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.
2) I agree that algorithms are important, to the extent that you know the importance of "use a hash table." I don't think being able to implement quicksort on a white board is important.
They want to see your thought process as you tackle an unfamiliar problem. Do you think about the input and the end-goals explicitly? Do you consider multiple different ways of solving it, and cover pros/cons? Do you consider where issues may occur, and attempt to mitigate them? That's what they want to see.
I guess I could go dig up my old data structures and algorithms book that I haven't touched in 15 years to refresh my memory, but I don't want to work at Google badly enough to bother with that.
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.
More importantly, conditions like "unless you were being an ass to that interviewer" make it an entirely sensible comment, in my view. I remember strongly disliking how fellow interviewers had zero empathy. They generally have more power in that situation, and therefore more responsibility for reasonable outcomes.
I also agree with the commentor that interviewers can be very arbitrary, and that is not good.
I only took issue with "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."
Commentor doesn't know what went on in that room, and doesn't know that this is what happened in this case.
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."
The next down cycle: You'll know it when you see it
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.)
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).
(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.
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.
http://www.fairtest.org/sat-i-faulty-instrument-predicting-c...
It's a small anecdote, but my high school got a grant to do a pilot program to incorporate SAT test prep into the school program back in the 90s. IIRC, the average score went up 100 points vs. the PSAT. With the old version of the test, I went from the 1200s (80th percentile) to the 1400s (95th). Writing was an optional test then, and the test prep didn't cover it, but I was already familiar with the writing process from AP courses.
30 points IMO would represent prep focused on test strategy exclusively. For example, with tests like the SAT, answering questions wrong comes with a higher penalty than not answering.
If you drill on vocabulary, tune your writing to line up with the scoring methodology and are familiar with the structure of math problems asked, you're golden. But knowing those things doesn't grant you greater general intelligence.
As for your anecdotal evidence, it sounds pretty flawed to compare results on the PSAT to the SAT directly—I also got a much higher score on the SAT without doing any studying at all, probably because they're scored and weighted entirely differently. Moreover, if this comparison was done over a year (ex. sophomore to junior year), the results are likely even more flawed—there's too much confounding development in that year to attribute the increase to SAT prep.
Anecdotally, I know I did much better than all of my friends who spent months studying for the SAT and drilling on vocabulary, math, and strategy. If the SAT is so game-able, they should have overcome me.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly not AI detecting hats and then finding colours based on lighting of faces and rest of scene.
> 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.
>> 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.
The author of "Cracking the Coding Interview", who worked at Google, has publicly said that, at least in her hiring committees, your education and particularly the prestige of the school you went to was very important.
In all of the hiring committees I've participated in I can't remember a case where the candidate's school was a significant factor in the hiring decision. Even for new grads.
It's possible that it's given more weight in the pre-screening process, but once you get to interviews it just doesn't matter much at all. At least that's my experience as both an interviewer and a hiring committee member.
There are all sorts of reasons why they wouldn't take me, but there's no way that's one.
Want to work at El Goog? Cultivate as much weirdness as you can without becoming a criminal or jeopardizing your competence.
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.)