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Ask HN: Why did Google turn me down?

9 points by some_rando ↗ HN
I had a Google interview a few days ago. I thought I did very well. Most problems I wrote out complete solutions to, while others I at least discussed in depth and it was clear that I had the solution. In each case I communicated, asked clarifying questions, discussed my approach to the problem, dis/advantages, diagrammed, considered other approaches, and discussed runtime/memory complexity easily. I split the problems up into smaller pieces and produced straightforward algorithms. I prioritized getting a right answer over optimizing. I stepped through my code and corrected issues if I encountered them. In several of the interviews I exhausted the interviewer's questions in the 45-minute time and got to ask questions of my own. I felt I had a good rapport with the interviewers in at least the majority of the cases.

I actually really had fun. I had come into the interview feeling apprehensive, but left feeling confident, feeling that if I were the one interviewing me I would have had no problem making an offer.

One week later, the recruiter contacted me and told me that I had been rejected. My feelings are hurt, but beyond that I'm simply confused. I really don't know what I could have done better short of just knowing the questions ahead of time and writing down the answer. Due to Google policy (which I don't understand either), the recruiter was about as vague as can be about why the answer was no. The most detail I could get was that two out of my five interviews had gone well, from which I take that the other three had not.

Obviously no one reading this knows how my interview actually went. But given my perception of the interview, what could have caused me to have been turned down? What was I likely doing wrong that cost me the offer? If there's anyone reading this at Google, what is it that you look for in a candidate, that based on what I wrote above I might have come up short on? How can I improve?

10 comments

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hahahaha23
don't get attached to this type of things. sometimes they reject people, because certain team doesn't have budget anymore, i.e. not your fault. sometimes, this is just pure luck. tech interview is kinda broken. I know capable people being rejected by google, I also know incompetent people got accepted by google and Facebook. As an example, my friend got to know a fellow engineer during google's orientation. That engineer told my friend that he/she heard that google usually won't fire engineers due to performance issues. So he/she had decided to fool around. that's how fucked up the interview process is. people with passion and real experiences get filtered out. people who prepare the interviews as exams get accepted.

the right strategy is applying for many companies all at once. overlap your preparation effort. don't just try and count on one company.

some_rando
Thanks, I appreciate the encouragement. I'm actually fairly happy with my current position, where I'm one of the more senior engineers. I was contacted by Google (and Facebook within a few days of each other, the latter of which I have an interview with soon...). So I'm not really in "job search mode," much less obsessed with working at Google, but nevertheless I can't help but feel a sense of wounded pride. Even more so due to the fact that I interviewed with Google 2 years ago and had the same result, but that time I didn't study at all and this time I did, and thought that I had done a lot better. :\ It also doesn't help that Google said they were "aggressively hiring", which apparently still doesn't mean that "answering all of the questions" is good enough.
schoen
Maybe there was simply another excellent candidate they ended up going with instead. I've seen people doing hiring really wish they could hire more than one of their candidates, but ending up having to make a difficult choice.
curtis
> I actually really had fun. I had come into the interview feeling apprehensive, but left feeling confident, feeling that if I were the one interviewing me I would have had no problem making an offer.

It's possible that the interview really did go that well. But it's also possible that there were two or three other interviewees that had equally successful interviews, but Google is only going to hire one of you. They may end up making the choice by looking at distinctions so fine they might as well have been random. If that's the case, they'd be hard-pressed to explain why they chose one really good candidate over several other really good candidates, which would explain why you couldn't get a sensible explanation out of them (1).

Now of course this might not be the explanation, but it's certainly a possibility. You of course want to learn something from every interview you go to, but you have to keep a cool head about it, and remember that each interview is to a certain extent a roll of the dice.

(1) Also keep in mind that companies (at least in the U.S.) do not like to give any feedback about interviews at all.

some_rando
> you have to keep a cool head about it, and remember that each interview is to a certain extent a roll of the dice.

Thanks, this is somewhat comforting. :)

[dead] throwaway14159
Having interviewed many times in many places, and also been on the inside of the interviewing process, my opinion is that the hiring process is mostly random. That is, the outcomes are a bit better than just flipping a coin, but not very much. (Sorry.)

What can you personally do about this? Not that much. Interview a lot. Make sure you don't have some obvious off-putting behavior, etc. Just keep learning your craft. And then interview, interview, interview. The same randomness that's annoying in this case also pretty much guarantees that you'll also get offers if you take enough shots. Good luck.