If Google (or any other company) don't know whether they should hire you after 6 interviews, I think that says more about them and their process than you.
In another refutation of Betteridge's Law, the answer is yes. Google has been relentlessly trying to recruit people in my peer group for a long time. I guess it's a specialty that's in high demand somewhere within the 'plex. A lot of these people are very talented indeed, and about half of them just won't even consider Google. Of those, it's another even split between those who are uninterested in Google generally (privacy issues or ad-based business model) vs. those who are specifically put off by the interview process. So that's maybe a quarter of that sample. It's something I'd be deeply concerned about if I were at Google myself, but I guess they feel that if they just fling enough money around they'll find enough people willing to put up with that crap, and since they literally have more money than they know what to do with it's not a problem.
I work on distributed filesystems. Most of the people I'm talking about work on various forms of data storage, though I could also think of a couple in virtualization, containers, config management, etc. One of the perks of being at Red Hat is that I get to rub shoulders (and sometimes bump elbows) with people across a pretty broad range of specialties.
I always wonder how Google manages to hire. I have a good friend there, but it was only because another role fell through that she ended up at Google; had the other company's HR department decided it was okay for a husband and wife to be working in the same department (different teams), she'd have gone there first.
For myself, Google's recruitment process was pretty laughable. I applied once in college for an internship, which was never responded to (fair enough), then had a recruiter reference it three years later when I was actually looking for another job, which I followed up on, but then had them drop off the radar (as seems pretty common) for a month, as I took a job elsewhere, and then later recruiters doing the same thing, referencing the time I applied 5-7 years earlier as 'expressing interest'. No, not interested.
It's just as well their interviews are geared for college students, because that seems to be the only type who would actually tolerate their hiring process (well, that and the type who doesn't actually need an interview, the famous 'oh, you have literally written the book on X, come work on X here' sort)
When you have a reputation for great culture and good pay, and are one of the best known tech companies, you get enough applicants that you can use pretty much whatever hiring process you want.
Most of the complaints in this thread are from people that had a bad experience interviewing with Google. There are very few people talking here that are Google employees that were through the process and/or had a positive experience. Google rejects far more people than it hires. So there are going to be way more voices on the rejected side of the discussion.
Bad hiring experiences suck and I know it's something many of the interviewers at Google try to avoid. But sometimes it happens, especially when you get the number of applicants that Google gets.
" (well, that and the type who doesn't actually need an interview, the famous 'oh, you have literally written the book on X, come work on X here' sort)"
Well, they have a reputation for absolutely disregarding whether you are famous or not:
That is the classic recent example of the phenomenon, right there. Seriously, if you don't usually read Twitter threads and you're interested at all in this HN story, you owe it to yourself to read that one.
I did the Google interview process and it lasted around four months. Finally, their decision was to say 'no' to me. They reached out for me twice after that, asking if I was interested in doing the entire process again. I turned them down both times and tried to politely explain that I didn't have any more time for them, that I already invested all the time that I was willing to invest in any company and more... Hell! I even used a week from my vacations to travel to their offices! What I don't understand is, do they expect us to dissappear from our jobs for a week, to travel to their offices, and not loose our current jobs in the process?
Weirdly, it seems very oriented for a European set of employees. A friend of mine who joined earlier this year was quite happy to burn through several days of holiday in order to take the interviews. But, as we get ~28 days a year, it isn't such a big deal.
Could be. I live in Argentina and we only get 14 days/year. Overall, I was lucky that I could match the travel date that they set with my vacations so I didn't need to do any explaining at my job at that time.
I am European. In Europe people have a strong work-life balance culture with the main focus on life :). I cannot imagine that any European would want to sacrifice holidays for a job interview. Normally people call in sick if they need to go to for an interview. And yes, Europeans have 25+ days annual leave, but the general feeling is that this is not enough. I think the priorities for the average European are as follows: Family > Friends > Hobbies > Holidays > Beer > Food > Cat > Dog > Neighbor's Cat > Something very unsignificant > Work
I suspect it selects for a very particular type of person -- someone who values the opportunity to work for google more than their own time; and consequently results in employees who are eager and willing to put the company before themselves, work long hours, and not challenge the company's management or policies.
It's like a gang initiation: put them through an ordeal to test and cement their loyalty.
Googler here, I don't find that long grueling hours is something they select for or that Google is particularily known for.
But IMHO the interview process (which I dislike) definitely selects for new-grad types. From my perspective it's very heavily biased against industry-experience types and in favour of people who are comfortable in the "look I can excellently apply what I learned in my Algorithms/Data structure course on a whiteboard without sweating and getting nervous".
I should also note that the interview process also puts a lot of burden on Googlers. People, especially senior people, spend a _lot_ of time interviewing.
Yeah, I had an interview where it was blatantly obvious the person doing it didn't want to spend the time. It was a remote interview, somewhat far along the process (e.g. after screening and some technical) via Skype, but sound only, no video. I found that a bit weird not seeing the person I was talking to. But realized during the screen-programming-session the interviewer was busy doing something else, so it was probably why.
I think it's true that they're filtering for people who value that opportunity, but I'll also note that those people fall into two important categories. First are those who want to work at Google itself. Second are those who want to have Google on their resume, and an extra bucket of money from being overpaid for a few years, as a way to jump-start whatever they do next (including startups). Google is glad to have these ambitious, slightly mercenary types pass through, making contributions while there and then seeding the rest of the industry with allies. If Google were just hiring the lifers their interview process would be even more rigorous but less burdensome and demeaning. They're deliberately selecting for ambition and determination as much as actual talent.
Well at least it has put me off, after being rejected twice.
I did not even apply, rather was invited by their HR.
Most likely I am not skilled enough to work there and am just a vocal average developer, fair enough, no complaints about it.
But then don't spam me all the time saying how great addition I would be to whatever team X, either I am an average developer or a great addition to the team.
I'm not sure what role the author is referring to, but I never heard of ordinary job applicants taking 6 months. I applied to Google online for a software engineer position and their recruiter reached out to me the next day. We scheduled an in-person interview a couple weeks later (since I wanted a little time to prepare). After the interview, it took a little under two weeks for them to move forward to meeting potential teams, and one more week for an actual offer to be finalized. It could take longer than this, but they keep candidates in the loop.
Author here. I'm just going by what the recruiter told me. He was clear that they need to do due diligence and that I could expect up to a 6 month process.
I sounds like yours took around 6 weeks - which I still consider to be quite a long time. My friend told me she went through 3 months of interviews.
These weren't for Director Level (or whatever Google calls them) but for senior product manager type roles.
Of course, neither you nor I have data about the average length from application to onboarding, so it is hard to argue specifics.
Yes, absolutely. Google is legendary for this. They are turning off not just talented applicants, but presumably applicants with other options and applicants with a good dose of self-respect who won't put up with such a long, impersonal process.
I've been in the world of 20-to-30-person start-ups for the last several years and seen some amazing recruiting processes. Emails to new leads are personal, not copy-pasted, and take context into account. Phone screens weed out all but the most likely applicants to work out. On-site interviews are a chance to get to know the team. Offers are made quickly, even same-day.
I interviewed with Google. While waiting for a response from my on-site interview I interviewed with another company and received an offer. I did not end up receiving an offer from Google but it did not make a difference as I already accepted the other job. It took Google almost a month after the on-site to get through their various levels of review.
Well, I politely declined the next stage when I heard it was a brain teaser round. I don't really seem to do well in brain teasers. I don't at all get a kick out of puzzles that aren't a means to an end. Does anybody else have that feeling?
What gets me is the numerous companies that expect you to do this, or take a day or two to build a mini project before even getting the chance to speak to anyone technical about the job.
The recruitment process is ridiculous. If you can get through the Google gates, you can get a close enough salary with equity if that's your sort of thing and start in a week.
And you'll end up working somewhere that your voice counts and the company is not a high profile privacy and political target.
It could actually be worse: at least the actual work environment seems to be decent enough, once you get in. I've explicitly turned down interviews (i.e. I actually responded to the recruiter, rather than just letting the email sit in my inbox) with Amazon because of how much the day to day would suck, based on experiences of people I know.
Yes, Google has read the "How to make enemies and alienate people" book and likes to apply it
But to be fair, they're not the only ones doing it. Sadly.
It's quite funny when recruiters come offer me repeatedly the same opening that I was rejected from on grounds of "not good enough test results" or "not enough experience in certain areas" (which sometimes are a 100% fair rejection but more often than not have a pass "grade" of slightly below top marks, which does not make sense, especially for your run of the mill web company).
6 interviews over a period of months isn't necessary to find great hires; it's a way of filtering people out of the interview process. The cost of losing out on talented people is balanced, at least in part, by the fact that their process puts off far more older, experienced developers and managers with families than younger people who dedicate a chunk of their life to the company.
A job interview is a negotiation. Go in to it with a clear goal - "a solid offer after 3 interviews" is a good baseline for a giant like Google - and if you don't get what you're looking for, be willing to walk away.
I would expect Google to reject that proposal flat out. They are incredibly keen on process and in this case the process feeds into one of their core ideas, namely that hiring the very best is crucial. Unless you are a major figure within the industry, they'll insist you do it their way, full stop.
Google today is operating as if they're Google 10 years ago - back then they were an incredibly exciting company with more potential than practically any other business if you were a talented developer. That really isn't the case now. Google are still phenomenal, but so are other companies now. Google can't say "do it our way or you get nothing" when a good potential hire will be interviewing with half a dozen or more other 'unicorn' companies, especially when those other companies are doing world-changing, ground-breaking work whereas Google's core products are mature, essentially finished things that lack that excitement.
I once consulted at a Big Corp that also focused on hiring and burning through fresh college graduates. I imagined the culture must have been a bit like google as a result. This was a large health care company in the midwest. They didn't have the prestige to hire from Stanford or CMU, but they could get some of the best grads from second and third tier schools.
They'd hire these kids in and put them to work on their legacy monstrosity, expected 50 hour work weeks, mediocre benefits, and mediocre pay. The result was a lot of really talented people literally wasting years and not advancing their skills, and not getting to use any current, marketable technology. It was also a highly toxic environment as these same capable people crucified each other in code reviews and one-up-man-ship.
Obviously google must not be quiet that bad, but I'm also sure they have a lot of really talented people wasting their abilities on internal CRUD apps.
This is... very, very much unlike Google. Almost the opposite; Google puts a lot of work into figuring out how to keep its employees happy. And, if anything, it has the opposite problem than "working on a legacy monstrosity" - there's enough internal mobility that it's hard to convince people to work on something lame. (Obvious bias: I work there a day per week still.)
Google puts a lot of work into figuring out how to keep its employees happy.
I'm not sure how you can say this for a company that's notorious for using closed allocation.
Worst horror story I've heard, here on HN, was an EE who was also good at Python. He sure thought he was hired to do hardware, but found himself stuck writing Python to test hardware. Not wanting to end his EE career, he of course had to resign.
And, yes, I know in theory you're able to quickly transfer out of that first position if it's not a good fit, but like the anecdote above, we've heard too many stories where that doesn't work in practice.
As others have noted, the whole thing for non-VIPs seems expressly tuned for new college graduates, who, in the case of this closed allocation policy, generally won't mind working on "whatever" for 18 months.
First - I've never entered Google as a fresh grad, so I have no idea what the experience is like. More of my students have entered after their Ph.D. than after their B.S., so again, more bias. All but one of the fresh Ph.D.'s who went there are still there, and seem generally happy with the way their careers are going; one left after a few years for a startup.
But, to more directly address your question with the information I do have, there are a lot of things that make a job good or not good. When it comes to a lot of the other things - benefits/perks, ease of getting things done, low overhead, responsive management, good culture, smart colleagues - Google does very well.
w.r.t. the actual job spec and happiness - all I can say is that there's likely to be a bias in hearing from people who were dissatisfied. But, again, my colleague set is biased towards seniority and people who've chosen to stay, so either way, you're getting an uneven view. :)
This response is much more measured than the previous one. The grand parent was clearly talking about fresh grads, yet you chose to respond as if you're exceptional experience was more relevant. If PhDs have a douche rep, this is an example of why.
There's a lot of objective evidence that Google is successful in being a good place to work. I assumed it wasn't necessary or productive to re-hash it. They're consistently ranked at the top of various "best companies to work for" lists, blah blah -- and while we all know those are partly a PR game, there's also some truth behind it.
The note to which I responded was by someone who had never worked at Google, and was making a large assumption based upon their experience at an unrelated company ("a large health care company in the midwest"). Many of the things in that note are factually incorrect as a basis for comparison ("mediocre benefits, and mediocre pay", said no Google or Facebook engineer, ever).
The point raised by hga has more to go on -- I don't know how common it is to be stuck doing things like that -- which is why I gave a more careful response to it.
(As an aside, I don't think it adds much to the discussion to make a personal attack or a categorical attack against people based upon their education. I welcome criticism, but it's certainly not fair to judge all Ph.D.s based upon my response, as much as it's not fair to assume that everyone in Kansas City misuses apostrophes based upon yours. :)
Oooh, you read my comment history, aren't we clever? Who so ever dissembles and back tracks twice(!) to explain and justify a banal internet post, they may have something to consider.
Yeah, both of the big Midwestern HCM shops have that reputation, though one considerably more than the other (one also being a bit more forward-thinking with things like SMART on FHIR, so there are places you can still do interesting development, I would imagine).
On the other hand, they're a bit like any ERP system -- if you can stomach spending years inside the horror show of their systems, you can do quite well as an independent consultant for health systems just making the products work. But if you have a particular love for computer science qua computer science, yeah, not the right place to land.
Did the process put me off? Absolutely. So much so that I don't want to apply again.
Before even starting the interview process, I took weeks to reviews algorithms, chopped through interviewcake/hackerrank/leetcode challenges, did numerous test-interviews on pramp and made sure Google was the last of my interviews to get as much experience in as possible. In the end, it didn't matter.
The phone call was almost not understandable. My interviewer had a horrible accent and extreme background noise, almost like he was in a public space with a really bad microphone. I had to ask 5 times to repeat his question or clarify what he meant which definitely irritated him as well.
When asked before the interview in what language I would like to do it, I said python. My interviewer gave me a C++ question (+ C++ class) with streams (I think that's what it was? I'm not a C++ guy). When mentioning that I said I want to do it in python he said "oh uhm... well, just implement your solution in python then", which was a little weird because python doesn't support streams.
I asked numerous times during the interview if I understood his question correctly, he said yes. I went ahead with implementing it that way and then later he asked me why I did it this way and that he wanted something else.
It was a disaster. I didn't pass the interview (they were 50:50 on me) and do not plan to apply again. I am at a great startup now and probably forgot most of that algorithm and data structure knowledge again.
They need to pay a lot because of terrible highering practices. It's a perverse incentive at highly profitable companies where people inside benefit from rejecting talent thus creating artificial scarcity.
You see the same at big banks where even low skilled jobs have huge barriers to entry. It's also a reason many private companies don't go for Ivy League applicants as it can corrupt a functional company.
to add another anecdote, my phone screen was quite good but at the in-person interview I was told to give a presentation on past work. One person didn't show up and another left in the middle to take a phone call and never came back.
All in all it was a positive experience but it definitely felt like hiring isn't a big priority to them, compared to other companies I've interviewed at.
Same experience. Lots of noise making it hard to ask questions. The guy sounded like he was blackmailed to do that kind of job. He asked me to "sum the contiguous number in the array". So I start writing the code looping through the array, finding the boundaries and adding the elements. After 15min the guy is like "why did you add the elements? I asked you to summarize them."
Yep I guessed. And that's a good thing. But they should make sure the call environment is optimal (good reception, no background noise, ...) and the interviewer sounds eager to receive questions.
If someone asks you to "sum an array" then it's quite reasonable to think they mean calculate the sum of an array. Some languages (PHP springs to mind) have native "array_sum" functions. Wondering if someone from Google, who is interviewing a developer means "sum or summarize" would be weird.
I read your comment a few times and still don't quite understand the difference between "summarize" and "sum" in this context (non-native english speaker here). Care to explain what exactly he wanted?
I have friends in the local Google office, and once long ago I interned there. A few years ago I decided to stop telling off the recruiters and give it a go.
I had 4 interviews where I needed to be exceedingly clever very quickly. I was for two of them, and wasn't for two of them, and so I was a no-hire. Given a few days to think through the problems again, I was able to solve them all in my head- just not in 45 minutes. None of the interviews asked about my ability to design systems, how to test or manage large-scale applications, how to gather requirements and work with customers.
My conclusion is that Google is primarily looking for people who either have every algorithm and problem memorized and ready to regurgitate, or exceedingly clever people who can solve tricky problems on the spot. I guess this works for them, as they're a very valuable company. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it works despite this process they have.
"None of the interviews asked about my ability to design systems, how to test or manage large-scale applications, how to gather requirements and work with customers."
No company will ever ask such questions, which is mind boggling. They will all ask minute questions about sorting algorithms which you will never code instead of asking questions related what you will be doing day to day or stuff that is actually critically important.
No one asks design questions, perhaps because it is an open-ended question. But aren't those the best question for a role that often requires coming up with new solutions?
EDIT: perhaps I was too harsh by saying "never". In my experience, companies have occasionally asked about design, but very few and very little in terms of the ratio with algorithm questions. Part of the problem is the "new interviewer every 45/60 minutes" style of interviewing. They all come in and start off with an algorithm question. Each and every one (at least the technical ones).
Once you get outside the bubble where development process is a dirty word and/or meme cargo culted from a blog, they often do. Especially companies with immutable external quality standards to design and test towards.
Not true in my experience, and the company that did ask such questions turned out to be a great place to learn a lot in a hurry. It also turned out not to be a good long-term fit, but I'm a much better dev for the experience, and I don't regret it at all.
Ironically I've found that non-software companies are a lot better about this than software companies when hiring programmers. They are much more likely to ask questions along the lines of "here's a typical problem we might have, give us a high level overview about how you might help us solve it".
Replying 11 days later so maybe you never see this but...
I'm an interviewer (and SDE) at Amazon and (at least in my division) we won't do a hire loop for a non-entry level engineer that doesn't include a design interview. It can make or break a candidate, but if you've been in the industry for a few years we expect you have some ideas beyond "Get a bigger database server" when we ask how you'd scale a solution.
I solved everything with time to spare and they still rejected me. So it doesn't really matter, they can find some other reason to reject you.
For me, they said my C++ wasn't "neat enough" which really pissed me off because we had several minutes at the end of each session where I could have cleaned it up if they had asked.
My friend was hired last week and somewhere near the end of the process the headhunters asked him for referrals. When he asked me if I'd be interested I said "Nope. Not wasting my time on the interviews" almost instinctively.
I suspect that the hiring process varies quite a bit by role and group, and mostly people talk about the worst cases.
I did part of the process once (a few years ago) and it was very straightforward. Roughly it looked like: Initial call "are you interested" on Tuesday, someone else on Wednesday for 30 min. They arranged a flight & hotel that Sunday, I spent Monday interviewing and visiting with 5 groups if I recall correctly, flew home that night.
So just under a week from first contact to interviewing finished. We started talking positions but I decided to take another opportunity the following week and stopped the process, so I don't know how long that might have taken for approval or negotiation. However, they had seemed confident they could get it sorted out in a couple of weeks.
So just anectdata but doesn't feel at all like the dragged out versions people talk about.
When designing a hiring process one should consider the balance between false positives and false negatives, and the cost of the process. Obviously we all want to hire talent and reject duds. A cheap quick process runs the risk of false positives: hiring duds. An expensive lengthy process tying up lots of top staff will eliminate the false positives, but at cost. So to reduce cost filters are introduced: online tests, homework, phone calls rather than face to face. And the filters increase the risk of false negatives - rejecting real talent.
While this is an accurate description of Google's process, and it seems like they intentionally designed it this way (willingness to reject false negatives), I'm not sure what the point is that you're making about it.
I was contacted by a Google recruiter, and she told me how grueling the interview process was. She said I could use up to four weeks to study. No thanks. I have a full time programming job. The notion of coming home to practice balancing a binary search tree, or finding the kth smallest prime palindrome in a linked list or whatever.....is revolting.
This has essentially been my attitude. If you're interviewing me based on my experience in my profession, why should I have to study for anything? We're talking about things I do 8+ hours per day. Study? That would only be needed if the questions are specifically not related to the job I'm expecting to do.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadFor myself, Google's recruitment process was pretty laughable. I applied once in college for an internship, which was never responded to (fair enough), then had a recruiter reference it three years later when I was actually looking for another job, which I followed up on, but then had them drop off the radar (as seems pretty common) for a month, as I took a job elsewhere, and then later recruiters doing the same thing, referencing the time I applied 5-7 years earlier as 'expressing interest'. No, not interested.
It's just as well their interviews are geared for college students, because that seems to be the only type who would actually tolerate their hiring process (well, that and the type who doesn't actually need an interview, the famous 'oh, you have literally written the book on X, come work on X here' sort)
Bad hiring experiences suck and I know it's something many of the interviewers at Google try to avoid. But sometimes it happens, especially when you get the number of applicants that Google gets.
If someone with enough clout wants a hire to happen, red tape magically dissappears
Well, they have a reputation for absolutely disregarding whether you are famous or not:
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
"Ken Thompson must take the mandatory C language test to check-in code." [2010]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_ou...
I think it depends on the office culture. Where holidays are booked months in advance, taking "sick days" for interview seems more normal.
But the last one is correct. And relative to the population, I love my job :)
It's like a gang initiation: put them through an ordeal to test and cement their loyalty.
But IMHO the interview process (which I dislike) definitely selects for new-grad types. From my perspective it's very heavily biased against industry-experience types and in favour of people who are comfortable in the "look I can excellently apply what I learned in my Algorithms/Data structure course on a whiteboard without sweating and getting nervous".
I should also note that the interview process also puts a lot of burden on Googlers. People, especially senior people, spend a _lot_ of time interviewing.
I did not even apply, rather was invited by their HR.
Most likely I am not skilled enough to work there and am just a vocal average developer, fair enough, no complaints about it.
But then don't spam me all the time saying how great addition I would be to whatever team X, either I am an average developer or a great addition to the team.
I sounds like yours took around 6 weeks - which I still consider to be quite a long time. My friend told me she went through 3 months of interviews.
These weren't for Director Level (or whatever Google calls them) but for senior product manager type roles.
Of course, neither you nor I have data about the average length from application to onboarding, so it is hard to argue specifics.
I've been in the world of 20-to-30-person start-ups for the last several years and seen some amazing recruiting processes. Emails to new leads are personal, not copy-pasted, and take context into account. Phone screens weed out all but the most likely applicants to work out. On-site interviews are a chance to get to know the team. Offers are made quickly, even same-day.
A brain teaser? Like a puzzle? Or do you mean a coding interview?
Brain teasers haven't been asked in years AFAIK.
And you'll end up working somewhere that your voice counts and the company is not a high profile privacy and political target.
Might have to buy your own lunch though.
But to be fair, they're not the only ones doing it. Sadly.
It's quite funny when recruiters come offer me repeatedly the same opening that I was rejected from on grounds of "not good enough test results" or "not enough experience in certain areas" (which sometimes are a 100% fair rejection but more often than not have a pass "grade" of slightly below top marks, which does not make sense, especially for your run of the mill web company).
A job interview is a negotiation. Go in to it with a clear goal - "a solid offer after 3 interviews" is a good baseline for a giant like Google - and if you don't get what you're looking for, be willing to walk away.
They'd hire these kids in and put them to work on their legacy monstrosity, expected 50 hour work weeks, mediocre benefits, and mediocre pay. The result was a lot of really talented people literally wasting years and not advancing their skills, and not getting to use any current, marketable technology. It was also a highly toxic environment as these same capable people crucified each other in code reviews and one-up-man-ship.
Obviously google must not be quiet that bad, but I'm also sure they have a lot of really talented people wasting their abilities on internal CRUD apps.
I'm not sure how you can say this for a company that's notorious for using closed allocation.
Worst horror story I've heard, here on HN, was an EE who was also good at Python. He sure thought he was hired to do hardware, but found himself stuck writing Python to test hardware. Not wanting to end his EE career, he of course had to resign.
And, yes, I know in theory you're able to quickly transfer out of that first position if it's not a good fit, but like the anecdote above, we've heard too many stories where that doesn't work in practice.
As others have noted, the whole thing for non-VIPs seems expressly tuned for new college graduates, who, in the case of this closed allocation policy, generally won't mind working on "whatever" for 18 months.
But, to more directly address your question with the information I do have, there are a lot of things that make a job good or not good. When it comes to a lot of the other things - benefits/perks, ease of getting things done, low overhead, responsive management, good culture, smart colleagues - Google does very well.
w.r.t. the actual job spec and happiness - all I can say is that there's likely to be a bias in hearing from people who were dissatisfied. But, again, my colleague set is biased towards seniority and people who've chosen to stay, so either way, you're getting an uneven view. :)
The note to which I responded was by someone who had never worked at Google, and was making a large assumption based upon their experience at an unrelated company ("a large health care company in the midwest"). Many of the things in that note are factually incorrect as a basis for comparison ("mediocre benefits, and mediocre pay", said no Google or Facebook engineer, ever).
The point raised by hga has more to go on -- I don't know how common it is to be stuck doing things like that -- which is why I gave a more careful response to it.
(As an aside, I don't think it adds much to the discussion to make a personal attack or a categorical attack against people based upon their education. I welcome criticism, but it's certainly not fair to judge all Ph.D.s based upon my response, as much as it's not fair to assume that everyone in Kansas City misuses apostrophes based upon yours. :)
On the other hand, they're a bit like any ERP system -- if you can stomach spending years inside the horror show of their systems, you can do quite well as an independent consultant for health systems just making the products work. But if you have a particular love for computer science qua computer science, yeah, not the right place to land.
Before even starting the interview process, I took weeks to reviews algorithms, chopped through interviewcake/hackerrank/leetcode challenges, did numerous test-interviews on pramp and made sure Google was the last of my interviews to get as much experience in as possible. In the end, it didn't matter.
The phone call was almost not understandable. My interviewer had a horrible accent and extreme background noise, almost like he was in a public space with a really bad microphone. I had to ask 5 times to repeat his question or clarify what he meant which definitely irritated him as well.
When asked before the interview in what language I would like to do it, I said python. My interviewer gave me a C++ question (+ C++ class) with streams (I think that's what it was? I'm not a C++ guy). When mentioning that I said I want to do it in python he said "oh uhm... well, just implement your solution in python then", which was a little weird because python doesn't support streams.
I asked numerous times during the interview if I understood his question correctly, he said yes. I went ahead with implementing it that way and then later he asked me why I did it this way and that he wanted something else.
It was a disaster. I didn't pass the interview (they were 50:50 on me) and do not plan to apply again. I am at a great startup now and probably forgot most of that algorithm and data structure knowledge again.
They need to pay a lot because of terrible highering practices. It's a perverse incentive at highly profitable companies where people inside benefit from rejecting talent thus creating artificial scarcity.
You see the same at big banks where even low skilled jobs have huge barriers to entry. It's also a reason many private companies don't go for Ivy League applicants as it can corrupt a functional company.
All in all it was a positive experience but it definitely felt like hiring isn't a big priority to them, compared to other companies I've interviewed at.
Ok. Never answered their email again.
I had 4 interviews where I needed to be exceedingly clever very quickly. I was for two of them, and wasn't for two of them, and so I was a no-hire. Given a few days to think through the problems again, I was able to solve them all in my head- just not in 45 minutes. None of the interviews asked about my ability to design systems, how to test or manage large-scale applications, how to gather requirements and work with customers.
My conclusion is that Google is primarily looking for people who either have every algorithm and problem memorized and ready to regurgitate, or exceedingly clever people who can solve tricky problems on the spot. I guess this works for them, as they're a very valuable company. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it works despite this process they have.
No company will ever ask such questions, which is mind boggling. They will all ask minute questions about sorting algorithms which you will never code instead of asking questions related what you will be doing day to day or stuff that is actually critically important.
No one asks design questions, perhaps because it is an open-ended question. But aren't those the best question for a role that often requires coming up with new solutions?
EDIT: perhaps I was too harsh by saying "never". In my experience, companies have occasionally asked about design, but very few and very little in terms of the ratio with algorithm questions. Part of the problem is the "new interviewer every 45/60 minutes" style of interviewing. They all come in and start off with an algorithm question. Each and every one (at least the technical ones).
Once you get outside the bubble where development process is a dirty word and/or meme cargo culted from a blog, they often do. Especially companies with immutable external quality standards to design and test towards.
Not true in my experience, and the company that did ask such questions turned out to be a great place to learn a lot in a hurry. It also turned out not to be a good long-term fit, but I'm a much better dev for the experience, and I don't regret it at all.
One of the best series of questions I've ever gotten in an interview. We probably spent close to an hour just on one major aspect of the service.
I'm an interviewer (and SDE) at Amazon and (at least in my division) we won't do a hire loop for a non-entry level engineer that doesn't include a design interview. It can make or break a candidate, but if you've been in the industry for a few years we expect you have some ideas beyond "Get a bigger database server" when we ask how you'd scale a solution.
For me, they said my C++ wasn't "neat enough" which really pissed me off because we had several minutes at the end of each session where I could have cleaned it up if they had asked.
Anyways it was a complete waste of time.
I did part of the process once (a few years ago) and it was very straightforward. Roughly it looked like: Initial call "are you interested" on Tuesday, someone else on Wednesday for 30 min. They arranged a flight & hotel that Sunday, I spent Monday interviewing and visiting with 5 groups if I recall correctly, flew home that night.
So just under a week from first contact to interviewing finished. We started talking positions but I decided to take another opportunity the following week and stopped the process, so I don't know how long that might have taken for approval or negotiation. However, they had seemed confident they could get it sorted out in a couple of weeks.
So just anectdata but doesn't feel at all like the dragged out versions people talk about.