I interviewed with Google last spring. My experience was different, but about as disappointing.
I applied for a job, and received an out-of-the-blue email from a recruiter about a different job a couple months later (my resume must have landed in some "recent" bucket). The position was in Google Cloud. I was frustrated by the "you'll talk to a team after you've passed 100 hurdles" nonsense.
I had one phone screen with my recruiter, which was positive. She said we'd be scheduling a phone interview. I got a call a few days later; she said we'd be skipping the phone interviews and going to an on-site at Sunnyvale. I thought this was a good sign! In hindsight, I think they just needed to fill a lot of positions quickly.
I did the onsite, which I thought went terribly, and I left feeling really discouraged. My recruiter said my packet wouldn't go the hiring committee, but that she thought the feedback was positive enough that I could find another role at the company. I got handed to another recruiter for a lesser role doing developer support. That recruiter reached out to me a few days later to tell me that he didn't actually have any roles for me.
The whole process took a couple months, and ultimately made me feel bad about my abilities. Everyone I met at the onsite was kind of an asshole. My "lunch interviewer" complained about the bureaucracy and said he was looking for another job after being there for ~18 months.
It's unfortunate that positions at FAANG are so beneficial to my resume, because I'd love to never go through that process again. I'm going through it right now with Amazon.
The only time I interviewed with Google involved a phone screen that apparently went very well and then dead silence for three months: my recruiter has apparently gone on vacation for 2+ months and was finally getting back to me. In the intervening period I had taken another job (that turned out to have been worth more than the google job would have been).
The recruiter was nonplussed when she called me out of the blue months later trying to schedule my on-site. She couldn’t believe I was not interested in continuing - how could I turn down Google??
This was when the google koolaid was far stronger - early/mid 2000s. To this day I consider it the most amazing example of a company being so entranced by its own narrative that it was genuinely incomprehensible to her and required spelling it out slowly.
To be fair, Google in the early-mid 2000s was actually a really good career option. If you played your cards right you could easily be comfortably retired today if you started at Google in, say, 2004. In fact I know someone who started at Google fresh out of college in 2005 and was in "FIRE" (Financial Independence, Retire Early) zone by 2017. They quit Google, didn't work for a couple of years, and then took a senior position at a San Francisco startup, where they work 35-hour weeks playing with shiny new hardware tech and couldn't care less whether they're laid off.
Google is still a great place to land as a new college grad, but these days I would consider many other options as an experienced professional. There are indicators that Google is starting to run into issues detailed in The Innovator's Dilemma, particularly with respect to its Cloud business.
> She couldn’t believe I was not interested in continuing - how could I turn down Google??
Lol. I had the exact same experience back in the late 90s, but with... IBM. Arrogant as heck, took three months to follow up and were shocked to know I was no longer interested. It was beautiful.
I also really don't get it. Obviously things like company compensation are really important in a job offer. But what matters for my day-to-day work satisfaction is the work I'm doing, my team-mates and my team's culture. I don't think I could get really excited about a new opportunity before I knew what I would be doing daily.
> evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
I only see evidence that the experience was disappointing for a single Googler, the lunch interviewer, not "a considerable portion" of them. The interviewer's data point is certainly valid, but it's not clear to me how much you can generalize it.
I also interviewed there last spring, but I thought it was super positive, even though I didn't get the job. I had to push myself really hard to get the onsite and I think that was beneficial to me. I have no computer science background at all and it forced me to prep intensively between interviews. So, I kind of went into it figuring I probably wouldn't get it but who knows and that it would just be good to have the experience of this super tough interview.
I learned some things! I started thinking about my job a bit differently, which is cool. Also, at the very least, the process made me better at interviews. Ha! There's always something you can take from a difficult experience (and it was for sure difficult.)
I don't think you should feel discouraged or feel bad about your abilities. It sounds like it was just a poor fit and you should be happy it didn't work out! Plus, now you've been through it once. You know what it's like. You can do it again somewhere else and it'll work out.
My interview experience was so unbelievably amazing at Google that I accepted the job mostly because of that -- despite the fact that I had an offer two levels higher at another public software company.
It has not been a mistake.
As plenty of people have mentioned, more than a million people interview here every year. With that many interviews, I cannot imagine how bad some outlier horror stories can be.
In aggregate, something like 78% of people consider interviewing at Google a positive experience, despite the fact that only less than 2% of respondents actually go on to work here.
I dunno about every one else, but usually there's a high correlation with satisfaction and getting the job. The fact that hardly anyone ends up getting a job here, and the vast majority of people are satisfied seems like the process isn't terrible.
I doubt there's many companies with a better track record.
I hear nothing but good things about Microsoft recently, so I wouldn't be surprised if their numbers are better.
> I think they just needed to fill a lot of positions quickly.
3 years ago i got that impression too. Google seems to be scrambling to get into cloud business believing that they are somehow entitled to success in what is a completely foreign business for them. Anyway, it was a surprise mirroring the experience of a couple acquaintances (who is in the same boat - long time enterprise software devs) - the interview wasn't a big deal and the result was an L5 with very low comp (not sure why they bothered at all offering below even regular companies not just FAANG), naturally didn't go for it. As far as i see Google runs the hiring as an academia/exec style appointment committees - those hiring/compensation committees - where one has to have the good looking on paper achievements to hit reasonably well, and the interview just gets you in the door.
Google is quickly becoming famous for lowball offers. Unless you have a competing offer with someone they think is on their level, they won't budge. They play hardball too, even with another offer.
The first time Google contacted me, I didn't make it (and was not happy with their process but thats another story). Thats when they let me know that they interview people on various things first and then decide the role. When they reached out to me the second time I politely refused citing that I don't want to interview if I don't know what I'll be working on; what if I don't want to work on a product area I am assigned to?
In contrast, my Amazon interviews were extremely efficiently done, and I loved their planning around it. Quick, no-nonsense, quick turnaround.
Have been inside google and have friends who have worked, work there. There’s some truth to the asshole thing. Though I think it’s more like snobbishness. That is, conditional super niceness if you demonstrate you’re googly.
Not all FAANG is like that. Google is an outlier in terms of their devotion to a particular interview process. Amazon may not be far behind. The rest are significantly easier in terms of process (but not in terms of the hiring bar).
Man what a stark contrast to how my Netflix interview went. I was contacted directly by the hiring manager, three days later I was onsite for the phase one interview, three days later I was onsite for the second phase, and I had a verbal offer on my way out the door (for more than I asked for).
Came back a week later to sign the paperwork after I emailed with the recruiter a few times about offer details. Started a week after that. (And then went on a one week vacation after working for only two weeks and got paid for it, because it was already scheduled).
And this wasn't an outlier. Pretty much everyone we hired had a similar timeline. Sometimes the candidates made us wait for an answer because we were so quick that they hadn't even had their first round at Google.
This is absolutely true. It was just as easy to fire someone as it was to hire someone, so hiring was a lower risk activity.
But even so, most people did not get fired, contrary to popular belief. I don't remember the stats, but almost no one was fired within their first year for example.
Due to bad publicity, Netflix reverted that "fire fast"/"sports team, not a family" mentality, at least on the paper.
Also, e.g. Google has a shorter average tenure.
Sure, but like I said, I wasn't an outlier in that respect. Everyone got the same treatment. It always started with a hiring manager reaching out directly.
Isn't Netflix an outlier in how they hire/place anyway? They hire for specific positions versus the rest hiring generally then finding a place to put you. (Team matching coming at the end rather than first) I believe Apple works this way as well.
It would explain why I've never been contacted by either. I have no expert level skills in things they're interested in. (I've mostly worked at startups - breadth over depth)
The process starts with a hiring manager reaching out for a position they are trying to fill, but sometimes after the interview we realized someone was amazing but not a fit for our team, so we would refer them to another team.
But most companies hire for a specific position. The way Google does it is the outlier.
It maybe different from Facebook and Google, but is hiring for positions on teams that unique? That's how my employer does it. A lot of our public facing job ads are for specific teams. We have a few general public-facing job ads but I think team/group matching is done early in the process for those also.
HN paints Netflix as an awesome place to work (for years). At least that is the image I get as somebody who doesn't live in states. If that's true - good job on their part
Google is an enormous company. Well over 100,000 employees. The answer to any question in the vein of, "Does X happen at Google?", or "Does Google do X?" is almost surely yes: Somewhere at the company, some team is probably doing that.
Google's interview process is notoriously bad for some folks, and that is absolutely true and something Google tries to fix. And there are absolutely plenty of unhappy people. Even if the odds are very low that any particular person is unhappy (and they aren't), the total probability across the company is quite high.
On the other hand, you don't hold on thousands of workers--most of whom has many, many choices of place to work--if you aren't doing _something_ right.
So the experience is valid, but generalizing is tricky.
One thought that I had after reading the article was just how average his experience was. This is really the bog-standard "how my Google interview went" post and not some kind of outlier.
One complaint that I have seen over and over (even in this thread) is his frustrating moment #3: "Google doesn't respect your time". That's of course entirely subjective and many people may be ok with months of preparation, days of interviews and weeks of waiting for feedback (with recruiters occasionally going dark for months). But many folks are justifiably irked.
A problem with the long, drawn-out process is that often people are interviewing at multiple companies, and might have to make a choice between shutting the door on Google and accepting another offer now, or pushing through the murky, very-uncertain Google process, and possibly allowing other offers to expire (even if a reasonable company won't have an "expiring"/"exploding" offer, they're not going to wait forever for you to make up your mind).
I've interviewed with Google 3-4 times over the years. Every time they've contacted me, they've asserted they've changed and will respect my time.
Most recently was this past June and I have to say that while the process was protracted, they did do a pretty good job of keeping me informed along the way. Eventually, I accepted an offer elsewhere as it seemed like they intended to under-level me and the choosing the team after the fact really doesn't work for me.
I don't really understand how Google doesn't respect your time? Can you provide more specific? How much people decide to study is up to them, Google doesn't force anyone to study for months, nor do I really think you need to if you're generally good at problem solving and walking through a problem, which is the skills they are looking for.
Most people think you have to go in and regurgitate a solution you memorized, but really most interviewers are looking to see your process working through the problem.
They do an initial quick screener, and then a one day interview. Not really sure how much more they could do to respect your time.
Numbers on both sides. Just because they have thousands of employees out of billions of people means nothing special about their process/culture. There are likely to be thousands of people in the world who are fine with it.
I'd be curious to know if this is typical. As someone that's never interviewed at Google but idly wondered at moments if I'd ever work there this sounds hellish. Not necessarily the exercises themselves (although they seem to have nothing to do with what any developer does day-to-day), but the sheer number of them and the amount of preparation required. I already have a full time job, I don't want to take on another part time job of "practicing for an interview at Google". Especially when I don't even know what I'd be working on (if anything) at the end of it all!
All I can figure is that's by design. The process selects for some combination of IQ and how bad you want it, basically. If you can't or don't want to put in 10-15hrs a week prepping, for a few months, on top of your actual job (god knows nothing I actually do at work as a programmer helps me be better prepared for this kind of shit), to then subject yourself to a crushing marathon of a day, they don't want you. They have enough people who are willing to go through that, so they don't need to cater to those who aren't.
Probably one inherent benefit of a process this shitty, in addition to whatever benefits of the criteria they're selecting for, is that selected candidates identify more strongly with their co-workers and with the company than they otherwise would (see: Cialdini's Persuasion on the benefits of hazing)
Between everything I've read about it and my own experiences, I get the sense that Google's interview process is by design a mirror of grad school. If you aren't willing to spend weeks to months prepping for the test so you can impress a committee (that you will hear from three months later), you just don't want it enough.
I'm not sure this is a great way to hire engineers, but at the same time I'm sure it feels pretty familiar to people fresh from grad school.
You and the parent have explained exactly what I've been running in my head when it comes to these interviews. I'm currently evaluating one of the FAANGs and with the amount of time and LC grinding I'd have to put in I'd rather learn a new technology.
Let's look at it from another perspective (and this holds true for most FAANGs): A month of serious work and preparation can land you one of the most paying jobs on the world which will make you a millionare in a few years if you play it right.
Most people (especially if they didn't win the birth lottery by being born in CA, USA) go to schools and colleges for YEARS and YEARS to come even a few steps towards what you can get at Google and FAANGS by working for a month or two to prepare for the interview.
Take a step back and consider just how damn pampered we are in this business when doing exercies for a few weeks before interview for a 250.000$+ job is too much for you.
Let's put it the other way though - there's an enormous amount of noise in the interviewing process, even the people responsible for the process admit this. So you can spend months preparing for a Google interview but you get put in the wrong role and get rejected for it, you can bump into an asshole in the interview process, you can simply screw up because of the pressure, or maybe they simply have some different set of skills they have in mind for that role. There's a thousand things that can go wrong.
So yeah, you can spend ages preparing for an interview, but remember you're probably topping your odds out. A genius well prepared might have a 90% success rate, if they don't prepare that's 0%. But not many of us are a genius and none of us are 0% prepared. So maybe you're actually boosting your odds from 40% to 50%.
Then finally, you've got your dream job! Oh but actually 3 things are possibly true. 1: You're surrounded by people who walked the interview in which case you are going to be sprinting to keep up and actually your job is going to be incredibly difficult. 2: You're surrounded by people who also had to desparately prep for the interview for months- so none of you are well suited to the job, actually google is interviewing for the wrong things and actually your life is going to be tough. And 3: Anyone who can't afford to spend months prepping for Google won't be working with you- anyone with any responsibility in their personal life probably won't be able to afford to do this stupid prep work and so they're simply never going to work there, so you're now in this homogenous leet code clique.
> (although they seem to have nothing to do with what any developer does day-to-day)
Depends on what you do at Google.
Google Guava is a data-structure/algorithms-heavy great Java library.
Dart and Golang are programming languages. I'd imagine you have to know how to write a compiler etc and the standard library definitely has sections for data-structure and algorithms.
They pay tons of money and prefer people to stick around and do different things within the company so I guess that's why they set the bar high for that specific section of skillset (algorithms and data structure).
Some people are willing to go through that for the Money, Prestige, and hopefully the experience. Some people don't. That's life.
I imagine they have multiple PhDs working on those projects. For your bog standard SDE these interviews have very little to do with the day-to-day job.
Besides not being related to day to day job a lot of these questions also select for a specific set of knowledge. If you've done that particular class of problems (graph, tree, dynamic programming etc), then you do well, if not then you don't. They also typically have a single or very limited number of solutions, so if you deviate early the chances of recovering is very low.
I see this style of interview questions pretty frequently and I really question their effectiveness, vs say something more open ended and fluid.
> I don't want to take on another part time job of "practicing for an interview at Google"
Problem is someone else will. And there's no easy fix.
If there was an easy way for a group of uncoordinated people (applicants) to coordinate against bullshit (stupid-long interviewing processes sometimes unrelated to the job and other stuff) we could solve many of this world's problems, don't you think?
I imagine there are industries where this is a lot more punishing. Personally I'm not prepared to go through that bullshit, so I just get a job somewhere else. But we're lucky that our industry is flush with jobs, I have to imagine other industries have similar requirements that are much less avoidable. And maybe there will be a downturn in tech one day, and I'll very much rue this day.
> Problem is someone else will. And there's no easy fix.
I personally think that that's a feature, not a bug, we don't actually need that many bright people working for companies like Google given how much data they have available (the same goes for FB).
Likewise, even if you were to ignore the upfront preparation costs just the timeline (months with not much indication) makes it pretty tough sell.
EDIT: Just, in general, it would be pretty difficult to commit time to such a task when it's more fulfilling to work on personal side projects (and potentially leverage that for employment offers).
> it would be pretty difficult to commit time to such a task when it's more fulfilling to work on personal side projects
Or if you, I dunno... have a child. That's something that (as a relatively new parent) leaps out at me with interview requirements like this. It feels like you need to get a job at Google before becoming a parent, or you're going to need to wait until your kid is in high school.
“You can pass every interview with A grades and still not get a job, because a senior Googler decides that you're the wrong person to be hired.”
Google doesn’t need you. They probably already have a clone of you. They have gobs of rank-and-file SWE effort on reserve should one of their key products fail.
The process is designed to entertain the hiring manager and certain key employees. They don’t want you for your productivity. They want you for the chance that you help surround one of their favorites with things they like so that this other guy doesn’t bounce elsewhere. This other Googler likely already has a competing offer— that’s how he got promoted last year.
At this stage, if Google hires you, you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else. You’re going straight for the bench.
Don’t prepare for months for just Google; prepare for your own future. Don’t let Google hijack your capacity for critical thinking.
This is ludicrously false and not at _all_ why Google hires people. They hire people because - big surprise - there are projects that need staffing.
"At this stage, if Google hires you, you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else. You’re going straight for the bench."
I mean, just wow. Do you really believe this? This is fantasy to an incredible degree.
What's ludicrous is the assertion of fantasy here. Some context:
* Google's current hiring process lag from first contact to start date is 4-6 months. That's based on reports in Blind and a couple of recent hires I know. That lag is double that of large competitors. Google wants to make candidates wait in order to appear more exclusive. "Projects need staffing"-- clearly not as much as Google needs to maintain its brand.
* "You're going straight to the bench." This is based on a variety of comments, some posted here, some from former Google PMs and SWEs I know. It takes more than a year to get a project that most people consider meaningful. Some have different expectations upon joining, though.
* "you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else." I used to work with an ex-Googler who had a large role in Google's Ads team. He couldn't code very well, and routinely struggled to have accurate assessment of senior engineers. It's questionable how he passed the SWE interview bar at Google. But he was "good looking" and "affable" (he once appeared in a vanity magazine in a shirtless photo shoot). He routinely claimed that his female Google superiors hit on him. Other ex-Googlers told me there where many people in the office who seemed to be "fluff" for everybody else.
The bottom line: Google prides itself (excessively) on having a uniform brand, yet is large enough today that the long tail of "out-of-brand people" is quite large. When you submit your resume to Google, you're feeding their index and ranking of all-of-SWE humanity (literally-- they heavily apply ML to their resume pool). Don't get brainwashed with the brand, and think critically before letting a _company_ have this sort of power over people.
But after all, most of the newer Google products really seem to be there just to entertain their own people and give them something to do. No one can tell me, for example, that there was a serious business case behind Google Allo.
> The process is designed to entertain the hiring manager
Hahaha no. Please talk to a hiring manager at Google, especially if they're trying to fill an even slightly niche role, about how tough it is to get anybody through the hiring process.
Also, for "generic" roles like SWE, the hiring manager has literally no input into the process: the hiring takes place first, and team allocation only happens afterwards.
They hire people they don’t need, to build products they’ll kill in a few quarters. Must be weird working in a company with one well-identified money fountain, and then endless side projects that don’t really matter at all
If you had one solid money fountain, isn't that what you'd also do, though? Throw a lot of other things at the wall which you expect would have a high chance of failure but high reward if they succeed. (Though Amazon seems to have managed something similar without randomly shutting down AWS services and such.)
I have two friends who told me they were trying to get competing offers so that they could use it in their promo packet. One was in the ads team, extremely sharp guy, trying to make Staff level in his 3rd year there.
Joe Beda, one of the creators of Kubernetes, had a giant competing offering from Facebook. Turned it down to stay at Google, got some more freedom, and now we have Kubernetes (!).
If you look on Blind, there is plenty of discussion of using counter offers to force the promo process to work.
you nailed it: "They don’t want you for your productivity. They want you for the chance that you help surround one of their favorites with things they like"
I enjoyed the write-up but I have a small correction to make about "Frustrating moment #2. You can pass every interview with A grades and still not get a job, because a senior Googler decides that you're the wrong person to be hired."
The author is referring to hiring committees, whose job it is to take the feedback from every interview and make a hire/no-hire decision based on the blended results. I've done hundreds of interviews at Google and I've never seen universally positive interview feedback result in a no-hire decision.
The problem is that most feedback is not universally positive (or negative). So the hiring committee has to dissect the feedback and try to figure out if the identified negatives are (1) credible and (2) sufficient to be disqualifying. That can be pretty difficult (especially if the feedback is contradictory) and why a committee does it rather than the recruiter or hiring manager.
he and his entire hiring committee reviewed all of their packets from when they, each individual member of thebhiring committee, were interviewing at Google.... the recruiter was just making a point that they were being too picky
The hiring committee is not the last step, you need to get accepted by the SVP of your org and the site lead as well, both of them are single persons who can torpedo your application alone.
Yep, I made it through the hiring committee and got denied at the SVP level. Was fun getting a literal congrats from the recruiter, then meeting my future team that gave me the thumbs up, then getting a call that it wasn’t going to happen... rough rollercoaster
I interviewed at Google for an SRE:Systems role around a month ago; I can share my anecdotes.
The first interview put me in contact with a recruiter who would basically be my guide throughout the process, at first he asked me some basic questions to feel out where I was weak and then told me to prepare those weaknesses for the next round.
The next round was 2 phone interviews, lasting about an hour each and over different days, one focused on my programming skills (of which, I have little because sysadmins don't typically do anything relating to data structures) and the second one was surrounding linux internals and debugging (which I was very strong on).
I spent roughly 2 working days worth of time preparing for them.
Preparing for the on-site was pleasant, I was put in touch with another google recruiter who ensured I knew where I was going and what I was doing, they told me that I'd be there the whole day and while they couldn't tell me what I would be asked/who I would meet/what to prepare; they gave me an approximation of the _kind_ of questions, very broadly.
I spent roughly 18 working days preparing in my weak areas, including leetcode/data structures and reading comp-sci papers (paxos and ilk).
On the day, I went through about 5, 1-hour long interviews that focused on various aspects of SRE (one of them being 'googliness'), some were about distributed systems (where the interviewer got hung up on the fact that I said I would use postgres instead of making my own database) and others were heavily programmer focused (linux internals was more about knowing the implementation of 'ls', scripting was all about the kinds of questions you get on leetcode).
I'm not going to lie, it was gruelling, and I'm typically pretty comfortable interviewing;
I thought I'd be fine with these interviews because I'm considered to be "shit hot" in sysadmin/writing glue by my peers, but I guess not, as I'm not a Google-SRE. :)
(sidenote: everything in TFA rings true, including the tips, google recruiters are quite transparent about your process. But they also said that the last stage is not the interview, it's roughly 5 hiring committees that are looking at your application "package" through different lenses)
To be really good at those interviews you have to practice to be really good at those interviews. It takes a tremendous amount of time to get good enough that you can't possibly fail (especially for people like me, who are incapable of thinking clearly when they're asked to perform in front of others).
My brother hires for a consulting firm and he was talking about how there really is a shortage of talent out there. That's true, but in an earlier era, companies would hire a bunch of people out of college and spend resources training them. I know there are a lot of intelligent people out there who would be more than capable of performing if the entry bar wasn't set so high. Unfortunately, I guess that model doesn't work in the era of job hopping.
> My brother hires for a consulting firm and he was talking about how there really is a shortage of talent out there.
Exceptional talent is rare. There's only a shortage if you're unreasonable. Lots of employers are some combination of apathetic, unreasonable, or plain ol' lazy. It costs them nothing to fish for talent for 6-12 months, accept hundreds of applications, and then complain when a unicorn didn't come along who was willing to take at or below market rate.
I would never dare to suggest writing a new database in a professional context, even less during an interview. Probably as a joke at the coffee machine because it's ridiculous but otherwise no.
It's so many distributed databases around there, no one is better than one good PostgreSQL for the majority of uses cases.
The same things, but in august 2019.
I spent about a month to prepare for the on-site.
The sections time-limit was about 45 minutes(not the 1hour)
Failed on one coding section and on Googliness.
HR coordinator said that I've slightly below the acceptable hiring level.
Also, the free seminars for NALSD finished the two weeks before my interview.
Also, I heard that I have only two remaining attempts of on-site at Google
I interviewed at Google and some other big tech companies in late 2015. From all the big ones Google's process was the most terrible. After the initial screening I had to deal with obviously terribly placed engineers who had an "ah I need to take another interview with a non-Googler - what do they know?" kind of attitude. Arrogant, dismissive, and actually a waste of time.
In contrast, Microsoft was much more professional and a real pleasure to interview at. They have been really interested and all the engineers I talked to have been great.
Disclosure: Did not decide for any of these - went for a smaller company as it was overall what seemed best for me. Did not regret my choice even though the Microsoft offer is something I'd love to try out in a parallel universe.
That's funny, I just had a bad experience with Microsoft. I applied for a job on their site that had several locations listed, one of which was of interest to me.
A recruiter sent me a bunch of questionnaires to fill out and then connected me with a Tech Lead for the initial phone interview. The Tech Lead introduced himself and the position, said the position was available in 2 locations (neither of which were my preferred location), and that was that.
I followed up with the recruiter and she expressed surprise, since she saw the same job posting I did.
A couple days later, Microsoft's site tells me I was not chosen for the job, no further information.
But of course, that's just one experience, and it's a large company, and all that. Maybe I'll apply for something else there.
Microsoft and Google interview thousands and thousands of engineers monthly, do not try to generalize the interview experience for everyone based on your one anecdotal experience (or that of a few friends) and naively assume it's that same way for everyone else.
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I applied for a job, and received an out-of-the-blue email from a recruiter about a different job a couple months later (my resume must have landed in some "recent" bucket). The position was in Google Cloud. I was frustrated by the "you'll talk to a team after you've passed 100 hurdles" nonsense.
I had one phone screen with my recruiter, which was positive. She said we'd be scheduling a phone interview. I got a call a few days later; she said we'd be skipping the phone interviews and going to an on-site at Sunnyvale. I thought this was a good sign! In hindsight, I think they just needed to fill a lot of positions quickly.
I did the onsite, which I thought went terribly, and I left feeling really discouraged. My recruiter said my packet wouldn't go the hiring committee, but that she thought the feedback was positive enough that I could find another role at the company. I got handed to another recruiter for a lesser role doing developer support. That recruiter reached out to me a few days later to tell me that he didn't actually have any roles for me.
The whole process took a couple months, and ultimately made me feel bad about my abilities. Everyone I met at the onsite was kind of an asshole. My "lunch interviewer" complained about the bureaucracy and said he was looking for another job after being there for ~18 months.
It's unfortunate that positions at FAANG are so beneficial to my resume, because I'd love to never go through that process again. I'm going through it right now with Amazon.
The recruiter was nonplussed when she called me out of the blue months later trying to schedule my on-site. She couldn’t believe I was not interested in continuing - how could I turn down Google??
This was when the google koolaid was far stronger - early/mid 2000s. To this day I consider it the most amazing example of a company being so entranced by its own narrative that it was genuinely incomprehensible to her and required spelling it out slowly.
Google is still a great place to land as a new college grad, but these days I would consider many other options as an experienced professional. There are indicators that Google is starting to run into issues detailed in The Innovator's Dilemma, particularly with respect to its Cloud business.
Lol. I had the exact same experience back in the late 90s, but with... IBM. Arrogant as heck, took three months to follow up and were shocked to know I was no longer interested. It was beautiful.
Actually (with that) he wasn't being an asshole; he was doing you a favor.
In revealing to you, quite candidly, just how disappointing the Google experience evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
> evidently is for a considerable portion of engineers.
I only see evidence that the experience was disappointing for a single Googler, the lunch interviewer, not "a considerable portion" of them. The interviewer's data point is certainly valid, but it's not clear to me how much you can generalize it.
I also interviewed there last spring, but I thought it was super positive, even though I didn't get the job. I had to push myself really hard to get the onsite and I think that was beneficial to me. I have no computer science background at all and it forced me to prep intensively between interviews. So, I kind of went into it figuring I probably wouldn't get it but who knows and that it would just be good to have the experience of this super tough interview.
I learned some things! I started thinking about my job a bit differently, which is cool. Also, at the very least, the process made me better at interviews. Ha! There's always something you can take from a difficult experience (and it was for sure difficult.)
I don't think you should feel discouraged or feel bad about your abilities. It sounds like it was just a poor fit and you should be happy it didn't work out! Plus, now you've been through it once. You know what it's like. You can do it again somewhere else and it'll work out.
Good luck with Amazon!
It has not been a mistake.
As plenty of people have mentioned, more than a million people interview here every year. With that many interviews, I cannot imagine how bad some outlier horror stories can be.
In aggregate, something like 78% of people consider interviewing at Google a positive experience, despite the fact that only less than 2% of respondents actually go on to work here.
I dunno about every one else, but usually there's a high correlation with satisfaction and getting the job. The fact that hardly anyone ends up getting a job here, and the vast majority of people are satisfied seems like the process isn't terrible.
I doubt there's many companies with a better track record.
I hear nothing but good things about Microsoft recently, so I wouldn't be surprised if their numbers are better.
3 years ago i got that impression too. Google seems to be scrambling to get into cloud business believing that they are somehow entitled to success in what is a completely foreign business for them. Anyway, it was a surprise mirroring the experience of a couple acquaintances (who is in the same boat - long time enterprise software devs) - the interview wasn't a big deal and the result was an L5 with very low comp (not sure why they bothered at all offering below even regular companies not just FAANG), naturally didn't go for it. As far as i see Google runs the hiring as an academia/exec style appointment committees - those hiring/compensation committees - where one has to have the good looking on paper achievements to hit reasonably well, and the interview just gets you in the door.
that was my google onsite experience in 2013. I haven't been back and wouldn't try again.
In contrast, my Amazon interviews were extremely efficiently done, and I loved their planning around it. Quick, no-nonsense, quick turnaround.
Came back a week later to sign the paperwork after I emailed with the recruiter a few times about offer details. Started a week after that. (And then went on a one week vacation after working for only two weeks and got paid for it, because it was already scheduled).
And this wasn't an outlier. Pretty much everyone we hired had a similar timeline. Sometimes the candidates made us wait for an answer because we were so quick that they hadn't even had their first round at Google.
So they see hiring as a relatively low risk proposition and will make decisions faster since the long term effects are greatly lessened.
But even so, most people did not get fired, contrary to popular belief. I don't remember the stats, but almost no one was fired within their first year for example.
It would explain why I've never been contacted by either. I have no expert level skills in things they're interested in. (I've mostly worked at startups - breadth over depth)
But most companies hire for a specific position. The way Google does it is the outlier.
Google's interview process is notoriously bad for some folks, and that is absolutely true and something Google tries to fix. And there are absolutely plenty of unhappy people. Even if the odds are very low that any particular person is unhappy (and they aren't), the total probability across the company is quite high.
On the other hand, you don't hold on thousands of workers--most of whom has many, many choices of place to work--if you aren't doing _something_ right.
So the experience is valid, but generalizing is tricky.
One complaint that I have seen over and over (even in this thread) is his frustrating moment #3: "Google doesn't respect your time". That's of course entirely subjective and many people may be ok with months of preparation, days of interviews and weeks of waiting for feedback (with recruiters occasionally going dark for months). But many folks are justifiably irked.
Most recently was this past June and I have to say that while the process was protracted, they did do a pretty good job of keeping me informed along the way. Eventually, I accepted an offer elsewhere as it seemed like they intended to under-level me and the choosing the team after the fact really doesn't work for me.
Most people think you have to go in and regurgitate a solution you memorized, but really most interviewers are looking to see your process working through the problem.
They do an initial quick screener, and then a one day interview. Not really sure how much more they could do to respect your time.
Probably one inherent benefit of a process this shitty, in addition to whatever benefits of the criteria they're selecting for, is that selected candidates identify more strongly with their co-workers and with the company than they otherwise would (see: Cialdini's Persuasion on the benefits of hazing)
I'm not sure this is a great way to hire engineers, but at the same time I'm sure it feels pretty familiar to people fresh from grad school.
Most people (especially if they didn't win the birth lottery by being born in CA, USA) go to schools and colleges for YEARS and YEARS to come even a few steps towards what you can get at Google and FAANGS by working for a month or two to prepare for the interview.
Take a step back and consider just how damn pampered we are in this business when doing exercies for a few weeks before interview for a 250.000$+ job is too much for you.
So yeah, you can spend ages preparing for an interview, but remember you're probably topping your odds out. A genius well prepared might have a 90% success rate, if they don't prepare that's 0%. But not many of us are a genius and none of us are 0% prepared. So maybe you're actually boosting your odds from 40% to 50%.
Then finally, you've got your dream job! Oh but actually 3 things are possibly true. 1: You're surrounded by people who walked the interview in which case you are going to be sprinting to keep up and actually your job is going to be incredibly difficult. 2: You're surrounded by people who also had to desparately prep for the interview for months- so none of you are well suited to the job, actually google is interviewing for the wrong things and actually your life is going to be tough. And 3: Anyone who can't afford to spend months prepping for Google won't be working with you- anyone with any responsibility in their personal life probably won't be able to afford to do this stupid prep work and so they're simply never going to work there, so you're now in this homogenous leet code clique.
This is a pretty steep exaggeration.
Depends on what you do at Google.
Google Guava is a data-structure/algorithms-heavy great Java library.
Dart and Golang are programming languages. I'd imagine you have to know how to write a compiler etc and the standard library definitely has sections for data-structure and algorithms.
They pay tons of money and prefer people to stick around and do different things within the company so I guess that's why they set the bar high for that specific section of skillset (algorithms and data structure).
Some people are willing to go through that for the Money, Prestige, and hopefully the experience. Some people don't. That's life.
I imagine they have multiple PhDs working on those projects. For your bog standard SDE these interviews have very little to do with the day-to-day job.
I see this style of interview questions pretty frequently and I really question their effectiveness, vs say something more open ended and fluid.
Problem is someone else will. And there's no easy fix.
If there was an easy way for a group of uncoordinated people (applicants) to coordinate against bullshit (stupid-long interviewing processes sometimes unrelated to the job and other stuff) we could solve many of this world's problems, don't you think?
I personally think that that's a feature, not a bug, we don't actually need that many bright people working for companies like Google given how much data they have available (the same goes for FB).
> Problem is someone else will. And there's no easy fix.
Isn't that... eventually... Google's problem that their interview process is putting of substantial numbers of engineers?
EDIT: Just, in general, it would be pretty difficult to commit time to such a task when it's more fulfilling to work on personal side projects (and potentially leverage that for employment offers).
Or if you, I dunno... have a child. That's something that (as a relatively new parent) leaps out at me with interview requirements like this. It feels like you need to get a job at Google before becoming a parent, or you're going to need to wait until your kid is in high school.
Google doesn’t need you. They probably already have a clone of you. They have gobs of rank-and-file SWE effort on reserve should one of their key products fail.
The process is designed to entertain the hiring manager and certain key employees. They don’t want you for your productivity. They want you for the chance that you help surround one of their favorites with things they like so that this other guy doesn’t bounce elsewhere. This other Googler likely already has a competing offer— that’s how he got promoted last year.
At this stage, if Google hires you, you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else. You’re going straight for the bench.
Don’t prepare for months for just Google; prepare for your own future. Don’t let Google hijack your capacity for critical thinking.
"At this stage, if Google hires you, you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else. You’re going straight for the bench."
I mean, just wow. Do you really believe this? This is fantasy to an incredible degree.
* Google's current hiring process lag from first contact to start date is 4-6 months. That's based on reports in Blind and a couple of recent hires I know. That lag is double that of large competitors. Google wants to make candidates wait in order to appear more exclusive. "Projects need staffing"-- clearly not as much as Google needs to maintain its brand.
* "You're going straight to the bench." This is based on a variety of comments, some posted here, some from former Google PMs and SWEs I know. It takes more than a year to get a project that most people consider meaningful. Some have different expectations upon joining, though.
* "you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else." I used to work with an ex-Googler who had a large role in Google's Ads team. He couldn't code very well, and routinely struggled to have accurate assessment of senior engineers. It's questionable how he passed the SWE interview bar at Google. But he was "good looking" and "affable" (he once appeared in a vanity magazine in a shirtless photo shoot). He routinely claimed that his female Google superiors hit on him. Other ex-Googlers told me there where many people in the office who seemed to be "fluff" for everybody else.
The bottom line: Google prides itself (excessively) on having a uniform brand, yet is large enough today that the long tail of "out-of-brand people" is quite large. When you submit your resume to Google, you're feeding their index and ranking of all-of-SWE humanity (literally-- they heavily apply ML to their resume pool). Don't get brainwashed with the brand, and think critically before letting a _company_ have this sort of power over people.
But after all, most of the newer Google products really seem to be there just to entertain their own people and give them something to do. No one can tell me, for example, that there was a serious business case behind Google Allo.
Hahaha no. Please talk to a hiring manager at Google, especially if they're trying to fill an even slightly niche role, about how tough it is to get anybody through the hiring process.
Also, for "generic" roles like SWE, the hiring manager has literally no input into the process: the hiring takes place first, and team allocation only happens afterwards.
Source? I'm very skeptical this is true. I am not a huge fan of Google's promotion process but it isn't that bad.
Joe Beda, one of the creators of Kubernetes, had a giant competing offering from Facebook. Turned it down to stay at Google, got some more freedom, and now we have Kubernetes (!).
If you look on Blind, there is plenty of discussion of using counter offers to force the promo process to work.
Dead Comment
I enjoyed the write-up but I have a small correction to make about "Frustrating moment #2. You can pass every interview with A grades and still not get a job, because a senior Googler decides that you're the wrong person to be hired."
The author is referring to hiring committees, whose job it is to take the feedback from every interview and make a hire/no-hire decision based on the blended results. I've done hundreds of interviews at Google and I've never seen universally positive interview feedback result in a no-hire decision.
The problem is that most feedback is not universally positive (or negative). So the hiring committee has to dissect the feedback and try to figure out if the identified negatives are (1) credible and (2) sufficient to be disqualifying. That can be pretty difficult (especially if the feedback is contradictory) and why a committee does it rather than the recruiter or hiring manager.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22345234
The first interview put me in contact with a recruiter who would basically be my guide throughout the process, at first he asked me some basic questions to feel out where I was weak and then told me to prepare those weaknesses for the next round.
The next round was 2 phone interviews, lasting about an hour each and over different days, one focused on my programming skills (of which, I have little because sysadmins don't typically do anything relating to data structures) and the second one was surrounding linux internals and debugging (which I was very strong on).
I spent roughly 2 working days worth of time preparing for them.
Preparing for the on-site was pleasant, I was put in touch with another google recruiter who ensured I knew where I was going and what I was doing, they told me that I'd be there the whole day and while they couldn't tell me what I would be asked/who I would meet/what to prepare; they gave me an approximation of the _kind_ of questions, very broadly.
I spent roughly 18 working days preparing in my weak areas, including leetcode/data structures and reading comp-sci papers (paxos and ilk).
On the day, I went through about 5, 1-hour long interviews that focused on various aspects of SRE (one of them being 'googliness'), some were about distributed systems (where the interviewer got hung up on the fact that I said I would use postgres instead of making my own database) and others were heavily programmer focused (linux internals was more about knowing the implementation of 'ls', scripting was all about the kinds of questions you get on leetcode).
I'm not going to lie, it was gruelling, and I'm typically pretty comfortable interviewing;
I thought I'd be fine with these interviews because I'm considered to be "shit hot" in sysadmin/writing glue by my peers, but I guess not, as I'm not a Google-SRE. :)
(sidenote: everything in TFA rings true, including the tips, google recruiters are quite transparent about your process. But they also said that the last stage is not the interview, it's roughly 5 hiring committees that are looking at your application "package" through different lenses)
My brother hires for a consulting firm and he was talking about how there really is a shortage of talent out there. That's true, but in an earlier era, companies would hire a bunch of people out of college and spend resources training them. I know there are a lot of intelligent people out there who would be more than capable of performing if the entry bar wasn't set so high. Unfortunately, I guess that model doesn't work in the era of job hopping.
Exceptional talent is rare. There's only a shortage if you're unreasonable. Lots of employers are some combination of apathetic, unreasonable, or plain ol' lazy. It costs them nothing to fish for talent for 6-12 months, accept hundreds of applications, and then complain when a unicorn didn't come along who was willing to take at or below market rate.
It's so many distributed databases around there, no one is better than one good PostgreSQL for the majority of uses cases.
Dead Comment
Huh? Google thinks it's valuable for their SREs to be hand-writing databases in place of industry standards? SREs specifically?
Also, I heard that I have only two remaining attempts of on-site at Google
LOL WAT.
This is a good enough reason for me to stay away tbh. I did not hear this from my recruiter.
In contrast, Microsoft was much more professional and a real pleasure to interview at. They have been really interested and all the engineers I talked to have been great.
Disclosure: Did not decide for any of these - went for a smaller company as it was overall what seemed best for me. Did not regret my choice even though the Microsoft offer is something I'd love to try out in a parallel universe.
A recruiter sent me a bunch of questionnaires to fill out and then connected me with a Tech Lead for the initial phone interview. The Tech Lead introduced himself and the position, said the position was available in 2 locations (neither of which were my preferred location), and that was that.
I followed up with the recruiter and she expressed surprise, since she saw the same job posting I did.
A couple days later, Microsoft's site tells me I was not chosen for the job, no further information.
But of course, that's just one experience, and it's a large company, and all that. Maybe I'll apply for something else there.
Microsoft and Google interview thousands and thousands of engineers monthly, do not try to generalize the interview experience for everyone based on your one anecdotal experience (or that of a few friends) and naively assume it's that same way for everyone else.
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