Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
i.e : They are internally working on self driving cars and, in particular, are looking for ways to integrate algorithm 'X' in their solution. So, google decides to setup a special filter for searches related to certain profiles that search for 'X and self driving ....Results get fed to the group conducting the work. In effect, allowing them to internally see what 'profiles of interest' are up to as it relates to Google's flagged area of interest.
It would appear that this could easily be made 'legal' under the premise that the individuals are anonymized. However, it does give google a unique advantage in being able to see 'what everyone is up to'.
The fact that they are already using people's specialized searches for flagging them for interviewing makes me strongly believe they are already internally snagging people's searches/clicked links to give them advantage on projects.
I think everyone should take a pause and consider the implications of this as they are quite damning.
Look at this guy's bio:
> Max has a degree in mathematics from Yale University where he received multiple awards from the math department including the Barge Prize and the Runk Prize. He previously worked at The Boston Consulting Group where he worked on projects in computer hardware and biopharmaceuticals. His interests include data analysis, hiking, pad thai, and skiing.
This essay reads like he is just discovering the magic of the internet for the first time, and is swept away by the user experience that Google has provided just for him!
No, somehow I suspect that he would have gotten a job wherever he decided to apply.
But apropos of the first comment, I wonder how much Google already knew about him before the challenge was displayed. In other words, is it just triggered by keywords? Or does the algorithm also take into account what else is known about the user doing the searching?
This seems a little unsettling when you think about it. As if they had been tracking him and just waiting for the right moment to spring this on him. I wonder how receptive he would have been had they approached him in a more traditional manner. Perhaps because of the uniqueness of their approach he was more receptive to going along with it?
Had this happened to me, I probably would have done an Elliot Alderson and tossed my PC in the microwave.
Question for you to consider: if google uses a person's search results internally to determine if they should show an ad or a knowledge card, whose to say they aren't using a similar process to strip Intellectual property from searches as it relates to projects they are working on?
It looks like it's a keyword match. You should be just as worried as when you saw the "do a barrel roll" thing.
Working for search quality, two things I quickly learned from watching a lot of random sample queries are:
(1) People like porn.
(2) People can't spell.
In other words, if you are working for algorithm "X", and if you gather one hundred random queries mentioning X, a lot of them will be along the lines of: "python library X", "CLR ch 12 X solution", "knuth X 1985", "given figure 12 what is the amortized time complexity of X" (or some other exact copy-paste of a homework problem).
People don't type "Amortized time complexity of X can be improved when f and g are monotonically increasing" into a search box.
Besides, exactly who's going to use the result? Imagine you meet a Googler who has PhD in Algorithm X, working for a super secret project, and tell them "You know, I found random guys on the internet searching for X and I thought their disjointed query terms might teach you a thing or two about how to use Algorithm X."
(Not to mention that almost everyone will view it as a gross breach of ethics.)
If one really wanted to worry about Google using search queries against the interest of searchers, one would probably ask "Do they loop search queries into either search quality against the interest of particular webmasters, or do they loop them into advertising pricing against the interest of particular advertisers?" The answer to both of which is "Yes."
Second, they tell every applicant that openly discussing the interview process (esp blogging about it) will get you disqualified/blacklisted from any future positions at google. So if you have posted this before your first day and didn't discuss it with your recruiter/hr person at the G, it was probably not a very smart move.
PS: It really isn't too hard to get into their interview process. If you create a github account and push some code one of their recruiters will probably approach you after a while. You can also just send them your CV and I am pretty sure you get the same process/treatment as anybody else.
That didn't take long. :-)
Wow, it's like they're fully aware of how poor many of their interviewing procedures have been over the years, and instead of making them more employee-friendly to compete with the rest of the industry, they'd rather just punish the employees instead.
Right in line with Google's reputation.
As per the secrecy; I reckon they want to keep part of their process secret so that people don't try to game it. At the scale they are operating (millions of applications per year) you obviously need some standardized tech testing for the first interview rounds (where no engineer is present yet) and if everybody just posted their questions and answers online you could kind of forget about that.
I'd even argue that highly-negative profit, pre-profitability employers can be far better for tech employees.
- High profit = the company's major problems are already figured out, they already have a money-making machine, they don't desperately need you and in fact you may be a liability who could break their already profitable machine. They could fire nearly everyone and possibly continue making bags of cash for a very long time.
- Highly negative in profit = they desperately need someone to solve their problems fast, which in tech product companies is often by making some new tech. Without you, they're nearly guaranteed to end up very screwed.
I think that's a mischaracterization of what people dislike about Google's interview process. People dislike that it takes a very long time for Google to follow up and that the process wastes a lot of their time.
Yes Google is profitable and a lot of people want to work there but that doesn't mean their interview process is great too.
I agree with much of what you said, though I don't agree with this particular sentence. I'm always pause a little when someone supplies an unflattering ulterior reason for a criticism ("oh, they're just pissed that they didn't get in"), since there may in fact be reasonable criticisms of google's interviewing process that shouldn't be dismissed so casually.
However, as someone who went through it recently (software engineer position, didn't get an offer), I agree with you that it is straightforward, no gotchas or gimmicks. I'd say that at least in my case, if you review data structures and algorithms, and are prepared to use them creatively to answer middle-to-difficult style questions from "cracking the coding interview" (not the exact questions, of course, but at that level of difficulty), at a whiteboard, in 45 minutes, without too much help, then yes, you're prepped. I'm not saying you'll pass the exams, I'm just saying you won't be surprised (again, just in my own experience, for a SE position).
The only thing I was "surprised" with is just how much progress you really are expected to make on these problems and the level of accuracy you are expected to show in your coding. I gave myself three weeks to prepare. I should have taken 3 months, maybe more. No, every parenthesis or semicolon doesn't need to be placed correctly, but (again, my impression here) you pretty much do need to be writing code (probably in Java or C++) that will compile and run with minor edits, and you need to largely solve the problem, at a whiteboard, in 45 minutes. If you get stumped a bit and need a prompt, I don't think that'll rule you out, but if you need too much help getting through, my guess (based on limited experience) is that this will be a no-hire.
Fair enough. I think there's room for reasonable disagreement about whether this sort of thing produces too high a "false negative" rate, but I suppose that's up to Google. Good software developers are hard to find, and while false negatives do cost you, false positives cost you too. I'd generally say this is google's business, they can afford to be picky, as you said.
With one difference… which is that Silicon valley companies almost uniformly insist that there is a severe shortage of software engineers, yet at the same time insist on being (this may just be my own opinion), extremely picky about who they hire. Should an industry that by its own admission tolerates an exceptionally high false negative rate be taken seriously when it says it has trouble attracting enough talent?
I'm not convinced of this argument at all. Many of the people I know who either work there or have work there complained about the process as well. I didn't get in which was fine (I certainly wasn't pissed) but I was very frustrated with the interviewer being 15 minutes late and when he asked me to implement an object he cut me off when I was almost finished to optimize a method (I protested; premature optimization and all). Then, since we had a truncated time table, I just finished optimizing and he ended the interview. I explained to him what code was left in my object implementation and it didn't seem to be a big deal. Then when I didn't progress a few friends I have at Google looked into it and found out I didn't get to progress because I didn't get to finish my implementation.
I've been in a variety of different types of interviewing. The more academic, white boarding of issues that you never even see on the job just suck in my opinion. I like it a hell of a lot more when I get to work with whoever I'm interviewing with and we're working on a real problem. Or hell even homework. Anything to show how I solve problems and code versus simply remembering different algorithms or data structures from college.
One disagreement, I don't think this is purely about remembering algorithms from college. That's a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you can't do the basic binary tree traversal (and so forth) stuff cold, I'd say there's no way you'll pass the exams, because you need to solve more complicated problems that are based on core data structures and algorithms.
Honestly, I have to say I'm pretty damn impressed with people who can do this at the whiteboard. I might be able to get there, with a few months of study, though this would probably require neglecting other aspects of my life and job for a while. The cynical part of me has this vague suspicion that this screening is actually designed to hire only those without these sorts of demands on their life (kids, family, outside interests).
Personally, I greatly dislike how software engineers are hired in the industry, coming from a prestigious graduate program of mathematics. There is an expectation at some of these companies that the candidate studied for their interview (or got just the right set of questions), even if they demonstrated highly valuable skills such as figuring out a complicated trick on the fly without any prior knowledge of anything similar. If one wants the smartest people, it is well-known in academia that that is not how one should evaluate a candidate, so I am not quite sure why such shallow & flawed metrics continue.
I know, anecdote, but: I went through the Google interview process not too long ago. It was stellar. None of the other places I interviewed at could even come close to how well Google's process went. Take that FWIW.
Interviewer tagged me and I thought I'd go along with it for the fun. I'm a systems engineer not a developer so YMMV.
First stage interviewer put me through a basic aptitude test ("what is netstat?", "what's the expected output of dig?") which was fine and I answered them all with a fair degree of correctness but the questions quickly went on to different programming languages, and while I've done some small things and I definitely know my way around a bourne shell I didn't get spectacular marks honestly, mostly because he was asking programming questions and I haven't had as much exposure to code as I'd like.
the next week I receive what I thought was a follow up call, but it was another round of preliminary questions.. around 2 questions in, and I realise these are the same exact questions I answered the week before. I'm a bastion of honesty, and while I knew the answers to all his questions now (because curiousity made me look up the ones I had failed.) I felt I should tell him that he asked me these questions before. I did.. he fell silent.. "are you sure"
"Yeah, your next question is about netstat"
".. oh.. well I don't have your results"
"Do you have any other questions to ask, you can reask me questions but my success rate will be higher this time"
"no, we'll contact you in 6 months"
Well, he didn't, but that process shook me a bit.. I certainly wouldn't call it stellar, and I'm likely blacklisted from interviewing at google now as I don't think I've had recruiter spam from them in a long time.
Job interviews are a business transaction (after all you are there because you want their money). Not hiring you is fair game and once they have decided/committed to pass on the opportunity it wouldn't be rational to waste money by continuing a pointless discussion.
Interviewer 1 called OP and asked questions. Then it was lunch time and he forgot to put result in the CMS.
So the same guy popped up a week later to Interviewer 2. He was reading off the same script, so of course his questions are the same. Not his fault, or Google's per say - Interviewer 1 happened to forget a step. (Which is sad, but we all make mistakes!)
The way it was phrased implied that it was the same person (would have otherwise been "I had been asked these questions before")
Are you joking? Did you even read their post. The guy literally called and asked the same set of questions twice, then didn't follow through with what they said they would do.
I cannot believe you're even asking "how could this have been a more stellar experience for you?" the gall.
If we ignore that they asked him programming questions not relevant to his position, there's the whole "they didn't even know they interviewed me, so they called me again to ask me the same exact things" FAIL, plus the lie about "we'll call you in 6 months".
That said how are questions about "netstat" and the "expected output of dig" programming questions?
Also for anyone planning to join Google as a sysadmin you should note that even Google's sysadmins do a fair amount of code since Google loves automation. Python will probably figure fairly prominently in your job.
I wonder what the most politic way to deal with this situation would be. It sounds like you were polite but honest, which is a good thing in my book. I might have done the same, but perhaps it would have been better to just play along, score higher, and get pushed to the next step? Just speculating!
They told him to take two days for the interview process. He goes through both days (16+ hours of grueling questions and whiteboard tests) and he's set to fly out at 6pm, the interview wraps up at 2pm.
Recruiter comes up while they're exiting last interview and asks him if he can stay one more day, another department head wants to interview him for another position. He balked and caught his flight back on time, thinking whatever he just went through should be more than enough information for whoever wanted to take another full day to ask him questions.
Never heard from them again. No follow-up, no email, no nothing.
He figured the last question was a test, to gauge how bad he wanted to work there. He said it was a really shitty way to determine how driven someone is by wasting two days of their time, then rudely asking him to cancel his flight, call his employer, and make another boatload of arrangements on the spur of the moment.
He did get subsequent recruiting emails and simply replied after his last experience, he wasn't interested.
>Second, they tell every applicant that openly discussing the interview process (esp blogging about it) will get you disqualified/blacklisted
...but it was on an internal newsletter, so that makes it public?
I think success at a phone interview question is a good positive signal. That's all you can get in interviews, signals.
Yeah, and there were no magical unicorns involved, what a dissapointment.
That said, I think all these premises are wrong.
Clearly this was indeed a secret. It wasn't publicly announced to be happening, only appeared to selected individuals.
Second, you do need to be special. Special doesn't mean to have some mutated X gene, just that it doesn't apply to everybody, but only those matching specific criteria. In this case you have to have the skills to be able to trigger the process (with matching query results) and then complete the puzzles. That would leave 99.99 of the population out.
As for the fact that "you don't get targeted personally but they do an automated/anonymous match on your search history", in the end you do get targeted personally (if you succeed), and obviously even people who get targeted personally "from the start" are first targeted by automated matches between tons of candidates. I don't think some recruiter just pops up a name out of the blue because they personally know them.
This is from January: http://jacquerie.github.io/google-foobar-post-mortem/
> For my interview, I spent a day at Google headquarters in Mountain View solving problems on a white board.
So what's the point? A phone screen takes what, 30 minutes? This is a lot of time to put in only to have to do it all again on a whiteboard.
I guess it would be better than a phone screen for Google, but this seems like just another hoop for candidates to jump through.
One of my gripes with the tech industry is that companies keep adding more onto the funnel part of the hiring process, but once you get the interview none of it matters. You can contribute to open source, have substantial github projects, complete coding challenges, have years of experience: all of this just helps you get the interview. Once you are in the companies hiring pipeline everyone is put through the same process, none of the other stuff really matters after that point.
Maybe I'm just bitter that my team just hired one candidate over another because they did better in the whiteboard interviews (but had no side projects or real code to show us) while the other person had a lot of (good) code and pretty creative projects to look at.
The ideal hiring process for me would be introductory culture fit phone call, in which working hours, benefits, vacation policy etc are discussed to see if there is a lifestyle fit between prospective hire and employee (not 'Do you rock climb and crush brews?' culture BS), then a coding challenge, and then an in-person discussion of your code. The in-person discussion could involve throwing new requirements and hypotheticals at the problem to see how the candidate thinks on their feet, but it would still be relevant to the work they did at hand rather than some arbitrary puzzle pulled from Cracking the Coding Interview.
I would be interested to know how the hoop-jumping-to-whiteboard process came to be standard. To me it does not make any sense why the determining factor for receiving an offer for a software engineering job should be dependent on one's improvisational problem solving abilities over actually writing code that runs and satisfies requirements. Is it because a whiteboard interview is much more cut and dry than code evaluation? Because every software company wants to think that they are Google?
A coding test doesn't tell you how well a candidate can collaborate. Can you toss them an idea, and have them successfully expand it and put it to use? Can you give them a couple of half ideas, and they expand them to full ideas? Would they be able to work together with you? Can they understand you? Can you uderstand them?
Those are all vital components to success, and you can't see those answers from a test. But white boarding is excellent for answering all those questions.
A quick word about hoop jumping. Being willing to jump through hoops means you're willing to cooperate and go the extra mile, and that you want to work at the company in question. This is a useful filter for the employer. They might lose some of the least patient and dedicated engineers (and perhaps some of the most talented) developers in the process.
Agreed.
> But white boarding is excellent for answering all those questions.
I disagree. There is no team social dynamic in a white-board interview. There is one person in a position of power who is judging you with a critical eye. The other person is being judged and either really wants this job or, worse, needs the job.
That is the social dynamic in the room.
That doesn't go away by saying "Let's play pretend like we are working on a project as equals".
Interviewers will often discuss their rationale as if the candidates know what it is, or that they should be able to know it.
For instance, "I want to see if they can take suggestions and run with it".
Great, how does the candidate know that's what you want? Maybe the last interview they were in wanted to see if they could take bad advice and quickly explain why that strategy wouldn't work.
Those both look the same from a candidate's point of view. They need to toss the dice and assume they interpret your intentions clearly.
> Being willing to jump through hoops means you're willing to cooperate and go the extra mile
I don't know if I fully agree, but working at a big company does involve a lot of hoop jumping in your day-to-day, so I guess it is something good to test for.
Well, it could be like that, and that's the popular conception, but it doesn't need to be like that. If it was handled more like a small meeting with them all contributing (but the interviewers possibly holding back some as needed to allow the interviewee to contribute), you could probably get a fairly good idea of how quickly they grasp concepts from other, how familiar they are with what they are trying to to, and how well they collaborate.
Actually, that's testing collaboration right there. If the question is vague, ask if they mean this, or that. Tossing the dice and assuming is exactly the opposite of collaboration.
It's possible the interviewer is just a prick, but it's also possible they want to see how you work and collaborate.
My solution for this is a pair programming interview:
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-programming-interview...
Like a whiteboard I'm there for everything that happens and can judge collaborative ability. And like a coding test, I'm seeing what people really do.
I may also do some whiteboard work, as being able to talk over an idea is also part of the job. But that's not in the "please do something arbitrary that you will never have to do in real life" vein. I try to make the whiteboard work as much like real work as possible.
I think it became standard because it scales, at least in some sense. Once big companies started doing it (because of scaling issues) small companies started doing it (because of "hey, it works for Google" issues). If I was in a small company, I am sure I would have a little more freedom in how I hire, but I am not.
I think I am actually okay with the white-board puzzle quizzes if you have nothing else to go on. For instance, a college graduate who only has course projects. However, we use them for everyone.
Maybe once you get to X years of experience (maybe 10?) the white-board interviews become easy, you're used to them.
This reminds me of "90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102
Pretty interesting discussion both for and against this type of hiring process.
EDIT: Word == Google doc
Editing to add: One of the quickest ways to get fired at Google is to violate someone's privacy.
I expect it's more about violating a corporate-policy than violating customer-privacy.
They make it pretty clear that event the higher ups/etc will never ever look into specific private accounts and anybody attempting to do so will be fired on the spot.
"To log in, you have to have logged in before. Confused? Search on...[google.com]"
Overall, Google can hardly expect this sort of thing to not get out over time, and... honestly... do you think Google recruiting is upset that this got posted to HN?
Secondly, it's trying to make this horrible recruitment-hoop-jumping bullshit fun. Imagine asking a worker from...basically any other industry to do exercises for 2 weeks before you'll consider them for an interview. You'll be quickly told where to go.
So true.
I was not sure if I was missing something or plain cynical when when I read he had worked for 2 weeks to get an interview.
At a point where the author would be in a weak negotiating position because he wouldn't have other offers to take (besides staying in his current job, but applying for a new job indicates he wasn't entirely happy with that.)
and they made me feel important while doing so.
Doing a search that matches a regular expression is all that it takes to make you feel important? Really?
At work, I'm using Perl 95+% of the time, with infrequent spurts of PHP and JavaScript. Occasionally some Python might be thrown in, and very rarely some Java.
Because I'm only in those languages infrequently I sometimes forget some basic syntax, or mix it up with syntax from one of the other languages from that list. I end up Googling newbie things like "write array literal in php" or "concatenate strings in javascript".
Add another item to the list of anti-trust charges Google is facing around the world.
> "they respected my privacy"
No they didn't. Not even close. But if Google is full of people with these notions I understand the major disconnect Google has with privacy regulators outside the US.
Honestly, this video is supposed to be an ad for Google:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olFEpeMwgHk
But when I watch it, it feels more like a trailer for Terminator 16 to me.
How, specifically, does that violate anti-trust law?
Anyway, assuming you believe Google effectively has a monopoly (as the EU commission does), this is yet another example where Google abuses that position to favour itself over everyone else trying to recruit. Very similar to the way Google manipulates shopping results (but sneakier).
I'm not even saying I agree with that logic, but it will almost certainly be added to the things various regulatory bodies will investigate. Apparently it's already taboo to even mention that on HN.
IMHO if you think google is wasting your time with their interviews just don't apply with them, nobodies forcing you. complaining about how bad and broken it was after you got rejected makes you look like a sore looser