In response to my post, “My team at Google is hiring,” I got a lot more résumés than I expected. This is absolutely great! Many thanks to all the folks interested in working in my team!
While chatting with a few of the potential candidates, I offered some advice on interviewing with Google. This is advice that was passed to me when I interviewed a couple of years ago. Even though these tips are nothing out of ordinary, they are, however, practical and useful. Since I found myself repeating them over an over, I thought it may be a good idea to write them down.
Here we go.
1. Listen to your best friend: the (Google) recruiter
Is the recruiter’s job to get you an offer from Google. He or she will do everything in their control to help you. As part of their job, they will tell you what you need to study for the interview. It is a lot of material, but it is absolutely worth the effort. Needless to say, Google is awesome.
2. You decide when to interview
It is your decision when to interview. Take all the time you need to prepare and don’t let anybody push you. Knowing when you are ready is difficult though. Studying all the material is pretty much impossible. Instead, you need to set a realistic goal. In my case, since I was terrified by the interview process, my goal was to cover the basic algorithms and data structures, and study until I feel calm and confident.
3. Practice, practice, practice…and get a whiteboard
It does not matter if your solution is wonderful, you are in trouble if the interviewer cannot understand it. While preparing for the interview, solve problems on a whiteboard. Learn how to express your ideas and write code (yes, write code on a whiteboard) in a clear, neat and organized way. You want interviewers to understand your solutions.
4. Let all your friends at Google know that you are interviewing
The more Googlers that can say something good about you, the better. You may be able to skip the phone interview (it is not a promise though.) I personally hate technical phone interviews.
5. $hit can happen
Preparing for the interview does not guarantee you will pass it. There are many factors that can work either in your favor or against you. Plus, there is no such a thing as a perfect interview process. $hit out of your control can happen. Don’t feel too bad if, for whatever reason, you fail the interview. It happens more often than you think. Seriously. Just learn from the experience and apply again in six months. Like I mentioned earlier, working for Google is worth the effort.
That’s pretty much it. Good luck! :)
My name is Alex Ruiz.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
The few occasions I dealt with Google recruiters I was struck by their complete disregard and lack of interest in my CV and their emphasis on process as well as their apparent expectation that I should feel privileged to even talk to them. So, I’ve declined to be interviewed on these terms on about eight separate occasions by now. There’s obviously something in my CV that draws Google (and other) recruiters but unfortunately they seem to not communicate with each other and the conversation starts from scratch every time.
My main problem with the standard proposition of a very uncertain process with a large emphasis on basic computer science skills and zero emphasis on what you actually did in the rest of your career is that it is very unappealing to someone who has passed his degree and has a successful career already. At the same time, I never got any satisfactory answer to normal questions such as what specific opportunities there were (like location, job description, and salary). That’s not a solid basis for me to engage with any company.
I haven’t actually needed to implement quicksort in about 15 years (since my algorithms class in 2nd year). I frankly I forgot most of the details and don’t actually consider this a topic worth refreshing for a job interview. Lets just say that I know how to Google for it, should the need arise. The Google proposition seems to boil down to having to work hard to even land an interview; then get grilled on topics which have little to do with your actual CV; and can then fail over such trivialities as not being able to reproduce quick sort, bubble sort or whatever algorithm from memory on a whiteboard.
I’m sorry, but no company is going to succeed in hiring people like me with a process like that. Most of us have jobs or are trying to run our companies, our time is scarce, and seriously we don’t want to be treated like I just dropped out of college. If you have a specific offer (job description, salary, location) great,
I’d be happy to talk to someone in that team and see if we can help each other. For me that’s a normal process. The hiring manager should be the guy that wants to be your boss. HR is there to support that process, not to own it.
BTW. It seems to me that Google is in need of some fresh blood to shake things up a bit. From where I’m standing Google employs tens of thousands of R&D people and I’m just not seeing the output of tens of thousands of geniuses. It seems to me that Google has turned into yet another big software corporation struggling to convert man power into innovation. I never found the IBM white shirt + blue suite thing attractive when I was young, was mildly disgusted by the whole Microsoft cult in the nineties and don’t consider joining the Google cult a career goal either.
Jilles,
I respect your opinion, even though I don’t completely agree with you.
I think you may change your mind if you actually go through the interview process. I bet you’ll have a more pleasant experience.
-Alex
Consider the hypothesis that Google doesn’t want to hire ‘people like you’.
Your “10,000 Geniuses” hypothesis is flawed. Genius doesn’t scale, or there would be no need for start-ups. And yes, Google is a big software corporation. If you don’t like big software corporations, I’d fixate on something constructive, like writing useful open-source software so we can all benefit from your genius.
One other piece of advice I’d give is to avoid the websites that claim to know what questions we’ll ask, and are full of ‘puzzle’ questions. It will fill you with false confidence. After all, if they know what we ask, why aren’t they working for Google?
Good one, Rob! :)
Oh yeah, one more: Don’t worry about how well you do on any individual question. You’ll get many questions during the course of an interview, and you can blow parts of a question (or even an entire interview) and still get hired.
This piece of advice was given to me by the receptionist while sitting in the lobby. It allowed me to clear my mind after I failed to rise to the occasion, and move on to the next interviewer.
Looks like an insider’s view on Google’s technical questions :
“Top 10 coding interview problems asked in Google with solutions: Algorithmic Approach” @http://www.amazon.com/coding-interview-problems-Google-solutions/dp/1482799014
@Jilles -
A couple comments from a non-Goolger. You come off sounding very hostile towards this company, and all of it is based on your experience with HR. That seems pretty strange. Apparently Google’s hiring process doesn’t fit well with you. I would take that as a sign that their culture wouldn’t fit as well, and frankly, your confrontational attitude wouldn’t fit well with my company’s interview process either.
Remember, it’s not all about algorithms, it’s about finding people you’d want to work with.
As for algorithms, Let me make an analogy. When a head chef hires other chefs at fine restaurants, they often ask them to prepare something any chef can prepare … an omelette, or fish. Now, a chef may not have prepared an omelette in years, but you can tell a lot about a chef’s proficiency and love for the craft by *how well* they make that omelette. You would expect a world-class chef to make one with relative ease, and it should taste good. Would you hire a chef that has to look in a cookbook because they “forgot” how to make an omelette?
Google makes *all* of their money on the strengths of their algorithms (search/ads). Is it so unusual that they would want to hire people who are good at writing algorithms — or at very least — understand the common ones?
Wow, Etienne, great response! Probably the best one I heard (or read!) :)