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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one.

Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?

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My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.

I interviewed with them 2 years ago, as well as a couple of months ago. 2 years ago I would have rated the experience as "fine". My most recent experience was great, however. Very organized, lots of communication on Google's part, and I had a great interviewer. They have definitely made improvements.

Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).

Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter. Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly on that, so they forwarded me to another recruiter who passed me on to a developer for a code interview. I was fairly fed up at this point and not looking for a job anyway, so I didn't do any interview prep. Interviewer sounded bored as hell, asked me to implement a graph deep copy algorithm and some other basic stuff. I haven't done algorithms implementation since college; I work in the real world where we have Google and libraries. So I bombed that, too. Got a call a few days later saying they're not interested. OK, see ya.

Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit, which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies suck.

Sounds pretty much like my experience with Google. I'm an embedded programmer with a EE degree, not a CS degree, and they hammered me with a bunch of algorithm questions like you said. I'm not even interested in (nor qualified for) heavy-CS type work; I thought maybe they'd want me for more low-level stuff or doing some kind of work with hardware, custom OS or driver development, etc.

But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush. Google's interviews are not at all like the interviews I've done with a bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small workgroup I ended up working in was a great team to work with, and again didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of years.

Haha, yeah, I do systems development, not far from your area of work, I imagine. I have a CS degree, but I hated doing it. Google seemed to be aiming for CS experts, and I just want to make computers do cool/useful stuff.

Of course, there's other disadvantages to working for big companies. Lots of dead weight (see: that recruiter I worked with), lots of rules, a lack of trust, lots of bureaucracy... I'd do it if I have to, but the small company vibe works way better for me.

There's advantages to big companies too: better pay usually, better benefits, more structure, and in my experience more professionalism. Also the ability to move laterally is useful. If you're a female or minority you'll probably do better in a big company too because they're very intolerant of harassment and discrimination because they can get in legal trouble for it, so they're very proactive about addressing these things early on, providing training for it, etc., whereas some small companies I've been at seem to have a "good-ole boy" culture still hanging around. If you can get into the right workgroup, a big company can be a good experience, but different groups and departments can be run very differently from each other within the same company.

Not saying it's a good interview question, but if you ever need to quickly estimate exponents of 2 just remember 2^10 bytes=1kb, 2^20=1mb, 2^30=1gb, etc. so 2^14 would be 16kb.

This is an old post about the experience for those interested: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/my-job-interview-at-google/

I worked for Intel years ago, and a lot of things in this thread applied there: really awful institutional performance review processes (they called it "ranking and rating"; I think it's been changed a lot since I left though), and also hiring first and doing allocations later (I had no idea what exactly I'd be doing when I got hired, but I was only a couple years out of college so I was very junior anyway).

Working there had its ups and downs. I will say, that company could actually produce stuff, unlike some places I've seen. It was also really, really nice to have a cubicle, but they were "compressing" those when I left. I have no idea if they've moved to the stupid open-office plan or not since then, but I kinda doubt it actually. I really miss having a cubicle... I used to think they sucked, but after years of other office arrangements, I now long for a cubicle again (though a walled office would of course be much better, just like it'd be nice to live in a $10M mansion and have a private jet).

Anyway, the interview process at Intel back then was grueling and ridiculous, with a bunch of managers coming in and grilling me with questions on all kinds of stuff, a lot which I had no idea about (like device physics). But a couple years ago I interviewed with Google. That was probably the worst interview experience I've ever had.

Lastly, I've interviewed at and worked with some other large companies. Their interviews were nothing like Google's.

Google's interviews are not like other companies', and are not representative of large companies at all. Google's interviews are unique to Google, and have been roundly criticized by many.

My experience was that they refused to even talk money before doing team matching. This was less than a year ago; maybe things have changed?

That's such a strange approach. The've marked you as a "hire" but not even discussed a range? Given how long this process sometimes takes, and that good people will have multiple offers (and typically an already comfortable income), how is one supposed to make a career decision?

duh it's google/facebook/etc...

If you are willing to make the fanatic choice; your the employee they want. They might be missing out on a lot of talent in the industry. But they do weed the candidates down to fanatics.

> how is one supposed to make a career decision

By finishing the process? I had other offers, and they waited the <one week it took to finish team matching with Google.

When would that take a long time? It was a quick chat with a few managers and then I picked.

The guy you go to lunch with during your on-site interview @Google is most likely the one that becomes your boss if you are hired.

FTFY: The guy you go to lunch with during your on-site interview @Google is most likely the one who hasn't completed interview training yet.

FTFY: the PERSON you go to lunch with...

FTFY, guy and dude are pretty much asexual references for a person you don't know who you had a personal interaction with, at least in California.

"Who did you have lunch with? Oh, some dude."

Try not to language police here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.

That's not true in my experience, and I doubt it's true in yours. While "guys" is sometimes employed to refer to a mixed gender group of people, it would be very weird for "guy" or "dude" to be used to refer to a woman. Argue in good faith, please. And try not to police PC here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.

As someone who has lived in Southern California 90% of their life, and Berkeley, CA the rest, I can absolutely say that it is true in my experience that Californians (and I obviously include myself in this set) will use 'guy' and 'dude' to refer to anything. Men, women, children, dogs, cats, cars, burritos.

Last week I got up from the table to throw the rest of my burrito away and offered to take my wife's as well by saying "Dude, are you going to finish that guy?" I understand it isn't "correct", and the English are within their rights weep for their language if they like, but it is not weird at all in coastal California.

I remember using "guy" to refer to a network cable at one point.

"Do I plug this guy or that guy into the switch?"

This was in North Texas.

I refer to many servers, consoles, screens etc as him/her/he/she/guy, and I to call out any last remaining food on the kids plate in the same way as you. West coast as well.

You bring up your experience, basically call me a liar about my experiences and accuse me of not adding anything to the discussion.

Interesting. I grew up in California and what I said is a fact, as confirmed by other people. What are you bringing to the discussion exactly besides baseless accusations?

I got it from both living in California and Miami, where many people used it that way, girls as well. For me it was a bit strange at first, but got used to it. I guess it might be some local urban stuff leaking nationwide?

Dude implies some level of laid back cool personality. A dude is someone who skateboards, skis or does lots of pot, not a typical accountant, grammarian or middle manager.

I agree with the lady who wrote this post.

Way to misinterpret what I said. I said that "dude" and "guy" were asexual, not "lady".

I was using "lady" asexually.

Just like you can use the "n-word" non-racially?

The conversation was about the colloquial usage of the word dude and guy. Nothing was said about lady.

> "guy and dude are pretty much asexual references"

and I'm using 'lady' asexually. Is this triggering you?

Considering that lady is not generally accepted as an asexual term, I'm having a difficult time parsing your statement.

Certain words mean certain things in certain contexts. If you want to start using "lady" as an asexual term, go for it. Be prepared for stares and weird looks when people don't know what you're talking about because it's not generally used that way, unlike 'dude and guy'.

What's your point exactly?

You don't see my point? You're frustrated and defensive, and all I've done is address you by the wrong gender.

> You're frustrated and defensive

Project much?

> all I've done is address you by the wrong gender.

How do you know it's the wrong gender? Why are you making assumptions about my gender, without knowing if I identify as a female?

My original point was the the words "dude" and "guy" have lost all gender connotations in California at least. Try to stay on point.

You guys should really fix English language. As a non-native speaker whose native language allows properly expressing gender anytime, I find this funny, being downvoted for what is a structural problem of your language :-D

Thing is, most languages that do that don't just allow properly expressing gender, they require it. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

Does your language allow referring to a person while leaving their gender unspecified? If not, your language is deficient.

All the mainstream European languages I've seen (Germanic and Romance) don't seem to have this capability at all, and it's a big deficiency. Formal English doesn't have it either, but colloquially we've evolved it, using "they" (which of course is bad because it's supposed to be used for referring to people in the plural sense, not singular).

So don't complain about a language having structural problems if yours isn't any better.

It allows both ungendered and gendered approaches. It's really up to you to choose. So in fact my language is better in this regard, worse in others. Like any language.

I would prefer mentalese over Vangelis' direct to be honest ;-)

Regardless of what weird world they live in, nobody refers to a singular woman as a guy or dude in the mainstream.

"guys" became gender neutral sometime in the 70's, Rita Moreno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_iGaQglnKg

This isn't true to my knowledge (I work at google). It's usually just another person from the interviewer pool. Decent chance you'll never see them or any of the other interviewers again after joining.

Facebook is like this as well, but I very strongly disagree that it's a negative.

MSFT did this as well (at least for my hiring) and I found it to be negative, largely due to many reorgs shortly after hiring/being in a side of the company only peripherally related to what information I had going in. (ended up making friends on the team I'm still getting coffee with even today and the team ended up turning out fine from a career/productivity standpoint, but I likely would have taken a competing offer at the time had I known the work I'd actually been doing)

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