The recruiter was nonplussed when she called me out of the blue months later trying to schedule my on-site. She couldn’t believe I was not interested in continuing - how could I turn down Google??
This was when the google koolaid was far stronger - early/mid 2000s. To this day I consider it the most amazing example of a company being so entranced by its own narrative that it was genuinely incomprehensible to her and required spelling it out slowly.
Google is still a great place to land as a new college grad, but these days I would consider many other options as an experienced professional. There are indicators that Google is starting to run into issues detailed in The Innovator's Dilemma, particularly with respect to its Cloud business.
And if you say smart, what's the current smart choice? (I will be checking back in 15 years to follow up).
Lol. I had the exact same experience back in the late 90s, but with... IBM. Arrogant as heck, took three months to follow up and were shocked to know I was no longer interested. It was beautiful.
Probably all the 900-pound gorilla companies go through that period of extreme arrogance when everyone's knocking on their door. Until they're not.
Actually (with that) he wasn't being an asshole; he was doing you a favor.
In revealing to you, quite candidly, just how disappointing the Google experience evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
> evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
I only see evidence that the experience was disappointing for a single Googler, the lunch interviewer, not "a considerable portion" of them. The interviewer's data point is certainly valid, but it's not clear to me how much you can generalize it.
As an interviewer myself and having interviewed for startups (which is a different beast due to the additional selling involved in converting candidates) I've learnt to break the ice, encourage the candidates, treat them as human and guide them towards the solution if they're off by a little. I do also cut short some interviews when I realise the candidate is an obvious mismatch. I do so politely and in the interest of saving both of us some time.
So, when the Airbnbs, Dropboxes and Googles don't extend the same courtesy - even though I know they have the upper hand - I lose any interest I have in joining them by the end of the interview. I have had really good experience with BrainTree & Pinterest & a few others. So I do know not all companies are bad and even within the company there are good and bad interviewers and it's just a matter of luck. Still, the doubts about self-worth are hard to squash.
Edit: I call out Braintree in particular because they conduct interviews in pairs. At least one person's job to listen at all times. IMHO, this makes all the difference. Any signs of bias, narrow perspectives and hostile behaviour should - at least to some degree - be reduced with this model.
I'm pretty sure that there is another "school of thought" that is exactly the opposite: start nonimpressed to make the candidate "fight for it". In some companies it's very plain how interviewers agreed a bad cop / good cop routine in advance.
My understanding is that this isn't a criterion for choosing interviewers, even lunch interviewers. The recruiters who line up interviewers with candidates aren't in a position know the views of the interviewers; I don't know any of them barely at all.
(Disclosure: I work at Google and have conducted many interviews, but I'm speaking only for myself.)
Obviously it is to be taken into account together with a whole slew of data points -- not just in the form of online postings, but from close acquaintances who have worked there over there years.
Humans don't work like that. That single data point and the experience he had allows quite some generalization.
Maybe this isn't how you build a ML model, but that ML model won't work very well when interacting with other people.
"I think you will like it here, me I'm bailing because I can't stand it"
The fact that someone in the interview chain is willing to tell you significant negative information dramatically raises the Bayesian prior.
An interview chain is normally extremely well vetted for people who are positive-only. The fact that this failed is a dramatic cause for concern.
Having worked at four companies I have yet to see there being any serious discussions on merits of which questions to ask, the style of interview to be conducted, how to grade candidates reliably, or the amount of help and guidance to give candidates. In short as far as I can tell the whole tech interview process is generally a mess.
I have tried to push for discussions on all of the topics above and most engineers simply do not find the topic interesting enough to engage at length. There's a lot to discuss and everyone complains about the current state of the interview process across the whole field yet few do more than complain. Alas that is life.
As for vetting for "positive-only", I am not sure that's something that can even be done. Usually conducting interviews is part of your performance and you are expected to do them or it will reflect poorly on you as an employee. So every senior engineer or above typically will aim to do some amount of interviews and, let's say you are one of them and you are not very happy, when you get asked by your manager whether you are a positive employee, you are very unlikely to say no.
Also unhappiness is a pervasive quality regardless of title and you can very easily find high level managers and one year out of college engineers that are equally unhappy if you were to ask them candidly. This is a separate topic, but we as an industry have potential to make our workplaces incredibly engaging and rewarding but that potential somehow seems so very hard to achieve.
Whoa! Really?!?!?!
That's a huge difference from any of the places I have worked. If you didn't want to be on the interview loop, nobody in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to command you to do so.
Normally people wanted to be on the interview loop simply so they had input on the people who might become their colleagues. But there were people who wanted nothing to do with the loop and that was okay, too. Maybe you simply had too many deadlines or just were an introverted personality.
But forcing people to do the interview loop? That's seems like a recipe for disaster.
Interviewing is apparently the most popular choice to fulfill this requirement, so get ready for a glut of disinterested people interviewing you at google.
I also interviewed there last spring, but I thought it was super positive, even though I didn't get the job. I had to push myself really hard to get the onsite and I think that was beneficial to me. I have no computer science background at all and it forced me to prep intensively between interviews. So, I kind of went into it figuring I probably wouldn't get it but who knows and that it would just be good to have the experience of this super tough interview.
I learned some things! I started thinking about my job a bit differently, which is cool. Also, at the very least, the process made me better at interviews. Ha! There's always something you can take from a difficult experience (and it was for sure difficult.)
I don't think you should feel discouraged or feel bad about your abilities. It sounds like it was just a poor fit and you should be happy it didn't work out! Plus, now you've been through it once. You know what it's like. You can do it again somewhere else and it'll work out.
Good luck with Amazon!
It has not been a mistake.
As plenty of people have mentioned, more than a million people interview here every year. With that many interviews, I cannot imagine how bad some outlier horror stories can be.
In aggregate, something like 78% of people consider interviewing at Google a positive experience, despite the fact that only less than 2% of respondents actually go on to work here.
I dunno about every one else, but usually there's a high correlation with satisfaction and getting the job. The fact that hardly anyone ends up getting a job here, and the vast majority of people are satisfied seems like the process isn't terrible.
I doubt there's many companies with a better track record.
I hear nothing but good things about Microsoft recently, so I wouldn't be surprised if their numbers are better.
If 100 people apply, only a small subset move on to the phone-screen. And you need to at least take the phone screen to be given a chance to fill out the satisfaction survey. Otherwise, there's not much for you to be satisfied or not with.
I'm not sure what the percentage of people that make it to the phone screen and have a chance to fill out this survey. Let's say it's 20%. Of those 20%, only a subset actually fill out the survey. Let's say it's 33%.
So, with my napkin stats, if 100 people apply, 6.6 would fill out the survey. Of those 6.6 respondents, ~1 of them went on to work here, and is hopefully satisfied with his/her experience.
Another ~4 should be satisfied. And the other ~2.6 would be dissatisfied.
It's possible that the other ~13 people that didn't respond were all dissatisfied. But they didn't respond, so we don't know.
Hiring 1/100 applicants is not unusual for any company. Put up an ad on any job site and you'll get hundreds of resumes from across the planet. Given the low effort of putting in the initial application, the odds are not a big issue there. The interesting question is the number you seem to be guessing at, namely the odds of getting an offer after investing so much time and effort in the grueling interview process. If that's very low, then they are quite evil.
As for 2/100, I thought you meant onsite interviews, which would be especially crushing for those of us who are going to do a google onsite interview pretty soon. If its just applicants, I can’t imagine it being even that good since Google must get a lot of resumes and without a recommend your chance of being noticed isn’t that great. And with the recommend, it looks like you can skip the phone screen, further skewing the numbers.
1/100. I think that’s literally a lower acceptance rate than most top level military special forces units. People getting these offers from Google must be truly god-tier.
I walked away feeling like if I really wanted to I could knuckle down and study for longer and get a job there, but I decided it wasn't really my thing and went in other directions. Like I said, I took the studying and the subject matter as a challenge and I feel pretty pleased with how far I got considering I have a painting degree.
3 years ago i got that impression too. Google seems to be scrambling to get into cloud business believing that they are somehow entitled to success in what is a completely foreign business for them. Anyway, it was a surprise mirroring the experience of a couple acquaintances (who is in the same boat - long time enterprise software devs) - the interview wasn't a big deal and the result was an L5 with very low comp (not sure why they bothered at all offering below even regular companies not just FAANG), naturally didn't go for it. As far as i see Google runs the hiring as an academia/exec style appointment committees - those hiring/compensation committees - where one has to have the good looking on paper achievements to hit reasonably well, and the interview just gets you in the door.
that was my google onsite experience in 2013. I haven't been back and wouldn't try again.
In contrast, my Amazon interviews were extremely efficiently done, and I loved their planning around it. Quick, no-nonsense, quick turnaround.
I applied for a job, and received an out-of-the-blue email from a recruiter about a different job a couple months later (my resume must have landed in some "recent" bucket). The position was in Google Cloud. I was frustrated by the "you'll talk to a team after you've passed 100 hurdles" nonsense.
I had one phone screen with my recruiter, which was positive. She said we'd be scheduling a phone interview. I got a call a few days later; she said we'd be skipping the phone interviews and going to an on-site at Sunnyvale. I thought this was a good sign! In hindsight, I think they just needed to fill a lot of positions quickly.
I did the onsite, which I thought went terribly, and I left feeling really discouraged. My recruiter said my packet wouldn't go the hiring committee, but that she thought the feedback was positive enough that I could find another role at the company. I got handed to another recruiter for a lesser role doing developer support. That recruiter reached out to me a few days later to tell me that he didn't actually have any roles for me.
The whole process took a couple months, and ultimately made me feel bad about my abilities. Everyone I met at the onsite was kind of an asshole. My "lunch interviewer" complained about the bureaucracy and said he was looking for another job after being there for ~18 months.
It's unfortunate that positions at FAANG are so beneficial to my resume, because I'd love to never go through that process again. I'm going through it right now with Amazon.