Google Passed on me - Written 12/9/05 amended 4/4/06

Interviewed w/ Google last Friday, 45 minute interviews starting at 10:15 going on until 3PM, with a lunch break. Met with either one or two people each time.

Google's recruiter recommended looking at www.topcoder.com/index before the phone screen. She also recommended looking at labs.google.com to see what they do beyond search. It was useful advice. I would add that reading some of the papers at labs.google.com will help a bit.

I found most of the questions that I knew to be easy and fairly elementary (if you've got experience). It's worth rereading an algorithms book to review.

That said, I think that the stuff I failed on was equally easy, I just didn't know it, hadn't been exposed, or had forgotten. I was interviewing for a position on their Mac team. I failed on some simple objective-C/foundation questions that if I had done an in depth project, I'd have gotten right. (Opposed to the simple stuff I've done). (4/4/06 - in fact when I reread Apple's Obj-C documentation, I found answers to the first two bad questions immediately.) Just know the area that your going in for cold. (I should have). Writing a simple application the week or two before the interview probably would have sufficed. (Also, I would have been able to give them that for their source code request.)

The first interview was opened with questions on objective-C/foundation that I couldn't answer. It didn't pickup. The next interview went well. But I think it was over from the start. (4/4/06 - I had decided to do the interviews w/o caffeine - then when things started going the other way, I went with a TeJava between interviews. I was fairly wired by the end of the day. So I didn't have any imagination when that would have helped. -- Very smart people, very friendly.)

I did have one interview where I had a brain freeze. The interviewer opened with what was a fairly simple question, but I just couldn't see an answer - we never got far beyond that. I was fine for the next person.

The way I explain the process to friends w/ degrees is imagine doing your oral's on a subject your an expert in, but haven't studied the fundamentals in over 30 years.

Overall feedback (4/4/06 from them): Good breadth of knowledge, but not enough depth. I found that fair. I usually have the depth when I'm on a project, but I haven't been on the right kind of project for over three years. Sigh.

(4/4/06 - When I think about how Google interviews vs. how I do, I really think they need to relax a bit, my goal when I do an interview is to find out something I didn't know before, with Google, I felt that I was being quizzed constantly. The best interview was the phone screen. I felt it was a conversation. The campus interview, I felt I was defense constantly. Probably 'caus I didn't know the answer to the first question.

I plan to change my interviews to add skills questions, 'caus I saw where that could be helpful. I did prefer the Google interviews to Microsoft's random word games. MS folks ask leading questions, and can't recognize if you've answered it correctly, but just differently from the "standard" answer. Google's questions were fairly objective, and folks were smart enough to recognize unique answers. One questions was to write a binary search - easy, I've written it so many times before it joined the "C" library it's kind of ingrained. Another was to write a routine to divide two numbers, it was a fun question - even though I didn't have a clue what the standard was. I was told that my solution was "refreshing", and the interviewer was smart enough to recognize a small bug I had in it.

Do wish I had been a bit calmer when I was there, I might have gotten another interview.)