Defining Google

pbaumgar writes "Did anyone catch the 60 Minutes piece on Google this evening? They mention their hiring process a bit in the story: 'For example, Google is hiring about 25 new people every week, and receives more than 1,000 resumes a day. But they're determined to stick to their rigorous screening process. Google uses aptitude tests, which it has even placed in technical magazines, hoping some really big brains would tackle the hardest problems. Score well on the test, and you might get a job interview. And then another and another. One recent hire had 14 interviews before getting the job - and that was in the public relations department.' As a person who recently interviewed with them this past summer (I didn't get the job), I was wondering what others' experiences were like who interview with Google. I had 4 interviews, and it was by far the longest and most interesting interviewing process I've been involved in. I'd love to hear others' experiences in their attempt to get hired."

This is a new trend

[Monkelectric]

The forever interview is becoming a new staple of the hiring process.

I had *10 hours* of interviews for a company that didn't end up hiring *ANYONE*, for a shity 50k a year entry position (yes, 50k a year is shitty in the area it was in when an apartment costs 1500/m).

A friend of mine got hired for a company who wanted an expert in *3* non-related research fields (he has a PHD and luckily and experience in those fields). He flew up there and did several *days* of interviews, Then they called him back and said he would also have to be an expert in Unix and could he fly back up to meet their Unix team.

We were able to maniupulate the test conditions and make him appear to be a unix expert. Hes been employed for a couple months now, and has worked entirely as a unix admin, which isnt even what hes hired for.

The job market is nothing less then crazy

Didn't Last Long

[bjtuna]

I got a call from Google earlier this fall, saying they'd farmed my resume off the web and wanted to interview me for some kind of Unix-related position. I spoke on the phone a couple times with an HR person who asked me some general questions and setup a phone interview with a current Google employee.

The phone interview with the employee, who was working at a position very similar to the one I was interviewing for, was rigorous. He asked questions that required me to speak code to him, on the fly. I ended up asking if I could take my time and write the code out before I read it to him, because I didn't want to screw up. I screwed up anyway. I was really nervous and even though the questions weren't very complex, they were things that I wasn't prepared to have to answer on the spot.

I finally heard back from them almost a month later, with the (no surprise) rejection.

Re:I hate college

[BWJones]

I am not going to hound you on your spelling or grammar, but I would like to suggest that you consider post-secondary education of some sort, or at least learn a trade. One of the reasons many companies require basic levels of competency (i.e. a bachelors degree or higher) is that college teaches you communication skills, problem solving skills and exposes you to alternative viewpoints and ways of thinking. These are all critical skills to have if a company wants to succeed.

I interviewed in May

[waffffffle]

I flew out to Google in May for an interview. I had first interviewed on campus (I actually thought I bombed that interview). They flew me out to California for an interview (the only person from my school that interviewed for that position). I was interviewing for an Associate Product Marketing Manager position. My day consisted of about six half-hour interviews, all in the same small conference room, with a break for lunch. The process was very different in comparison to Microsoft (I had just flown out to Microsoft two weeks earlier). While Microsoft moves you from building to building, room to room, so you get sufficiently lost and disoriented (while the different interviewers talk about you behind your back) at Google the interviewers come to you and they don't know anything about you until you meet them (so they claim). Google's questions seemed significantly easier than Microsoft's, but I was interviewing for a Program Manager position at Microsoft, so the focus of the questions was pretty different. Microsoft gives you brain teasers, tells you to write code on the board (even though it was a non-coding position), and even gave me an ethics question. Google gave me a lot of estimation questions (number of pizzas sold at college in a year), which I don't really understand since I don't see how being a good estimator makes you good at anything else. Regardless, I was really proud of all of my estimations (I prepared myself with a bunch of dumb facts, like the number of Wal-Mart stores in the US, to use as references, which worked well. At the end of my day of interviews (which I thought went really well) I was talking with an HR guy (not my HR guy, strangely) and he asked me what time I was coming back the next day. I told him that I wasn't coming back since my flight home was the next morning (this was set up by the Google travel people, I had no choice in this matter). He told me that I needed to meet with two more people and he went back upstairs to see if they were free to meet with me that afternoon. It took him a long time to come back and tell me that they were too busy, so I was sent home, pretty much knowing that I wouldn't be getting a job since I couldn't complete the interview process. I was an east-coaster, and unlike all the Stanford kids that they seemed to move in by the busload for interviews, I had to go home. It took them a long time to get back to me about their decision. The HR guy kept telling me that the meeting to discuss my interviews kept getting postponed. Then one day he told me that I needed to set aside two hours for a timed essay. I took the essay, which was the "final step" in the interview process, according to the Word doc they sent me (I was expecting some high-tech web form that prevents me from missing the deadline, but instead I just got the email at the time specified and had to email it back within two hours). I got an email about a week later telling me I didn't get the job. My essay kicked ass. I should post it online. Oh well. I've got a lot of other observations about the differences between the Google and Microsoft interview processes if anyone cares.

Re:Is it just me

[aussie_a]

Google is censored in North America (or at least the US portion), see their dmca policy. See my post below and whether or not I believe it's evil (I'm against their DMCA policy more then their Chinese policy because the DMCA affects me. If I were Chinese I may have a different opinion).

By the way, those fanatics you talked about is a foreign government. With that sort of respect it's no wonder America isn't the most popular country right now. No, not a flame. An observation.

Re:I hate college

[Torham]

The sad thing is that I was easily able to name people at my work, with a BS, that can't even do these things. (No not me, I don't have a BS)

Re:Searching Questions

[blcknight]

Rule #1: Never, Never ask an interviewer what they meant by their question. They meant it exactly like they asked it. Give concise answers, if you find yourself getting too repetitive, think about the question and try to give more detail in your answer.

Welcome

[Mark_MF-WN]

Welcome to the real world. The disabled are NOT welcome ANYWHERE.

Most companies just hire a few people with irrelevant disabilities that don't actually impinge on their ability to work -- like people who require a wheelchair. That way can they show off the fact that they don't discriminate, without having to actually employ anyone whose productivity would be below average.

People with real disabilities, like severe schizophrenia, a learning impairment, or even plain old major depressive disorder, simply can't get good jobs. They're doomed to spend their lives in janitorial positions and the service industry, going from job to job because they can't hold down even such these simple positions. If the person is otherwise intelligent (and there are certainly lots of intelligent people with schizophrenia, depression, and other mental disorders), this is a death sentence.

Google's Process Seems Pretty Standard to Me

[alphanumwheel]

So I'm a programmer at Amazon.com - I do a good bit of recruiting/interviewing.

Google/Amazon/Microsoft all do it pretty much the same way, with a few variations. Everybody's looking for the same super-awesome programmers, and so you have basically a gauntlet of programmer-led technical interviews. Google's aptitude tests, advertisements are just it's way of leting the super-awesome programmers know that Google Wants You!

The main difference between places is how exactly they define "super-awesome". Here's my take on the companies I know about:

1. Google will hire really hardcore theroetical people into pretty applied positions. Raw intelligence seems to be job #1 at google, so they hire people without a solid pratical track record.

2. Amazon will hire hardcore hackers, even if they don't have perfect academic credentials. Stuff like sucess in Open Source project is way up there at Amazon.

3. Microsoft will hire people who have decent (but not awesome) coding skills and social skills and give them a Project Manager job. Because they have so many Project Managers, I think that also frees them to hire programmers with even fewer social skills.[pmjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjn

Re:Can't Imagine this on 60 seconds...

[Momoru]

Yeah I didn't quite believe this....according to SEC filings he has cashed out something around $100 million in stock (forget the exact number)....that must have been one expensive T-Shirt, either that or he has an awful big matress he's stuffing that under.

Re:Searching Questions

[Legion303]

On the contrary, most hiring managers recommend this, on the theory that they'd rather you ask them to clarify so you can give the question some thought, instead of just spurting an obviously canned and pre-planned response.

Re:LOGIC PROBLEMS DO NOT WORK!!!

[Geoff-with-a-G]

I think the part where you have the pirates "promising" stuff to each other is where you go off track. There's no reason to assume they'll trust Pirate 2, especially since he's about to get zero. Pirate 4 will surely vote with him, but Pirate 3 will expect to get zero if Pirate 4 doesn't stick to the "promise".

You're trying to introduce emotional factors like trust into a problem that's about logic. Sure, you can say that real live humans don't work like the problem assumes, but computers do. Someone who can accept the set of rules presented to them and find the mathematically optimal solution to the problem without bitching about its realism will be well suited to work with computers.

Anti-Military?

[Autonin]

It may have just been the individuals who interviewed me, but when they started going through my employment history and hit my military service, the interview took a dive.

They pulled out the Google mantra of "Do No Harm" and started asking pointed questions about how I could possibly work for them when I was this horrible warmonger. They would ask me what I did while I was in (I was M.I. = Intel), and then started asking me if I thought the intelligence products I'd developed had killed anyone.

At that point, all technical questions regarding my technical ability were basically dropped in favor of bashing my experiences in the Army.

I was really disappointed - it seemed like a great working environment, and I was more that qualified for the job (really!). It was before the IPO, so that would have been nice as well (*wink*), but I really wanted to be there for the atmosphere more than anything else.

Any others with this kind of experience? Or was my disaster a localized incident?

Do you know what you are saying?

[SuperKendall]

See, this is the exact thing I am talking about. You are displaying your ignorance of algorithms here. A vector and a List (eg, ArrayList in Java) are *very* different. Sure, the both implement the java.util.List interface, but that is of no real concern. A Vector can access elements in O(1) time - a list can not. However, inserting into a list is O(1) time, inserting into a vector is not. These ideas are *fundamental* and are very important, regardless of the language being used.

Excuse me, but do you understand what the implentations of List do? I guess not. It's generally not a Linked List (which is what you are thinking of). There is in fact a LinkedList class (in 1.5) and ArrayList is not it.

Why do you think "ArrayList" has "array" in the name? It's a list backed by an array, O(1) access. The difference between Vector in Java and ArrayList, is mainly one of thread synchronization around calls into the list. Even then ArrayList is really better as you can synchronize calls if you like with an optional wrapper.

You have just proved my point again, at how dangerous it is when you do not understand the libraries throughly enough to know what the implentation is going to do. You would have chosen Vector over ArrayList seeking O(1) access but instead would have cost yourself a substantial synchronization penalty for no reason! I have seen the same behaviour in countless junior Java programmers, mistakenly using Vector instead of a List reference.

Why? Why should I care what IDE someone uses as long as they write the code properly. If they are more efficient using SharpDevelop or vi, all the power to them.

Well in the case of C# (which you also seem to know little about) the IDE is the language. They are essentially inseperable, at least not without great cost in productivity. In other languages sure, the IDE is not really important.

Same thing goes with the Java libraries. You don't need to know them by heart, all you need to know is the URL to the API spec and what youa re looking for. It is **far** more important to decide to use the correct algorithm (eg, a list vs a vector), before you get to the API.

Once again, as you have shown it's also important to understand the IMPLEMENTATION behind the API as much as the algorithm you are gunning for. Algorithms are I agree key to understand - but beyond that understanding the library you are about to invoke and the nuances of using it are equally important in any modern language. Otherwise you do things like adding strings without realizing the cost.

I call BS on "no Porche" quote

[w3bgeek]

The article includes "If anybody got a Porsche or a Ferrari right now at Google, they'd probably be drummed out of the company," observes John Battelle, an author and entrepreneur who has been following Silicon Valley companies for 20 years. I call BS. Google is opening a new campus in Kirland, WA (another Seattle burb, next to Redmond) in an effort to poach as many devs as possible from Microsoft. My wife was out driving near there and saw a brand new Mercedes SL500 (about $90k) with the license "GOOGLE1".

Re:Google and Others

[frozen_crow]

One of the things missing from the interview, for example, was any sort of discussion of the Google side of things, or what the job or work relationships or technology are like.

Did you ask? When I interviewed there, they drove me nuts, everybody asking all the time whether I had any questions.

And don't forget, google is notoriously secretive. It should come as no surprise that they don't volunteer much information about the technology. A number of my questions got "sorry, I can't answer that" answers.

Re:Innovative practices...

[Nasarius]

Ah, if you bother to look at the date on the posting, this was over 20 years ago. Things have changed.

Why manhole covers are round

[Animats]

That's the classic Microsoft interview question. And all the published answers are wrong.

Today, covers come in many shapes - round, square, rectangular, oblong with rounded corners. But older covers tend to be round.

This reflects manufacturing technology a century ago. In 1900, you could cast metal, so you could get any rough shape you wanted. Machining was limited to flat planing, grinding, drilling, and turning on a lathe. Milling machines for heavy work didn't exist yet. Welding wasn't working yet, either. Turning on a lathe was the only really high-precision operation available.

So you could make flat things, or round things, or imprecise things, or riveted things. Look at a steam locomotive from about 1900, and that's what you'll see. Almost everything is either flat or a full circle. You won't see arbitrary curves on parts that have to fit. You won't see rectangular inside corners.

Actually, it's not making the cover that was hard in 1900. You could make a square cover. But making the ring into which it fits was tough. The inside of the ring has to be flat, or the cover will rattle. An unmachined casting will be too rough. Some finish machining will be required.

Casting a round ring is straightforward. You make a wooden master, press it into a box of moulding sand, and pour in molten metal. Straightforward foundry work. Finish-machining the ring on a lathe is easy. The only surfaces that matter are the ones where the lid touches the ring. One clamping of the work to a flat spindle plate, two cuts, one for each surface, using stock lathe cutters that can be resharpened on an ordinary grinding wheel. This could all be done cheaply in 1900.

Today it's no problem to make a square frame. You'd make a square frame by cutting angle stock into sections and welding the corners. Clean up the welds with a power grinder. Or make a rough casting, then do a quick pass with a CNC grinder to true it up. So today, you see square frames with square covers.

But try to make a heavy square frame with 1900 technology. You can rough cast the frame, but smoothing out the inside edges is a tough job. You can't use a lathe; the workpiece isn't round. You don't have a milling machine. You can't get a planer into the corners. It's hand work, with files and grinding stones. That's slow and expensive, unaffordable for a cheap generic product.

And that's the real answer to why manhole covers are round.

Re:Anti-Military?

[Autonin]

God's honest truth this happened.

They asked me what projects or other work I'd done that I was proud of (typical background question = allows the candidate to put forth their best work).

When I started talking about how I'd had the job of analyzing enemy data traffic comms and how I'd been able to build a nice, concise map of their network from traceroutes and DNS zone transfers, they lit into me about how could I even consider myself eligible for Google (they must've said "Do No Harm" like 10 times, no joke), and how effective my targeting was, and how many people did I think I killed with this information. When I explained to them that this information wasn't probably used to kill anyone, then they lit into me about why I thought I should be proud of this work when obviously it wasn't ever used.

I was basically damned if I did, and damned if I didn't - I either was proud of my work and was an effective soldier (and therefore "Harmful" = strike 1-2-3 you're out!), or I was an ineffective nobody who's work wasn't good for anything (and therefore "Incompetent" by my own admission = strike 1-2-3 you're out!).

I was really disappointed. It really was just two people together during one of my 4 interview sessions that day, but it seemed their negative reviews sunk any hopes I might have had. I was never given a complete answer as to why I was rejected, other than I was 'unsuitable'.

Observations

[waffffffle]

Here are my observations, as promised yesterday: I found it interesting to compare the processes of both Google and Microsoft. Microsoft seems more willing to spend money on you. They give you incredible flexibility with travel arrangements and let you stay up to two extra days to see Seattle. I interviewed in 2003 for an internship and spent the entire weekend out there and Microsoft paid for all of it. It was as much fun as a solo vacation could be. Google on the other hand was very stingy. They required that I take only the cheapest flights that they could find and wouldn't let me stay any extra time (I asked, since I hadn't really been in the bay area before). This is more frustrating since the fact that they flew me home the next morning seemed to be pretty influential in their decision, not allowing me to meet with all the right people. Google also had a less formal expense system. It also took them a lot longer to reimburse me for my meals and I had to pay for the car rental upfront (which they didn't warn me of). As for the questions, I don't know if I should give away all of them, because from what I hear the companies don't really like that (I still may end up working for either of them some day). The Microsoft ethics question was a complete hypothetical, about a company that created medical equipment, not about something Microsoft-related. Many of Microsoft's questions required me to design a product that Microsoft would probably not be interested in. For my final interview I then had to explain why Microsoft WOULD be interested in selling such a product. That last interview didn't go as well as the rest (another reason it didn't is that in the middle of the interview I realized that I had lost my cell phone, so I was distracted the rest of the interview). One of the fun parts about interviewing at Google is lunch. You've probably heard about their great cafeteria: the food is amazing and free. Because of this the lines seem to be very long to eat, but everyone at lunch seems pretty happy, as opposed to the Microsoft cafeteria that I ate at, where most people didn't seem so enthusiastic (although I have certainly seen far worse employee lunch rooms in terms of people's demeanor). At Microsoft your lunch is one of your interviews. I found that my lunch interviewers were often the nicest interviewers. They asked the easiest questions and seemed to focus mostly on my opinions and less on my creativity or technical ability. This was my experience with my two trips out there, so I don't know if this standard. My first time the interviewer took me to a restaurant and put it on an American Express card (I'm assuming he can expense that) and this past year we just ate in the cafeteria. In the morning the recruiter gives you free lunch tickets for you and your interviewer. Since I didn't use them my first year I gave mine to a friend of mine who was working for Microsoft so he can have a free lunch (not like he needs it though). Unlike Microsoft, Google gave us all lots of swag. I came home with a whole lot of pens, and the coolest freebie, a Blogger sweatshirt, although that was a special gift from one of my interviewers . (I was an original Blogger Pro customer but didn't read the end of the email where they told us we get free sweatshirts for supporting the company before Google bought them until after the deadline, so she got me a sweatshirt.) At Google I felt a lot like a group of interviewees. We all had name tags and had a lot of time to meet each other. Everybody was my age (graduating senior) and the majority of the kids were from nearby schools like Stanford. Many of them only had half the interviews that I did, and were scheduled to come back the next day for more. I met one girl that originally had her interviews scheduled for the day that they announced the IPO but they sent her home because no one wanted to interview her. Luckily she was a Stanford student. At Microsoft an interviewee feels very alone. I spent very little time around other candidates other than the 20 mi