My nightmare interview with Google (an anecdote for those who will be graduating from college)

Google came to Syracuse’s campus to recruit new graduates when I was a senior. I attended the information session and learned which jobs I could qualify for. I created a fancy cover letter and resume, crossed my fingers and e-mailed them my documents. One week later I had an email in my inbox from Google.

Google wanted to interview me! Forbes’ #1 company to work for was interested in speaking with me about an Associate Product Marketing Manager position in Mountain View, California. I called everyone I could think of, ecstatic and day-dreaming that my job hunt might end quickly and painlessly with me surfing during lunch breaks at the Googleplex.

Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job—those people obviously never applied to Google. My 3.6 suddenly seemed inferior. Google also wanted to know if I had received any job offers. They wanted to know who was recruiting me and how far along I was in my job search. Talk about salt on an open wound to a college senior. Sad and dejected, I ticked off the “No” [no one wants me] and “Yes” [I’m still unemployed] boxes. I should have realized then that this was shaping up to be a grueling interview process, but I was too excited to pay much notice.

To prepare for my two back-to-back conference calls, I googled Google and learned their history, products, current news, founders, locations, business models, competitors, AdWords, investors and mottos. My heart had never been in anything more and I was prepared for any curve ball they could throw. I practiced interviewing with friends and felt confident when my cell rang at 4:00pm sharp.

I’d be more inclined to pick a programmer who read anything outside of his field.

Both of your approaches are interesting, but I don't know if they are in any way helpful. In my beginner's days - which was around 1983, on 3rd year in university, I read a lot of computer books - about IBM/3[67]0 hardware, about languages, about PDP-11 and its hardware and the languages, about UNIX, about DECUS C and other C compilers, Pascal, FORTRAN, PL/1, parsers, grammars, etc. etc.

But over time I discovered that I'm largely past that point. I don't think I read any hardcopy book about programming in last decade, even though new languages like Java and C# showed up as strong players (and I used Java, and use C# currently.) But somehow I managed to learn them without reading books. Probably it's because I have some basic knowledge, and whatever extra is required to code in this or that language I just get from the Net.

Often reading a book is plain counterproductive. A full description of a .NET API may easily exceed TAOCP by volume. But can you really learn a thousand classes, each with hundreds of public members? At best you can remember a few concepts, but they aren't that difficult, and they already changed a few times between WinForms and WPF. Your best book is under that F1 key, especially considering that it is linked online to even larger depository of sample code and documentation and "best practices" articles. When I needed to attach a custom font as a resource I learned the way to do it not from a book but from Google.

Today I read a lot of SF. I don't read about Perl. I don't code much in it, and when I do I have bookmarked everything that I need to do what I need. Today I'm not in a position of a fresh, green graduate who has to spread thin to meet requirements of many potential employers. Today I know my sphere of comfort (analog/RF, microcontrollers, firmware, and PC software to operate hardware.) I don't need to get outside that and study stored procedures in Oracle, for example. There is a lot of demand for someone who knows the difference between S[2,1] and S[1,2] and can quickly put together a system that measures both, simultaneously :-)

“Today I read a lot of SF”.

And you’d be at the top of the heap. I want people who may not know everything but who can figure out how to find the information that they don’t know in order to be an asset to the company.

That’s at least been my approach. Has it been successful? I’d love to have a list a mile long, but I don’t work there anymore, and haven’t for some time. Times are tough these days.

* 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?

To make $20 for $0.10 a click you need $20.0 divided by 0.1 or 200 clicks. To get 200 clicks when 0.2 % of the people click you need 200 divided by 0.2 or 1000 people.

Put another way,

Let x= site visitors, 0.20x = site visitors who click, at $0.10 a click, (0.20x)($0.10) = $20.00, $0.02x = $20.00, x = ($20.00/$0.02) = 1000.

Oh yes, solve for x.

I like your way better. Thank you.

It seems like Google’s interview process needs some looking-at. If somebody is going for a basic administrative position and they start asking them questions about robotics, don’t you think that’s a little out of hand? It’s the difference between someone graduating from NYU and MIT. Obviously, there’s a chance the MIT student might know about robotics, while the NYU student would know very little.

The point of those strange, off-the-wall questions probably isn't what the person knows about robots (especially when interviewing for an administrative position). The point of those questions are to show how the person thinks under pressure and how well they maintain their composure.

It sounds to me like a stupid interview process. They shouldn’t expect someone going for one specific thing to know every little detail about the company if they don’t know someone in it.

They seem to be doing something right.

FTR: I know two people who work at Google. They're both engineers and they both love it.

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