This wasn't an interview, it was a test. I had a similar experience with a startup. I was interviewing for a Marketing Communications Manager position. Essentially PR.<p>One of the unofficial interviewers (at 24 year old MIT engineer working as an email marketer) challenged me with the question "How many barbers are in San Francisco?" We proceeded to map it out the analytical process on the whiteboard. He wanted to see formulas to understand how I would arrive at the answer.<p>It was a stupid, impossible question. In a similar way to this girl's experience, he jabbed repeatedly critiquing my logic.<p>He wrote me later to explain that he posed the same question to his girlfriend, an MIT engineer herself, and she couldn't come up with an answer. Neither could he.<p>They offered me the job and I declined solely based on this guy and his misguided, silly behavior. I would have hated to work with him.<p>When a company misguidedly challenges potential employees in this way it hurts the quality of its hires. Sure, Google can afford to be picky but does it really need an engineer in a Product Marketing role? Perhaps for dev-facing apps but such an interview process is overall misguided and immature.
Sounds like she is the "recite facts" type, rather than "quickly think critically" type. Google wants the second type of person, and it appears she is not that. So the interview process worked perfectly; she didn't get a job she wouldn't be good at, and Google doesn't have an employee that doesn't fit with them. I fail to see how this is a nightmare, other than that she'll have to work somewhere that makes her buy her own lunch.
I worked for Google for a few years, and did a lot of phone screens. Most of the people who I interviewed probably felt the same way as this lady. The process may seem brutal, but it is impossible to invite everyone in for an on-site interview, and the phone screen does a pretty good job of filtering out the definite nos (although I'm sure that some good candidates are rejected).<p>I could count the number of people who passed one of my phone screens on one hand (and I considered myself a fairly easy interviewer).
These were just questions for a position as Associate Product Marketing Manager. During my senior-year interviews with Google for a Software Engineer position, there were 3 rounds, each getting increasingly harder, chock full of nothing but technical questions: some trivia (name all standard network port associations), some implementation (design a chat server), some theory (what is the big-O runtime advantage of doubling an array size upon copy over just adding new entries linearly), etc, etc...<p>Each time they said "this interview will take about 30 minutes," but each one ended up being around 1.5 hours.<p>It was grueling, but fun. I'm not sure what happened because I didn't hear back after the 3rd interview. It was at least a nice feeling to know that all of my classes in school had helped me with the answers.
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“Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?” I froze. The problem sounded easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it.
'<p>The problem only <i>sounded</i> easy? Isn't this what you learn in 3rd grade? When you can't do this stuff you shouldn't be allowed near numbers.
Rigorous interviews will increase the false negative rate, at the expense of false positives. It's part of the culture at Microsoft and Google and other companies.
I liked the "quiz" question someone posted on the linked "Business Insider" article:<p>You work for a digital age media company who has already achieved superior market dominance in an industry rife with failure and turnover. Your company's stock, though depressed, still sells for multiples above its competition and the option pool is pretty full and limited.<p>The company's single main product continues to grow its revenues nicely but has failed at virtually all attempts to broaden its product line so it remains reliant on its single huge product which may come under government anti-trust action at some point in the future to say nothing of two leading competitors aiming to unseat it. It's only other breakthrough products are given away free or at nominal charge with no discernable profitable business model.<p>Is it a good career choice to join or stay with this firm even though they pride themselves on asking stupid quiz questions to gauge your intelligence and make you feel very special if you are offered a position?
I'm her age. This is essentially a case question straight out of a consulting book. I'm out of practice for it. Way out of practice. Meanwhile, I'm scared stiff of applying for jobs because my entire class has gone crazy about how to behave, what to say, what is the right answer to questions like this. I know I'm not perfect already. I know I have work to do to get better. and the bAck of the evenvelop question is one of my weak points. And I know it.<p>First thing I discovered though from helping other people on other sorts of collaborative projects on the web:<p>Get paper for this stuff if you are out of practice, and ask to wait for an aswer while you write it down, and if you forget something, as to repeat. Always good to write somehting down- shows you are listening. She didn't.<p>Be a little more wild with your answer. Not over the top. But just a little. I got that last night from someone at McKinsey. Was talkign to a class of mine about the history of business. Someone asked. Don't be too much though.<p>And reach out about your humanness. Not everyone is perfect. If your weak point is Back of the envelope stuff, then it is your weak point.<p>Speaking of which, since I am taking my time (becuase I can't freak out any more, I just can't) How do I brush up on those questions? And that way of thinking. I'm good on the creative side with large data sets and how to sort out problems, but not on the calculations side...which sucks.
I interviewed with Google a year ago and was pretty disappointed. One interviewer was a no-show, another was over half an hour late.<p>I know Google is a big company and all (sampling space fail) but that really turned me off.
In engineering school, we got pretty familiar with BOEC (back of the envelope calculations), in some part to give a double check on calculations, and in other part (ahem) to double-check on slide rule calculations and exponent correction.<p>But that is a useful skill, particularly in conjunction with a <i>problem-solving attitude</i> which they repeatedly emphasized us to do.<p>And the book <i>Innumeracy</i> by Paulos gives examples of good problems to check with: "Is there a cubic mile of human blood in the world" and "How long would it take to move Mount Fuji" as a couple of examples.<p>It doesn't sound like a good sign if your latest math was as a freshman if you are looking for a software career.
Google has interviewed tens of thousands of candidates in this manner. Other companies have interviewed even more, using roughly the same process. With all the preparation this girl put into her interview, I don't see how she possibly could have been surprised by those types of questions. The first piece of advice anyone will give you is that the final answer is not <i>nearly</i> as important as talking through the process you would use to solve the problem. Obviously she never even read that first piece of advice, because she blurted out a wild guess to the very first question. Don't let this happen to you!<p>Google's interview process isn't a nightmare. It's entirely typical. If you plan on interviewing for any job, you should spend a lot of time studying the interview process and how to excel in it. If you're interviewing for programming jobs, this course is an <i>invaluable resource</i>: <a href="http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/" rel="nofollow">http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/</a><p>Read all the handouts 5 times, and you won't be caught off guard like this girl was.
Oh, please. Perhaps they care about pedigree and GPA for new grads, but what else do they have to go on? I'm 40, and they didn't seem to care at all where I went to school nor what my grades were. The interview was challenging, but a lot of fun (the good kind of challenging), and certainly not a "nightmare."
I wouldn't really say <i>nightmare</i> per se, although it probably felt like that at the time. She just wasn't very practiced at estimating and making reasonable assumptions.<p>Back when I was in my final year of uni I interviewed for a set of blue-chip graduate recruiters who threw similar questions at me. I distinctly remember sitting in a Data Connection office somewhere trying to work out how many petrol stations were in the UK. I was terrible. But there are ways to get better at this and it's really no secret that Google asks these kinds of questions. I think they reveal two things about the candidate - how good they are instinctively, and how well they prepare.<p>Obviously Google asks candidates who get past a certain point to sign a NDA, but there's still a surprising amount of information out there. I was recently helping a friend (and have previously helped an ex) with interviews and preparing for the logic and theoretical comp.sci. parts was actually quite a lot of fun. Maybe because I didn't have the pressure!
The questions mentioned in the article don't seem particularly odious. They sound like standard "think-on-your-feet" case-based questions that management consultants and bankers also love. Demonstrating creativity and problem solving grit is more important than producing a correct number.
These seem like soft-ball questions all around. Phone screening is such a pain in the ass, I am surprised that more people don't have a timed web form or similar setup so we can avoid having to waste the hours talking to people that aren't going to make the cut.
I thought it was funny that the link she gave to "15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid" has wrong answers in the solutions. See if you can beat their answer for the two egg problem - Bonus prove your answer is actually the minimum possible.
"Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job." Uh, maybe for a second job- but when you are still a senior in school your GPA is one (admittedly crude) measure of how well you were doing at your last occupation (student).
For an associate product manager position, it only gets harder.<p>I quite enjoyed the back of the envelope calculations during the early calls, as well as talking about interesting products I had encountered recently.<p>It got quite interesting on-site. I really enjoyed the first couple of days of interviews, which focused on design ("design a shopping mall"). The last day was still fun, but less enjoyable, as it involved coding on a whiteboard, estimating the computational complexity, and then improving its efficiency. Then I was asked to spec out the requirements for adding unit tests to a programming language.<p>I felt the interviews were fair and well-balanced, the main sticking point for me was the emphasis on GPA and academic history.
My Google interviewer had a toothache. I didn't get an offer. Their recruiters are notoriously independent; not sure that's a good thing. I was actively sought out, but had no chance because the interviewer had a bad day.<p>Question: is it more important to keep out the bad ones but lose some good ones, or vice versa? (ie, what's the correct balance between false positives and false negatives?)
I am mystified that companies use interviews in hiring despite the overwhelming academic evidence that interviewing does not work,<p>I conjecture that what we are discussing is primate social behavior (yes, "monkeys in a tree") and social hierarchy in action. Of course we _are_ primates, so maybe it _is_ vital that Google hire enough "alpha males" or whatever.
I once came on interview with a very big company, a lady that interviewed me slowly began to become medieval and very angry - for no reason, so I got afraid of her and just walked away myself, for goodnes sake. A guy before her was friendly.
I think those kinds of quizzes doesn't extract how good or bad the person is for the job.<p>I wouldn't work for a company that rate a person by quizzes or tricky questions.
Non critical thinking people are not worse as they can have other strong skills like immagination or creativity or ability to understand user feeling or simply a lot of taste. I think that with this kind of interview Google is creating a monoculture inside the company. The effects may be the fact Google has some problem pushing web services where technological strenght can not do a real difference.
Her last answer really did her in, I think. She said she was "wishing [the number of graduating seniors] was higher" since she was amid a job search. That would mean more competition for jobs. That indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.