Edit: there is lots of interest here... Google folks, turn this into a mini HN/Google career fair.
Edit: Guessing this submission was downmodded by a moderator. Ouch?
Its a pretty interesting story so I thought I'd share:
I applied through the traditional on-campus recruiting at UC Berkeley. Got past the first round of interviews on Berkeley's campus and then was taken to the Mountain View campus for 4 interviews and a bunch of events. That night, I got a call saying that the interviewers really liked me and recommended that I be hired. At most companies, that would mean that I was made an offer. Instead, they have these "hiring panels" where executives from various departments take a look at your resume, the notes from interviewers, and your transcript / other related documents. 3 weeks later I got an e-mail saying I was rejected during one of these panels. These people never met me; in fact, the 6 people who had met me all recommended that Google hire me. It was kind of weird, since no other company I had applied for had a process where people who hadn't interviewed you made the final decision on whether you should be hired.
Obviously, I am a little frustrated by it - so take this with a grain of salt. However, I think that my experience was emblematic of a few specific issues with the hiring processes there (though they have some amazing processes as well):
1) People who've never met you should not be pontificating in large panels about whether you would be a good fit. That just doesn't make sense.
2) Google has a very strong academic focus on hiring. It is clear when you interview with them that they care a lot about top-brand schools and top GPA's. They seem to believe that the best students will make the best employees. I am not sure, but I think the reason I got rejected may have to do with two C's on my college transcript (which is not indicative of my inability to Ace calculus but rather my lack of interest in attending class). Personally, I think the academic focus is much to their detriment - and a major part of the reason they've struggled at social. That said, Google has some brilliant people who I'm sure I would've loved to work with :). Take this answer for what it is but hopefully you'll find it valuable.
Consider re-applying? Maybe follow up specifically with each of the people who recommended you, asking for what you could do to bolster your chances?
It sounds like you've got a real legit shot, so if you want it and you're willing to do the massive persistence thing, maybe it'd work out?
There might be other reasons unrelated to yourself as to why the panel decided against you - a cutback in hiring quotas for the short-term, perhaps.
There are a lot of anecdotes online of people getting in on the 2nd or 3rd try, I don't think anyone there views re-applying after a period of time as a bad thing - or your rejection as a permanent sign.
Even Steve Yegge didn't get hired on his first attempt.
I'm self-taught and have been programming and making software from scratch for 15 years and have been pretty successful at it. Recently I did an MSc in CompSci in my spare time and was pleased with a merit (natch, only scored 69% and missed the distinction). This was the first time I've ever done exams or written anything (I was sleeping rough on streets when the peers I have now were being educated) and I feel good with the merit even though I kick myself at not finding that extra 1% somewhere.
What puts me off is a multi-faceted thing though:
1) That a late entry into academic and failing to get a distinction is going to count against me.
2) That my self-learning and lack of a strict appliance of a common vocabulary will sound bad in an interview (I felt in the exams that my struggle for the 'correct' term even though I knew what I wanted to express was not helping me get every point that I could).
3) That if 1) and 2) count against me, that a rejection will count against me in future (that Google collect and never forget data and that it would hurt a future chance when I might try again)
4) And then there's a deep concern with being in London... are the London engineers working on the same level of problem as the engineers in the US?
This last one is the real gnawing doubt... assuming I got through the interview, I'm not particularly interested in working in a body shop. I have ideas, I have creative solutions, I have dedication and I want to create world-changing product, and to improve life on this blue sphere. I want to invest my life's work into that... so I really really don't want to go through what appears to be a protracted process to arrive somewhere I didn't want to be.
Recently the work on Places is changing my view on Google back to a strong positive. It's making me consider applying again whereas before I didn't know why I would apply beyond the challenge of doing so. But the deep doubt remains... do people who work in the London office get the opportunity to work on the core of these problems?
To that, I've just not seen a strongly affirmative answer, and so I'll continue to delay any possible application because why would I risk a rejection unless I really know that I want to be there.
The academic focus puts lots of people off. I know absolutely incredible engineers with very good educations who wouldn't make it through the hiring process because they haven't been in a classroom in 20 years...ergo, their knowledge of easy-to-lookup trivia required to pass the gatekeepers isn't up to snuff.
I know one guy who walked out of a Google interview after they started in with the trivia stuff, his response was "are you kidding me with this?" Picked up his stuff and left. He felt it was extremely disrespectful and wouldn't have been a good selector for a successful employee anyway.
a) I don't think Google is a place for me in terms of age and society.
b) I don't come from a CS background, am self taught but have over 12 years of professional experience behind me - I know what I am doing but can't rant of algorithms off the top of my head.
During an interview when I couldn't answer a question about CS theory I drew on something I learned as an English major: the analogy. I said:
"Imagine that you aren't a tech company hiring a developer. You are a band hiring a lead guitarist. Do you want someone who studied music theory who can wax poetic about diminished arpeggios and phrygian scales? Or do you want Jimi Hendrix, who is self-taught and doesn't read music, but who can rock out with a Stratocaster and a Marshall Stack?"
I've used that one twice, and I've gotten the job both times. It also helps when you can pass all of the written tests. At my last job I outscored all of the CS majors on all of the tests they gave me!
I'm with you there...I don't think I'd fit in at a hardcore engineering shop like ITA where you'd have to live and breathe algorithms. But at places where you're just building and maintaining straightforward web apps, you don't need to be able to give a lecture on computer theory, you just need to know how to code, and how certain practices affect security, scalability, performance, or maintainability. These are the places where you'll find CS guys who like to talk a big game, but the codebase is messy and full of hacks. In my experience, the CS guys at these places spent all of their time learning theory and how to architect on whiteboards at school, but they never learned how to write good code. This is where I shine, because when the lights go down and the crowd goes silent, no one cares about how many chords you know, or whether you can play a harmonic minor scale...they just want to know if you can hit notes.
Google hired me with 10 years professional software development experience and no CS degree. Google hired my friend with similar years of experience and no high school diploma.
I think the typical awesome engineer is just a shade too self-deprecating to even think it possible to get hired there.
That's not to say it won't be harder to get past resume screens and such, and a referral does help in these cases. Thetrumanshow is right that Google suffers when people like you don't apply.
I remember going to their campus, and getting a ewww... this place has a too corporate vibe.
Three of the people that interviewed me seemed burned-out, no enthusiasm whatsoever. Also from my conversations it seemed that Google is a pretty political place (even though it tries hard not to be one).
Only two of the guys, I clicked with. One had done mobile dev since early 2000, and we had worked a lot on similar problems.
The other guy I thought was cool had come from an acquisition.
I didn't even get to meet the recruiter who was supposed to handle my case, and I was greeted by somebody else. The whole interview experience felt like cattle processing.
For some reason I came out with the opinion that Google is a very unhappy place, and competitive (cut-throat perhaps), as it attracts people that are smart, and have tough time being average.
Perhaps it is subconscious sour grapes, or not, but my thinking is that while Google it is chock full of smart people, it seems not to be a fun place.
Ps. I know two googlers in person, and I think they are really smart people, and I respect them as engineers, but I just don't think them as entrepreneurial types though.
So as individual place, it has a lot of smart people, but as a collective and as environment google is not a fun or attractive place to be at least when viewed on a superficial level from the outside. Maybe that's why they have to pay really well to retain their engineers.
To be fair the recruiter said it was a generic interview - I spent the week studying data structures & algorithms. And then I get on the phone and the entire interview was on JavaScript and how to hack around the same origin policy.
When you applied, did you have any reasonable expectation that you would actually be hired to work there, or was it just on a whim... like a lottery ticket?
When one has people around who are clearly more able programmers, one can take the chance to learn from them and try to achieve their skill. But when you believe you might be the top programmer around your office, how do you determine whether you're really good, or you're just in a not-so-great environment?
A lot of entrepreneurial advice mentions trying harder: if you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough. Applying at a very competitive company like Google, Facebook or Apple is, IMO, a good way to assess how you "rank" next to very talented peers. Failure there is failing at a very competitive level, and the interviews will give you a sense of how far you might be from them, and perhaps energize you to try harder.
I guess a method to determine your current "level" could be to keep trying to be hired by harder- and harder- to get-into companies, until you fail; that's the level you should strive to get to in the future. If you were never rejected, how do you know whether your current "level" is your highest?
Another common advice for entrepreneurs: "you only fail if you fail to learn the lesson." The reason for failing to be hired is invaluable feedback on your shortcomings, which are much harder to self-assess.
In short: don't self-reject yourself.
(note: I don't have any startup experience, and just 4 years of professional experience as an employee. I guess the more entrepreneurial people around here would propose shipping something and see what happens to make your self-assessment :-)
(2nd note: I was recently hired by Google in Munich, and can't wait to start! :-)
EDIT: this was longer than expected. I totally forgot to address your question: I was afraid of rejection, but I also thought I could do it. I never thought of it as trying my luck in a lottery, and wouldn't apply if I didn't believe I could deliver once on the job.
Good luck trying to get any useful feedback from a Google or Facebook rejection. Often it's just random.
However, I could tell during the conversation on the interviews whether I was doing well on a particular topic or not so well. I got the impression the questions just keep coming while you keep answering; when you say "I don't know this, I actually never saw similar problems before", I guess this is when the interview begins: how do you solve new problems and try to tackle them? This is also the feedback you can take away: where did you stop, and what would it take to go on?
With Facebook, I at least had a phone interview and could run post-mortem on what I might've messed up there. Google appeared to just toss my resume down a black hole.
I later decided that really, I didn't want to be a programmer, I wanted to found a startup. I was still in school and not 100% sure of myself at this point, so I applied to 1 programming job at a small place in Connecticut. I got a phone interview and then a rejection. I blamed my "failure" then on my lack of interest probably showing through.
Sadly, I had the same null feedback experience with many seed funders that spring. Most of the time it was a black hole. 2 (Lightspeed and IO Ventures) of them gave a brief explanation, which matches some (but not all) of my own post-mortem analysis. I think that given the high probability of rejection, rejection feedback significantly increases the value of applying.
While I don't think rejection from a place like Google is necessarily "random," I would certainly agree that it rarely provides actionable info.
I would love to hear about this being brought up by someone else in the interview itself. "What are some reasons Google would fail to answer questions that they themselves asked for?" In fact, I would make this one of the first questions asked. "I don't want to waste anybody's time, so..." I'm sure it would disarm any interviewer who entered the room readied with a "GOOG IS GOD" attitude.
By the end of the interviews, I felt I did well (considering that I'd read up on complexity theory for the first time the night before and had told an interviewer that I didn't know what a hashtable was), and felt that even if I didn't get the job, I'd had an awesome day, but still didn't really believe that it was really going to happen. Then it did. I think I worked out OK for Google (I'm still here 5 years later, at least).
My perspective was that of a foreigner in a land where CS was a path to becoming a suit-wearing enterprise software automaton - at the time, Google seemed like this romantic faraway wonderland, so the whole process was very removed from reality for me; the perspective of someone who went to a school like Stanford or Berkeley is probably very different and more realistic.
I wouldn't say I expected to get the job, but I nailed the interview. I've since moved on from Google, but the stuff I learned during those months has been incredibly valuable for my career.
Google sucked-up nearly all the Python people from Seattle mid-decade this way, just as I was migrating back to Common Lisp, so it wasn't that appealing to me anyway.
It was months before the IPO was announced, no bus from SF yet, no SF office then, and I couldn't bear a reverse-commute. (Wife doesn't drive, so living outside the city not an option)
Anyway, I'd prefer to work on doing my own thing, and build an awesome startup, than go to work for any big company, Google or otherwise. Hell, even Lulu felt big and bureaucratic to me when I was there, and they were only about 100 employees at the time.
First strike was the recruiter trying to lowball me that VPs at other companies come in at this level.
I applied and heard nothing back I applied, had a phone interview and was rejected I applied, interviewed in person and then was rejected I applied, was offered the position and turned it down.
PS I fall in the applied and heard nothing but crickets back column -- i feel so ashamed, HN hold me and tell me it will all be okay :(
I was contacted some three years ago by a recruiter on LinkedIn, talked a couple of times via email, then the phone interview. The interviewer asked me questions about networking ("describe what happens during a HTTP request at the various levels of TCP/IP") and Linux internals ("what to do if your open a shell and any command you type results in 'Not enough memory'?"), and we chatted a little bit after that.
By talking with him, I learned that it was more of a sysadmin-y position (dealing more with infrastructure and supporting application developers) then actually working on their products.
My interested waned quite a bit after that. Combined with the fact that my Linux internals answer was far from stellar (I learned a thing or two about /proc afterwards), it didn't surprise me when I got the "we are sorry to inform you..." letter a couple of weeks later.
I don't know if I was being overconfident or if it was the effect of the "web 2.0" bubble, but I though then that I could be hired. I would apply today if I heard of some interesting position in Cambridge or NY to work on Android. Alas, it seems that the Android team is all in the West Coast.
And I thought I was the only one who thinks this way.
I went to one of the top French engineering schools, which, like most of these schools, is "generalist" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles). This means I got to learn a lot about mechanic, electronic, chemistry, thermodynamic, entrepreneurship (and I am glad I did), but only started to learn about computer engineering during my last year (with a CS specialization). I'm a passionate web developer since almost 3 years, but I never got around to really dig into algorithms / data structures / OS internals... Hell, I've never written a line of C!
I plan to teach myself by reading books / watching the MIT online lectures, but keep postponing it, because it doesn't seem that useful to me in my day to day web programming job, where knowing the basics is enough for the (relatively) small datasets I have to manipulate. Plus, Java abstracts away the OS internals and most of the data structures: while I don't know how to write a linked list / tree / hash map, I know when it is appropriate to use each one of them.
Instead, I find myself focusing on best practices for my current language (Java), learning new languages (Scala, Ruby, Clojure), web programming, cryptography, user experience, and learning more about Linux tricks / sysadmin tasks. I think these skills are a lot more useful in today's programming environment, but my lack in more "classical" computer engineering skills has stopped me from applying to Google.
All in all, it was decent self-learning experience. I say apply anyway. Even if you don't get it, it might sharpen you up enough for somewhere else.
Me. I came in 4+ years ago by way of an acquisition. Note that "never applied" doesn't equate with "never interviewed" - we all had to go through the same interview process as regular candidates.
I don't know how common a story that is. There are probably quite a lot of people who've been contacted by Google recruiters but decided not to apply at all.
I'm looking at starting up a small business, then if that fails (which it damn well won't), I can always look at working for Google (or whatever the next Google is) at that time.
i haven't applied again because consulting and startupping have been more exciting than working for medium-large companies. but then again, i wouldn't know :)
No hard feelings, though; the interview process is fun. And if anyone interviews in Dublin, have the pizza for lunch. It's really good.
It's unfortunate. I was excited at the prospect and they did try to encourage me to continue through the process. I had lost my initiative though.
Not quite Portland, but if you're willing to move to Hood River or The Dalles...
http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/the-dalles/sw...