How I (almost) got an internship at Google

My story: After my technical phone interviews, I got "accepted" as an intern, meaning I was in the Intern Pool of Rot, where I waded and waited for a team to fish me out. I waded and waded for a couple of months, hoping for a kind suitor. The HR woman always told me that she was "optimistic" about my prospects, so I rejected offers from other companies.<p>Then a really cool opportunity came, and I accepted that offer because you can't just sit in a rotting pool for two months.<p>A friend of mine stayed in the rotting pool and was told at the beginning of summer that no one at Google wanted him.<p>This was 2009-2010. I hope Google changed their ways.

I expected better from a company like Google. Asking candidates for pre-canned code snippets to cutesy little CS problems on the whiteboard is miserable and the outcome depends too much on what the candidate studied in the last few weeks before the interview. It actually tells you very little about the kind of programmer a person is and the interview itself can get quite horrible on a personal level very fast.<p>A while ago, I used to conduct job interviews like this. Sort this, insert that, search for the other. I still feel sorry for some of the candidates I did this to. That process was the largest single mistake I made when hiring people. I should instead have asked for the code of some projects they had been working on recently and maybe discussed a few more creative things with them.<p>In fact, if I could ask a candidate just one question, it would be "what projects are you working on in your spare time?"

Many candidates wrongly assume they failed to get a position because they got a question wrong. Unless the question was trivial (i.e. what is the height of a tree?), most of the time these questions are intended to see how well you can carefully think through, create, clarify, and debug your code.<p>For example, when I was reading your writeup as a former interviewer (lots and lots of college candidates for MSFT -- I was a dev manager and did both my own hiring and was flown to colleges for those "interview days" for several years), I was far more worried that you had trouble finding the bug in binary search than that you got it wrong. Everyone gets problems wrong the first time unless they have just implemented them recently. Superior candidates are good at rapidly trying good normal and edge cases, hammering out a good solution, and writing inspired code when given hints at how to improve their solutions.

I wouldn't bother applying. Why the hell would you want to work a company that runs you through the gauntlet like this, only to give you the chance that <i>maybe</i> you'll get hired? I mean, this is obviously a really skilled guy who has lots of prospects.<p>Why are Google so popular anyway? I genuinely don't get it and would love to know from someone who has specific knowledge. Do they pay better than everyone else? Work on more interesting problems? Better perks, work environment, more status? I can understand it from the perspective of someone who joined years ago, when you got stock options and didn't have to do a full circus performance in order to get in, but not any longer.<p>The experience would have to be twice as good as the alternatives before I willingly submitted to this kind of process. A long process of interviews like the ones I have heard about hints at more pain and no autonomy once you actually join.<p>For an _internship_? If you're turning down other offers for the _chance_ to work at Google, you're selling yourself short and not getting full market value.

I hate little programming puzzles that you have code by hand or little word problems, or trick questions that you have to think "out of the box".<p>In many years of programming I don't remember having to write a binary search in C, by hand, in a text document, without being able to compile and test. Or having to dictate a Python program over the phone to someone.<p>I certainly do not remember ever having to solve stuff like:"One train leaves Los Angeles at 15mph heading for New York. Another train leaves from New York at 20mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at 25mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?" NEVER.<p>I had to implement &#38; modify algorithms from scientific papers, I had to work with complicated lockless versions of data structures, but I probably couldn't write the binary tree search in C over the phone. If that's that Google uses to hire then I will never work at Google.<p>EDIT: Alright, got a angry and used the 'fuck' a little too much.

Google's loss is some other company's gain. Apply to places like Facebook or Microsoft or Amazon instead. Or in your case The New York Times.<p>Personally I was in between jobs recently, so I sent Google my resume using their online application site. After about a month, Google still didn't get back to me -- meanwhile I managed to interview at 6 different places (all the way) and found a new job.<p>"I heard nothing for a month and a half" is the key problem I think. It's going to be very hard for any full time employees that are any good to stay off the market that long, they'd have to apply to Google before quitting their last job.<p>As for interns, I am not overly surprised since you applied in December. At my school we had the hiring booms in October/November and then again in March/April (that's when we had the 2 engineering job fairs), so anytime between that people weren't really finding a new internship (unless it was on their own).<p>One last thing, what exactly is a Google spreadsheet beta candidate form? Is that the same one as the optional Google "survey" where you had to rank your skills (1-5 or 1-10 was it)?

I was disappointed by my interview process earlier this month for a potential summer internship at Google. I'm sure part of it is driven by the result (I didn't get past the phone screens.) My main complaints are<p>- Every step of the process involved a new person. Overall, I had to be handed off through 4 different people, each one wanting a bit more information or a filled out form, until I was scheduled for the phone interviews. This was especially confusing when I had a recruiter assigned to me, and I was being emailed by both her and someone with whom she worked with at the same point in the process.<p>- The first interviewer was apparently a fill-in for the intended one, which is unfortunate, because he and I were a complete mismatch. He seemed to be a C/C++ guy and I have more high-level language experience, and we ended up doing what I would consider advanced bit manipulation / number theory. (The second interview was much more reasonable, and it is my own fault if I did not pass it.)<p>- The amount of time time that it took from the "Hi, we would like you to apply online" email to the you are not "a close enough match" email was over a month, which is much too long for simple back-to-back phone interviews. Waiting for their responses was the most frustrating and nerve-racking part of the process. I am glad at least the OP had quick responses.<p>Should I go through the process again, I would strongly consider asking them to expedite it in one way or another.<p>On a more optimistic note, I do feel like the interviews do help highlight weaknesses in your programming skills and resume presentation skills.

Mirrors my internship experience almost exactly. Three rapid-fire technical interviews that I thought went quite well, then a "sorry, no dice" email. Someone else I know just went through the same thing, also for an internship.<p>Google sure makes a lot of noise about how they are hiring and competing for talent, but continue to turn away good people for unknown reasons.

I went through the Google process too and it didn't come out nicely.<p>First, I have had almost no actual CS lessons in my university, because it was more focused on general engineering and IT management than on code writing.<p>However, I've done quite a bit of code in various open source projects and I've touched quite many technologies...<p>I went through the sets of interviews, and I really seemed to work quite well, even if many design-patterns where unknown to me (I didn't know their names). But the last one wasn't the best one.<p>Therefore, I got the mail telling me that they got no positions for me, which I understood and accepted easily (I had another engagement at the time).<p>However, I dared to ask "why?". Was it my technical skills, my personal skills, my logic skills or the way I answered the process, the cause of my rejection?<p>They refused to even discuss about it, which is not even reaching the minimum of politeness I expect from a company. When they asked if they could keep my Resume, I told them to go away...<p>This recruitment process does not seem enough respectful for me and gave me a very bad opinion of the company.

I found this interesting because I went through part of Google's internship process not too long ago.<p>If you're just a sophomore, you shouldn't feel bad about not getting an internship at Google.<p>Another reason not to "feel bad" about it is that AFAIK the people interviewing you just take notes, and then other people review those notes to decide whether or not to take you. So the people you interviewed with weren't even the ones that made the decision.<p>Perhaps for the C program, you should have done something simpler than a binary search, at least to begin with. The way you described it, they didn't require you to do a binary search.

I've often hated writing implementations of searching and sorting algorithms with someone looking over my shoulder.<p>I think it tests specific knowledge of an algorithm more-so than anything else.

Lucky him, atleast he got to face tech interviews. As for me I never got the chance to prove myself.<p>I got my call, was inquired about my projects and current offers by HR and then got a rejection letter next week. After I inquired, it turned out that my low GPA [ 7.03/10.0 ] was the cause. They want academically bright freshers with shining GPAs and with strong CS101 skills.

This was exactly my experience. Everything from the two technical interviews with the addition of a third to the technical questions with queries about bugs in the code. I think 2-&#62;3 conversion is exactly what you said. The first two interviewers split on their opinion of you, so you get scheduled a tie-breaker interview. Unfortunately for me, the tie-breaker interview was my worst, partly due to me and partly due to non-existant feedback for 45 minutes on the part of the interviewer.<p>But, I believe there is a method to the madness. They have so many qualified applicants that they would rather err on the side of caution. They would rather reduce the false-positives even if the number of false-negatives grows. They can afford this luxury. They want the best and they can afford rejecting good candidates.<p>My favorite way of thinking about this was from Steve Yegge's blog post about the interview process : "Because of the inherently flawed nature of the interviewing process, it's highly likely that someone on the loop will be unimpressed with you, even if you are Alan Turing. Especially if you're Alan Turing, in fact, since it means you obviously don't know C++"

With a process like this (based on this story as well as others), does Google actually consistently employee competent talent? Obviously Google has landed some serious rock-star talent, but of the scores of college graduates they hire for internships or entry-level positions, does anyone know if their hiring process is working for them?

<p><pre><code> given two full hours and any high-level language (including pseudocode) only 10 percent of professional programmers implemented binary search correctly, according to Jon Bently. </code></pre> Wow!<p>I'm not particularly intelligent and I'm not in the top 10% -- but I could implement an in-place quick-sort in C in 10 minutes that my interviewer could run with only a minor fix (forgot a semi-colon), and I even described the parallel version with OpenMP (although there I got the syntax slightly wrong). This was for my interview at Adobe, when I got hired by them a couple of years ago; went on to other things since then.<p>By that logic that should place me in the top 1 percent ... but so are my ~ 100 friends that are also software developers from my city, and statistically speaking, something smells like shit in those statistics thrown around.<p>Maybe binary search, when discovered, used to be a hard to understand problem, but now it is taught from high-school. And sure there are lots of idiots out there, but many of those idiots also believe they are in the top 10%, because some statistic told them so.<p>So cut the crap and build stuff. Only by that metric you can prove yourself.<p>-- EDIT --<p>I'm not referring or addressing the article's author directly. I'm also not saying that you SHOULD be able to implement binary search, or quick-sort or whatever metric du-jour -- in interview conditions. I get it that you may be stressed by eyes watching you, or that you may be bitten by edge-cases other people haven't noticed for years.<p>I'm referring more to these metrics flowing around -- like, if you read HN you're in the top 5%, if you read this stupid blog you're in the top X%, if you can implement binary search ... etc, etc...<p>We are software developers, mathematicians, computer scientists -- surely we understand selection bias and should be able to recognize bullshit, even if it doesn't appeal to our ego.

I'm surprised by the rapid succesion of the interviews. When I applied for an internship at Google, I think the entire process lasted about three months until I got a final acceptance email. Only had 2 technical phone interviews spread over a month period and they were both decisive (aka if you failed the first one, you didn't get in the second one).<p>This was quite a contrast to my Facebook experience, where I had a contract signed after I think 3 weeks. :)<p>I'm really quite surprised that binary search is considered difficult, have you ever tried to implement quick sort? I can write AVLs with less bugs than quick sort.

I feel for you - my advice is not to let it get you down.<p>I think an important factor in these interviews is the emphasis on talent in software development. Don't get me wrong - I don't deny its importance, it's more that I question the nature of the beast. To me talent is instinct, a feel for what you're doing, and the 'right' type of thinking for the thing. It's pretty obvious when somebody has it (or doesn't), and I think obvious whether you have it too if you're honest with yourself about it.<p>Tech interviews <i>emphatically</i> do not test for this. Nor do they, I believe, test for smartness; I think once you hit a certain level of intelligence the rest is far more preparation and experience (and yes I'm getting Malcolm Gladwell on your ass) - so all a failed interview indicates is (assuming you are an at least moderately talented, moderately intelligent candidate) one or more of the following:-<p>* Lack of preparation (<i>knowing</i> the stuff, and <i>practicing</i> the stuff)<p>* Poor/incorrectly focused preparation<p>* Lack of confidence<p>* Bad luck - e.g. haven't looked at binary search for x years they ask about it, or what Steve Yegge termed the 'interview anti-loop'[1] - basically the guy interviewing you just doesn't like you and that's that.<p>The biggest problem with these things is that people (and I'm kind of talking to myself here more than anyone) take these things personally and put it down to some idea of talent that you might just lack. Fuck that.<p>The problem is that - and I'm risking repeating a well-known cliche here - hiring good people is extremely hard, and a false positive is <i>way</i> more damaging than a false negative. It is right, IMHO, that (good) companies probe algos, os fundamentals, etc. as this stuff <i>matters</i>; however failing an interview emphatically does <i>not</i> mean you suck.<p>[1]:<a href="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html" rel="nofollow">http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...</a>

In regards to your comment about their recruiting speed, I wanted to chip in. While not Google, I interviewed with meebo and went through three phone screens as well within 1 week, and they flew me to Mountain View within 2 weeks -- by far THE most efficient interview I have been through. Great people.<p>I cannot emphasize enough how much more awesome it makes your company look when you have a streamlined recruiting process!

I would not appreciate a candidate spilling the beans on what we ask in our interviews, even if he didn't sign an NDA. Sometimes you do ask similar questions, and it's a waste of everyone's time when the candidate in front of you went through some programming interview books and a bunch of blogs like those.<p>Similarly, I wouldn't even bother to bring in a candidate who transcribed his interviews elsewhere.

Having read a plethora of stories about the Google interview process over the years, from interns on up, it seems like it would be easier to build a company and sell it to Google than to get through the application process. Surely someone has done this at least once, given the number of companies Google has purchased.

Given the input and output, why isn't a linear search a proper solution?

<p><pre><code> &#62; I got an internship with The New York Times &#62; the following week. </code></pre> Did the internship involve 41m$ in compensations and the instruction to build a pay wall secure enough to fend off toddlers?<p>In any case, well done. Technical interviews are hit-and-miss at any stage in your career, although I have to say that a coder worth his salt should be able to code up a binary search in no time at all. Even a college sophomore.