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Want To Work At Google?
ramboando writes "In an article on the ZDNet site 'chief culture officer' and HR boss Stacy Savides Sullivan describes the kind of traits that she's looking for in potential Google employees. If you're thinking about applying, she also goes over what kind of questions one might be asked in an interview, Google's 'happiness survey' and the best perks that makes employees tick and stay with the company (Google ski-trips or paid paternity leave, anyone?). 'I think one of the hardest things to do is ensure that we are hiring people who possess the kind of traits that we're looking for in a Google-y employee. Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done. So, we put a lot of focus in our hiring processes when we are interviewing to try to determine first and foremost does the person have the skill set and experience potential to do the job from a background standpoint in addition to academics and credentials.'"
What they mean to say is they don't want new employees using Google's internal internet bandwidth searching for another job.
I for one, would love to work at Google. Don't they let you bring your pets to work?
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For me best benefit working at Google's headquarter are individual swimming pools... any other company has it?
Marc Garcia is the best expert in GNU/Linux Debian, Apache, MySQL, and Python!
School education has nothing to do with how skilled you are and how well you can get the job done.
I have been job hunting in the US and the thing that has stuck me most is the cavalier rudness of recruiters, including those at Google.
When I applied for a job in the UK my application went in at 11pm one evening and I received a phone call the next day at 9am. With US companies they never seem to bother to reply unless they want something.
Perhaps they don't realise the bad feeling this creates, but when I have gone out of the way to prepare an application, tailor my resume and cover letter and get references in order to offer my skills and exprience the *least* I expect is a polite thank you for my time. Otherwise perhaps when they look through their files to fill a vacancy in six months time I will be the one who does not bother to reply to them.
If you are from HR then your mindset should not be that you are giving out jobs like favours to be bestowed, your mindset should be that you are looking for talented people who you can persuade to bring onboard. Otherwise all you will end up with is persistant fools who can't get an offer elsewhere and instead keep on bothering you.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Business is a team sport. The "fit" of an individual is as important as raw skill/talent.
Cheers,
Rob
"Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done."
In my experience, this translates into a dead-end grunt job.
Fairly flexable = Willing to do anything from sweep floors to fetch coffee.
Adaptable = Doesn't need to be shown how to sweep floors or fetch coffee.
Not focusing on titles or hierarchy = No promotions and everyone is your boss.
Just gets stuff done = This would be the stuff no one else wants to do.
Translation: Paid Intern
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
She also doesn't mention that to Google, hiring is mathematically equivalent to Information Retrieval, except that they only care about "precision" not "recall".
What that means to lay-people is that so long as they can maintain 10,000 applications coming through per-month, false negatives (passing on a suitable applicant) do not matter because there'll be another candidate along in a minute. False positives (hiring an unsuitable applicant) are all they need to focus on. The "fit factor" is effectively the search string of traits; however, with such a large candidate pool, they can focus their "hiring algorithm" entirely on rejecting candidates where it is even slightly difficult to ascertain whether they fit or not.
So, their advertising blitz "aren't we a great place to work for" is a part of what lets them keep their hiring process easy. If they get bad PR and applications fall, then they'll need to worry about recall as well as precision.
Want To Work At Google?
Eh? No.
By searching from the bottom after the first marble breaks. So, if the first one didn't break at 12 but broke at 15, try 13 and 14 in that order.
The funny thing about comedy is that it is often true.
I don't think they produce good people as much as they select good people. Why go to the trouble of perfecting your own interview process when top-tier universities already have it down to a science?
Not having a good degree doesn't necessarily mean you're not qualified. But having a good degree virtually guarantees that you are.
'workplace satisfaction? Maybe, maybe not. Workplace satisfaction points towards the colour of the walls, the taste of the food... the focus "sounds" narrow. Work is where we spend about say 50% of our quality time so it is a major part of our lives. Google with its ski trips, for example, is acknowledging the blur between work & personal life. Thus with a hapiness survey they take a wider interest/responsibility than with a workplace satisfaction survey.
Personally whilst I find this blurring interesting it's also a little disturbing- many of the people I know who work at Google have an incredible personal loyalty to the firm, they socialise together, ski trips, voluntary charity events... somewhat cultlike.
Actually, it seems obvious to me what the guy that interviewed you wanted to know: if you could convert what you learned in school in the real world. "Worse case scenario" (aka: O) isn't something you can blindly follow, as in many, many cases its irrelevent (thus why the 2 others). I can't talk for them, but in the place of a google engineer, I'd be MUCH more interested in "the most likely scenario" than in the worse case, since when you deal with a large amount of customers, the only thing that really matters is what happens day to day, and if the "worse case" happens, you add an extra server, be it at google, be it at your average corporation (not that simple, but you get the idea)
:)
On top of that, google interviews are fairly known for seeing how you -react- to challenges, not your answers to them, thus the open ended questions. You could have answered all the questions wrong and they would take you anyway, if you showed your only weakness was experience, but they probably have seen too many people worrie about which sorting algorythm is the best when having to sort a 10 item dropdown menu...
Oh well, I'm sure your skillset will be more appreciated elsewhere, so no big loss to you
What's the big problem with open questions? A good interviewer will give you some space to show your knowledge. One way of doing that is to ask open questions and see where the interviewee goes. Real life isn't like an exam question, with nice clean solutions from section xx.y of the syllabus.
They want young, smart people. Forget it if you are old (>30) and smart, you won't even make it to the interview.
I have gone through interviewing at Google not a long ago, and when I reached the on-site interview stage, these guys were surprised that I didn't fill anything in the academic background section. Their forms are not even suitable for not having an academic background.
So, is it true that absolutely *no* collage dropout can be considered a genius these days?
The fact I've been a self taught workaholic software engineer since an early age doesn't count at all?
Is it my fault for starting a career and making money instead of wasting my time over a pointless CS degree?
Maybe it's just my pride being hurt, but I think that their hiring process should be considered much less optimal than what it may appear.
Yes. If you show up to a technical job interview with a dirty t-shirt on and are rude to the receptionist because you can't "deal with people" then you may not even get the interview after all. Except in very few circumstances (academic research comes to mind), doing your job well consists mainly of solving problems for other people. If you can't get along with those people you may very well be unable or unwilling to help them solve their problems.
Someone who can learn quickly is more desirable than someone who knows Java like the back of their hand.
What would you say the balance should be, 60/40, 70/30? Can you quantify it?
I don't believe you can quantify it. The instances in which I have seen attempts at quantifying "fit factor" (think college roommate selection, most online dating services, and etc.) fail most of the time because personalities and relationships are, for the most part, dynamic. If you were to quantify it, you would probably have to do it on an individual basis. One person's technical ability may compensate for a shortcoming in personality whereas the opposite may be true for another individual. It also varies by the type of job (i.e. short-term contract versus full-time employee).
Still, I believe that "fit factor" is more important than technical competence.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
So... You really want to work there? Yes, you get lots of money, yes you get brainwashed it seems and rather arrogant after a while.
Interesting, from your story it appears he wasn't the arrogant one.
When you were describing your physics optimization, you really shouldn't expect him to want to listen more than a few minutes anyway. You say you spoke 'different languages'. Communication is a key skill, and perhaps you weren't explaining your research project in a way comprehensible to an outsider of the field. Or perhaps he only has 15 minutes he can devote to the interview, lunchtime or not, and needs to get as much info about you as possible. You can't expect him to give you all the time you desire, merely in a first-stage phone interview.
He wants to see how you think, and you didn't seem to make that obvious, you were more interesting in answering questions with academic answers not immediately useful for the real world. His question for the phonebook asked "how long" it takes to look up the name, and just reciting O(1) isn't the full answer to this. You're right that logs of diffeerent bases are only related by a multiplicative factor, but if someone wants to know how many comparitive lookups you need what reason could you possibly want for expressing this in any base other than two? (I'm a physicist, not a comp-sci guy, so if there is an answer to that I'd be curious to know). To answer how long, you need to know how long each lookup takes and how many lookups you would need to perform (assuming he wanted an answer in time). You were like a politician, and answered a different question than the one he asked.
You also made it clearly obvious to the interviewer that you would be a very difficult guy to work with, Ie, if you're of average google hiring intelligence and experience, half of your coworkers at google would be less smart or skilled as you. And if someone needs help understanding big(O) notation for their project and asked you to help them, you might be a dick to them, as per your interview.
Additionally, if he's in a hurry, it's your obligation to sell yourself in the phone interview while making the most optimized use of time that you can, which you severely failed to do. In any job your superiors will almost always be very busy, and you must demonstrate how to efficiently use their time, as well as your own. You made yourself seem to high maintainence.
Finally, if the interviewer was in a hurry and didn't ask you if you had any questions, you should have left it there, or at least been mature about it instead of cutting him off as you said. This is only a first round phone interview, and perhaps not the proper venue to ask questions if the interviewer didn't ask you. If you're serious about working for Google, and they're serious enough about you to fly you back for a follow-up interview, that's where you should start asking questions. You should have done enough research about the company on your own, prior to the phone interview, to see if it's a good enough fit for you to seriously consider the interview process.
You complain about the interviewer making no attempts to lead a good interview, well sorry to bust your bubble but the effort to sell yourself falls entirely on YOU and only YOU. It's unfortunate if you did have an annoying interviewer, but in the actual workplace you'll have annoying coworkers too, and you need to know how to deal with them effectively to get the job done. Your focus at the phone interview should have been on selling yourself to get invited back to a second interview. At that interview you can then judge what the work atmosphere is like, and whether it's a friendly environment or not.
The interview doesn't only test your technical knowledge but your personality too. Your description makes it relatively obvious that you failed in all those aspects, and to me you really didn't come off as a mature responsible potential employee that I would ever want to hire. Sorry.
make world, not war
Your statement is meaningless without at least stating the admissions policy of the college that you are attending. For example, in Michigan, Michigan State has 'selective admission', which mostly means you remember to wipe your chip when you drool, whereas the University of Michigan has 'highly selective admission' which means you wipe your chin when you drool, but you don't drool as often. Northern Michigan University has 'open admission' which means you remember to wear clothes most of the time. Getting A's with the clothes most of the timers is an easier task than getting A's with the don't drool most the timers(and the course work is actually designed to separate the good from the bad in each category).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Parent's interpretation is closer to reality than most people might want to see. Even google cannot completely eliminate bureaucracy and politics in the workplace. After all, where there is money, there will be politicians. The best it can do is minimize the chance of conflicts and the impact to productivity thereof.
Of course, parent's is a rather cynical viewpoint, but that doesn't make it any less true. But some of these issues are present in many other organizations, not just Google. That's probably why a programmer who moves around a lot (once every 3-5 years) ends up getting paid better.
Few years ago, this type of interviewing would seem pointless to me, as well. However, since then, I have become a team leader at my company and had several opportunities to interview candidates for positions in our development team. Managing developers has taught me that technical knowledge and years of experience in programming language X on platform Y, although important, is secondary to one simple property of a human individual: intelligence. I know it sounds unfair but I can say in all honesty: I don't worry too much if an experienced developer never coded in Ruby. He'll learn it in 3 days! What I worry about is whether his poor logic will cause our applications to run slowly or our projects to run late. That's what questions like these help me figure out at an interview.
BTW, the first question is interesting. I'd start by dropping one marble from the first floor, moving up 3 floors at a time, dropping the same marble and keeping one in reserve. Therefore, if a drop from the floor n was successful and a drop from the floor n+3 wasn't, I'd try the floor n+2 with the second marble. If it doesn't break, n+2 is the answer. If it does, it's n+1.
It's more important.
My reasoning may be a little simplistic but it gos like this: If your skills are 50% below the standard for your job it means you will be worth 1/2 as much to the company. A problem which can be handled in different ways without a large financial impact. I.e. Smaller salary to match your skill level, which increases as you are trained and grow with practice.
If however you are a misfit you could drag down the performance of other people. The wrong kind of misfit can cause your best people to quit or just not like the job any more.
What's the wrong kind of misfit? Imagine if you will an office like Slashdot (I hear google looks like a bank by comparison). How would Malder, Hemos and Cowboy Neal cope with the kind of person who won't even answer you unless addressed by his formal title I.e. "Dr. Doe", not "John" or "Doe". Worse yet "Mrs. Row" who will start an argument if called "Miss Row".
PS: An eager and ambitius recruit with below standard skills may be a great investment. Like buying a shoddy looking house which just needs a coat of paint at 1/2 the going rate.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Better, but still not optimal. I'm assuming you want to minimize the worst case (though I think mine also has better average case).
10 floors at a time has a worst case of 19 drops when the answer is floor 99.
Instead, the first marble should use a larger step size at the bottom and a smaller step size at the top, such that (number of drops so far) + (step size) is constant. The sequence is then something like 14,27,39,50,60,69,77,84,90,95 which gives a worst case of 14 drops.
Smart comments. Let me put this another way. Really good engineers/designers/analysts seem to "know" just what their clients need. EXCEPTIONAL engineers/designers/analysts work hard to DISCOVER what their clients need via TONS OF INTERVIEWS. That Requires A Lot of People Skillz.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Google has a hiring committee. I'm not sure of the exact size but it is on the order of 6-18 people. If any one of the hiring committee rejects you then they do not offer you a job. They are more interested in stopping false negatives than they are in stopping false positives. I think false negatives are potentially as damaging as false positives. At least you can fire the false positive. The false negative may go to work for a competitor, with a bad memory of Google, and not go back onto the job market again for years.