking is because my current employer was being acquired and all of us received a letter stating, "We will tell you in x months whether you have a job or not." It turned out about 80% of my coworkers got laid off but I did not. But I didn't know it was going to turn out that way at the time. I'm not interviewing now, but honestly they're just trying to figure out a way to cut me out of the picture without torpedoing the business I support. Eventually they'll find a way though realistically it's another year away. I have one fall back company I can go to in a snap at equal pay and I do side consulting about 15-20 hours per week so I'm not worried enough at this point to be interviewing.

Balgair 13y ago

My brother had an interview for their X division. He said it was really strange. They were very very secretive. My brother has a TS clearance and he said Google was beyond the US gov.'s paranoia even. It made it a really tough interview too. He said it felt like they couldn't tell him anything so the interviewers were trying to psychicly communicate with him. Then they took him to lunch on campus which was ok and then sat him in front of another guy who was nicer but still mum. Also they apparently can't talk about the google glasses even though some lady had just walked out the door with them. Its like : 'Dude, you can see them right there.' It seems they need to get hungry again, not be complacent in their domination of our lives.

radiusq 13y ago

I got an in-house interview and did well until the final guy. He barely spoke english, and i've worked with many foreign co-workers in the past but his english was worse than anything i've heard before. I struggled trying to understand him while he explained the problem and he was noticeably upset. I wanted to call the HR person in to talk about it but I didn't want to risk making the situation worse. Didn't get the job, likely based on this interviewer.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

727374 13y ago

I had a google interview about a year ago. The thing I found strangest is that some interviewers would walk in the room and throw up a coding exercise without any introduction at all. They literally wouldn't give their names and what projects they worked on. You don't care that I've been working for almost 10 years in the real world and would rather judge me on my ability to solve a linked list problem? Really? If anything is "gameable" this is. Just spend a year playing topcoder in your spare time and you could ace any of the questions I got. I have a good friend who works at google and compares the recruiting team to being "the hot girl in highschool" (no intended sexism). Since google recruiters are at one of the elite companies in the world, they can treat people disrespectfully. If you don't like it, there will be a million people more people to choose from. I actually didn't get this vibe from them, but I only dealt with a couple recruiters.

praptak 13y ago
> Just spend a year playing topcoder in your spare time and you could ace any of the questions I got. I wouldn't call this gaming the system. Doing a year of such training would raise your actual skill.
- tobyjsullivan 13y ago
  "I cheated on the test by studying really hard"
  - WalterBright 13y ago
    I've often been bemused that people will expend more effort finding ways to cheat than if they just learned the material.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    I cheated on my ACTs/GREs by using prep material and studying really hard. Got really good scores, didn't learn a damn thing. You can always game a test that you know ahead of time by prepping, it has no correlation on your non-prepping abilities though.

joyeuse6701 13y ago

Let me sum up my response to the article in 2 words: Their loss.

smtddr 13y ago

Yikes, this story and HN comments sound like disasters. As a sorta balancing out here, my experience interviewing with Google(June 2012) was fantastic IMHO. We agreed right off the beginning what role exactly I'm interviewing for(Test Engineer), different from what I applied for(SDET) and went with it. Note, that I was holding them off for about 2 years. They'd email/call me every 6-8 months, and I'd say "Hold on, gimme a few more months". Eventually stuff happened that caused me to email them back and say "Okay, let's do this." I had the first typical phone-screening, talking about myself 'n such, why I'm looking for another job, why Google, etc. They gave me a bunch of blog links to "Life as a TE at Google" 'n stuff. 2nd phone screening was a programming thing that was kinda hard but not out-of-bounds PhD stuff. I was a bit intimidated by the fact I spent the whole hour on a question that was labeled "Question#1". I asked about it, the SoftEng. told me "Oh, don't worry about that". I asked if there were more questions, he said again not to worry... hmm. I did talk a lot though so he knew what I was thinking while trying to code. Anyways, a week later I get an email from a Google recruiter saying the SoftEng thought I knew what I was doing so we set up the MTV visit with 5 or 6 people. I was super-excited I made it to the on-site visit. Did you know Google Maps on mobile behaves differently if you're on campus? :) Everything happened on time. The interview questions and conversations we had for those 6 hours were great, eye-opening for me. I will say that I went into this whole Google thing with an open mind and with the assumption that all these people had more intelligence in their toe-nail than I'd ever obtain in my life. In the end, 2 weeks later, I was told that they "wouldn't be going forward with me". Of course I was bummed, I didn't even tell my family I was interviewing with Google. I wanted it to be a surprise. But, they showed me my weaknesses and I fixed 'em. Now I have an awesome job(SDET2) and I think the only reason I was able to get through this job's interview process is because Google's interview improved me significantly.

AznHisoka 13y ago
Ha, I didn't tell anyone in my family, including my SO I went to interview with the Big G either. Didn't want them to see how disappointed I would be if they rejected me.
- AndyKelley 13y ago

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incision 13y ago

My experience with Google corroborates some of this. Particularly the unpredictable callbacks and repeated contacts despite being within the 18 month period and complete lack of feedback post-interview. Additionally, there was plenty of confusion about which position I was being asked to interview for. Initially, it was something completely outside my skill set, later it was a bit more refined, but not at all specific. I did encounter some questioning where the interviewer seemed to be looking for one rather specific answer, but nothing nearly as bad as "I wanted you to use a priority queue. We will just move to another question." or "Time's up. Maybe you can ask your friend there what the answer is." Amusingly, a friend of mine who interviewed there not too long ago ended up receiving and declining an offer only to be called and asked about his "start date" months later. That said, my experience was generally positive and I'd do it again given the chance as most of my difficulties came from the recruiting end.

ensmotko 13y ago

Just to add my experience with Google to the pile: After the initial screenings and interviews with two different recruiters (one from Dublin and the second one from Switzerland) I finally get to the first technical interview. I struggled a bit with some questions, but I did get to the optimal solution in the end. I felt I could do better, but the second recruiter assured me that I did really well. He even sort of apologized because he needed to schedule a second phone interview, before inviting me on site. The second interview, as far as I can tell, went the same as the first. I made some mistakes along the way, but I did get to an optimal solution at the end. The interviewer told me I'll get the results by the end of the week. Two weeks pass and still no word from Google. I decided to send an email to the recruiter, asking for an update. Still nothing. After a month I decided to send a friendly email to my first recruiter asking for an update - I didn't know what else to do. The second recruiter replied the next day telling me it was a "close call" and that I should re-apply in 12 months. No thanks :)

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astrodust 13y ago

There's something odd with this page that causes Safari to jam up and use 100% CPU. It shows up as "Processing Math 0%" in the lower left corner while doing this. Is there some kind of renegade JavaScript going on here?

reikonomusha 13y ago
It's for processing the typesetting of mathematical expressions. See MathJax.
- astrodust 13y ago
  Well, it would be nice if it actually worked instead of jamming up Chrome and Safari completely.

eyeareque 13y ago

index billions of web sites, stock around 850+/share... but their recruiters/interviewers can't return a call/email or show up to give an interview on time. This something that small and large companies have been doing successfully for ages. They seriously need to work on their culture in this aspect. It seems like such a trivial problem to fix inside of google. What is the hold up? I'm certain there are more good interviewing experiences than bad interviewing processes, but it does seem to be a common theme over there.

myko 13y ago

Interviewing at Google can be terrible. I was an intern who had high scores in my reviews (my host rated me just below 'superstar', whatever that means - I'm not really a superstar and just assume that was some rating jargon they used at Google). Anyway when it came to my conversion interviews the person who was supposed to interview me wasn't at the office. I ended up waiting around for someone to interview me, and when they came in 15 minutes late we had to trek across campus to get a room. I was asked a fairly difficult problem and botched it pretty hard, and of course didn't have the complete time to attempt to solve it. I thought I nailed the next interview though! After I answered a couple pretty complex problems the interviewer literally said there is no way you're not getting an offer, and we just ended up chatting a bit. I got rejected a few days later, not totally unexpected as I knew I botched that first interview. When I asked my host about it later he said the second interview wasn't even on record. C'est la vie, I guess. I'd still love to try again, I had a lot of fun working there, the people are top notch - even of the hiring process is extremely hit or miss.

Yourfags 13y ago

I don't agree with the fact that they were rude, which is what is it to not respond in these cases, but they didn't do anything particularly offensive except for leaving him in the dark. All he needed to do was take a job offer, if Google really wanted him, they could fix their mistake(s) of waiting so long. The comments though for this article are pretty egregious, it's too bad interviewers are that awful.

abalone 13y ago

Ok, the RealTimeCounter problem got me thinking. It's a great question. It seems very simple, but as the author notes even PhD's are stumped by it. Here my solution. One very important purpose it serves is to see how well you can identify problems in algorithms. Probably I'm guessing it's not even important that you get it perfect, just that you can recognize and talk through the challenges. One challenge relates to understanding the requirements. It needs to return the count for the preceding period of duration N, whether N is a second or a day. It could and usually does start in the middle of the preceding second, day, etc. It's a constantly moving window. That means if you just reset the counter each time you pass the absolute boundary of the next N (1:00, 1:01, etc.), you lose accuracy. So that suggests that you might have to track each individual increment() somehow. But there's the next challenge, memory usage. If you just store all the timestamps, that's linear memory growth every time increment() is called. So it seems to me like the solution is a tradeoff between memory usage and accuracy. If you don't call increment() very much or have a lot of memory, you can get perfect accuracy. So that's the "theory". Now here's where it gets more interesting from an engineering perspective. Optimal implementations. Here's what I came up with in about 15 minutes. First you minimize memory usage by storing offsets instead of the complete timestamp. Do this in 2 arrays, one for the preceding interval and one for the current one. This makes it easy to exploit our knowledge of when we've crossed the interval boundary, e.g. via now().getSecond(), to clear out old data. (I am only considering one type of interval like seconds here.. you could extend this to minutes, hours, days by duplicating this method, or perhaps theres some way to consolidate more optimally.) Anyway, increment() takes the offset from the fixed start of the current interval, i.e. the nanoseconds since the start of the current second, and appends it to the Current array. It also checks if we've passed into the next interval, in which case it reassigns the Current array to the Preceding array and starts a new Current array. The getter functions also do this. To get the count, the getter simply 1) Finds the nearest offset in the Preceding array to the current offset (could just loop over it, start in the middle, etc.) 2) Subtracts that index from the array length to count the number of in-scope increments from that preceding interval (this works because the array is naturally sorted) 3) Adds that to the length of the Current array (because everything in the current array is in-scope) SO, that should be a pretty fast way to do it with minimal memory requirements. If memory's going to be a problem, A) you could spend a little more computation to do a kind of garbage collection. In step 2, resize the array to clear out the out-of-scope indexes. (Maybe you'd want a more optimized kind of data structure than a vanilla array for this.) B) reduce accuracy by quantizing the offsets. Ok am I hired yet? I'll go wait by the phone. Just kidding, I'm sure this is wrong in many ways. But the point I'm trying to make is that it's a great problem for exploring tradeoffs, yet easy to understand what's being asked and requires no special technical knowledge.

sebnukem2 13y ago

The worst (actually, the one bad) job interview experience in my life was with Google. The interviewer was extremely unfriendly, had a thick unintelligible indian accent, and didn't try to hide the fact he had something more interesting to do than interviewing me.

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bane 13y ago

Before anybody goes to try and get hired at a "hot" company, please please please check out glassdoor's interview experiences and ratings. You'd be surprised at how shitty some companies treat people during the hiring process. I've experienced it myself a couple of times.

mzs 13y ago

I had similar situation many years ago for a different large company. Two before lunch interviews, and I bombed one. Then the rest of the day's interviews seemed easier and I did splendidly. I felt great. A few days later, two job offers from that company, but not from the group I had originally hoped for. I passed and took another job I was more excited about the group I would be with. Later I knew a friend that worked there, he told me that they used the first two interviews to decide which track of second interviews you get after lunch. So then you are with other candidates for other jobs if you have not done in the top of the first round. Something like this may have happened to this fellow, just that the other candidates in the secondary track won out over him making an even better impression.