Good luck. I recently went through the google interview process and it took months. The lockdowns were starting and the economy was melting down around me, and then I myself got sick with covid-19. It was a stressful time.

I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.

Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.

Google has a notoriously slow hiring process. For new grads and internships, the time between initial coding assessment to final hiring confirmation is often several months.

Yep, we took advantage of that at Netflix. Our average time from first contact to walking in the door was about two weeks if you wanted to move as quickly as we did.

We got a few folks who were in the final stage at Google, and we contacted them, interviewed them, made the offer, and got them in the door before Google ever got back to them.

They've been slow on "poaching" experienced folks as well. One person I know was offered a king's ransom to switch to Google, refused a "please stay" premium from the home company, and it still took half a year to walk through the door.

A friend interviewed with Google a few years ago and the process took well over six months before he actually got an official offer. It really is amazing how slow they are.

Counter point: The time between my on site interview and hire date was 1 month and 1 day. I skipped the phone interview so the time from initial referral to offer was under a month.

Having an internal reference may have helped, as did the fact that I told them I was actively interviewing and had offers.

Similar experience here. Having internal references seems to be very useful, not just for skipping the phone interview but for getting through the hiring committee. My start day is exactly one month after my interview, but even then that is because I put it back a week.

Does anybody get hired for SWE positions at Google _without_ an internal referral? When I was interviewing there 6 or so years ago I was under the impression that you, in practice, had to have an insider vouch for you.

The only internal reference I had was a distant acquaintance who - as they said themselves - just submitted one that basically read "don't know them much but they don't seem to be a jerk".

So you can absolutely get hired in engineering without internal references. (I'm also on a hiring committee myself.)

When I got hired back in 2004 that was pretty much the bar (helped that I knew how to fix servers I suspect too)!! :)

I was hired last year without a reference. I just submitted a resume to the careers page.

Sure, but my Fortune 500 employer takes 2-3 weeks to do that on average. Longer only if the new hire needs longer to unwind from prior commitments.

My story: first contact December 2005, started work October 2006.

My story: Interviewed October 2014, they wanted me to start December 2014, I pushed them to Jan 2015. My friend interviewed a week or two after me, started 1 week after me.

That seems longer than typical. From my first phone call with a recruiter to my first day of work was less than 4 months, and that includes me intentionally delaying my interview until after the holiday season, giving the job I left more than the standard 2 weeks notice, and my Google start date being pushed back due to the coronavirus situation

I purposely delayed my interview despite recruiter encouragement to get it over with, but I interviewed on March 20th, I was hired on the 30th (I think, it was in the week after the interview, I team matched by the end of the week), and I will onboard (unless something bad happens) next Monday. I’ve found Google to be much faster than I thought.

Congrats! Enjoy your time there. There's lots of good people, including some programming language luminaries.

One has to think why the concept of employment is still considered like marriage that require such an extensive ultra-deep multi-level deliberations. Let's say you were local, why it shouldn't be possible to give someone on-the spot offer after half-day of interviews as well as let them go with, say 2 weeks of standard severance if things don't work out?

At a large technology company with its own software stack it takes several months before a new hire isn’t a net-negative to the team they join. And it will be months after that before they reach full productivity. A bad hire is an extremely expensive mistake.

A bad hires are expensive mistake if you can't get rid of them until some artificial annual event. While I understand onboarding complexities, my experience is that the teams/companies which hasn't create good automated process so new hire can commit their first change within 2-days are big red flag (this was insisted upon by Zuck extensively at Facebook scale). I would also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.

Being able to make a change, and being able to make a change without handholding are two different things.

> hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa

Places where this happens are normally considered very high stress and competitive.

> I would also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.

You're arguing in favour of high turnover - that can't be good neither for the company nor for the employees.

As much as our industry sucks at interviewing, it sucks at performance management even more.

A congenial but mediocre developer can stick around forever in most places once they're in.

This performance management weakness also makes me suspicious of various companies claiming to have nailed the interview process.

A congenial but mediocre developer may actually be more valuable than a rowdy and talented one because she pisses off less number of other brilliant developers.

Correct.

But that congenial/mediocre developer is still taking up a headcount that could hold a congenial/high-performing developer instead. There is also a separate issue where mediocrity discourages high-performers.

Because employment is indeed like marriage. Divorce and bad marriage is costly.

I mean, in some places, with some companies, they hire people as temps or contractors and later make them permanent. That effectively amounts to the arrangement you describe. This can't be obscure, so I don't understand your tone as if it was. It's just a matter of what kind of employment you consider worth applying for.

That would be a creative and different way to hire local unemployed people.

But it'll give you a reputation that makes it difficult to entice the sort of people whose current employers don't want them to leave.

It costs millions of dollars to hire someone at a place like Google. If you get it wrong you’re making an extremely expensive mistake.

Bringing someone up to speed in a large complicated ecosystem is extremely expensive. They will have to invest months into you before you will be capable of contributing in a way that isn't a net loss and a drag on existing team members.

At worst you pose a massive threat to the company/codebase. LOL i accidentally leaked all our secrets to china/apple/MS whoops.

But most of these companies/teams already employ massive numbers of contractors. They typically sign NDAs and often work on same code.

I've been on development teams which had contractors as 20% or more members. We had just couple of interviews and next-day offers for contractors while full timers went through multi-month process. Both worked on same code, often similarly complex tasks and used same on-boarding docs etc. One difference was that full timers were given more longer term tasks although, looking back, I feel many longer tasks simply became longer term because of tribal knowledge full timers developed and kept to themselves. The contractors were required to extensively document everything all the time :).

Pretty much all of my University friends got into team matching at Google for an internship position (myself included). All of them would have taken the job, and none of them were able to because the process was too long. It's pretty absurd, they even set up a call with myself and a dozen other people in team matching to basically tell us that we should take any other offers we have because Google is too slow. And then for full time it was the same thing - my time from application to on-site to offer was like 2 weeks for Jane Street, why is it 3 months for Google? The worst was that the deadline kept getting pushed back - for a month, I was told that I would be matched with a team that week, and I never actually got matched before my other offer deadlines.

I think everybody who interviews at Google gets “stuck in the final process for a week”. That’s kinda how they do things. I interviewed there and they rejected me at the final stage after many days of no-communication; but they told me I almost made it, which made me feel good until I talked to other people and found out they say that to everyone. Still: best of luck to you :)

If you made it to the full slate of interviews, you're already in the 1% of top applicants. If you made it through to hiring committee submission as well, you were very close to getting hired (they don't even try otherwise) and they're serious if they suggest you try again later.

I was rejected by an SVP at Google. Recruiter was surprised but said it happens. Said I did a good job and could pick a different role (wasn’t for SWE), got the offer the second time around but had to start all over and got passed to a new recruiter.

I wish I could want to work at Google, but, between the hazing rituals on the front end, the long lead times, and these mysterious vetoing robed elders on the back end, they make it so unattractive.

I wonder whether their approach has been alienating entire large categories of people, and what diversity of ideas and influences they're missing as a result.

Yeah, I think most normal people would just never apply and that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think working at Google is FOR normal people. I am a normal person and I'm pretty sure Google is not suffering from the lack of me! :D

You know, I work in tech but I have never attempted to have a Career in Tech. I definitely don't own a whiteboard and I'm sure I'd never get past the resume stage. (I've only actively applied for a couple of jobs in my life and all in the past year, purely because I thought I should REALLY get some experience with applying for jobs. I actually just had an interview and bombed it so much, omg, at one point I claimed not to know JavaScript! :D I don't think it's for me.)

But out of the rareified circles of HN, I've not found any of the career stuff talked up on here to be necessary anyway. There's more code that needs writing than coders to write it and so long as that's true there'll be work going. I work a few days a week for a company and the rest for myself. I have fun and write code and invent things and people generally give me enough money to pay my bills so I'm happy with that. It's a pretty sweet deal! Before I was a coder I was an unpaid family caregiver (hence no school or credentials or career) so compared to that I can't really imagine a programming job that could really genuinely be BAD. They are all simply gradations of sweet.

My brother (who did massively go to school) works at Google and loves it. I drop in and hang out with him there sometimes and it does seem great for a certain kind of person. And they have so many resources and work on loads of fun games and obviously it would be great to be rich as well. I think it's really clear why it's so attractive. If you think you have a shot then go for it!

But if you know you don't have a shot, why break your heart over it, is my view. It's not a bad thing to be clear eyed about your prospects in life.

I'm in the same situation. That whole process makes me feel like a mindless cog about to enter a well oiled machine without the possibility to question some of those nonsensical steps.

How does that happen? The way interviewing should work is that every person that interviewed you should vote, and if its unanimous that you should be hired, then some SVP a few levels up decided to veto it, I'd be livid if I was a hiring manager.

So, your described situation almost never happens. There are candidates who get 100% hire votes, and they get hired. Most candidates have some variability- it is rare that everyone is 100% onboard. The svp review is to make sure that the hiring process has worked and nothing major has been missed.

Yeah, that screams micromanagement.

If you so lack in trust that the people on your team can make good hiring decisions, even to the point of rejecting somebody you haven’t actually met...well... that’s just nuts.

My theory was that it was a comp/background mismatch. I was interviewing for a role that someone with more of a sysadmin background could do but I had a SWE background and was trying to command that comp level.

For many (although not all) people being hired at Google, the SVP approval process happens before you're matched with a manager. The SVP approves you to work in their PA, and then you're matched with a manager within the PA.

Execs veto decisions lower down all the time, for good and bad reasons. If you don’t like it, get yourself promoted.

They are free to do so, but when they do it for arbitrary reasons, it instills a lack of trust in leadership. Leaders that lead through fear are much less effective than leaders that are able to motivate their followers in positive ways.

How common is this? What was it like going through a second time? Any stigma or negative associations you detected?

If you are past team matching phase then it is likely that you would get an offer.

Note: I don't represent Google.

I was one of the "special" ones who didn't make it past Google's final hiring committee review (although I now suspect this is a lot more common than they let on). And that happened after the recruiter had already called to check my references, matched me with a team, given me a verbal offer and told me it was "basically" final. The entire process took over 3 months. It has been years but I'm still annoyed by how they wasted my time.

Yeah, I was brought back after the final interview to do another round and was verbally told by the recruiter that everything looked great and that she would be extremely surprised if I didn't get an offer.

Guess who got to tell me I didn't get it (again)?

Note to recruiters: don't say that stuff.

Fortunately, I'm still happy in my current job.

Being brought back to do another interview is not a good sign at Google. Best case is your interviewers totally forgot to cover something important, but more commonly it means somebody has serious doubts about something and they need to check it again.

Or that you're being considered for a similar job but under a different hiring manager.

Another thing to note about Google hiring is that it's very different for different role types. Specifically, for SWEs, Sales, and other roles that are expected to function in a largely boilerplate manner, it's fairly cut & dried how things work, but for roles that are less clearly defined (for example, "program manager" or "solutions consultant") the actual responsibilities can be so highly variable (or so niche) that interviewing for them is a specialization in itself. These kind of one-off situations is where Google's "automate all the things" general mentality falls apart.

Same thing happened with me -- I wouldn't quite go as far as receiving a verbal offer, but had been discussing compensation and they were asking about my other offers to send off to the comp team after I matched with a team. Such a long, drawn out process to come up with nothing.

As a note, there’s another compensation review that takes place after hiring committee.

What makes you think that? I’m past team matching, HC, and VP. I’d be so disappointed to make it so far and not get the offer...

How often does one get past hiring committee but not match to a team? What happens then typically?

FWIW Google hiring is just generally really slow. Give it a few more days.

If you do get it, I'd strongly consider negotiating a severance for the risk you're taking on.

You might be okay, time to reach out to your recruiter.

I did — she said, paraphrased, "I wouldn't blame you if you took another offer. I have no idea how long it will take in light of today's memo"

I’m also stuck at the SVP approval since 8 days...

What's SVP?

Senior Vice President.

Every hire at google needs to be OK'd by a Senior Vice President?

Until 201x (not sure exactly when it changed), every hire needed to be approved by Larry (ref both my memory and https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-larry-page-on-hir...).

Thanks.

Didn’t know google had so many senior vice presidents ...

They don't.

job title inflation is a thing.

But not at the SVP level, at least not at Google.

The bullet of getting hired by a company with famously large margins and a huge pile of cash? I could think of worse places to be during this crisis.

Is it surprising that some people may value things other than just money? Of course there are people who would decide against an opportunity to go work for Google, FaceBook, Twitter, et al. I like to think there are more than a few, but I've no sources to backup any assertions right now.

How is that relevant in the least to someone who applied for a job there?

I don't understand your question. Did you read the post I was replying to? That may add missing context.

It’s possible they would have just built yet another chat app for Google to shutdown. I’m not sure what Google even does anymore innovation wise with all their wealth and resources.

They do some great machine learning research and I am sure good research in other fields.

Surely their research is a small percentage of all hires.

A silver bullet?

There’s better companies IMO.