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Comment by MindTwister | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have similar experiences with Google?

My only experience with Google went like this:

1. Google recruiter emails me, says my name was recommended to her by somebody inside Google. I'm still not sure who the "somebody" was as I don't have any close friends inside Google and nobody mentioned anything to me. I suspect it may have been a HN'er actually, somebody who doesn't know me IRL, but liked something he/she saw in my posts here or some of my open source work.

2. I politely declined to pursue anything, explaining that I am knee deep in a startup of my own, and that my ambition is to run my own company, not work for anybody else - even Google.

3. Recruiter replied, expressed that they understood, and asked if they could contact me again in the future to see where things stood. I said "sure".

4. About a year later a different Google recruiter pinged me, mentioned the earlier dialogue, and asked me if my situation had changed. I answered that it had not. They replied and said "thanks for the update".

5. I haven't heard anything from them since.

All in all, everybody was polite and cordial, but then again, we never got into any detailed discussions because I just wasn't interested. YMMV. shrug

The few times I've interviewed with Google (plain old job interviews, not as an acquisition or acqui-hire), they've always been pretty arrogant. Enough so that I wouldn't interview with them again if they contacted me. The attitude is clearly, "You're going to jump through our hoops and do what we say, because we're Google and we're totally awesome and we can take you or leave you."

I don't know if the guy in this story is really as bad ass and worth as much as he thinks he is, but the interaction with Google sounds spot on.

> "You're going to jump through our hoops and do what we say, because we're Google and we're totally awesome and we can take you or leave you."

I've met more than my fair share of the Googlers that exhibit an air of arrogance, but are you sure their hoops aren't just Google's standard interview process?

Google has stated their interview process is designed to produce very few false positives, accepting that false negatives are a necessary by-product.

I actually really enjoyed the interview process with Google. It was expeditious and respectful. It was, however, clear they are not used to taking "No" for an answer, and that's when things got a little uncomfortable.

My own interview process was pretty delightful (which is a good part of why I ended up working there), but when I have referred friends or even been an interviewer, I've seen stuff that's so sloppy and disrespectful that I started adopting a "friends don't refer friends to work at Google" policy.

I suspect it may've been because I was hired at the bottom of the 2009 recession, right around when they fired all the temps and all the permanent recruiters were fearful of their jobs and there were virtually no other candidates in the pipeline, while folks who applied in 2007 or 2011-2012 when it was much busier got a terrible experience.

I interviewed in late 2010 and was hired in early 2011. I had a great experience. Other than the long delay between interview and offer, of course. It may be relevant that I didn't interview in MTV.

I was invited to interview with Google in Sydney (site reliability engineer), but the salary range was less than I was already making in a much cheaper town (Canberra).

Arrogance is the right word... I got the impression they would prefer candidates who were bending over backwards to get in the door, and by asking about salary and relocation costs I clearly wasn't.

Edit: Then about 6 months later I took a job in Sydney anyway, at a 20% higher salary... Then took another paycut to go back to Canberra (Sydney is expensive!)

See this story and the similar tales in the comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243627

I had a product launch that went extremely successful, and then someone from Google approached me via an email with an ambiguous messaging; i.e., "We're from Google and we want to talk to you". I thought they wanted to buy me out, but instead they just wanted to convince me to apply for a job interview.

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