Top anybody interested, I setup a google form, completely anonymous, asking programmers their opinions on the interview process. I'm working towards building something better that is re-usable and makes life easier across the board.
So far, based on the responses, I'm seeing trends like: side projects barely matter, wages can be used as leverage to find better jobs, companies investing in your career are really important, etc...
If I get enough data, I will post my results somewhere public and I will offer some packaged services to companies and developers alike that I think alleviates the issues we're currently seeing in the tech hiring process.
Google has the name to attract strong programmers. I'd like to see stats on how few (or many) strong programmers their interview process misses. Especially when that interview process is used at a company without such a huge name.
I interviewed for google once; their recruiter found me through an open source project in which google has a stake.
Anyways, I was tired when I did my phone interview, having just returned home from work. I bombed a couple of those interview puzzles. I felt pretty stupid because the answers are really obvious to me in hindsight. No biggie.
So this week they interviewed a junior programmer I mentored in the past. It looks like they might hire him! :-) good one. If they asked him he'd easily send them my way (guess who he comes to whenever he has questions?) Oh well.
If their recruiter contacts me again I might still do another interview. Their "write some code in a google document" interview style was novel, but possibly sub-optimal. YMMV
Every interview process sucks. I interviewed and got a job at a company that modeled their hiring on Google's asking me puzzle type questions. I can do really good with those. Doesn't say a thing about my coding skills. I feel sorry for the companies that model their process on Google's, especially the small startups because you need the exceptional engineers that fall through such cracks to really boost your business.
It's not so much the rationale of this interview process, reading the response from other Googlers seems to show that this selection process does a good job of maintaining a cultural fit for those that make the cut. The problem is that it seems to make enemies of people without a hardcore technical background when a simple review of their background would help both sides from pain.
I know our industry will debate the merits of google-style interviews forever. I think that the system may be a decent way of capturing good programmers, but that it also allows for awesome programmers to fall through the cracks. Don't let performance in interviews dictate your assessment of your on-the-ground performance. You sound like a capable coder in my view of things.
I think many of us here have been contacted ( unsolicited ) by Google for job interviews in the past.
My Google interview story ends with me stopping the 8th interview ( 4th technical interview ) half-way in due to the frustration of listening to my interviewer loudly reply to text messages on his phone while I'm trying to write very complex source code into a shared Google Text Document using no other development tools.
At one point the 8th interviewer asked me if I had ever used Github before. Considering Google cold-contacted me on my public Github email address and half my resume was Github projects it was obvious this guy didn't even look at my resume...
I upvoted you because I appreciate the feedback. Just to let you know, 3 years ago I interviewed with Google, made it through the recruiter phone screen, the second "technical phone screen", and flew to Mountain View to do the in-person interview.
The entire process took about 3 months, and at the end of it all, I was told: "At this point, we're going to be pausing on the recruiting for this position and therefore will not be scheduling any additional candidates for this role. Because the company is in a major push to meet certain software hiring numbers soon, the majority of our operations positions are slowing down at this point. I really appreciate your patience and flexibility with us. I'll be keeping your information here on file and once things begin to move again, AND if you're still interested in us, I'll be in contact."
This was back in 2007, now they contact me in 2010, and I don't even make it past the initial phone screen.
The interview process at Google is probably one of the worst I have been through. I understand you want to put everyone on the spot and make them write code on a white board right in front of you, without any access to a computer, compiler, tab completion, or any of the niceties of a modern IDE, but please:
If you're a software engineer interviewing system engineers, don't expect them to regurgitate code verbatim without errors every time. I can write a quick Perl or shell script when needed but I don't live in an IDE all day long and I don't think of every solution as a software solution. Sometimes a good hardware solution can fix bad software. I do it every day, over-engineering hardware to accommodate bad code.
But seriously, if anything, I'm overqualified for a position there and perhaps that is the problem. Google just comes off as a company that wasted a lot of my time in their hiring process. I'm happy to work in my corporate job and pull in $200K/yr. as a senior systems engineer. Google probably wouldn't pay me that much anyway.
The problem with google interviews and tech interviews in general is that it is almost impossible to capture what makes a successful candidate in a couple of mini interviews. They don't even pretend that what you do in the interview is what you will be doing in an actual job there. Most of a developers time is spent in meetings, understanding their problem domain, writing documents, or reviewing other developers documents.
I know it isn't perfect, but I personally am a huge fan of Google's interview process. It's a boon to people switching careers because data structures and algorithms can be studied without any professional experience. Behavioral interviews and GitHub portfolios are biased towards those with previous experience and internships, which many of us never have the opportunity to do.
After leaving graduate school (not CS), every startup expected me to magically know how to be a professional software engineer, and I found Google to be the only company willing to hire and teach me. If the goal is to bring together smart people with diverse academic backgrounds, I find that Google's process is rather successful.
I expected better from a company like Google. Asking candidates for pre-canned code snippets to cutesy little CS problems on the whiteboard is miserable and the outcome depends too much on what the candidate studied in the last few weeks before the interview. It actually tells you very little about the kind of programmer a person is and the interview itself can get quite horrible on a personal level very fast.
A while ago, I used to conduct job interviews like this. Sort this, insert that, search for the other. I still feel sorry for some of the candidates I did this to. That process was the largest single mistake I made when hiring people. I should instead have asked for the code of some projects they had been working on recently and maybe discussed a few more creative things with them.
In fact, if I could ask a candidate just one question, it would be "what projects are you working on in your spare time?"
I don't understand why a non-technical recruiter would be asking technical questions of a technical candidate, especially to a high-level one. Maybe for college hires, where you need to weed out an overwhelming field of candidates. Maybe Google just gets that many more applicants but jeez, I feel a web form and a minimal machine learning classification could do a better screening job.
Google does the same kind of software interviews as anywhere else. They aren't special. You code on a whiteboard and it's supposed to be compilable in C or Java. The process beyond that is just as subjective as anywhere else and is largely based on gut. They depend largely on employee references/friends.
The data they collect is really only to make the process more efficient, not more effective. They reward employees that process the most phone screens in a month. The strangest thing, in my opinion, is that the interviewers usually don't make a decision at all, they just give a rating. Then, a group of people who've never even met the candidate decide whether to hire them based on forms that were filled out.
I had a relatively good interview experience with Google. I wasn't hired but I felt that the process was fair. True, it was long and I had to invest some significant time to freshen up my algorithm skills. But overall I was left with a good impression.
I do think that Google puts too much accent on algorithms and college-level CS. I consider myself a good programmer. I created two moderately successful Micro ISVs in my free time. I contributed a huge chunk to the product at my corporate job. I get things done. However I felt that this is not what Google looks for even if the say they do.
Alternative premise, tech interviews continue to become increasingly competitive, and if you want to be a true dev hirable by Google, etc. this is the output you need.
That will never happen. Google is obsessed with their academic, whiteboard coding procedure to a scary degree. It's a point of pride for recruiters to mention how intense it is. I'm going onsite to interview with them next week and they bombard you with training brochures, invitation to live interview training exercises, links to books etc. It's part of their brand now.
Anecdata, but all the people I know who work at Google tell me the interview is the hardest part. One of them spends their time fixing low-hanging bugs in Python
Okay, well Google doesn't want to hire you if you can't write efficient and elegant code on a whiteboard for a problem they've specified while they look over your shoulder. Me, I only don't want to hire you if you can't take a few pages of code you've written for fun and make it presentable. Who would you rather interview with? (Assuming, of course, that I was offering jobs as nice as the jobs at Google.)
My last week's interaction with Google's recruiter (I have to admit she is very nice person and genuinly wanted to help, but she was forced to put everyone through Google grinding machine).
I think I already passed technical interview process with Google a few times in the past and gained quite a bit of an extra experience since then.
As I mentioned I'd be happy to connect with the team in person to see how my experience can be of benefit to Google enterprise,
but considering my current situation - going through new rounds of pre-screening coding tests to prove my worth is not something I have interest in.
I completely understand. As I mentioned this is the first step of the process. If you do decide to reengage in the process I would love to work with you. The prescreen call will take about 45-minutes and focus on your most recent coding experience, and the experience that you've gained since your last interview. This phone call isn't just a skill assessment, it will help further narrow the team that might be a match for you. I know the process can be a bit lengthy, but it's designed to have a low standard deviation and really hone in on your skill-set, and area of expertise.
I have a poor opinion of the Google style job interview to the point where despite having worked at Google for 8 years and trained in the interview process twice I just won't give interviews... I don't like the idea of giving an interview that I wouldn't pass myself.
BUT...
Having recently been through an interview with a well-known open source software company where the third interview ended with a "No" based on what seemed like purely subjective factors with no skill-based or evidence based reasoning at all... I do now have a lot more sympathy for our process @ Google which at least requires a panel of people with calibrated scores, multiple interviews with copious note taking and documentation, etc.
It really is hard to find a middle ground, though.
I'm late to the party, but I'll provide my two cents as someone who worked at Google and interviewed candidates (most engineers there are trained to do interviews):
1. Your resume looks good and should get the recruiters attention, and
2) that's about all your resume is good for, in my experience. Interviewers will look at what you've done in the past to help decide what questions to ask, but your answers to those questions are far more important than your past experience.
As others have said, review your basic algorithms and data structures. Be prepared to write correct code on the white board (not pseudo-code, at least not as your final product).
Finally, if things don't work out at Google - why not submit your resume to OpenX (http://openx.org/jobs or email me joel at openx dot org)? We're also hiring :)
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc8neScWE0-gmc00u1s...
So far, based on the responses, I'm seeing trends like: side projects barely matter, wages can be used as leverage to find better jobs, companies investing in your career are really important, etc...
If I get enough data, I will post my results somewhere public and I will offer some packaged services to companies and developers alike that I think alleviates the issues we're currently seeing in the tech hiring process.
reply