I worked for Intel years ago, and a lot of things in this thread applied there: really awful institutional performance review processes (they called it "ranking and rating"; I think it's been changed a lot since I left though), and also hiring first and doing allocations later (I had no idea what exactly I'd be doing when I got hired, but I was only a couple years out of college so I was very junior anyway).

Working there had its ups and downs. I will say, that company could actually produce stuff, unlike some places I've seen. It was also really, really nice to have a cubicle, but they were "compressing" those when I left. I have no idea if they've moved to the stupid open-office plan or not since then, but I kinda doubt it actually. I really miss having a cubicle... I used to think they sucked, but after years of other office arrangements, I now long for a cubicle again (though a walled office would of course be much better, just like it'd be nice to live in a $10M mansion and have a private jet).

Anyway, the interview process at Intel back then was grueling and ridiculous, with a bunch of managers coming in and grilling me with questions on all kinds of stuff, a lot which I had no idea about (like device physics). But a couple years ago I interviewed with Google. That was probably the worst interview experience I've ever had.

Lastly, I've interviewed at and worked with some other large companies. Their interviews were nothing like Google's.

Google's interviews are not like other companies', and are not representative of large companies at all. Google's interviews are unique to Google, and have been roundly criticized by many.

I interviewed with them 2 years ago, as well as a couple of months ago. 2 years ago I would have rated the experience as "fine". My most recent experience was great, however. Very organized, lots of communication on Google's part, and I had a great interviewer. They have definitely made improvements.

Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).

Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter. Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly on that, so they forwarded me to another recruiter who passed me on to a developer for a code interview. I was fairly fed up at this point and not looking for a job anyway, so I didn't do any interview prep. Interviewer sounded bored as hell, asked me to implement a graph deep copy algorithm and some other basic stuff. I haven't done algorithms implementation since college; I work in the real world where we have Google and libraries. So I bombed that, too. Got a call a few days later saying they're not interested. OK, see ya.

Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit, which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies suck.

Sounds pretty much like my experience with Google. I'm an embedded programmer with a EE degree, not a CS degree, and they hammered me with a bunch of algorithm questions like you said. I'm not even interested in (nor qualified for) heavy-CS type work; I thought maybe they'd want me for more low-level stuff or doing some kind of work with hardware, custom OS or driver development, etc.

But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush. Google's interviews are not at all like the interviews I've done with a bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small workgroup I ended up working in was a great team to work with, and again didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of years.

Haha, yeah, I do systems development, not far from your area of work, I imagine. I have a CS degree, but I hated doing it. Google seemed to be aiming for CS experts, and I just want to make computers do cool/useful stuff.

Of course, there's other disadvantages to working for big companies. Lots of dead weight (see: that recruiter I worked with), lots of rules, a lack of trust, lots of bureaucracy... I'd do it if I have to, but the small company vibe works way better for me.

There's advantages to big companies too: better pay usually, better benefits, more structure, and in my experience more professionalism. Also the ability to move laterally is useful. If you're a female or minority you'll probably do better in a big company too because they're very intolerant of harassment and discrimination because they can get in legal trouble for it, so they're very proactive about addressing these things early on, providing training for it, etc., whereas some small companies I've been at seem to have a "good-ole boy" culture still hanging around. If you can get into the right workgroup, a big company can be a good experience, but different groups and departments can be run very differently from each other within the same company.

Not saying it's a good interview question, but if you ever need to quickly estimate exponents of 2 just remember 2^10 bytes=1kb, 2^20=1mb, 2^30=1gb, etc. so 2^14 would be 16kb.

This is an old post about the experience for those interested: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/my-job-interview-at-google/