Just bc you're getting contacted by Google recruiters this week or interviewing doesn't mean you'll ever find a team or get a real offer.
The process is absolutely insane and an obvious symptom of Google knowing people really, really want to work there. They do not respect the candidate at all, and then will cold email you again a year later as if you've forgotten how painful it was the first time. I'll probably end up interviewing again.
I guess a key difference though is that it's not very "data structures and algorithms"-y and much more "optimizing React performance"-y
I ended up actually passing but, being the only junior there, no company was interested in a contract with me. However, I don't really consider it a waste of time because I really learned a lot from that interview and I think it played into how I interviewed later
At the current company I work for they're really surprised at certain skills I have. Skills that I can trace back to having to study for that one interview
Yeah, I'd say definitely try it at LEAST once just to see what's out there. You might just get an offer of life-changing money.
One time all of my interviews involved reinforcement learning. I didn't know much about it, so I tried to answer all of the questions the best I could using CS concepts and programming. Years later, when learning about Reinforcement Learning, I face-palmed pretty hard when it became extremely obvious that they were testing my knowledge of policies.
(It was worse than that: I told the recruiter I was interested in roles in any location except the South Bay and Seattle's Eastside, and they came back and said those were the two places they found matches, so I took a different job. And they were surprised. As far as I can tell Google can't figure out how to not assume that they're everybody's dream job choice like I guess they might have been in the 2000s.)
When I was interviewing, my significant other was looking to go to grad school in either NYC or Cambridge. NYC was her preference, so I told the recruiter I preferred NYC or Boston and I did my on-site in NYC.
After all my interviews, the recruiter told me that the NYC office was doing "renovations", and so some teams were holding off hiring until they had the physical space (in retrospect this excuse makes no sense). He asked if I was still open to Boston and I said yes. But at this point, my SO had to accept one of her grad school offers, and based solely on the fact that I thought I would have a Google job lined up in Cambridge, she committed to the Cambridge school.
At one point during the pointless team match process (after we were committed to Cambridge and after I had several unfruitful Cambridge team match calls), my recruiter actually asked me if I wanted to go back to looking for NYC teams. I couldn't believe it- what a slap in the face! (I had told him our priorities and timeline)
We live in Boston right now, 4 years later, solely because I thought Google would have a role for me here after having passed 9 interviews. Thankfully, everything worked out. I found a different job, my SO got a great degree and is using it here in Boston, etc. Of course I'm the lone idiot in this story, but it's incredible how flexible I was just because I thought big G was making my dreams come true.
I ended up taking an offer in MTV and my wife went to Amsterdam. 1 year down, 1 more year to go. We're again going through the process of trying to find something that works for both of us between NYC, London, and Amsterdam.
I think this is a symptom.
Their experience getting hired is likely the same as yours: all your family and friends and even significant others sometimes think its the dream job and the most important accolade in your life.
You know thats its not. They're not in big tech, they're not in medium tech either. You know there's plenty of organizations you can get paid in lottery ticket securities from, you know there's publicly traded organizations with faster vesting schedules and higher stock market upside. But they don't know that.
Many of the people that go into Google was surrounded by that same pressure by their friends and family of getting accepted, and then they also are beneficiaries of Google's infrastructure and financial weight off their shoulders. It distorts their view whether they realize they can get paid more elsewhere or not.
So it selects for that distortion field where people forget that Google is just a choice.
Surprised it took that long, but he's happy he stuck w the Google process.
Am I reading this right? Your friend spent 9 months interviewing for a single job?
And then he decided that the company that had been trying to hire him for a pregnancy's worth of time was somewhere that he wanted to work after already having a job that hired him in a month?
Is this 'normal' for the Goog? If so, why am I not shorting this company?
No really, what did they put in my java today?
EDIT: Actually, yeah, someone put in some sort of super caffeinated beans today. Sorry for the somewhat manic posting here.
Basically it takes ~2 weeks of initial phone screening and scheduling, then another ~4 weeks that will involve setting up the full day of interviews and collecting feedback and making a decision on whether or not to hire.
So basically after ~6 weeks from first being contacted by a recruiter, you know whether or not Google wants you. This is not unreasonable for a large company.
BUT -- this is just as "generic PM". Because then there needs to be a match made between you and a specific PM position.
And so this is where you basically wait around for a PM position to be open that is in a geographic location where you're willing to work and the team thinks you're a good fit. If you're willing to relocate anywhere in the world (or especially Mountain View) it's not going to take anywhere close to 9 months. But if you're only willing to work in Boston, for example, it may very well take that long. Over those 9 months, you might wind up having ~3-hour interviews with 5 different teams seeing if you're a good fit. Also remember that even if a team wants you, you might decide you don't like the team (e.g. you want to be a PM on something closer to Waymo than to Ads).
Also remember that PM jobs aren't nearly as fungible as software engineering jobs -- if it's an enterprise product they might want a PM with an enterprise background, if a consumer hardware product then a PM with consumer hardware experience.
But it's not like you're having a new interview every week for 9 months or anything. It simply can take 9 months to match up the right person for the right role when there are geographic constraints.
PM = Project Manager.
Projects can range from something like all of Project Loon down to some one small little thing.
Project managers can manage many people (and other managers) down to only one other person.
Project managers are given access to budgets, including hiring and project budgeting.
The role is somewhat ambiguous, but you are definitely in the 'Management' side of the business now, not the 'Labor' side.
In general a TPM at Level N will have the technical skills of a Level N-1 SWE. So many TPM's have a CS background, and a good TPM is an amazing partner/resource for a TL to have, especially for a large, complex project which spans multiple teams and multiple departments.
For my Hybrid SMR project, my TPM came out of a HDD vendor, and was very well versed in the technologies of HDD internals. At the same time, he could navigate all of the bureaucracy and process to get test racks ordered, populated with servers, and installed in data centers. He could also create the capital budget plan and get it submitted and approved through finance so I could concentrate on the technology. A good TPM is critical for the success of a large projects; I couldn't have done it without him.
1. validate that you pass the minimum bar to work at Google as a PM. Whichever team ends up talking to you, they know you're at least minimally competent.
2. understand if you are a fit for the specific team and product. That might take a long time cause openings come and go, sometimes they get filled by internal candidates which are always a favorite cause learning how to function inside Google takes time.
It's annoying from the perspective of an external candidate but now that I work at Google I understand why it's done this way, especially considering that Google has a very weak internal training system and the chaos is so prevalent it takes at least 6 months to get the hang of things.
That's crazy. When I joined FB a few years ago the total time was under a month.
The reading list thing makes sense for some people who have never done a FAANG-like interview before. I remember moving from London to the USA early in my career and I had no idea how the process worked and so I got my first phone screeen with Amazon, thinking I'd explain a bit about my background and we'd have a bit of a chat and instead I got "Okay. Give me code to perform an in-order traversal of a binary tree." which was NOT something I was remotely prepared to do at the time :)
If you know the format and basic types of questions (and have access to leetcode etc.) it's not too bad, but a lot of these resources weren't around 15 years ago, especially to people from another country with no context.
A second Amazon interview aside: in an in-person interview I did, things had been going very well and I was on my fifth interview of the day. Again, I was recently from London and hadn't fully understood that words mean different things in the USA than they do in the UK. I was asked to design a GPS system. This seems simple enough if you know that "GPS" in the USA is the same thing as a "SatNav" or "Satellite Navigation" system in the UK and that the goal would be to build a system that could compute an efficient route between two points.
The problem was that I assumed the person wanted, well, a GPS system. i.e. he wanted a design for a set of satellites in geosynchronous orbit that would, using very precise timing, allow a person almost anywhere on earth to get a latitude and longitude like "12.345, -2.345" and so we spent almost the whole of the conversation talking about two different things and even when I was given the hint that maybe I could use some kind of graph algorithm, I had no idea how to use Dijkstra's to solve clock drift on a satellite :)
For some I guess it'll be worth it, but this insistence on that approach then means they're causing the candidates with enough experience to get competitive offers elsewhere to self-select away.
There's a ton of people on the internet who claim that they just haven't done enough leetcode to get into FAANG but they're sure it's The Way, and anyone who is in FAANG cannot possibly dissuade them from this belief. I imagine they're reading the interview prep books too and still not getting in.
I'm senior enough that I don't need to deal with that bullshit to get a well paying job, so in not trying to sell me on why I should want to work for them but instead giving me junior level "homework" they made me mentally raise the bar for how much money it'd take to make it worthwhile quite substantially.
Maybe they don't want people like me, and that's fine if that's an intentional choice on their behalf and not an effect of failing to realise that it's pushing away the most experienced candidates who have other options first.
Add to the fact that I was hesitant to even consider Facebook to start with and it was easy to pass on it.
Hiring processed has changed though, so I'm not sure if this is still true.
The blacklisted for a year thing sounds like the normal Google, “Try again in a year” messaging that happens whenever someone doesn’t get an offer for failing interviews. Again, don’t know if that is what happened, but it hardly constitutes anything nefarious.
To be clear, this is the "You are not permitted to apply for any positions at this company" messaging for people who pass interviews and fail to sign offers within 4 days.
Never heard of anything like this in the non-startup industry
For them that is. Sucks for you and me.
At Facebook, it's possible to match before starting, but candidates usually try to do the matching in the 2 weeks (or so) of training they do in Menlo Park. It's up to them to cold call and find time with hiring managers to sell themselves (and vice-versa). But time-wise, the process is much more constrained than Google's.
This is inaccurate. In 2019 a Google recruiter decided on my behalf which team I would match, extended a 4-day exploding offer, and blacklisted me when I said that other processes would take more than 4 days. This was within a couple months of passing hc.
They also subject you to high-school level team picking, which is deeply rooted in internal/company politics and an additional dynamic of company bias and it all enables the company orphan you easily if they find you don't submit to being overworked easily and complying with the deep team culture that each company evangelizes.
People are pressured now more than ever to adopt rules of conduct that encroach upon and threaten their individuality now more than ever by large companies.. Even when you log on to apps like TikTok and Instagram. Your individuality and experience are often thrown out in working environments so that you become a cog in the wheel, and more easily replaceable for these companies, not so that you can one day grow to be a CEO or Exec, and even still, those types of positions are often reserved for others who can fail multiple times and not get fired, while if you fail on the months long hiring process, you'll never survive.
On the inverse, I have been hired by smaller and medium sized contracting companies for much better salaries, and they often hire within days or weeks. I have very little patience for dragged out hiring and onboarding processes now. I work efficiently, do a good job, respect everyone's individuality and culture, and then go home to enjoy my life. I only work at companies there that is the culture. Luckily, if the market is screwed up or too hostile, I just work on my own ventures, it took 20 years of suffering through hostile corporate cultures and attempted indoctrination to get to this point where I have the choice.
None of the large corporations I've worker for called to check on me since our breakups, but most of them would likely rehire me if I re-applied... Not being arrogant, but emphasizing that the internal rules are frequently bent to serve the needs of delivery...
The people that get chewed up worst by the machine often have the lowest technical skills and ability, experience, and self esteem. I don't put any company on a pedestal; I just work efficiently and effectively with integrity, constantly learn (well aligned) stuff that works to get the job done, rely heavily on my prior experience, fight to keep solutions simple, and adapt constantly to efficiently meet goals... Company "culture workshops" and even colleges will never teach you that.
There are so many factors that affect compensation for each individual employee, comparison of pay is useless. Geographical region also has big bearing on the discussion, and it really makes no sense to compare compensation online with a public audience in that manner. I won't discuss specific details and employers online for obvious reasons.
I reside on the East Coast, West Coast is a completely different labor market, and the cost of living in silicon valley is higher, another reason why comparison is futile. Jobs also rely on skill and experience, to which each person ranks differently, so individual salary comparison online is ultimately not accurate, why even try?
That being said, 6 months of work at $200k or 1 year of work at $100k is the same amount of money, but one job costs the employee a lot more time out of their life. Work is meant to supplement our lives, not the other way around. We're either marketable as employees or not, small companies that want to compete and grow within a workspace often pay more for highly skilled employees for shorter work terms overall, because they have vital work to do in order to be competitive...
Sure small and medium (non-public) companies don't offer RSUs and other things that large (FAANG) companies do, but if you really take a look at how long it takes to be vested in those huge companies, and how most people don't last long enough to vest, and how much big company culture changes employees to the point that when they're laid off or quit after bad experiences they suffer in readjusting to the regular working world... The compensation can be a lot better in small/medium sized companies.
I'll happily tell you what the approximate compensation is by Google in Atlanta or NYC, because there's really no reason not to discuss those things.
Care to share what the TC for these companies is these days?
This may differ on which office you are at. In Seattle, we started working with teams during the tail end of bootcamp, with some people finding a team in 1-2 weeks and others in 6-8 weeks.
One thing I liked was that if a team had an open position and you said "I want that position", the hiring manager basically had to take you, whereas at Google, each hiring manager could reject you for their team, so you can spend a long time trying and failing to match.
The other thing I liked about FB's process was that you actually got to work directly with the team and do real work, rather than having the position filtered through a hiring manager. Spending a week actually writing code helped a lot with understanding which team would be the best fit and isn't something you can really do with a non-employee.
Of course I'm sure it's no longer good with the hiring freeze, but the point is that Google is so heavy on the "no role needed" train that even when you're recruited for a role, you're apparently still able to turn it down and still join Google later on a whim.