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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.'"
So they basically want a Google-y employee or, put another way, someone with the right fit factor. Does this mean that a highly qualified person, skilled and high standing in the community, but prefers to be quiet, in the dark and working alone won't make it?
;)
I ask because my own company puts so much store in the "fit factor" that they end up hiring people with less skills than the other candidates.
Do I want to work at google? Well now, that's between me and HR
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Really? The idea of wanting to go work for someone else seems strange to me. I work in my current job to pay the bills, at the end of the day. "Culture" is just a side benefit of that. Would I work at a place I didn't like? Not if I had a choice. Would I leave my job to go work for someone because their office seemed "fun"? No.
I'm going to start my own company, personally.
I gone through the initial process with Google twice, with the same outcome. It seems to me they need to improve their HR process, as I've gone through a phone interview, but then told I wasn't a good fit.
If you look at my background and resume, I think you would concur that the positions I was interviewed for weren't a good fit, but because it was Google, I gave it a shot. But, fool me once, fool me twice and all that. If they call again, I'll let them know how I feel about the whole process.
Not that Google is breaking down my door, but I wouldn't work there just based on this article.
One of the top gripes I have with corporate culture is all the bullshit language that is employed. What is this 'Happiness Survey?' This smells of new-age rebranding. Aren't they talking about 'workplace satisfaction?' Don't most companies conduct workplace satisfaction surveys? The companies I have worked for do.
What is this Culture Czar position? You take workplace issues to HR, who coordinates with all other departments to implement the corporate workplace vision. Some companies are better at it than others, but rebranding the position doesn't make Google any better at it.
Google produces innovation based on incentive... which is basic capitalism. It's great that they want the incentives to be more than just cash, but this just feels like a while lot of cheerleading. These tactics don't strike me as being professional. It feels like more spin in an age of way-too-much-spin.
Regards.
Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done
Odd for an organization that prides itself on the contrary through their bit on favoring exclusivist universities and the concepts that go with them. They would do well to take a few pages from the concept of Jante Law to have an honest effort at meeting those concepts. That includes doing away with everything that connects them to Stanford in terms of exclusivity as well, as that hasn't helped in that effort as well.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"I found your contact information on the Internet. I am interested to know ... etc
your openness to new job opportunities and find out more about your past
work experience."
A few months ago I got a few like these (not copies of the same text). A bit spammish but with restrain. I remember being surprised and wondering how many people were getting these. I wouldn't want to relocate to another country so I never replied. I'm also not a big Google fan personally (call me paranoid). Especially the cultivated "kool-aid factor" (aka PR) ticks me off.
Anyone else been contacted this way?
It just shows the difference in cultures between the USA and western Europe that paternity leave of a "couple of weeks off" can be viewed as a perk. Sadly as a Brit we are much closer to the USA than the rest of Europe (especially Scandinavia and Finland).
first question: Find the density of the marble, then calculuate the ... oh what do I know.
:-)
Second question: Radix sort on disk.
Third question: Binary weighted tree in memory.
BTW I hate job interviews like this. I did one for RIM (in like 2002 ish) and at one point after answering like 5 different "puzzles" I turned around and asked the interview "here are two 1024-bit numbers, multiply them quickly." To which he replied "I'm asking the questions." I just got up and left. I don't want to work somewhere where I have to sit pretty and beg all the time just to get paid. I'm sure had I taken the job with RIM I'd be one of those "middle name" people (mass murderer) types eventually. Sure I have to please my boss by finishing my work, but I certainly don't kiss ass.
Next time you have an interview like that, just stump the interviewer, see how they like pressure.
In all honesty, if you don't have prior job experience and/or a portfolio of projects, they can't really tell what you're capable of anyways. High pressure interview questions do not reflect the job scenario in the slightest.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you're as sensitive to rejection as your post suggests, you're almost certainly not going to prosper (let alone be happy) in the no-bullshit, no-praise zone that is Google.
Politeness in technical companies is a choice, not a requirement.
If you think this is harsh or needless, consider what this says about what is important to you vs. what is important to them. Consider that Google may have been doing you a favor.
To be sure, there are plenty of workplaces were people play nicey-nice games, avoid confrontation, and focus on employee "messaging" rather than substantive content of communication.
Such companies are really pleasant places at which to work, for most of the year. Then in the winter you get your annual review and you spend a quarter wondering why you got blindsided because "things seemed to be going so well."
Unless this is the sort of thing you've been doing before, it's unlikely you'd be able to do that - I'd have expected you'd need some time to work out the answers. I know I would, and I've been programming for 25+ years.
The first question is quite easy to answer -ish. I guess they meant 'as efficiently as possible' - not as 'effectively as possible' (in which case, as long as you got the right answer you'd meet the requirements). To get the basic concept isn't hard, but to get it "as efficiently as possible" you'd need some thought, which would be hard on the phone. (You go up in steps (eg 10 floors at a time) until the first marble breaks, then go back a step and go up one floor at a time until the second marble breaks - the "hard" bit is knowing what size steps to use for the first part to be most efficient)
BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'? Do they want the file in byte order (all the 0 bytes first, then all the 1 bytes) If so, then you could do that with 256 bytes of data RAM... Maybe they want it in BIT order - that would only need 8 bytes :) If this isn't what they want, then it would help to know WHAT you are sorting - eg a radix sort could be good here, but it might depend on the type of data
Were you allowed to ask how much memory was taken up by the OS, network stack and what programming language you were using to guess how much memory was taken up by the program?
For the 3rd question I'd have difficulty. AFAICS you'd have to use some form of compression to be able to do it (you have to hold 8M characters in 2M RAM - you could convert the phone numbers to 'real' numbers, but that'd still be 4MB in 2MB RAM). I reckon I'd be able to do it, but I'd guess it would take at least several hours to work out the nitty gritty - which sounds dumb for a phone interview.. (There's a cool way I can think of that would sort up to 10 million 7 digit numbers in 2MB RAM - but it would need 12MB to sort any number of 8 digit numbers - and this would rely on the numbers being unique, which isn't specified)
Could I offer to donate £50 from my first pay cheque to buy Google some more RAM? ;)
At another company, sure it might be like that. Though at the G, it's more like:
Flexible = You don't turn down opportunities to do a variety of interesting things.
Adaptable = Able to fit in well with a variety of people (the world doesn't revolve around you)
!Hierarchy focussed = Don't care for power games, politics and related bullshit. Happy to field requests from outside your dept.
Get stuff done = Like above, no power games but actually like to do your work instead of a multitude of 'meta-work'.
J.
I've been asked all of these questions at (fairly) recent interviews. They're definite favourites at City (of London) type institutions.
The first question can actually end up using a little calculus - you need to advance by square-root of the number of floors IIRC.
Two I can't remember my answer for, but think there were a couple of variations.
Three requires you to realise that the numbers are unique, within a finite range, and you have sufficient *bits* for a radix sort.
When I worked at AMD I always kinda smirked at the contrasts between the IBM campus [where I was a liason] and the AMD home office [in sunnyvale where I went for meetings]. IBM had all sorts of "earth tones", waterfalls, lounge areas, and darker lighting [with personal lights in the cubicles]. AMD on the other hand was a fluorescent wasteland of equal sized cubicles and green paint on the walls. Don't get me wrong, the OUTSIDE of the buildings looked nice, but the inside was very sterile and boring.
:-(
AMD would have been a bit nicer to work for if they had catered to the out of towners. Nothing like flying 3000 miles to then have to pay for the hotel and food out of pocket [expenses for out of country employees took 6 weeks to get at the least].
Where I work now it's fairly sterile too. We have a few posters up on the wall, but mostly it's a sea of beige and fluorescents. Fortunately, there is a pub just behind the office so I can sneak into there for a quick bite to eat when I get a case of the Mondays. That and we're tastefully colourful during lunch hour discussions [e.g. not PC-centric] so we can act like adults.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Stop being so literal and read the article. The point of the questions is not necessarily to get the correct answer, they are interested in your though processes.
Over the years I have had more than my fair share of jobs and many of them I got even though I failed to answer the technical questions. What I did was explain my thinking, even on multiple choice tests, I write my thinking along side. You are never ever going to have to solve the marble problem, but they want to know if you have heard of things like a binary search and more importantly how do you respond in situations that are "out of the box".
It aims to demonstrate problem solving, communication, breadth of knowledge. They do not want you to sit in silence for 5 minutes and then given them the right answer, they want you to explain ALL the ideas you have about how to solve the problem, and then the criteria you may use for selecting a solution from the available ideas. Arguing the toss about the number of marbles, the mass of the marbles, etc. is not going to get you anywhere.
Art is the mathematics of emotion
I also interviewed with Google... did the 3 phone interviews, wacky questions, flying out to CA at odd hours, and ultimately got rejected. However, I think it was overall a great experience for me. I do not feel bitter about the process and in fact feel that it probably helped motivate me to become a better computer scientist. The impression that I got from its employees is that they are truly in love with computer science and I would do well for myself to take a similar approach to my craft.
In fact, I was asked soon after my Google experience to help interview a group of candidates at my current company, and I decided to take the Google approach. While there were very few people who were able to ace the battery of questions, there was an interesting effect. That is, you learn very quickly by asking those types of questions the kinds of people that YOU would want to work with. There are those people who simple brush those questions off by saying, "I don't know that... I've never needed to know that..." and there are those who try to work through the problems and seem enthusiastic about learning the solution. Which of those two would you rather interact with on a daily basis?
-m
Do some back of the envelope calculations, take into account that the terminal velocity of a marble-sized hailstone is 45 ft/s, and you'll estimate that terminal velocity occurs within 15 floors.
Drop it at 7, and do a linear search on either side of that depending on whether it breaks or not. That yields less than 14.
I have no experience with google, but it is my experience elsewhere that in HR, "fairly flexible" means "will work long hours without compensation," "adaptable" means "will not make a fuss when his/her review date comes and goes without action" and/or "will accept that any bureaucratic injustices with the company do not exist, and if he/she has a grievance, it is actually the one filing the grievance who is in the wrong". And "not focusing on titles and hierarchy"...well that just means "not focusing on titles and hierarchy while those above him/her do."
Again, I don't know much about Google in specific, but this is the way HR tends to word things in most other companies.
But no, I'm not bitter at all.
I have to agree here. I work for a big 'ol boring publishing company as a software engineer. It's not the "sexiest" place to work. No, there's no free sushi in the caf. But, they pay me slightly above market, they have a liberal telecommute policy, generous time-off, have great health benefits. I sometimes think about sending my resume to Google, but then i think - do i really want to be part of that elitist techno-snob culture? (I have a degree from a state college woud they even consider me in the first place???) And what am I really getting for it - looooong hours and the ability to _tell_ people i work for google. That's really all it is. I mean, just how much more do non-managers make at google than other companies?
I think I'll take my nice work/life balance with a pretty darn good, although not earth-shattering, salary.
They told you the correct answers! How very nice of them.
After 3 such phone calls, and a plane trip to one of their offices so they could grill me with such questions for 6+ hours all the more I got was 'we've decided to halt the interview process.' When I attempted to ask them why (really honstely so I could improve whatever skilset they felt I didn't have) I got no response.
Found it to be a bit on the rude side.
END
This is something I realized after 10+ years - smaller is better. I started out at a small shop and got my break doing everything and anything I could to help. I had to get along with 5 other people that were pretty much just like me.
Then I "moved up" for more pay to a mid size company, not bad. Pretty good actually.
Then eventually went to the largest privately owned company in the world. Benefits were great, but I was faceless. I was expected to do more work for less, but my heart wasn't in it. For some reason I couldn't help feeling used. Why? Because I felt detached from the company. Their goals were not my goals and they could have given a shit about my goals.
Maybe it was a personal issue, but at 30+ years old you simply come to a point in your life you make a decision. You either buy in and ass kissing becomes your specialty or you have a "life crisis" and try to find some sanity somewhere else. I chose the later and now work for a small company again. I don't think I'll ever go back to a large company, it just feels inhuman and unnatural.
But to each his own, some people don't have the same issues with authority that I have. More power to them.
You might be interested to read Two Kinds of Judgement, which discusses this issue in some depth and explains why you shouldn't take such rejection too personally.
They're not only an R&D house -- they actually have daily operations and need people to run things as well. If they only hired geniuses, they'd end up with a lot of bored geniuses in no time.
-b.
In regards to #2... Wait a second, they just want it sorted by BYTES? Wow...
1) Make 256-element array
2) Iterate through file, incrementing array elements to count occurrences of each byte value
3) Iterate through array, outputting desired number of each value.
Total storage required: 256 x 4 bytes, supporting file sizes up to 4GB, working in O(n) time.
Of course they probably meant the file contained a list of strings or numbers, but then it's their fault for being too vague...
(I applied on their website, and didn't get past the first screenings... Guess my 2.9 GPA wasn't good enough, huh? Stupid history courses...)
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
I can't be 100% certain that they just read my gmail accounts, but I was in raving paranoid mode soon after the first interview.
/.ers about through my published gmail account. Cool again, for I had recently posted on those topics on /., then received follow up emails from like minded people which led to long email conversations that ranged into other themes. Both questions were almost exactly lifted from those email threads, but not from the /. postings. I had the first indications that my Clark Kent identity and my AntiCypher identity had been compromised. I know of only two close friends who know both, and neither are the types to let on, or really care.
First question was from my dim, distant past, close to the dawn of telecommunications. Nothing at all I would list on a CV that only highlights the best of my recent career. Cool, thought I, I know this because I did my thesis research in it. Now, I never finished my thesis, and never published my results because private industry came courting and I haven't mentioned this on a CV in at least 15 years. Some of my closest and geekiest friends understand it, though, so who knows.
Next two questions were about some technology I emailed some
The next question was straight from a forum where I've never used my real name, or any alias except for a gmail account that was linked through an invite at some point. Since I long ago made a conscious decision to never be professionally associated with that forum, and took extreme precautions to avoid posting from traceable IP addresses and the like. I kind of stammered through a half-assed response about knowing very little on the subject. At that point I suddenly realised that something wasn't right.
The rest of the interview alternated between topics on my CV and archaic systems I haven't admitted to knowing in a long time. Clearly the first interviewers from Google had access to information about my early career and life back to childhood. It was exactly like sitting a government security clearance interview, they already had the information, the interview was just to confirm you and your past were in agreement. I knew all the answers, because the first interviews were obviously running from a script that I could have written.
Later interviewers just wanted to know really detailed technical things that ranged all over and some of it I had to admit I didn't know. One interview lasted about 5 minutes, the guy knew I wrote some programs about 20 years ago, so he started asking questions as if I were still actively coding. When I told him I no longer write code, he wondered why I had applied for a job as a programmer, but then figured out I was being recruited for other things and politely ended the interview.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on