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Comment by xigency | Hacker News Reader

From interviewing at Google, I had a really robotic impression of employees and life there. The entire process was disorganized. I drove four hours across the state to get there, navigating all sorts of construction, and found my own accommodations. When I arrived on site I was repeatedly asked to solve the same Java/C problems on whiteboards for a new person each time.

No one bothered to ask me what made me unique or interesting, even though I have amazing stories to tell from traveling around the world and from projects I've worked on in the past. The free lunch thing is sort of over-blown, when you have to fill out a form and shout over a line of people to get a BLT sandwich made. And then there were a bunch of bicycles strewn out across the campus, mostly toppled over, for no explicable reason.

Honestly, the only reason I would want to work there is for the money, and for that reason employees should not really expect to enjoy their time there.

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Something easily in excess of 90% of applicants at Google can't program computers in any reasonably productive way. The interview process is designed to find out whether you've ever seen a computer (the HR phone screen), whether you've ever programmed one (the next phone screen), and whether you'd be able to productively contribute to a huge and complex code base (the on-site).

Asking about all the stamps in your passport would be a waste of everyone's time. If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch. Otherwise nobody cares. Anyway at a company with tens of thousands of engineers there's already a bunch of people exhibiting every one of your "unique" characteristics.

In this case I am the only American to voluntarily move to a radioactive fallout zone in Japan immediately after the Tohoku earthquake where I studied computer science at Japan's only school dedicated exclusively to the field. So while it is nice to hear how Google does their text-to-speech from a young employee, I do understand Markov models and Mel frequency coefficients well enough and have done my own interesting research working in a CS lab setting. I could care less if they hired me, I thought it was rude that I traveled 10,000 miles around the world and survived to be shoved out the door.

This was also coming after resigning from another company where I was treated terribly after moving from Chicago to southern California.

And that's really beyond the point. Fog Creek Software in New York City does an excellent job of treating their employees well, both interviewing and starting, and maybe that's something only offered by smaller companies, but I think an interviewee for a software job should be treated with a little bit more personal respect.

And there you've experienced the best that Large Enterprise life has to offer for worker bees.

Working for an employer is inherently dehumanizing. You are considered a resource of the company, not a unique individual. The larger the company, the stronger this effect.

It's not just employees, Google and other large enterprises treat their customers in the same way.

>In this case I am the only American to voluntarily move to a radioactive fallout zone in Japan immediately after the Tohoku earthquake

No offense, but that's frankly irrelevant to an interviewer. You can't expect someone to waste a part of their day to stroke your ego when their task is to evaluate you and see if you can make it in the company.

It's just a huge red flag to me that the employees of a massive international company could be so globally unaware looking at the dates and locations of things printed on my resume to not ask a single question about it.

Furthermore, Google might just be looking to hire a massive number of low-level Java developers and have a need to make them write bubblesort and FizzBuzz over and over, but I am someone who is a Java compiler writer, so I thought things might have lined up better.

And at this point, I am not concerned about my ego so much as having a way to support myself. I didn't start programming when I was 10 to make a million dollars, I did it because I wanted to know how things worked. Now I might as well work at the pizza factory down the street so long as I have a place to live.

Not trying to challenge you on your various experiences, but you sound somewhat annoying to work with. Congratulations on being such a smart, accomplished, and worldly human being.

Just a tough couple of months. Thanks.

Merry Xmas to you too.

You're right, I was being kind of an asshole. However, I think the OP's frustrations may have more to do with his high opinion of himself than he thinks.

Are you still in the market for a job? Send me an email, it's in my profile. I won't get back to you right away because of the holidays and such, but I'm intrigued none the less.

There are huge swaths of CS undergrads I could introduce you to that "write java compilers". :)

> but I am someone who is a Java compiler writer

Have an ounce of empathy and look at things from the other side of the table. Anybody can write "I wrote a java compiler" on their resume. Anybody who is even modestly determined can fake a github repo of such a project.

People have done (much) crazier things to try to get a job at Google.

The only thing for interviewers to do is to try to assess your technical ability in the limited time that they have.

I did a fair number of interviews when I worked at Google. (For strong candidates,) I spent every minute of the 45 or whatever given to me in an interview trying to get more signal to make their interview summary packet stronger. If I stop to ask how you saved a village in Fiji from sharks, that's fewer glowing words I'm going to write about you in my feedback.

To echo what somebody else wrote upthread:

> If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch.

Sure.

This type of dissonance is actually quite common and may be nothing personal. This article details some of the sociology issues involved.

The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/01/095679761455...

FWIW if you are successful in other endeavors in life, down the road, you'll potentially deal with these situations time and time again.

Good luck.

"It's just a huge red flag to me that the employees of a massive international company could be so globally unaware looking at the dates and locations of things printed on my resume to not ask a single question about it."

For a large company that is more or less irrelevant unless you are interviewing for a position specific to varied international experience.

Making sure you can program is far more important. I work at a really international setting ... good C++ is good C++ regardless of the cultural background of the programmer.

Which in itself is really friggin awesome - in my experience a programmer is a programmer with any cultural background just as long they grok the CS and programming fundamentals. Perhaps Google has observed the same?

For smaller companies where the interviewers will be dealing with you day to day the personal details are more interesting.

> No offense, but that's frankly irrelevant to an interviewer.

* at a large company.

I would be fascinated by that story if I were interviewing GP for a position at our (small) company.

Right, but you can afford to be inefficient with your interviews because you don't have north of 2 million applicants a year.

I mean, most reasonably well-off people go abroad during or after college studies and this experience doesn't really sound that remarkable other than the fallout zone. Did you develop any interesting biological mutations?

Nice comment. Anyone can be an ass. It is fascinating though that alot of people act like one. Yourself included.

No, I took iodine pills.

I studied phonetics in a language lab and volunteered with other international students at a local elementary school, among other things.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect a Google interviewer to ask you about your "stories ... from travelling around the world." Their primary reason for hiring you is for your ability as (I'm assuming) a developer. Although your travel experience may make you a more interesting person, that isn't altogether the point of the interview.

I guess you could say that measuring the "likeableness" and culture-fit of a potential employee is important, but that can definitely be derived from the interview in general rather than from your life stories.

> Although your travel experience may make you a more interesting person, that isn't altogether the point of the interview

Maybe it is a mistake that it's not a point in the interview? In fact, I'd care a lot about the personality of a person I will be working with in the future.

I understand that in the "cattle hiring" model where you hire people and then assign a team, this is irrelevant, but I personally consider this a huge weakness of cattle hiring.

I agree it should be considered in an interview, but I don't think it should be the point or the focus of the interview. The idea is that even though you'd like to work with someone who has a nice personality, I'm sure you'd also like to work with someone who is competent and the company would much rather hire someone who is competent rather than only interesting.

Whether you hire the person or not they are going to go away with an impression of the organisation. In this case it wasn't a very good one.

> No one bothered to ask me what made me unique or interesting

To me, it seems like Google's hiring process as a huge company (at least for the vast majority of positions) is explicitly looking for interchangeable people, so regardless of what they advertise, their process is not one that holds "uniqueness" as a plus. This is also evidenced by the "hiring committees" they are proud of and talk about a lot outside the company, which will inevitably reduce the variance of new hires.

P.S. that might not be a bad thing for a big company of that size; I'm not holding this against them, but as a prospective employee, one should definitely consider this.

To be fair, filling out a form for a sandwich is about 5% of the food service operation at Google.

Most are just like lunchrooms in school, with much better food. Sorry that someone didn't give you a better experience there, with regards to food and otherwise.

An interview is a fairly terrible way to get to know a company's culture. Among other things, the interview is a filter, not an employment conversation.

At the end of the interview I was left alone in an office where an employee showed up and thought I was there to interview him. Still, I understand your point.

Out of curiosity, why would an existing employee think anyone would be interviewing him?

He was waiting to use a conference room and misheard me.

But ... he already had the job.

interviewing for a promotion/different team?

He asked if he could use the conference room. I said I was there for the interview. He asked if he was being interviewed. I said, no I was. And then he asked if he could Skype someone. So I ran through a few buildings looking for my hiring rep. Because I got stuck with my file that they were supposed to have at the end.

Yes, but it's time for your meeting with the Bobs.

... I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS, DAMMIT!!!

(apologies if you've not seen "Office Space")

The filter works both ways. Why would an employer want to leave a bad impression on someone who could potentially work there?

This is truth.

I have seen this from both sides, and it is something you _need_ to know if you are interviewing people. The very best people for the job will have options. The very best hires don't _need_ your job. Not considering that your organization is being evaluated by the same folks you want to hire is not smart.

Why would you expect anything but an interview when showing up for an interview? It's not like they expect an impromptu tap dance to convince them you really want to work there.

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