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Yeah, same experience. I interviewed a long time ago (something like 5-6 years ago), and the interviewer sounded bored and grumpy the whole time. I told them before I interviewed that I didn't know of any of their core languages well enough to interview in them (Python being the only one I could possibly perform well enough with), but they said doing it in Ruby was fine since I was going for a testing position where they used Selenium and Ruby (no clue if that was true since the guy who interviewed me said it wasn't). The interviewer was just severely adversarial the whole time, constantly pointing out "you can't do that" syntactically or "that won't work" even though I'd step through and show them links or irb runs that proved otherwise.

And what's the deal with doing code interviews in Google Docs? I don't know if that's how it's done now, but it was extremely high-pressure. Given that he could see every keystroke and was pretty un-cooperative, it made for a super unpleasant interview with the constant feeling that I couldn't think or explore the problem given.

Needless to say, I didn't progress.

Yes, Google Docs was still the whiteboard for screening less than a year ago.

Thankfully, the person I dealt with was generally pleasant and made for one of the better interview experiences I've had.

Still used less than a few months ago. My interviewer was at least pleasant and helpful though. Would be nice if they would just make a plugin for major IDEs/Editors and let people use what they want.

Google docs here too the last time. Very pleasant, kind and helpful interviewer.

Yes, google docs is still used. Several of the people I did phone screens with commiserated that it's a poor way to code online, but they seemed to have 0 choice in the matter.

Yahoo used collabedit.com, which was much more pleasant (but still realtime).

Yeah, I had the same problem with G docs. I think an inherent capability of a decent candidate is thinking of all possible avenues at once. When you add in the meta-cognitive overload of an interview to that you're testing other things. It's like adding confounding variables to a neural net. :)

It's a step up from when I interviewed, also about 5-6 years ago. I had to solve some coding puzzles ("uniquify a list in python while maintaining order") over the phone. Not so easy to dictate python code to someone with a strange accent over a crappy phone line. 2/3's of the interview spent on me or him saying "what?" He also was very grumpy. But it was a fun experience.

Frankly, if the initial interview at Google sucks and you actually want to work there, make your case to the recruiter.

I had a similar experience as yours - got a guy that seemed uninterested, and who then proceeded to give me interview questions that firstly were totally irrelevant to the position, and totally outside of the area the recruiter had told me I was meant to be asked about. Secondly they made it clear that the guy interviewing me had a very specific idea of what answers he wanted, but didn't have sufficient knowledge of the field to realise that his questions were ambiguous or incomplete.

After the interview, I was just annoyed. I didn't see any point in waiting for feedbackm and fired off an e-mail to the recruiter, telling her I'd lost interest if that was how they managed their tech interviews. I also gave her the details of the questions and answers I had issues with (which was most of them).

She got back to me a few days later, and informed me she'd discussed the interview details with a few people, and everyone agreed with the points I'd made, and she had gotten it set aside and offered me to proceed to the next stage.

But at that point I declined - I'd had interest from a couple of prospects I saw as more interesting, and the (glacial) pace at which the process had been progressing and the issues with the phone interview (conducted by one of the engineers in the group I'd be managing if I'd been offered the position) gave me a fairly negative impression. I've talked to a number of Google recruiters over the years, both people approaching me to get me to interview, and in other situations, and _every one_ of the ones I've talked to have been totally exasperated over the recruitment process they have to deal with.

Exactly the same for me. I was approached several times, tried the interview up to the second stage, but it was just horrible. Same as you explained. I also said, no thank you. Not any other technical company I interviewed with was THAT bad. They should really fire all their hiring personal.

Interviewed for PM there a while back. Slow process. Neither interviewer adapted questions to the candidate, asked trivial stuff, didn't scale up difficulty. Static, reading script, little followup.

Second interviewer didn't read feedback from first, repeated one or two questions. Got to third round and withdrew.

Google is what you get when you hire essentially random people, all of whom believe or are led to believe that the process that led to them being hired is infallible.

You obviously don't work for Google.

I interviewed a few years back, it was a mix of the most interesting and most asinine interviews I have had. A great discussion w/ one woman going into linux internals and kernel programming. I learned a bunch but also it was a good conversation.

That last person I spoke with never introduced himself, asked essentially an open ended question with no real answer. I presented what I thought was reasonable, he said "that's wrong", and never answered what he thought the approach/answer should be. Relayed this to a friend there just after the interview - her response was "that is an idiotic question and actually your answer was correct".

I was declined for the position, but still get calls by google recruiters on a regular basis. I relay the story and politely tell them no thanks.

we only hire experts at google

Combined with the fact that Google ties roles with geographic location, and doesn't reveal what post people will work on during recruitment, this assertion is quite amusing. I suppose he thought he was an expert too! That interviewer is selecting for hubris with this question at least - often those willing to call themselves experts are anything but.

If the best people in x live happily in Toronto and Bangkok and the team is in Mountain View, Google won't be hiring them or even probably interviewing them because of their opaque and broken interview process, which is a shame for Google I guess. The insistence on relocation and the refusal to recruit for actual roles must put an awful lot of good people off.

He responded "well we only hire experts at google".

Funny. One of the Google recruiters told me that expert at technology X meant you either wrote a book on or invented X.

Did the books have to be very good?

People in my life think I'm arrogant when I say I'm not interested in working for Google, but it's more just that it's not a "good fit" for either of us.

When I interviewed at the GOOG a year or two ago they asked me to rate myself on a 1-10 log scale for whichever skills I claimed to be proficient in. 9-10 was 'wrote the book' / 'invented the langauge' IIRC.

Yeah, Microsoft and Amazon also use that language.

Funny. It's almost as if one Google employee's opinion doesn't represent that of the rest of the company.

Given that Google employs or has employed Guido van Rosssum, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, and Josh Bloch, I think that would be a fair assessment of what "expert" means in the context of interviewing there.

It might be apocryphal, but at one point candidates filled a "rate yourself from 1 to 10 in technology X, Y, Z" to help guide the interviewers in choosing questions. The general consensus was "if you rate yourself as a 10 in Python, there's a non-zero chance you'll end up with Guido on your interview panel"

I've interviewed with Google a couple of times for PM type roles over the last few years. I found the interviews pleasant enough, a few brain teasers hidden as algorithm questions and some very basic experiential questions...that sort of thing.

I had the distinct feeling that the outcome of the hiring process really had nothing to do with the interview so long as I answered competently enough.

One interview I nailed, got to the second round phone interview nailed it and then didn't get a call back...ever.

Out of curiosity I send some emails off, turns out the recruiter had quit or "was no longer with the company" or whatever and they had filled the position, please feel free to apply again.

Regardless, it didn't really matter, I had a good time, it was fun, I didn't get the job, but meh. I didn't have to go through the hassle of relocating either.

The few other SV type company interviews I've been on have been similar. Not terribly hard, a few brain teasers, lots of vocalized processing of my thinking process, but even with the ones I got an offer for, came away with the distinct impression that the interview particulars just didn't matter all that much. They were simply confirming some predisposed hiring assumptions and would probably go with whoever went to the best school or whatever arbitrary metric they were using.

They were looking for X, using a hiring process that looks for Y, and it all ended before a committee that hired for Z anyways.

I think this is the most important factoid that's come out of this all is this realization that Google finally had after crunching years worth of data (which was already common knowledge among the rest of the world):

"G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything."

Well, they do predict that people who are given near term ranking and validation of their work will work their asses off to get that ranking and validation.

A little etymology: valedictorian, from valediction, from Latin valere

validate from Latin validus (see valid) from valere

So it's no wonder that valedictorian and validate have the same root. A high achiever is by definition somebody who's efforts have been validated against the measure of achievement (whatever that measure might be) and confirmed to be valere "well", "strong".

It's too bad that what a company needs is an employee that does their job, not one that needs to be constantly validated in their efforts.

And thus a hiring system, put together by validators, who designed the hiring system to validate and filter for people who focus on validation, forgot to look for people who get shit done and don't need to be thanked for it.

And as a result, Youtube becomes more and more unusable every single day.

I think being a valedictorian has a lot more to do with saying goodbye (vale) than it does being validated, but I do think you might be right about Google's bias toward those who seek validation.

Yeah I'm stretching the meaning a little bit, but they do actually have the same root which I didn't know until I looked it up on a hunch.

Yes, it means "to bid farewell", absolutely no relation with valere.

Wrong, please look at the etymology.

I'll walk you through it.

Valedictorian used as a noun in 1832, adj in 1834. American English. From Valedictory adj. and -ian variant of -an, Middle English -ien from French loan words, -an "pertaining to" from Latin -anus.

Valedictory first used in the 1650s, from the Latin valedictum from valedicere and -ory from Latin -orius, -oria, -orium "to have a quality proper to the action accomplished by the agent".

valedicere from vale, imperative of valere "be well" and dicere "to say". See also "Valediction" from 1610s.

Validate v. from 1640s from Latin validatus, from validus, from valere "be well", "be strong" (connoted)

I stand corrected--I had understood the original comment as something that contradicted mneary's reply, and I knew the specific etymology of "to bid farewell" just didn't look at the full derivation.

No problem, I missed the edit window on my reply when I realized it might be a little bit terse sounding in tone. I meant it as being helpful.

I'll add that the Latin vale can be used to mean "farewell", which is usually how it's translated, but if you dig down the etymology rabbit hole, they come from two different language families and not surprisingly don't mean the same thing.

"farewell" is from somewhere between 1200 and the 14th century middle English, a composite of faren "fare" and wel "well". The phrase used to be "fare thee well" but was contracted later. All have Germanic roots.

"fare" is old-English fær means "to go forth on a journey" and still hangs around in some words like "sea-faring", "wayfarer" and "farewell" ("fare" eventually turned into the more modern meaning "payment for passage or conveyance", but that's a digression).

"well" in the sense of "farewell" these days connotes good health (as in "are you well?") but originates also in Germanic tongues to mean "satisfactory".

"thee" is also proto-Germanic in origin and I won't belabor it.

Swedish speakers may recognize this in the modern form as "farväl" and Dutch as "vaarwel"

A "valedictory" is usually translated as "a farewell address" and the act of the speech the valedictorian gives is called a "valediction" (a farewell). But this isn't strictly correct. "valedictory" means something more like "words for good health".

So it's more like we commonly translate "hope you feel well!" to "have a safe trip!" which isn't really quite right.

It's interesting then that:

a) "well" has come to adopt the Latin meaning "health" in the sense that "valere" means "well" i.e. "health" (similar to "valetudo" or "valetudinis"). "valere" more strictly translates to "health" (which all the other meanings connote e.g. "strength" "well" etc.). Also found in words like "convalescence" with the "strength" connotation ending up in words like "valiant" and "validity". When we "validate" something, we are proving it to be strong, which is a connotation of "healthy". So it really means "to prove to be healthy".

b) We define Latin words in terms of Germanic explanations, but not the other way around. e.g. if you look up "farewell" in the dictionary it's not defined as a "valediction". Which would come as no surprise to those that know that English is a Germanic language.