Ask HN: People who made it to Google. What was your experience like?

maybe I am not the best person to answer this question because I got rejected. I got to the onside interview. I recognised that it was unable to evaluate your performance. I thought my system design was bad, but they were impressed.

I'd say the questions are not that hard, but they try to figure out, if you understand the corner cases. Can you really understand the problem, do you understand your own implementation? It's a difference if you solve the problem or understand your solution.

Every interviewer brings his own personality. Most people(probably all) will stay to-the-point. Actually the more to-the-point they are, the more time I get to solve the problem, so that's kinda by design. Emphasis on behavioral stuff is near zero. But a couple of people asked me questions related to stuff on my resume. E.g. one interviewer asked me a VHDL/Verilog related question(I think of it as a sanity check question, to make sure I'm not BSing on my resume), the other had already asked me two questions, so he used it as a topic of chit chat. Some interviewers are poker face to the point that you feel the pressure, one interviewer wasn't big on hints(at one point I could hear the wall clock ticking so loud, I wanted to throw it on to the floor and smash it), one interviewer liked to make encouraging comments and was somewhat chatty. The others were like just any dudes you might run into at a party, very casual.

The CS/Coding Questions covered topics like Dynamic Programming, trees, arrays, bit manipulation. The questions were not easy. I think I did ok in 3 of them(one/two might be even slightly below par). The Dynamic programming question I solved in 15 minutes, then I got asked a second question(which was easier in my opinion) I finished that too and I still had 10 minutes left. I imagine I impressed that interviewer. That might be the reason I got through.

The system design question was a very interesting one, I loved it. But it wasn't your typical large scale system design question like designing a service and so on. It was about designing a file system. I enjoyed it so I thought I did well there. Since I seemed to have talked all I wanted to about that question, I got asked a second systems question(in the same interview), an open ended question about internet system. I did ok in that one.

I didn't ace most of the interviews(Dynamic Programming interview being the exception). I thought it could go either way, since Google has a reputation for being very picky.

I had put some time into preparation this time. Friend of mine is coaching for interviews, so he provided me very well defined structure to focus my efforts, including videotaped mock interviews and feedback on it( interviewkickstart.com for anyone interested. Highly recommend!). Through the mock interviews I realized that I was talking too much, both in behavioral questions and during problem solving. Not only could that test the interviewer's patience, it also meant I had less time to solve problems. So I had to strategize about that. I think that helped me go that last mile.

Lunch interview was very casual. The guy was very friendly and liked to chat. I asked him whatever I thought I should about Google and the people there. Got some insight into Google that way, even though I know friends who work there already so I could have asked them anything.

I had 5 interviewers. I made it clear to each up front that I had never worked in one of the canonical languages (Java, Python, C++, Go) and that my background was mostly C#. All of my interviewers seemed to take that point, so the questions I was asked were mostly pseudo-code. The one language-specific thing was about Java iterators, so I had to ask about the Iterable/Iterator contract before I could start. My pseudo code was pretty C#ish and that's pretty close to Java, so I was able to intelligently discuss differences or explain my intent.

The crazy thing about my interview (and the interviews of most people that I talked to) was that I thought that I crashed really hard. One guy let me fumble around for almost the entire time trying to answer his questions (it dealt with statistics and big data). Of the five, I feel like I knocked it out of the park with two of them, flubbed it with two of them, and the fifth was meh.

Later, I talked to the recruiter about it. I was feeling a lot of impostor syndrome (very common) and trying to understand why I was hired and make sure that it wasn't an accident. In the end, recruiters are looking for very high or very low scores from your interviewer, and interviewers give a lot of points for trying. Even the ones that I thought I failed on gave me medium scores because I did a good job of connecting with them on a personal level, and I talked through my work as I did it. So I ended up with 3 moderate scores and two high ones, which was enough.

As for passing but not getting hired, that's a little different. You don't really pass the interview. You do a phone screen and then the recruiter decides whether to proceed. After that you come in for interviews, and once you're scored again the recruiter decides whether to proceed. Then you go to hiring committee, where they decide hire or no hire. The recruiters have a pretty good idea of what hiring committee will say, and they tend to send borderline people. After hiring committee you go to offer committee and then you get the offer letter. After you accept the offer, if you're a general purpose SWE, then you talk to teams to determine placement. The whole process took about 3 months for me.

For my prep, I actually went on other interviews and read books (particularly on solving by induction - these things show up often on interviews).

Everybody has a different experience, but when I read posts by people who claim they were passed over because they couldn't solve a specific problem, I suspect the problem was really poor culture fit, resulting in low scores across all of the interviewers.