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Comment by therandomguy | Hacker News Reader

I had heard horror stories of Google hiring practice: long timelines, brainteasers, GPA, top schools etc. Hence I had never really considered Google as an option. Then a recruiter got in touch and scheduled the interviews. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to go in. But I did. And it turned out to be the best interview experience I ever had. By far. I didn't make the offer and despite that I felt great about the process and myself. I called up all my talented friends and encouraged them to apply at Google. They have definitely gotten this right.

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As with most things, anecdotes are anecdotes. There are many horror stories and many great experience stories. But the bottom line was that it is important to Google and that was why they had folks go through a pretty detailed training class and they often took candidate feedback through the hiring committees back to the interviewers.

Disclosure: I worked there for four years and interviewed a lot of people.

I've also done an interview at google and would have to agree.

I decided to take another offer. I'm sure google's offer would have been great, but the timeline was taking too long, and I wanted to start at the other place, so I didn't wait for it (2 weeks at that point).

I had a similar experience. Google's interviews were generally great (and the interviewers were kind -- it might have helped that I generally did well in them), but the overall process was far slower than some startups and I eventually had to shut down the process at Google to take another offer that was too good to turn down.

The bottom line is that, unless you request everything to be expedited from the beginning, it can take a few months to finish the entire process with Google. Even requesting a schedule change to be made would take about half a week for me. At least that was my experience -- I can't speak for others.

>it can take a few months to finish the entire process with Google.

That is not too bad for such a large company really. Personally I have always worked for small software companies where the hiring process frequently consists of one interview, a bit of a programming test and an offer all concluded in 72 hours (frequently less). Compared to that a few months seems slow but I once had a friend get hired as a trader at a huge international financial organization and that took a glacial 6 months.

Whats more there was the expectation that you would more or less just walk out on whatever job you happened to have accepted in the interim, get on a plane and fly to where they wanted you as soon as you finally received an offer. Looking back on it I suspect that agreeing to that was itself part of their selection criteria.

I had heard similar things and wasn't really considering Google either, but a friend there recommended that I apply so I did. The recruiter I interacted with was moderately (but, I suppose, understandably) condescending, and the phone interviewer combative---he also apparently hadn't bothered looking at my resume, apparently assuming I was still in college (I've been out of college for a decade).

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