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It's too bad that Google has likely permanently ruined their HR image. They have developed an overwhelming reputation for arbitrary interviews and prolonged hir

It's too bad that Google has likely permanently ruined their HR image. They have developed an overwhelming reputation for arbitrary interviews and prolonged hiring decisions. I'd like to think I'm a pretty good developer and have made a positive impact everywhere I've worked. Yet I'd never even consider applying to Google, because I know exactly how that process would go down. 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.) 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months. 3) I'll have to drill on data structures and efficiency of sorting algorithms I've literally never implemented outside of an interview or academic setting. 4) Even having drilled on those arbitrary questions, I'll likely fail the interview because after a multi-day gauntlet of questions a random engineer didn't like the particular assumptions I put into my Fermi model of golf balls. 5) Of course, if they ever bother to let me know I failed, it won't be for months. (Note: this is all based on actual Google hiring experiences.)

bitwize 12y ago
Google is looking for people with interesting stories. They're big on diversity. A straight-laced bloke like me from a regular family hasn't a chance without that MIT/Stanford sheepskin. But if you were adopted into a trisexual human/Klingon line marriage... well, Google could use someone with your fresh perspective, even if you only went to clown school. Hell if you went to clown school you're a shoo-in. Want to work at El Goog? Cultivate as much weirdness as you can without becoming a criminal or jeopardizing your competence.
bwy 12y ago
I wonder when these "experiences" happened. I went through Google's process this semester looking for an internship position and it was no different than the dozen other companies I've gone through. Things might have changed since the days of random Fermi questions. Edit: correspondence with the recruiter was no less timely than it was with other companies, and the only major difference I can think of is the host-matching process we went through.
- morgante 12y ago
  Maybe they have. That's exactly why my comment was that it's too bad Google has developed this reputation.
  - bwy 12y ago
    Yes, I was confused because that's how your comment starts out - it sounds like you're looking at this reputation like it's a thing in the past. Then you go on to say you'd never apply because you "know exactly how that process would go down." Which sounds like something you're thinking now and even in the future. I'm getting downvotes so maybe this makes no sense to anyone else but I don't see why you'd say "it's a shame" they've ruined their reputation in the past and then go on to say that you're sure things are going to be the same now and in the future. By the way, since I'm getting the downvotes already anyways, I might as well say that you sound a little salty. I'm sure no one bases hiring decisions entirely on what university you went to. Furthermore, all of the news articles we read love emphasizing the weird questions you might get once in a blue moon, the quirky perks you get for working there, etc. but in reality I doubt the interviews and work experience are much different from any other company (I asked my interviewers about this as well). Just some food for thought before you go accusing them of having "developed an overwhelming reputation" - a lot of this is the result of media hype, not their practices per se. Even though I agree that being employed at Google is probably overhyped, there's no need to be so antagonistic to the company for it.
    - morgante 12y ago
      To be clear, I'm just not sure what it's like there now. Maybe it's still bad, maybe it's improved a lot. Probably it's a bit of both, depending on who you encounter. My point is that even if they have improved (maybe they have!), their past reputation makes me reticent to even bother seeing if they have. > I'm sure no one bases hiring decisions entirely on what university you went to. Former Google managers have explicitly told me that this filter is used for some positions at the resume screening level. Sorry if I sounded salty. I have a great job and probably wouldn't work at Google even if they offered—just trying to frame the common perspective.
dsacco 12y ago
So, I'd like to think this article is more about hiring practices than it is about Google, but I'll bite. >> 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.) I didn't go to college at all, and I've been invited to interview there by engineering managers. If I didn't have absolute golden handcuffs at my current job, I might have considered it. Furthermore, I know plenty of people who haven't gone to any college and work at Google. If you don't hear back, it has nothing to do with the college you went to. Even if a single interviewer had this bias against you, the larger hiring committee would review each of the interviews you had with different people. To name a couple of examples - David Byttow, founder of Secret, was hired as a Software Engineer at Google without any degree. Michal Zalewski is in an engineering director role without a degree. Once you reach the interview, the sole reason for a hire/no-hire decision is how you did in the interview process. Literally nothing on your résumé will disbar you at that point. >> 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months. You won't hear about the interview date for months? I admit this can be frustrating for large companies, but no one I've spoken to told me it literally lasted months. The longest I've heard of was a month and a half, from first interview to hearing news. How are you submitting your résumé? Are you just applying to the job and hoping for a recruiter to pick it up, or actually emailing a hiring manager at Google? If you apply without trying to get the attention of a decision maker it always takes longer because that's how the process works at large companies. >> 3) I'll have to drill on data structures and efficiency of sorting algorithms I've literally never implemented outside of an interview or academic setting. While algorithmic questions are asked, they do not make up the entirety of the technical interviews at Google. Generally speaking from what I have seen, questions are not "implement a linked list", questions are "implement this program" and you are free to choose which algorithm is best. However, I acknowledge that interviewers might not always follow this. >> 4) Even having drilled on those arbitrary questions, I'll likely fail the interview because after a multi-day gauntlet of questions a random engineer didn't like the particular assumptions I put into my Fermi model of golf balls. Fermi questions are actively discouraged by the Hiring Committee, and questions involving these will be thrown out when evaluating an interviewer's analysis of an employee. As someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned, this would involve a strongly worded email from the Hiring Committee afterwards. The first thing to understand about Google's hiring process is that you are interviewed onsite using five or so 1:1 sessions. The interviewer has to perfectly transcribe everything that happens and needs to be able to explain their decision to the Hiring Committee. The Hiring Committee will not consider answers from an interviewer like, "He couldn't tell me how many stoplights are in Los Angeles" or answers like "He didn't give a good enough answer about why he wants to work here." I realize this seems like "my anecdata is better than your anecdata", but what are you saying is actively negative and contrary to a lot of the literature about what Google's hiring practices. I'm not saying their hiring practices are perfect - far from it. But you seem to be ascribing malice to their methodology when it's really not the case.
nostrademons 12y ago
Apply during a down-cycle. Most of the hiring snafus at Google are because they use a large population of temp recruiters, whose contracts may not be renewed before the candidates they're sponsoring get offers. When that happens, the candidates are often left in limbo. When there's a recession, all the temps are laid off, and you only get the permanent recruiters who now fear for their jobs. They are extra incentivized to a.) make sure the candidate gets through the process, so that they have a reason for their job to exist and b.) make sure the candidate has a good experience, so they get a commendation. And c.) they're all experienced, so you don't get the kind of gratuitous screw-ups you might with temps. The hiring bar is higher during down cycles, but that can also work in your favor as well; your resume doesn't just show "Worked at Google", it shows "Started at Google when nobody was hiring", and you occasionally get comments like "So how long you been at Google? Oh, that means you started in...January 2009, wow, you must be smart to have gotten through the hiring process then."
- pucallpa 12y ago
  when are the "down cycles" and "up cycles" ?
  - jghn 12y ago
    Current status: up cycle The next down cycle: You'll know it when you see it
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      Yeah, you'll know it when you see it. Some indicators: The press never writes articles on startups, except to report their demise. Everybody is seemingly in hiring freeze at once. (But don't let that stop you! Many times, companies that are reported to be "in hiring freeze" are actually still hiring for the right candidate.) VC firms start telling their portfolio companies to conserve cash, shutter lines of business, and lay off people. Plans for new corporate headquarters are shelved indefinitely. You start hearing "Well, at least I still have a job" from friends. You start hearing "Fuck, I just got laid off. Can I crash at your place for a month while I find a cheaper apartment?" from friends. Searching for new jobs starts to seem dauntingly frightening - what if they go under? (In the context of this thread, this is ridiculous - Google is not going under.)
spankalee 12y ago
Based on my actual experience: 1) I went to community college, dropped out, then finished my degree at a state school 10 years later. Google didn't care. 2) I have no idea how long it took them to decide to interview me. Once they decided I got a call. People I've referred recently have received _very_ prompt responses, though years ago sometimes people would sit "in the system" for a while. 3) It is good to brush up on algorithms, like for most other SWE interviews. You do end up using this stuff regularly though - Even if say, your'e "only" doing UIs, it's how you avoid accidental n^2 algorithms in the middle of your UI code which pisses off your users. I don't get the attitude that algorithms are just academic. They matter. Besides, "use a hash table" is often the correct approach in interviews and non-academic code ;) 4) I have no idea what a Fermi model of golfballs is, but I've never asked or been asked such a thing. And "fail" is such a black and white term. Candidates are scored, and those with marginal scores the first time often get another chance later on. 5) Not my experience in general. Sometimes the interviewers lag on getting in their feedback for non-hires, which is really unfortunate, but the recruiters are pretty on top of things. You say your post is based on actual hiring experiences, but I bet that the negative experiences get much more attention than the positive ones. People don't generally write blog posts about how wonderful their interview was.
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  I actually had a very good interview experience at google even though I didn't get an offer. One interviewer and I clearly did not get along but that happens other companies too.
  - pkulak 12y ago
    Same here. The recruiter was super nice and it all went very quickly. I got to a second interview, but then didn't make the cut. I understand why; I screwed up those interviews pretty badly. It was my first technical interview ever. But, the experience was great and I'm much better at tech interviews now.
  - MCRed 12y ago
    But, unless you were being an ass to that interviewer, whether you got along or not is not a measure of your quality as an employee. Presumably you were being polite and trying to develop a rapport. That means you didn't get along because the interviewer brought their own baggage or narrow mindedness into the interview. This is very common and shows the interview process was incompetent. That may sound like a strong word, but if you were qualified and they didn't hire you because of what this guy said, then they are, by definition, incompetent. Maybe arbitrary is a nicer word to use, but it's the same thing.
dmitrygr 12y ago
I was worried about this as well (to a point that when Google reached out to me, I told them thanks but no thanks, given all this). They eventually wore me down and the process was actually quite painless. I have been here for 3 years now, quite happily.
- MCRed 12y ago
  They wore you down? They tried to wear me down, to the point of contacting me multiple times a week, via every means of contact possible, for weeks on end, until I threatened to take them to court because they were harassing me after I asked them to stop contacting me. Every single one of those contacts, by the way, was by a used-car-salesman type of "recruiter" who would blow smoke and not answer questions, etc. There was no way I was going to ever work for google because of their lack of ethics... but this didn't matter to them. And their persistence despite being told that only confirmed the view. Edit: Sorry my experience doesn't fit your desired view of Google. But if pointing out facts that don't fit someone's ideology gets me constantly downvoted here, what is the purpose of participating in this site? Is this only for circle jerks?
  - dmitrygr 12y ago
    They responded to all my questions as honestly as they were able to
  - barry-cotter 12y ago
    I was mightily tempted to downvote you, not for the substance of your comment but for the complaints about downvoting. Up until the complaining it was interesting.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
Facebook is still like this. The ask all the dumb questions like how do you detect what color hat someone is wearing. Then if you don't do well, they won't let you know.
- limeyx 12y ago
  I did not have at all this experience interviewing @ Facebook for a mobile position. Questions were reasonable and the interviewer gave nudges / prompts when it was obvious you were stuck on something. They really seem to take recruiting very seriously and it showed.
- cbhl 12y ago
  How do you detect what color hat someone is wearing?
  - DanBC 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Puzzle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Puzzle Sadly not AI detecting hats and then finding colours based on lighting of faces and rest of scene.
    - jmccree 12y ago
      My response would be: Let me take a selfie.
- justrudd 12y ago
  Was this your experience? I just went through an SDE loop last week (still waiting to hear the results), but I got no "aha" questions. 2 strictly coding questions and 1 open-ended design question (with pseudo-code). It was very straight forward.
coffeemug 12y ago
Most people will go out of their away to invent reasons for why a disadvantageous evaluation system is fundamentally broken. For example, people who don't do well on standardized tests (e.g. SATs) typically say "I'm bad at test-taking" or "SATs are stupid" despite overwhelming evidence that SATs are a good predictor of general intelligence. It's worth considering the possibility that while you may be a great developer, you're not as good as you think you are with respect to the caliber of people that work at Google. (Note -- I don't work at Google and didn't do spectacularly well on standardized tests; but after working with many algorithms whizzes over the years I've learned that I'm not nearly as good a programmer as I once thought).
- nvarsj 12y ago
  > despite overwhelming evidence that SATs are a good predictor of general intelligence I never heard this before. I thought that SATs and other standardized tests heavily correlate with background / race. Which to me, means it's not a good indicator of intelligence, but rather education.
  - morgante 12y ago
    That depends on whether or not you think intelligence is an inheritable trait.
- morgante 12y ago
  If Google primarily worked on developing novel sorting algorithms, I'd agree that this is a great process for them. Heck, maybe it is a great process for them—they just do an astoundingly poor job of explaining who they want to work at Google. (Also, please recall that literally the only time I personally applied to Google was the freshman year of college. This isn't a case of personal sour grapes.) By the way, I also don't think their hiring process is fundamentally broken. Just pointing out that this is the reputation it's acquired. Since you brought up the SAT, it's an absolutely perfect and effective system with zero flaws—which I did spectacularly well on.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  If SATs were some sort of general intelligence assessment, it is unlikely that a $500 Kaplan course would significantly increase your scores (which they do).
discardorama 12y ago
> 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.) > 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months. My gut feeling is that with the rise of Facebook, Google has really changed its hiring practices. Now they don't want to lose out a good talent to FB; and dicking around for months is a sure-fire way to lose that talent, because FB sure doesn't.
samstave 12y ago
I interviewed over a period of three month in 2007. At the end of the interview, they said I did great. The recruiter called me and said they would be extending me an offer the next day. I was ecstatic and told my family and was planning on how I would tell my current employer. The next day the recruiter called me and said that they rescind this and wont be offering me the job. He said he was not given a reason why. Then, over the next ~4 years, they called me no less than 4 times for the same damn position. I had to remind the recruiter about the first interview experience, after which they said OK then they dont want to continue that process. After the 4th time, I angrily said to the recruiter "You have called me for this position 4 times! Either give me the damn position of delete my damn phone number from your system!!" They haven't called me since.

bitwize 12y ago

Google is looking for people with interesting stories. They're big on diversity. A straight-laced bloke like me from a regular family hasn't a chance without that MIT/Stanford sheepskin. But if you were adopted into a trisexual human/Klingon line marriage... well, Google could use someone with your fresh perspective, even if you only went to clown school. Hell if you went to clown school you're a shoo-in. Want to work at El Goog? Cultivate as much weirdness as you can without becoming a criminal or jeopardizing your competence.

bwy 12y ago

I wonder when these "experiences" happened. I went through Google's process this semester looking for an internship position and it was no different than the dozen other companies I've gone through. Things might have changed since the days of random Fermi questions. Edit: correspondence with the recruiter was no less timely than it was with other companies, and the only major difference I can think of is the host-matching process we went through.

morgante 12y ago
Maybe they have. That's exactly why my comment was that it's too bad Google has developed this reputation.
- bwy 12y ago
  Yes, I was confused because that's how your comment starts out - it sounds like you're looking at this reputation like it's a thing in the past. Then you go on to say you'd never apply because you "know exactly how that process would go down." Which sounds like something you're thinking now and even in the future. I'm getting downvotes so maybe this makes no sense to anyone else but I don't see why you'd say "it's a shame" they've ruined their reputation in the past and then go on to say that you're sure things are going to be the same now and in the future. By the way, since I'm getting the downvotes already anyways, I might as well say that you sound a little salty. I'm sure no one bases hiring decisions entirely on what university you went to. Furthermore, all of the news articles we read love emphasizing the weird questions you might get once in a blue moon, the quirky perks you get for working there, etc. but in reality I doubt the interviews and work experience are much different from any other company (I asked my interviewers about this as well). Just some food for thought before you go accusing them of having "developed an overwhelming reputation" - a lot of this is the result of media hype, not their practices per se. Even though I agree that being employed at Google is probably overhyped, there's no need to be so antagonistic to the company for it.
  - morgante 12y ago
    To be clear, I'm just not sure what it's like there now. Maybe it's still bad, maybe it's improved a lot. Probably it's a bit of both, depending on who you encounter. My point is that even if they have improved (maybe they have!), their past reputation makes me reticent to even bother seeing if they have. > I'm sure no one bases hiring decisions entirely on what university you went to. Former Google managers have explicitly told me that this filter is used for some positions at the resume screening level. Sorry if I sounded salty. I have a great job and probably wouldn't work at Google even if they offered—just trying to frame the common perspective.

dsacco 12y ago

So, I'd like to think this article is more about hiring practices than it is about Google, but I'll bite. >> 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.) I didn't go to college at all, and I've been invited to interview there by engineering managers. If I didn't have absolute golden handcuffs at my current job, I might have considered it. Furthermore, I know plenty of people who haven't gone to any college and work at Google. If you don't hear back, it has nothing to do with the college you went to. Even if a single interviewer had this bias against you, the larger hiring committee would review each of the interviews you had with different people. To name a couple of examples - David Byttow, founder of Secret, was hired as a Software Engineer at Google without any degree. Michal Zalewski is in an engineering director role without a degree. Once you reach the interview, the sole reason for a hire/no-hire decision is how you did in the interview process. Literally nothing on your résumé will disbar you at that point. >> 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months. You won't hear about the interview date for months? I admit this can be frustrating for large companies, but no one I've spoken to told me it literally lasted months. The longest I've heard of was a month and a half, from first interview to hearing news. How are you submitting your résumé? Are you just applying to the job and hoping for a recruiter to pick it up, or actually emailing a hiring manager at Google? If you apply without trying to get the attention of a decision maker it always takes longer because that's how the process works at large companies. >> 3) I'll have to drill on data structures and efficiency of sorting algorithms I've literally never implemented outside of an interview or academic setting. While algorithmic questions are asked, they do not make up the entirety of the technical interviews at Google. Generally speaking from what I have seen, questions are not "implement a linked list", questions are "implement this program" and you are free to choose which algorithm is best. However, I acknowledge that interviewers might not always follow this. >> 4) Even having drilled on those arbitrary questions, I'll likely fail the interview because after a multi-day gauntlet of questions a random engineer didn't like the particular assumptions I put into my Fermi model of golf balls. Fermi questions are actively discouraged by the Hiring Committee, and questions involving these will be thrown out when evaluating an interviewer's analysis of an employee. As someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned, this would involve a strongly worded email from the Hiring Committee afterwards. The first thing to understand about Google's hiring process is that you are interviewed onsite using five or so 1:1 sessions. The interviewer has to perfectly transcribe everything that happens and needs to be able to explain their decision to the Hiring Committee. The Hiring Committee will not consider answers from an interviewer like, "He couldn't tell me how many stoplights are in Los Angeles" or answers like "He didn't give a good enough answer about why he wants to work here." I realize this seems like "my anecdata is better than your anecdata", but what are you saying is actively negative and contrary to a lot of the literature about what Google's hiring practices. I'm not saying their hiring practices are perfect - far from it. But you seem to be ascribing malice to their methodology when it's really not the case.

nostrademons 12y ago

Apply during a down-cycle. Most of the hiring snafus at Google are because they use a large population of temp recruiters, whose contracts may not be renewed before the candidates they're sponsoring get offers. When that happens, the candidates are often left in limbo. When there's a recession, all the temps are laid off, and you only get the permanent recruiters who now fear for their jobs. They are extra incentivized to a.) make sure the candidate gets through the process, so that they have a reason for their job to exist and b.) make sure the candidate has a good experience, so they get a commendation. And c.) they're all experienced, so you don't get the kind of gratuitous screw-ups you might with temps. The hiring bar is higher during down cycles, but that can also work in your favor as well; your resume doesn't just show "Worked at Google", it shows "Started at Google when nobody was hiring", and you occasionally get comments like "So how long you been at Google? Oh, that means you started in...January 2009, wow, you must be smart to have gotten through the hiring process then."

pucallpa 12y ago
when are the "down cycles" and "up cycles" ?
- jghn 12y ago
  Current status: up cycle The next down cycle: You'll know it when you see it
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Yeah, you'll know it when you see it. Some indicators: The press never writes articles on startups, except to report their demise. Everybody is seemingly in hiring freeze at once. (But don't let that stop you! Many times, companies that are reported to be "in hiring freeze" are actually still hiring for the right candidate.) VC firms start telling their portfolio companies to conserve cash, shutter lines of business, and lay off people. Plans for new corporate headquarters are shelved indefinitely. You start hearing "Well, at least I still have a job" from friends. You start hearing "Fuck, I just got laid off. Can I crash at your place for a month while I find a cheaper apartment?" from friends. Searching for new jobs starts to seem dauntingly frightening - what if they go under? (In the context of this thread, this is ridiculous - Google is not going under.)

spankalee 12y ago

Based on my actual experience: 1) I went to community college, dropped out, then finished my degree at a state school 10 years later. Google didn't care. 2) I have no idea how long it took them to decide to interview me. Once they decided I got a call. People I've referred recently have received _very_ prompt responses, though years ago sometimes people would sit "in the system" for a while. 3) It is good to brush up on algorithms, like for most other SWE interviews. You do end up using this stuff regularly though - Even if say, your'e "only" doing UIs, it's how you avoid accidental n^2 algorithms in the middle of your UI code which pisses off your users. I don't get the attitude that algorithms are just academic. They matter. Besides, "use a hash table" is often the correct approach in interviews and non-academic code ;) 4) I have no idea what a Fermi model of golfballs is, but I've never asked or been asked such a thing. And "fail" is such a black and white term. Candidates are scored, and those with marginal scores the first time often get another chance later on. 5) Not my experience in general. Sometimes the interviewers lag on getting in their feedback for non-hires, which is really unfortunate, but the recruiters are pretty on top of things. You say your post is based on actual hiring experiences, but I bet that the negative experiences get much more attention than the positive ones. People don't generally write blog posts about how wonderful their interview was.

kelukelugames 12y ago
I actually had a very good interview experience at google even though I didn't get an offer. One interviewer and I clearly did not get along but that happens other companies too.
- pkulak 12y ago
  Same here. The recruiter was super nice and it all went very quickly. I got to a second interview, but then didn't make the cut. I understand why; I screwed up those interviews pretty badly. It was my first technical interview ever. But, the experience was great and I'm much better at tech interviews now.
- MCRed 12y ago
  But, unless you were being an ass to that interviewer, whether you got along or not is not a measure of your quality as an employee. Presumably you were being polite and trying to develop a rapport. That means you didn't get along because the interviewer brought their own baggage or narrow mindedness into the interview. This is very common and shows the interview process was incompetent. That may sound like a strong word, but if you were qualified and they didn't hire you because of what this guy said, then they are, by definition, incompetent. Maybe arbitrary is a nicer word to use, but it's the same thing.

dmitrygr 12y ago

I was worried about this as well (to a point that when Google reached out to me, I told them thanks but no thanks, given all this). They eventually wore me down and the process was actually quite painless. I have been here for 3 years now, quite happily.

MCRed 12y ago
They wore you down? They tried to wear me down, to the point of contacting me multiple times a week, via every means of contact possible, for weeks on end, until I threatened to take them to court because they were harassing me after I asked them to stop contacting me. Every single one of those contacts, by the way, was by a used-car-salesman type of "recruiter" who would blow smoke and not answer questions, etc. There was no way I was going to ever work for google because of their lack of ethics... but this didn't matter to them. And their persistence despite being told that only confirmed the view. Edit: Sorry my experience doesn't fit your desired view of Google. But if pointing out facts that don't fit someone's ideology gets me constantly downvoted here, what is the purpose of participating in this site? Is this only for circle jerks?
- dmitrygr 12y ago
  They responded to all my questions as honestly as they were able to
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  I was mightily tempted to downvote you, not for the substance of your comment but for the complaints about downvoting. Up until the complaining it was interesting.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago

Facebook is still like this. The ask all the dumb questions like how do you detect what color hat someone is wearing. Then if you don't do well, they won't let you know.

limeyx 12y ago
I did not have at all this experience interviewing @ Facebook for a mobile position. Questions were reasonable and the interviewer gave nudges / prompts when it was obvious you were stuck on something. They really seem to take recruiting very seriously and it showed.
cbhl 12y ago
How do you detect what color hat someone is wearing?
- DanBC 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Puzzle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Puzzle Sadly not AI detecting hats and then finding colours based on lighting of faces and rest of scene.
  - jmccree 12y ago
    My response would be: Let me take a selfie.
justrudd 12y ago
Was this your experience? I just went through an SDE loop last week (still waiting to hear the results), but I got no "aha" questions. 2 strictly coding questions and 1 open-ended design question (with pseudo-code). It was very straight forward.

coffeemug 12y ago

Most people will go out of their away to invent reasons for why a disadvantageous evaluation system is fundamentally broken. For example, people who don't do well on standardized tests (e.g. SATs) typically say "I'm bad at test-taking" or "SATs are stupid" despite overwhelming evidence that SATs are a good predictor of general intelligence. It's worth considering the possibility that while you may be a great developer, you're not as good as you think you are with respect to the caliber of people that work at Google. (Note -- I don't work at Google and didn't do spectacularly well on standardized tests; but after working with many algorithms whizzes over the years I've learned that I'm not nearly as good a programmer as I once thought).

nvarsj 12y ago
> despite overwhelming evidence that SATs are a good predictor of general intelligence I never heard this before. I thought that SATs and other standardized tests heavily correlate with background / race. Which to me, means it's not a good indicator of intelligence, but rather education.
- morgante 12y ago
  That depends on whether or not you think intelligence is an inheritable trait.
morgante 12y ago
If Google primarily worked on developing novel sorting algorithms, I'd agree that this is a great process for them. Heck, maybe it is a great process for them—they just do an astoundingly poor job of explaining who they want to work at Google. (Also, please recall that literally the only time I personally applied to Google was the freshman year of college. This isn't a case of personal sour grapes.) By the way, I also don't think their hiring process is fundamentally broken. Just pointing out that this is the reputation it's acquired. Since you brought up the SAT, it's an absolutely perfect and effective system with zero flaws—which I did spectacularly well on.
Spooky23 12y ago
If SATs were some sort of general intelligence assessment, it is unlikely that a $500 Kaplan course would significantly increase your scores (which they do).

discardorama 12y ago

> 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.) > 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months. My gut feeling is that with the rise of Facebook, Google has really changed its hiring practices. Now they don't want to lose out a good talent to FB; and dicking around for months is a sure-fire way to lose that talent, because FB sure doesn't.

samstave 12y ago

I interviewed over a period of three month in 2007. At the end of the interview, they said I did great. The recruiter called me and said they would be extending me an offer the next day. I was ecstatic and told my family and was planning on how I would tell my current employer. The next day the recruiter called me and said that they rescind this and wont be offering me the job. He said he was not given a reason why. Then, over the next ~4 years, they called me no less than 4 times for the same damn position. I had to remind the recruiter about the first interview experience, after which they said OK then they dont want to continue that process. After the 4th time, I angrily said to the recruiter "You have called me for this position 4 times! Either give me the damn position of delete my damn phone number from your system!!" They haven't called me since.