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Comment by zak_mc_kracken | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to see this kind of title from someone who's never worked at Google.

OP seems to be mostly disgruntled by Google's recruiting process, which seems horrendous, to be honest. But just because there is a lot of red tape before you can get a job offer doesn't mean the job will suck.

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I went through the same thing twice at google, but actually failed the over-the-phone interviews. Bank of America had a firm offer the very next day after the interview. I've been there 4 years, get great vacation amount and benefits (401k match, etc) and it's 20-40 minutes from the house, depending on traffic, instead of in Venice, which would be 1.5 hours. And I get paid well. On top of that, the work is interesting and challenging.

Heh, completely opposite experience with BoA for me. Incredibly disorganized interviewers (I was waiting for almost an hour between some interviews), the last 2 out of 5 gave me attitude too. No offer in the end.

Bloomberg was the next place I interviewed at and they had a firm offer that same day (the HR guy was the last person I spoke to) -- I had them wait another 4 days since I had 2 more interviews lined up.

You took the Bloomberg offer I assume?

I did. One of the other 2 jobs turned out to be completely opposite of what the job offer advertised (consulting instead of R&D), so I lost interest. The other could have been interesting, but they took their time to get back to me and I did not want to lose the Bloomberg offer by waiting too long.

I had a similar experience back when I'd interviewed with Bloomberg. I was scheduled for a set of interviews with one team in the morning and another set with a different team in the afternoon. 1pm rolls around and the Bloomberg recruiter tells me the 1st team wanted to make an offer so there won't be afternoon interviews. I'd been looking for work for quite a while so it was really gratifying to have things just suddenly fall into place. Plus now I had the rest of the day to explore NYC a bit.

Surely it's indicative though; a lot of skills are general. If they're bad at recruiting they will probably also be bad at customer support, supplier negotiations, and whatever it is the company actually does.

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