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Comment by officemonkey | Hacker News Reader

According to the article, the Google "sales force" seems to leave much to desire. They don't keep appointments, they can't explain their product, they don't understand their client, and they overprice their product.

It does not surprise me in the least that savvy users will find other arrangements.

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Well we just went through the same process. And the guy we talked to at google was extremely helpful and knowledgeable. But in the end that did not matter, because even after a 80% discount of the list price the final google maps offer was still 350% more expensive than our local alternative(a country-specific provider). So come january 1st, we are changing map provider. Fortunately it was rather easy to switch. Its been great having been able to use google maps all these years for free, and for that we are grateful.

Interesting to read about this on the same day I read an article about Google's infamously challenging interview process. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020455230457711...)

Clearly something doesn't add up (though it could be as simple as the non-engineers don't get as much scrutiny. Shouldn't Google want the world's best sales reps too?)

It takes one to I know one... Google was founded by phd's not sales people- it is. Very different to hire and manage a sales force compared to an engineering team... Sales people tend to be less honest and often comeback to bit - look at groupon

My Google interview wasn't anything like that. If anything, those could be questions they ask non-engineers, but I don't actually know.

They also don't type on computers during interviews, which I doubt is something specific to engineering. My interviewers took notes, copied down what I wrote on the whiteboard, and then (apparently) later entered all of this into the computer system.

As for the questions, they certainly don't ask any that are in the article. Steve Yegge's article covers the exact category of questions they ask:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

I don't remember the exact questions I was asked, and signed about 80 pieces of paper saying I would Never Speak Of Them, but they are of the style where you must know X and then use pieces of X to solve completely unrelated problems. (X could be, for example, quicksort.) Graphs, algorithms, and data structures are essential, but nobody is going to ask you "implement a binary tree"; that is way too easy to study for. (I'm guessing that discrete math questions are also common; but because of the position I was interviewing for, they replaced those with testing and refactoring questsions. Which was good, because I was never good at discrete math.) I had not seen any of the questions they asked before, and two of them were interesting enough to keep me thinking about them for several days. (I was disappointed to discover, while implementing my solution to one, how easy it is to brute-force problems involving English words. There just aren't very many words. But the idea is what counts, and brute-force is not going to get you hired :)

Since I've been hired by Google, people have pointed me at a lot of "popular media" articles or videos about Google, and not many have matched my experience, but then again, I haven't actually started work yet.

(The linked article also talks about Bank of America intervewing, which doesn't have a standardized process. I know because I worked there and asked different questions, 100% chosen by me, every time I interviewed someone. So while one person at Bank of America may have asked "What animal are you?", that's not some sort of company policy. So it's a bit disingenuous of the article to name-drop Bank of America there.)

> They also don't type on computers during interviews

One of my engineering interviewers took notes on a computer instead of on paper. Clearly your mileage may vary.

Uh, what? That's certainly not a typical interview for Google.

Check what an ex-Googler has to say on the brain teaser questions: http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-goog...

Can somebody please give the rationale behind banning the brain teasers?

I would imagine it's because brain teasers test mostly one thing: If you've heard the brain teaser before. (Or, alternatively, how much of a smart aleck you can be. "Why are manhole covers round?" - "Because manholes are round. If they were square, they wouldn't fit")

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