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Comment by discardorama | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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My experience was not so stellar.

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.

But how could this have been a more stellar experience for you? Should they have given you a consolidation price?

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.

I mean, not parent commenter, but I'd expect, y'know, the recruiter to actually remember giving the exact same preliminary interview to the same candidate a week earlier.

Was it the same interviewer? Maybe there are 10 interviewers going off the same script.

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!)

it was the same guy, we'd spoken before on Linkedin.

Hah then shame on him ;)

> I felt I should tell him that he asked me these questions before.

The way it was phrased implied that it was the same person (would have otherwise been "I had been asked these questions before")

> But how could this have been a more stellar experience for you?

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.

>But how could this have been a more stellar experience for you? Should they have given you a consolidation price?

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".

As someone who did a lot of interviewing at Google I can say your interviewer didn't do his job and that definitely should not be the usual experience.

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.

those questions were not the programming ones, I don't remember the programming ones, but they would be considered pretty tame by most programmer standards, I simply lacked the knowledge at the time..

That's interesting. I wonder if that recruiter needs to work on his filing system a bit -- e.g., work on stuff in the inbox, then place it in the outbox :)

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!

I had the exact same experience happen to me in a phone interview. I told the interviewer he had already asked me those questions. He told me to just go ahead and answer them again. Needless to say, I aced the phone screen since we went over all of the answers together the first time round.

He "tagged" you?

To counter your anecdote here is mine: during the interview my plane back had been switched by Google from something like 6 pm to 11-12. The interview was over before 4 and it had been at Youtube (very close to the airport) so I got to spend more than 8 hours at the airport before my 12 hours multi-connected flight. Literally the worst experience I have ever had during an interview.

something similar happened to my best friend when he interviewed there.

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.

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