They put a bunch of machines in a room and ask you to stand in front of them and teach them something on the whiteboard.
So pretty much no difference from a standard Google interview.
So pretty much no difference from a standard Google interview.
While HN isn't perfect, I think overall it's extremely well moderated. Although I have to admit (and I have other accounts which are much older, so I'm not new here), it does seem to be slowly slipping in the wrong direction as it becomes more popular.
The reason I made another account after that is this account specifically seems to have its comments automatically moved down the list. It's easy to find examples where upvoted comments sit below grayed out comments, and oftentimes when I post a new comment it immediately starts at the bottom of the pile.
I also tried doing the whiteboard questions in my strongest language at the time, Objective-C, which in hindsight was a huge mistake (Objective-C is ridiculously wordy, I kept running out of space on the whiteboard). A couple of the interviewers said they weren't too familiar with Objective-C either, so I clearly wasn't getting interviewed by their iOS teams.
If I were to do it again I'd probably use a much more terse language like Python.
> A couple of the interviewers said they weren't too familiar with Objective-C either, so I clearly wasn't getting interviewed by their iOS teams.
Google's onboarding process is such an enigma to me. I went through a few of the remote interviews for SWE a few years back (I didn't commit to an on-site one in mountain view though). It seemed very odd to me that, near as I could tell, they don't really give an indication about what you would be working on until after you are hired and oriented.
This is way better IMO to the reverse which is applying to ten different interesting positions at another big tech company and having to speak to individual hiring managers for each position.
Generalists tend not to live in algorithm and data structure quiz land most days, and it's probably not their strong suit. It's not mine, at least.
Another thing that surprised me is that the interviewer records your actual whiteboard code (by transcribing it into their notebook by hand) or your Chromebook code (by clicking a button), and the hiring committee sees it and evaluates it. And it seems the hiring committee has the ability to re-evaluate the result of the interview and second-guess the interviewer in the room, if they feel that it's necessary. It's entirely possible that your code was seen by folks who did know Objective-C well, although yeah, it seems like it would have gotten them more signal if they put people who knew Objective-C in the room with you....
But that wasn't the only reason I wasn't hired, I'm sure. I was only given a week and a half to prepare, while working a stressful job at the same time, where the Google recruiter basically gave me ten links (including a long TopCoder algorithms link I think) and said "Prepare by doing and reading everything on these links")
During the interview, I struggled with a couple of the problems in particular, and I was late to the first interview because I under-estimated just how bad the traffic would be and how lost I'd get on Google's campus.
Google's gotten in touch since, and I basically just have to tell this one recruiter to set me up for another interview if I wanted one, but I've been hesitant to go through that again and I'm no longer sure if I want to move out to SV (I'm from Chicago).
You could also consider it a wry social comment on the Rise of the Robots.
(I notice your comment has been downvoted. I will up vote it -- I disagree with it, but it's also reasonable question as questioning the standards and practices of the group are a way to converge on good practice. Every team should be doing that).