Hacker News Reader

Had a similar thing happen to me in a Google interview.

The recruiter was personable and polite.

But the engineer had my 7 year old resume even though I sent the recruiter a recent one. They didn't seem interested in asking much about what I did in the last 7 years. They seemed tired and frustrated and I in turn got nervous and started to stutter and then got into a dead end programming some stupid tree building program. It was pretty bad, and left me with a bad impression.

Year later they contacted me again, and I refused to interview with them.

> the interviewer required Heath "to read the program coding over the phone."

Yeah, if that actually happened, Google should fire the interviewer. How incredibly absurd.

I'm pretty sure this is common (the same happened to me).

I have interviewed twice at Google now and it seems pretty par for the course. They didn't tell me the interview date and time until the day before, and despite having to rearrange my schedule on short notice, they couldn't have the courtesy of being on time.

After showing up to the call half hour late, we got started. My interviewer was quite verbally irate when I asked clarifying questions and had some connection problems. Then he asked me to explain my code over the phone, brace-by-brace, colon by colon. I asked to share a document it was declined, I asked if we could talk about the algorithm and pseudo-code, but he wanted the C++. Afterwards he told me it wouldn't compile because it was missing some semicolons.

A few months later I tried again, thinking it was a fluke. Second interview started much the same as the first. I just hung up, not worth my time.

> I have interviewed twice at Google now and it seems pretty par for the course.

I had a phone screen with Google earlier this year and it had great audio quality and used a shared Google Doc. It is really sad to hear that you and others are having such a different experience.

I wonder if the quality of people's interviews are affected by the location and position they're interviewing for. I was interviewing for a smaller location instead of the main campus.

I second this. I just finished interviewing on-site at Google. The phone screen was fine -- I was given a link to a Google Doc ahead of time. Audio quality was fine and the interviewer was personable. I actually found the on-site interviewers to be significantly nicer than other places I've interviewed at. I mentioned this to one of them and he said that all interviwers are required to go through special training. This was on the main Mountain View campus.

My impression is that bad interviews are the exception and get disproportionate attention. Glassdoor interview ratings for Google are 54% positive, 26% neutral, 18% negative. http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-Question...

After Google missed the first scheduled interview, I had the same experience the last time I interviewed. I'd hardly call it a good experience because the call was clear and they used a Google doc, however. I will never understand the idiocy of asking someone to code over the phone (and then not giving them either the time or space/privacy to work in), but if it must be done, at least use an appropriate tool. The code I wrote was JS and there are at least a handful of online realtime JS interpreters like jsbin etc. with proper indentation handling, code highlighting, and most importantly, the ability to run the code so you don't spend time figuring out where the semicolons should be or where missing parenthesis might be. While I have no doubt that age discrimination is happening at Google and elsewhere, one can answer all the questions in the phone screen correctly and still not pass so it'll be quite difficult for the lawsuit to prove its claims.

Out of curiosity, which Google office location?

Google's interview process is a bad joke, but frankly the (internal Google) recruiters I've spoken to appears to be as fed up with it as candidates - anyone interviewing with Google who has a bad phone interview should bring it up with the recruiter, as at least sometimes the recruiters can get the phone screens thrown away.

(source: first hand experience with Google recruiters, and first hand experience of being sent further in the process after explaining the long list of ridiculous flaws in the phone interview I had, all of which the recruiter agreed with me on. I declined to continue the process, though, after it became clear that if I had gotten the job I would have been managing the guy who gave the phone screen; I had no desire whatsoever to ever work with that person based on the way he acted).

Yeah, sounds ridiculous, but, well, I don't know, maybe it's on purpose… Like to get a feeling of how able is that person of communicating with his colleagues and explaining code without appropriate media at hand or whatever. It's debatable if this is really what interviewee should be tested for, but ideas about the best interviewing strategy and "what the team needs" diverge drastically, so I guess it's his business.

One more possible scenario: some manager thinks your team absolutely needs more people. You don't think so, because there's some limit on how many people are needed to change a light bulb. So you, in fact, actually aren't that interested in the candidate unless you see that he is perfect fit, somebody you just cannot lose only because you don't need more people right now. And I cannot judge you, it's, well, _OK_ to not to hire someone. Yeah, in the perfect world everybody is always polite and sincerely interested in others and so on, but c'mon, lets just allow people do their job and keep them away from all these political bullshit.

A friend went through a Google phone screen at a satellite campus two or three years ago. The interviewer asked him to solve a simple problem first, which my friend answered. The interviewer followed up with a tougher problem, and before my friend could think for a minute about questions to ask the interviewer, he was told that the interviewer would be leaving to go to the restroom. The interviewer set the phone down.

Twenty minutes later, he returned and asked for a solution, which my friend didn't have. The interviewer ended the call and my friend was turned down. He raised his objections to the process to his recruiter, who apologized and agreed to send him a Google branded mug and T-shirt for his troubles (what a joke). He still hasn't received them.

Is it really that bad?

It's understandable if people find it ridiculous to read their code line by line but it's not at all clear from the article this is what was being asked as opposed to asking about the general approach to the problem. I feel like if the person's English was not that good, one thing that the interviewer might have wanted to know was whether the person could communicate effectively with coworkers.

Indeed, the article even says that the interviewer could not understand what was being read. For someone so senior, it's likely that he would have had to mentor junior developers. Seems like it would be a bad experience if they were unable to understand him and vice versa.

> I feel like if the person's English was not that good, one thing that the interviewer might have wanted to know was whether the person could communicate effectively with coworkers.

person = interviewer, or candidate?

The interviewee may have wanted to know the same thing about Google employees...

Person = candidate

And indeed the interviewee should probably know that too. Either way it sounds like it was a poor fit if they couldn't understand each other

A bad phone interview is very different from age discrimination. Was this lazy interviewer even aware of the candidate's age? If this is all they have, this can't possibly go anywhere. Right...?

Reading between the lines, it sounds like the guy got angry and argumentative with the interviewer, and that never ends in employment.

A better legal angle could be that the crappy phone line is discriminatory against people with bad hearing, such as many old people.

When I interviewed at Google in 2006, I had to read my scribbled 14 lines of code over the phone. It was kinda reasonable then, but I'm astonished they still do that when we have simple tools like this: https://coderpad.io/ not to mention Google's own Docs.

> The interviewer was 10 minutes late to the call, barely fluent in English, and used a speaker phone that did not function well.

Sounds a lot like my Google interview. And then it took a month for the interviewer to send his feedback. Along with a bunch of other ridiculous things, it really was the worst interview process I've ever had.

That's still pretty sketchy grounds for age discrimination, unless there is more to the story that isn't making it into the tech press.

How about this one: About 2005, shortly after completing my Ph.D., I interviewed with th' Goog', including an on-site in Dublin (they said they had just started doing on-site interviews outside of Mountain View); the next day I received email from the recruiter in Dublin saying, "looks like we're coming to a successful conclusion", and a few days later received their standard thanks-but-no-thanks letter. I was unable to get more information from them. Clearly, I was denied by the mother ship, but one of the few solid reasons I could come up with was that I was 37 at the time.

> one of the few solids reasons ... was that I was 37 at the time.

I'm sorry but you have to give specific reasons. Otherwise this is just an imaginary persecution complex.

For those unfamiliar with the interview process at Google, you meet with several people over the course of a day.

What's more likely is that you had some positive scores and feedback from several interviewers initially. Then, the remaining feedback from the other interviewers came in a little later and was below the mark. Interviewers have focus areas typically, so it's not uncommon to see candidates do very well in one area (e.g. culture fit) and poorly in another (e.g. technical ability).

The recruiter shouldn't have lead you on like that. They should know that until all the scores and feedback is in, nothing is final. That said, it is their job to keep candidates engaged. So, perhaps this one was a little over zealous?

This seems fairly standard for phone interviews at large tech companies, regardless of the age of the interviewee.

The interviewer is probably an engineer who had to find a random conference room to conduct the call in (hence being 10 minutes late and using a lousy speakerphone). Asking the interviewee to talk through the code he's written would not be unusual if the interviewer wanted to find out about the thought process that went into writing the code.

And it's impossible to know without context, but the "barely fluent in English" part sounds more like bias on the side of the interviewee than anything.

That story may well be accurate, but it more likely reflects how the interviewer/environment mistreats everyone, instead of any unusual treatment of one candidate.

It sounds like Google has some real assholes working with them. Why would you want to work for a company where people like that could be your boss? Sounds awful.

It sounds like the interviewer didn't care much about the interview, and conducted it while driving so that he didn't waste time out of some other part of the day.

(Of course, this is pure speculation based on a third-hand one-sided account.)

If so, it has nothing to do with discrimination.

> Heath politely asked him, repeatedly, to use the phone's headset but the request was declined.

It's also easy to see how it could seem the interviewee wasn't that interested in giving the interview a fair shot, but you forgot to point this out.

How?

"I cannot hear you, could you use the headset instead of the speaker phone mode?"

How does this make it seem the interviewee wasn't interested? He couldn't hear and asked the interviewer if he could use the headset which would have taken no effort and made the whole process a lot better.

You assume that is how he asked. I know he describes it as politely but he might consider a polite request as 'Please use the headset." Repeated, even after being told no, possibly with explanation that he can't understand him due to his accent instead of comment on the quality of the speaker phone.

My point isn't that either of these straw man situations happened, its that any of a wealth of possible scenarios are possible given the extremely vague details given by the interviewee it is easy to see many different interpretations by the parties involved as reasonable.