Why Working at Google Is Not My Dream Job Anymore

Google is like a corporate supermodel. Their brand is legendary, like Apple or Facebook. They have so many guys to choose from, and they can afford to be very picky.<p>Fortunately for those of us who do not work for corporate supermodels, being married to the supermodel is not always the heaven one imagines. Maybe it has its upsides, but a lot of the allure is just image and marketing, and the reality is much less pleasant than the fantasy.<p>If working for Google or Facebook or Apple is important to someone, then they have to take whatever crap these companies dish out. But personally, I&#x27;d much rather work for the NEXT Google than the current one. And if I was going to work for the current Google, I&#x27;d much rather do so by way of them paying me millions of dollars to buy the amazing product I created, rather than by way of begging and hoping for a job. Guido van Rossum and Ken Thompson created amazing things, and because of that, Google hired them.<p>Therefore, instead of seeking a job at Google directly, a more profitable approach might be to immediately start creating whatever you really care about, and let the question of what company creates your W-2 take care of itself. This is no guarantee that you&#x27;ll eventually work for Google, but it is the most likely path to eventually being legitimately in the company of the van Rossums and Thompsons of the world, and it will probably be a lot of fun getting there.

<i>I still remember being in high school and reading about how amazing [...] their free cafeterias were, their company gyms, massage chairs, and on-site laundry machines</i><p><i>What computer science undergraduate didn&#x27;t dream of working at Google? To work at the same company with brilliant minds like Guido van Rossum, Leonard Kleinrock, and Ken Thompson?</i><p>I think these reasons are likely to result in disappointment anyway. The first set are designed to keep you at work for as long as possible, and the latter will, sadly, have next to zero impact on your actual working life.

I sympathize with you. My Google interview process took over 6 months, consisted of over a dozen interviews, including going to their campus twice, and resulted in a no-offer with no explanation.<p>This was the second time I was interviewed by Google.<p>They have some good people, but they have become bureaucratic and they really don&#x27;t care that much about what you, as a potential recruit think.<p>I complained to some friends of mine that work at Google and they were furious at how I was treated. They talked to some people internally. They said they would fix things, but I think its just a huge problem.<p>They are hiring a lot, and their HR processes aren&#x27;t very good.<p>They have some good teams though.

When I interviewed at Google I was able to bypass the screening and hear back three days after the onsite. Everything from initial phone call to final decision took three weeks.<p>These were the steps I took.<p>1) Apply through internal referral. Ask multiple people to refer you. 2) Ask your friends to check up on the application process. Make sure they tell the recruiters you are further along with with Facebook, Twitter, or some other competitor. 3) When the recruiter contacts you. Thank them, tell them how much you want to work at Google, and then mention your tight deadline due to offers from other companies.<p>And I had a wonderful experience at Google because of two interviewers in particular.<p>1) I failed both questions from an interviewer. They were easy questions and I managed to crash and burn spectacularly. I don&#x27;t understand how my interviewer managed to remain friendly and treated me with respect the whole time.<p>2) On the last round, I did well enough to score a 3&#x2F;4. Yet during our chat, we talked about my other options and concluded that I should go join Redfin because developers can make a bigger impact at a smaller company. I appreciated his honesty.

I had the same experience - but with Shopify.<p>I knew someone who was hired, given a letter of offer and attended his first few weeks of training. They walked up to him two weeks later and said we don&#x27;t actually need your position right now but would you mind waiting until we call to set something up? On top of that, they bungled his pay.<p>An outlier I thought.<p>Then I went through the hiring process, nobody knew what anyone was going. I showed up to shadow for a day, nobody knew I was coming despite planning it all out and scheduling the day with a number of different people. I suddenly realized I was overqualified for the job, telling the guy I was shadowing what he needed to do, despite my limited familiarity with the interface.<p>A few weeks later, after another 3 interviews, they told me I wasn&#x27;t what they were looking for because I told them I wanted to get out of my current job (one that had broken some promises to me)<p>Another person I went through the hiring process with was never actually onboarded. Like my other friend, she was given a letter of offer, and everything sort of fell apart at the end of the day.

People often ask why Google&#x27;s hiring process is so Byzantine. It&#x27;s a company that likes to innovate, measure statistics, and treat their employees well, so why do they harass people they might want to hire?<p>Here&#x27;s my theory: it may have grown by chance, but it&#x27;s still there by intention.<p>Google can&#x27;t put you through twelve weeks of basic training to break you down and form you into their image. Instead, they give everyone a shared hard experience, at the end of which the successful ones have been welcomed to the ranks of the elect, and the chaff discarded. Since the process produced you, the new Googler, and clearly that&#x27;s good, then the process is good, even though it was hard.<p>Now, everybody who stops to think about it rather than feel it will come to the conclusion that there must have been plenty of the could-be elect among the chaff. But if you aren&#x27;t asked to focus on a question, you probably won&#x27;t think much about it.

There&#x27;s a really interesting presumption in some of the comments on this post. Namely, that getting the job after an interview is the default outcome, and that any other represents an exceptional condition.<p>In every place that I have worked, making an offer (and landing the candidate) is the exceptional condition. Each step through the recruiting process (resume submission, one or more phone screens, one or more rounds of interviews, extension of an offer, and negotiation around terms and conditions) results in fewer and fewer candidates. I have no idea what the pass rate for each stage is at a typical high-tech company, but I would guess that it could be between 10% and 15% at best.<p>In other words, odds are that you are not going to get the job.<p>Separately, there&#x27;s no reasonable and legally defensible way to provide official feedback if the interview process results in a no-hire decision. The interview is your chance to put your best foot (brain?) forward. If you got post-interview feedback that said &quot;Your linked-list implementation was O(N<i></i>3) and we wanted O(N),&quot; or &quot;Several of your responses were not in harmony with the way that we like to build systems&quot; how would you respond, and how would hiring companies and managers handle the situation with any degree of efficiency? You had your chance (the interview) to make the case.

I had a similar experience with Microsoft - 8 interviews over a period of 6 months. Two things that were different from the Google experience is that I was kept informed of progress and how it all works, and I did land the job (a better job, so not the one I initially applied for).<p>All that said, I think it important to have a Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon on your résumé. It&#x27;s definitely not critical, but 5 years at one of these (or similar) gives you credibility out of the gate that you might otherwise need to demonstrate through other means. It greases wheels.

What I found peculiar about Google&#x27;s application process was that all of the emails from Google&#x27;s recruiters went straight into Gmail&#x27;s spam folder.

I can sum up the whole article in four words: Google is too big. They have obviously become what they would have despised at the outset: a lumbering bureaucracy.<p>But I have no interest in being one fifty-thousandth of Google, and to anyone who&#x27;s on the fence, I&#x27;d argue that you&#x27;ll learn more and wield far more responsibility at a much smaller company.

It&#x27;s surprising to see this kind of title from someone who&#x27;s never worked at Google.<p>OP seems to be mostly disgruntled by Google&#x27;s recruiting process, which seems horrendous, to be honest. But just because there is a lot of red tape before you can get a job offer doesn&#x27;t mean the job will suck.

I see it as a sign hubris when a company makes you invest a ton of time into their interview process and then don&#x27;t even show you the courtesy of an explanation if no offer is extended.

Up until about a year ago (or maybe 2 now?), Larry Page still personally reviewed every single Engineering resume.<p>This gives you some idea about what could happen at the &quot;11th hour&quot; at Google.

So, to make this more constructive than a rant-article, does anyone know who does this right? For a large company?<p>Can it be done with a separate HR staff, or do you need an engineer on the inside managing this?

I recommend disregarding the ping-pong tables, the free organic-sustainable food, beer, MacBooks, the branding (we are enlightened geniuses constructing the future), etc. Pay attention to who you will be working with, and for. If your prospective job will be bullshit janitorial work, it doesn&#x27;t matter if Guido van Rossum works there.<p>Throughout the process of interviewing and joining a new company, they will be communicating important things to you, whether they realize it or not. Just listen.

Disclaimer: I work for Google. These are my opinions and not necessarily Google&#x27;s.<p>My hiring experience was slower than other companies, but did not seem particularily obtuse. It was maybe a few weeks from my initial interview to an offer. I delayed my interview so I could study and had a waiting period after offer before I started due to visa, but the core hiring process was just a few weeks.<p>Talking with others internally about their experience, it was all pretty similar. No one I know internally suffered through their hiring process.<p>It does seem to be the case that we sometimes don&#x27;t do a good job of properly rejecting candidates who didn&#x27;t make the cut, but there are so many factors that go into these things it&#x27;s impossible to take a face value a one sided view.<p>My advice for anyone who does want to work for Google is that you shouldn&#x27;t, if possible, parallelize your Google application with any other companies. Try here, and if it doesn&#x27;t work out, continue with your job hunt. But if you try and speed up the Google process by presenting competing offers, you&#x27;re gonna have a bad time.

Okay since there appear to be people here who know what they are talking about may I ask a question about what happened to me?<p>At the end of my Microsoft Internship I got an offer, this triggered a Google recruiter to contact me and do a phone screener. I&#x27;m not sure how well I did on the interview but when I mentioned I had decided not to take the Microsoft offer the recruiter said they wanted to push any next stage stuff back a couple months (4-5 months), they mentioned December.<p>That was fine by me. In fact I was still fine in November &#x2F; December because I was trying to interview at Mozilla and was working on making a contribution in support of that.<p>Mozilla hit their hiring cap just after I got the patch accepted. So now I&#x27;m curious what happened to the recruiter? Was the sudden change in tone when I said I wasn&#x27;t accepting the offer the recruiter worrying I had lied on my blog? Was she serious about moving any later interviews until closer to graduation, and maybe just left the company?

We often don&#x27;t understand is that our inaction communicates just as much as our actions and speech do. The difference is that the recipient can interpret inaction to mean whatever they want it to mean. In an interview process, I could interpret silence from HR to mean that the company has moved on when the truth is that the recruiter is on vacation.<p>Google can obviously get away with this because they&#x27;re still one of the richest company in the world. When they piss off a candidate, they&#x27;ve got twenty ready to take her place. For those of us at smaller companies, it&#x27;s crucial that we over-communicate during delays and move decisively when hiring.

I had a similar process out of college, but didn&#x27;t even make it to the phone screen portion of the process before getting mad and giving up. Google was sort of a dream job for me, too, but the recruiting process made it clear that I was at best a potential cog or a line item to their HR.<p>They&#x27;d never call at arranged times, but did call while I was giving a project presentation, once during another interview (probably looked good actually, &quot;Oh it&#x27;s the google recruiter again.&quot; &lt;ignore&gt;)... the whole thing was enough to put me off. I was a bit older than the standard college grad, so maybe I just become disillusioned at 8th grade level.

I recently had a very similar experience with Google.<p>They have you run through the hoops a full day or two of interviews, then deliberate for months. I ended up correctly answering every question given to me, but was in the end rejected, the only feedback I received is that it was a marginal situation but one committee member &quot;had some doubts&quot;.<p>Being that I didn&#x27;t graduate from a ivy league school, far from it, my imagination can come up with many motivating factors of their various hiring committees. Also, I did not approach Google, their recruiter contacted me based on my rapidly growing list of successes on my resume.<p>But in the end, I&#x27;m glad they didn&#x27;t offer my the position, because after reflection, it was really just the prestige of working for Google that drew me to even consider an offer from them, when the smaller, more agile and more innovative atmosphere of a start-up is far more in-tune with my skillset and mentality.<p>And while there is no in-house laundry, so I can literally live in my &quot;open office&quot; without the bother of ever leaving work, I do have a few things in which I don&#x27;t imagine I would find at Google, namely: A good work&#x2F;life balance, an innovative atmosphere with little bureaucratic inertia and most importantly, a warm feeling when I&#x27;m driving to work in the morning.<p>In the end, I think it&#x27;s google&#x27;s policy of &quot;Let&#x27;s get the best, forget the rest&quot; that is slowly taking them from &quot;Do no Evil, be a cool place to work at&quot; to &quot;stuffy, sterile, homogeneous corporate environment&quot;. As people who are often &quot;the best&quot; have a much higher chance to be the trajectory oriented egocentric types who rarely, in my experience, produce &quot;the best&quot; outcomes and seem to be more interested in proving&#x2F;showing&#x2F;demonstrating how much better&#x2F;smarter&#x2F;whatever&#x27;er they are than everybody else that, despite their reputed intellect, seem to have a poorly understanding of the prisoner&#x27;s dilemma as outlined by game theory.<p>eplilogue: the start-up I ended up with exceeded the salary requirements I handed Google, have free food too, and oh yeah, I get to make robots, oh yeah!

I had a pretty shite experience with Google applying for internships.<p>I had gotten through the interview process and told I was being placed with a team and would get a chance to speak to my new manager in November&#x2F;December. I give her my preferences for placement and I waited until a few months before the summer started and asked my recruiters what was going on, and they said there were very few positions left and they must have flubbed the paperwork. She said she would work hard to get my team sorted out. Nothing for a week. I ask again, she apologizes. Nothing for another week. She apologizes and I finally speak with my manager. It is one of the teams near the bottom of my list of preferences. I had several great offers at the time and was by this point very unenthusiastic. I ask for another team, but am told all placements have been made and that they will try me again in the future.<p>Now I get calls&#x2F;emails from Google recruiters every few months, seemingly always a few days after I sign a contract to work elsewhere. Are they intentionally trying to poach me? Anyways, I&#x27;ve had enough of big companies. I&#x27;m going to a startup as the 7th engineer that will let me work remotely as I sail around the world. I think I&#x27;ve made the right decision.

Google grew big and its bureaucracy grew with it. As well as many other things have changed, and not for the better. It&#x27;s not the Google of the 2000s anymore.

I went through Google&#x27;s interview process twice, including passing all the phone interviews and remote coding sessions and being flown out to Mountain View, only to be rejected each time.<p>When they started another recruiting push and asked me to come back and interview a third time I told them no thanks.<p>Ironically I wound up working for Google anyway after the startup I worked for was acquired!

Here&#x27;s a secret for those who still want to work at Google. Put your resume on Dice and you&#x27;ll probably get contacted by a contracting company. My friend who did this has no college degree and just had to do 2 non-technical phone screens. He gets free food and whatever and has his dream &quot;job at Google&quot;. Now if you want to get a job at Google doing something interesting, all bets are off. He works on a large angular app that shows hardware allocations for an internal team. It&#x27;s his first programming job at a software company though so he&#x27;s learning a lot.

More and more of these stories seem to be popping up now. It doesn&#x27;t seem to be to googles overall detriment though as people are still just as interested (I think?) to work there. Guess they can get away with it.

Is it possible the same people doing the hiring, are the ones doing the tech &#x27;support&#x27;?

&quot;on-site laundry machines&quot;<p>Let&#x27;s just pause and think about how INSANE that is. Are people that work at Google really so hopelessly dependent on their employer that they can&#x27;t handle basic bodily sanitation without help?<p>Let me get this straight. These people are <i>taking their laundry on the Google bus</i> to <i>wash their clothes at work</i>?<p>Hi, reality much?

You are also older, and maybe realize the free food, stupid chairs, and on site laundry are gimmicks intended to keep you at work as long as possible. It really boils down to salary and tangible benefits such has vacation and healthcare. That free lunch only costs the company $5&#x2F;day, $1250&#x2F;year. I&#x27;d rather take that in pay.

As goes the recruitment, so goes the employment.<p>Despite the efforts of the Valley&#x27;s largest companies to &quot;be different, think different, not be evil&quot;, etc..., they are human endeavors run by human beings subject to the same natural laws of behavior and organizational psychology as the companies they were once trying to &quot;be different&quot; from.<p>Your story is no different from the typical story of someone trying for non-trivial employment at IBM, Apple, Microsoft, the Department of Defense, or even Wal-Mart. Except, perhaps, for the free lunches- which you&#x27;ll be trying to avoid after a few months anyway, unless you have given up any semblance of outside life to join The Party (or The Company).<p>It is proof that large tech companies, new and old, have not made the type of change that their execs and founders have always trumpeted. They are still subject to the same laws of human behavior and organizational development that affected older companies, the United States, the ancient Greeks, the Catholic Church, etc...

My guess is that OP is not in the U.S. Google isn&#x27;t perfect but a 2-month background check is NOT the norm. A company that dysfunctional would get no talent.<p>In my experience, any scrutiny beyond the normal 2-3 references (no back channel) can be killed by faking (or, better yet, getting) a competing offer. That type of scrutiny&#x2F;delay means they&#x27;re on the fence because they see you as a low-status (but possibly capable) chump and social proof is often what it takes to land on the right side.

Well, that escalated quickly!

It may just me, but I feel like you&#x27;re just a little sour grapes.<p>If it was really your dream job, you wouldn&#x27;t give up on it so easily.<p>It sounds like the root of it is, you desire to work at a &quot;great perks&quot; type silicon valley company, not google in particular.<p>Time to dream again...

I don&#x27;t get it. The blog post is about failing multiple Google interviews, then complaining that the process is good enough for you, then saying Google isn&#x27;t your &quot;dream job&quot; anymore?<p>How is this different than the old, &quot;I didn&#x27;t want to go to your stupid birthday party anyway!&quot;??<p>Maybe I missed something in the post but I was hoping to read about someone who had actually worked at Google before criticizing it..

Get over it, you were not good enough for them and that&#x27;s what it is. If you were &quot;google quality&quot;, you would have had long had an offer. This is for everyone else reading this, if you don&#x27;t want to go through this. You must dazzle the folks interviewing you. Building amazing products you are willing to demo, solve interesting problem utilizing ridiculously large data sets, or in interesting AI domains. Google doesn&#x27;t want average folks. I don&#x27;t work at google or ever did, but your post is one of many lamenting about this.