How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-to-get-a-job-at-google-interview-questions-hiring-process.html

by ddodge • 16 years ago

123 124 16 years ago

dondodge.typepad.com

How and more importantly why the process works.

known• 16 years ago

This interview process sounds like searching for reasons to reject a candidate

brown9-28• 16 years ago

They are very clear that they feel it is better to have false negatives rather than false positives, I don't think this should be a surprise.

ddodge• 16 years ago

Exactly. The process is designed to reduce false positives. The downside is there will be some false negatives.

It is not 100% accurate and it can take months to get through the process, but if we do it right we will be spending years together. So, it is worth the investment in time.

Don

jbarham• 16 years ago

Given that the final hire rate is less than one half of one percent of received resumes, they can probably afford to.

nerfhammer2• 16 years ago

Hmm that makes me wonder what the funnel analysis is between each of those steps...

davidw• 16 years ago

> We set impossible goals and achieve many of them.

I suppose they keep setting impossibler and impossibler goals...

city41• 16 years ago

> Google offers are very competitive, some might say generous, and very thorough.

Interesting, I've always heard Google doesn't pay very well. Similar to game companies, they can take advantage of the fact people really want to work there and know candidates will accept lower pay because of it. I've heard that from several Google employees past and present. Perhaps things have changed?

shin_lao2• 16 years ago

Google didn't pay well in 2007. A friend and me went very far in the recruitment process and it stopped as soon as we explained we expected more money.

brown9-28• 16 years ago

Meaning that you received offers?

dstein• 16 years ago

I think Google is past the point where it can attract talent on reputation alone. They're already public AND their stock has probably peaked which makes stock options worthless. I imagine Google, like other companies, are having trouble attracting and retaining the top talent. There's a lot more opportunity right now in building a startup, and all the top developers know it.

willscott• 16 years ago

As a recent Google hire, I think the article gets this point right, the offer was competitive if not generous. At the new-grad level at least I'm in the high-end of what I was expecting to be making.

I know that the reason I wanted to work at Google was to learn how to solve problems involving scale and massive parallelism. There really isn't anywhere else that can teach you that stuff as well.

d2viant• 16 years ago

Amazon and Facebook both come to mind when I think of scale and massive parallelism. Microsoft as well, but it doesn't get as much attention.

bnoordhuis• 16 years ago

I interviewed with Google for a SRE position earlier this year and their screening process sure is tedious: Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture, like how to write good, maintainable software. I like nerding about graph traversal algos as much as the next guy, but not for 90 minutes on the phone after a long day of work.

I'm sure the screening process filters out duds but it's bound to generate a lot of false negatives as well. People that would otherwise be a perfect fit but who get fed up with the interminable interviewing or simply don't do well under that kind of stress (for me it was both).

amichail• 16 years ago

Maybe they didn't have people readily available to interview you on topics more relevant to your position.

Or maybe they care more about IQ and the sort of interview you got is better at estimating IQ.

harryh• 16 years ago

False positives are way worse for most companies than false negatives. Interviews processes are generally designed around this principle.

wheaties• 16 years ago

They've actually said as much. They understand that their process generates false negatives but they don't want any "crud."

BrandonM6• 16 years ago

I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true?

One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job.

Personally, I don't like my current job but am growing frustrated with job hunting. I'm very close to just looking for a bartending job to go along with the part-time valet work that I picked up between jobs, and then maybe doing hobby programming in my spare time for pleasure and profit. I'm serious here: ridiculous interview processes are making the quality of the programmer pool worse by nudging programmers out of it altogether.

Why is it so unreasonable to bring people in on an intern-like trial basis?

arghnoname• 16 years ago

This is asserted as a truism, and perhaps in Google's case it is, but if the difficulty in the hiring process dissuades enough people who have other options from applying I can see it hurting the job pool.

If you were to get 100 applicants, and you were only interested in hiring the top 5% (5 people), and 3 of the good people decided to accept decent jobs they could get without giving blood samples and their first born, and 20 of the less capable people decided not to bother (Incompetents don't know they are in competent and have less choices), then now you have 2 good people out of 77.

Now what if one of those two is a false negative?

Google is attractive enough that good people go through all the trouble anyway, but is this always true? Since we are able to fire people easily in this country, is a bad hire really so ruinous?

I don't actually know the answer to the question, but I am skeptical of your statement. Maybe the assumptions in my numbers are wrong (they almost certainly are), but what are the real numbers?

KaeseEs2• 16 years ago

Perhaps the position they were interviewing you for actually involved writing efficient software, and thus required thorough knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science (data structures and algorithms &c) and systems programming?

BrandonM6• 16 years ago

And certainly your day-to-day work would involve answering questions about those data structures and algorithms in real time, with your future career depending on it, without external references.

zppx• 16 years ago

SRE (Site Reliability Engineers) according to Tom Limoncelli (a Google's SRE) is a kind of sysadmin, I doubt that this would ever be the case.

lutorm• 16 years ago

I interviewed two years ago and I think it was pretty reasonable: one 45min phone interview and two 3h on-site interviews. I interviewed for a stat position and the questions were mostly a "see how you think on your feet" problems, talking through how you would solve some problem. I thought it was quite a pleasant experience, the whiteboard-discussion style was quite similar to what we do in academic research.

X-Istence4• 16 years ago

When I interviewed with them for the SRE position I was extremely nervous (I was right out of college, and Google had contacted me rather than me submitting my resume) and the guy on the other end of the phone for my first interview seemed uninterested, had a really bad quality phone (I could hardly hear his questions), and kept asking the same questions over and over in different terms, and I really couldn't figure out what he was looking for as the "right" answer.

The Unix trivia was not nearly as bad, that was easy as I had done a lot of reading on it, however some of the data structures I was asked about I had never learned in school and had just read about on Wikipedia so I didn't really understand them well enough.

The second interviewer was absolutely fantastic, and was genuinely interested in me as a person, had checked out my resume and looked at some of the previous projects I had done (Near Space balloon launches were discussed). I felt much more at ease, but I did seem to have somehow mixed many of the different programming languages I know (C++, C, Python, Java, F#, Scheme) thus my code was less than clean.

Ultimately after 5 different phone interviews I was unfortunately told that I was not a fit, that they would keep my resume on file and that I could try for another position when I had gained some more professional experience.

The Google interview did help me get through many other interviews I had the pleasure of going to. I was less likely to be caught off guard, especially since it was my first MAJOR interview with an extremely large company. I do wish that Google had not been my first interview as maybe then I would have gotten further into the hiring process and maybe just maybe I would have been working at Google.

That is an awful lot of maybes and it is not worth brooding on what could have been. I am extremely happy with my current job, I love what I do and the people I work with at a small new startup. I feel with a small company I can make more of a difference.

MC27• 16 years ago

Whenever I read about these interviews, I get the impression that they are designed for recruiting students - that is, they are loaded with theory and don't test experience.

rsbrown• 16 years ago

This was my impression when I interviewed with them. I passed two phone screens and interviewed on-site, but my resume died in committee. The on-site interview was pretty brutal for me, because it was very heavy on CS theory and I interviewed "cold" (meaning I did no preparation beforehand).

I subsequently read Steve Yegge's tips on getting hired there:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

His post made me feel simultaneously better (he also failed in his first attempt) and stupid (how could I think I would breeze through the Google hiring process without first boning up on CS theory?)

The interview questions would have been better suited for me 12 years ago when I was a new graduate and sorting algorithms and low-level file structures were fresher for me.

I don't blame Google, though. These are important concepts for them and it's my fault I didn't freshen my knowledge (or keep those skills honed over the years).

nerfhammer2• 16 years ago

Just went through a recruiter screen myself. Contrary to what I've always heard, they said they don't care that I don't have a relevant degree given enough years of experience, though I'm intimidated by the prospect of what kind of grilling I'm going to get from the actual interview.

petercooper• 16 years ago

This article focuses on the process for a vanilla (by Google standards) candidates but does Google place any value on or change the rules based on the stature of an applicant it hasn't headhunted? Let's say Nat Friedman or Alan Cox decides he wants to work at Google. He's not going to be fielding "balls on a bus" type questions, right? Or is he?

wrs2• 16 years ago

Well, if they made Ken Thompson do a C programming test before letting him check in... (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_ou...)

btilly2• 16 years ago

Um, that is readability. Everyone goes through it. Basically, "Do you know the Google style guide, and can you be trusted to know when code does or does not follow it?"

In a large code base it is important to have a consistent style. There are a million reasonable style choices. And knowing a tremendous amount about the C programming language tells us squat about whether you know what style choices Google has settled on.

I don't think Google's policy on this is unreasonable. (Disclaimer. I work at Google.)

ekidd2• 16 years ago

I've heard several claims about Google: 1) They hire less than 0.5% of applicants. 2) Their interview process is extremely time-consuming. 3) They pay below-market salaries in many cases. 4) They're a reasonably nice place to work, by big-company standards.

The current article supports (1) and (2), disagrees with (3), and supplies no data about (4).

For a talented engineer, what's the expected payoff of actually going through this whole interview process? If there's only an 0.5% chance of getting hired, it seems like a poor investment of time. If, on the other hand, Google is throwing out 98% of applicants as completely unqualified (which is typical in the industry), then the expected value of applying might be high enough to be worth the effort, provided you're in the remaining 2%.

Also, what's the upside of actually working for Google, compared to a startup? Do they give out enough Founders' Awards to make their base salaries irrelevant to people who would otherwise be launching successful products at a smaller company?

MichaelSalib2• 16 years ago

I recently interviewed with Google and I'd dispute (2). I have a friend at Google who vouched for me, so they didn't bother with a phone screen. The interview process consisted of two half-days where I spoke with 5 interviewers in total. That seems about the norm for tech companies. I certainly prefer splitting it across two half days rather than having one giant wall of interviewing from 9 to 5.

Also, your payoff/cost calculation is off since they choose whether to invite your back for the second round. I was told that because I got called back, the odds of me getting an offer were much, much higher. So if you get flushed early, you only blew half a day. If you end up having to spend two half-days, then the chances you'll get an offer are quite high.

I've heard some anecdotal support for (3), but they also seem to have very generous 401k matching. Plus, getting good food for free every day has to be worth something too.

Also, what's the upside of actually working for Google, compared to a startup?

One can generally work on different classes of problems at an established company with enormous problems and tons of really smart people like Google. Most startups aren't dealing with data anywhere close to the scale that Google is, and there is no startup in the world that can give you access to the internal talent pool Google has assembled.

ekidd2• 16 years ago

Thank you for these answers! Two half-days of interviews is quite reasonable. I had the impression that things took longer than that, though perhaps I was mistaken because Google takes relatively long to make an offer.

If their interviewing process is anything like the ones I've helped organize, at least 49 out of 50 applicants could be dismissed out-of-hand, either because they didn't read the position description, because they can't write fluently in their native language, or because they can't write simple programs. So taking that as an estimate, Google is accepting perhaps 5–25% of "serious" applicants.

I think the large fraction of non-serious applications is caused by a survivor bias—the qualified candidates get hired quickly, but the unqualified ones keep applying to hundreds of jobs.

And you make a good point about interesting problems—Google certainly works on some neat stuff at an impressive scale.

X-Istence4• 16 years ago

Having an in is always nice, for those of us on the outside the interview process is tedious and does take a while. Various different phone interviews, talking to recruiters, emailing back and forth. It is all rather time consuming.

brown9-28• 16 years ago

Do they give out enough Founders' Awards to make their base salaries irrelevant to people who would otherwise be launching successful products at a smaller company?

This seems like a highly speculative question.

What percentage of potential employees that would have begun a startup would be "successful"? How do you even quantify this?

What's different about "working for Google compared to a startup" versus working for any other company rather than being your own boss? Why do you ask about Google only?

marknutter• 16 years ago

Why anyone with the talent to get through the interview process at Google would rather work there than start their own startup I will never understand.

moobot2• 16 years ago

Some of us require more stability than the startup scene allows. Some of us also have wives that want to be able to afford decent living/eating conditions, and demand to be able to spend time with their spouses. Some of us also don't like the amount of stress involved, or the need to do things other than just working on software...

inklesspen• 16 years ago

Someone might work at Google for a while to get both experience in working at scale as well as some nice bootstrap funding (basically, save your bonus each year).

xentronium• 16 years ago

You have to be very ambitious and determined to handle startup. Also gotta be ready for ramen-profitable (if any profitable at all) months.

And you may still fail eventually.

strlen• 16 years ago

Working at Google or other well funded, yet young technology-at-the-core companies (which includes some startups too) means you spend most of your work hours doing what you enjoy: coding, code reviews, etc... On top of that, evenings and weekends are yours: if you don't get a chance to learn tools, technologies or concepts you're interested in your work hours (and if you chose the right place, you frequently do) you can do this on your own time. You also get to work with plenty of people smarter and/or more experienced, which is a great way to grow professionally.

Starting your own company (or joining a very early stage startup) means you'll be spending only a small proportion of your time coding: if all you do is as a founder is write code, you're essentially guaranteed to fail. Certain kinds of problems (core web search algorithms in post-Google era being the obvious one) are also, traditionally, are much more difficult for small startups to tackle than they are for big companies: certainly if you're passionate about these kinds of problems, than startups are generally off the table (in this case, your opportunity cost is much higher than money).

Obviously, it's still extremely rewarding for many people (it's something I'm still interested in doing at one point or another), but "start my own company" vs. "work at a great technology company" is neither clear cut in favour of the former nor mutually exclusive (witness "Xoogler" startups, Paypal Mafia, etc...)

stevejohnson• 16 years ago

When I saw this I felt like I had seen this exact thread play itself out before, so I Ducked around to check my feeling. It was correct:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130984

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784479

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374722

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145035

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520323

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135666

(And for future reference, for when I inevitably re-post this in some future Google interview thread and forget to include this post itself in the list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690792)

rjurney9• 16 years ago

Why would anyone want to work at Google at this point? They can't hold onto their people, have very high churn and dissatisfaction rates, etc.

I could see maybe wanting to put in a year to learn the google stack, or if you have a particular area you've been researching and they will pay you to do exactly what you want, but beyond that... there are lots of companies offering better salaries and options with serious value, with similar challenges, that are going places. When you have people leaving despite half million dollar retention offers... why would you jump on that ship? Don't get me wrong - I think Google is fundamentally a good company. I just don't get why people aspire to work there, given the other options available.

Is it a mensa thing, with a brand recognizable outside the valley? Like you pass the interview, you're in the IQ club, stamp of approval, all that?

shadowfox• 16 years ago

> there are lots of companies offering better salaries and options with serious value, with similar challenges, that are going places

Genuinely curious. What companies are you talking about?

rjurney9• 16 years ago

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Zynga, etc.

brown9-28• 16 years ago

They can't hold onto their people, have very high churn and dissatisfaction rates, etc.

Do you have citations for this?

rjurney9• 16 years ago

What better way than to link you to google? :) http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

And specifically http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/google-making-extraordinary...

More generally, this is common knowledge around the valley.

peregrine• 16 years ago

My goal is always to work with highly intelligent people. People always talk about the big fish in a little pond but I think there is more value in being a little fish in a big pond because their is more room for growth.

I've noticed that if I'm not learning I'm not happy and its much easier to learn with smart people.

Its generally known that Google hires smart people.

drivingmenuts2• 16 years ago

But are they happy smart people?

drivingmenuts2• 16 years ago

Personally, I wouldn't want to work there, either, but for different reasons. I don't want to work at an organization where I can't get to know everyone there, at least on some level.

Even the marketdroids.

guelo2• 16 years ago

Google is one of the top 5 software companies in the world, it is chok-a-ful of world class talent including many of the luminaries in computer science, they are changing the world with massive innovation every year, and to top it off they are famous for their employee perks and flexibility ...

but you'd rather go work for zynga making dumb games?

To each his own I guess.

rjurney9• 16 years ago

I wouldn't work at Zynga, but your dismissal of them is pretty on par for Google's social media strategy, so it does make sense :)

bkhl2• 16 years ago

Personally, I think Google's recruiting process can become very long and tedious. I interviewed with Google 4 months before my graduation and went through 6 different interviews (all technical) for two different positions. The HR person told me that she would like to schedule another hour for interviews and took my availability for next 2-3 weeks. I got no response back. I contacted the HR person again, and she told me that they were going through reorgs and things were getting lost. She then took another 2 weeks of availability. No response. I didn't have much time to wait any longer, I decided to join another company.

From friends and colleagues who interviewed and/or are working at Google..I found out that the interview for college hires can become very long. One of my friends took 6 months to get a job. If this is still happening at some part of Google, they must improve this process. People don't usually have time to wait 6 months to know whether they got a job or not.

Psyonic2• 16 years ago

My experience was much smoother. A phone interview, a day of in-person interviews (5), and then the decision. The whole process took a month or so, but I wouldn't say I was strung along.

bkhl2• 16 years ago

Yea, that's what a recruit candidate would expect. It's just that I was one of unlucky ones to be in such loop along with some others. I also think the "reorgs" played some part there.

paracomerpan• 16 years ago

In norvig page, norvig.com it is said that a good method to increase the power of the team is to choose someone that is better that someone at google. The author did a statistical simulation to show the positive effect of this strategy compared to another one. There is someone working at google that was working at apple and is good at social blogging (I don't remember now his name) but he didn't pass the test and he is working remotely (a exception). Also someone said that if you go before seven p.m. you are looked down, I am only remembering things I read on blogs.

studer• 16 years ago

The post you're referring to is here:

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg...

and the argument is that you should try to "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees", rather than just hire people better than the worst you have.

I find the part where he talks about hiring for project vs. hiring for the company a bit more interesting.

arethuza• 16 years ago

This comment is interesting:

"This model seems to assume that people don't change, or that they perform in an interview and hiring process in the exact same way that they will perform on an actual team with a variety of personalities and any kind of manager."

alexkiwi• 16 years ago

don, awesome post. hope to see more of you on hacker news

alforreca• 16 years ago

I had a round of interviews at the London office a long time ago, and another one recently. I think they are improving, but the fact they don't tell you where you failed is annoying. Also, some of my friends say they couldn't believe I had been rejected both times when they compare me to people they know who got accepted.

pencil• 16 years ago

i'am sick of hearing google's interview process.a company like google with kickass problem solvers should not hire a person based on his fucked up SAT scores{to me it sounds like sad scores!!} it has to be purely based on talent,his aptitude/attitude and skills.

sunjain• 16 years ago

Does anyone know about interview process at Apple(for Eng/Design positions)? It will always be debatable which of the two(Apple and Google) are more innovative - I consider Apple to be a better mix of innovation and engineering, whereas Google comes out as primarily an engineering focused company.

TGJ• 16 years ago

I know that the larger more prestigious companies will require more intensive hiring processes but I think this kind of attitude is really hurting smaller companies. The process for getting hired at smaller companies is getting so convoluted for one particular reason. It is hard for a company to simply hire and fire. In the most logical situation, you hire the best application, work them for a week and throw them out if they don't fit. As it is now, people whine, sue and pitch a fit when they get fired so that companies have to come up with aggravating hiring practices to get the people that will work out.

sourcefrog• 16 years ago

The problem with "what do you know" questions is not (or so much) that they may reject people who know stuff but recall it differently, but that they aren't selective for having the ability to stick with something for an extended time. Avoiding distraction with the internet, or the more subtle types of distraction into futzing with things rather than doing the most important but more discouraging tasks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690578

adlep• 16 years ago

I had an honor of being interviewed in Mountain View CA for a basic in-house tech support person, but didn't make it. It was in May 2006. I was one of the finalist, but just not good enough. The experience however was fantastic and a huge ego booster. They flew me over to California for few days and gave me a tour of GooglePlex. I have to say that my interview process was consistent with the article. My "google question" was: "How would you fill out exact 4 liters in a Can of 5 liters and another Can of 3 liters, with unlimited supply of water?" I was able to answer it: Pour the content of the 3L can to the 5L one. Repeat the process again until the 5L can starts overfilling. So now you have 5L can full of water and 1L left in the 3L can. So now, empty the 5L can, and pour in it that 1L leftover water from the 3L can. Now you have 1L in the 5L can. Fill 3L can with water and pour it again in the 5L can. So 1L + 3L == 4L :) Still it wasn't enough for the job as I may have failed the regular expression part of my interview...

How to get a job at Google, interview questions & process

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