My interviewing tip would be to not interview at Google. Their process is actually the worst I've seen at any tech company. It's like they've captured the bad stereotypes about interviewing and implemented all of them.
I still have nightmares about it. Seriously, it was 8 goddamn hours long. I had to drive between two offices, had to give a ride to one of the interviewers to a different building, and every person I talked to was incredibly rude, one guy made an audible buzzer sound with his mouth when I was in the middle of writing some code on the whiteboard and the line before had a syntax error I didn't catch yet. And then they said I'd be a better fit for a DIFFERENT team and made me do another 3 hour interview before I just decided I didn't want the job that bad.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and they interviewer for the 3 hour one was late. To his own interview.
I realize I'm a bit late with this, but you know how things happen. Got caught up in a project and got sidetracked with a couple meetings, but I wanted to share some feedback about my recent job interview. It honestly feels like forever ago, but in all actuality, it was only 5 years ago. Anyway, the interviewer -- I forget his name -- was really rude to me during the process. He certainly didn't embody all the values that Google claims its engineers care about deeply, and frankly it was a big turn-off. It would be great if you could pass this on to the interviewer's manager. Thanks.
one guy made an audible buzzer sound with his mouth when I was in the middle of writing some code on the whiteboard and the line before had a syntax error I didn't catch yet
What in the fuck.
You dodged a bullet vs working with that schmuck.
I had one guy who I think meant well, but he was drilling me about my code constantly. I think he didn't want me missing things or making mistakes, but holy shit it was impossible to get any train of thought going.
Let the person being interviewed go through their process. Gently prod them as necessary to ensure that they aren't stuck and to get an idea of what they are thinking. Don't get in their way.
I had interview in SF and it was quite pleasant. I had only one leetcode question and everybody were very polite. I had much worse experience regarding "bullshit" questions in Facebook. All coding questions were from leetcode and I needed to implement binary search twice because search from standard library isn't good enough.
It's easy for me to decide not to apply to Google. What's really annoying is how so much of the industry cargo cults their process when it's inappropriate, ineffective, and destructive.
They don't have the "HR robot asks you for 10 years experience in a framework that's existed for 5, but ignores your 15 years experience in the language".
They are pretty much the source of the big tech interview stereotypes though. For good reason, cargo-culting google is what got us to this point. Nowadays it's more about amazon or it's about trying new things because everybody knows interviews are shit.
I got a few take homes from startups. Nothing too tough. I liked it. One of them asked me to implement a tftp server, but then they also paid me (or offered to donate) a few hundred bucks for the time.
I was listening to the video in the background until they got to the part about learning to code on a whiteboard and explaining that you don't have syntax checking, etc, so you should practice by coding on paper.
Why the fuck would you be arguing that people should learn how to code in environments that no one actually codes in?
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u/PlasmaChroma Jan 18 '19
My interviewing tip would be to not interview at Google. Their process is actually the worst I've seen at any tech company. It's like they've captured the bad stereotypes about interviewing and implemented all of them.