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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> "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!)

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