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.'"

Comments

"Fit Factor"

[Architect_sasyr]

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 ;)

Re:"Fit Factor"

[rsmah]

Business is a team sport. The "fit" of an individual is as important as raw skill/talent.

Cheers,
Rob

Re:"Fit Factor"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"Fit Factor"

[Ihlosi]

remember: there's no "I" in team. but there's no "we" either!!!

There's a "me", though.

Re:"Fit Factor"

[bynary]

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.

Re:"Fit Factor"

[rmckeethen]

Someone who can learn quickly is more desirable than someone who knows Java like the back of their hand.

Interestingly, having spent the past few weeks interviewing, I tend to think desirability of 'quick learners' vs. 'skilled experts' depends upon the size of the company. Small companies prefer quick learners because there are always many more tasks to do than skilled employees available to handle the tasks. In this situation, quick learners have the advantage because they can more easily grow in a company where the jobs aren't always well-defined. If it turns out that the Java guy you just hired can also manage the corporate web site, this is a real plus in a small firm. Having people who can do lots of things, and do them reasonably well, is absolutely necessary when your company is limited by the number of resources available.

At large companies though, the situation is reversed; hiring managers in large corporations are often distanced from the actual work getting done, so their 'win' is to hire the person with the best current skills. This way, hiring managers get the most 'bang' for their corporate hiring buck because the expert employee is immediately productive in the job. In addition, larger companies spend much more time managing a workforce that expands and contracts depending on the economy. Human resources are just that -- something you aquire when you need to increase production, and get rid of when you don't. Overall, it's far easier to manage a large corporate workforce when employees have very narrowly defined skill-sets that you can swap in and out depending on the needs of the company.

In a nutshell, small companies want people who can get things done, where large companies want someone who can do one job and only one job, but still do that job better than anyone else.

Is this a job ad?

[Timesprout]

Seems like quite a few people have been leaving Google lately

Would you fail if...

[niceone]

Would you fail if... you threw up at the first mention of the word "Google-y"? Ah, that's me out...

If it were any other company...

[strobexii]

I'd translate it thus

Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, You'll be working long hours. Weekends, possibly holidays...

adaptable Management will shuffle you around as it sees fit

and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, Promotion?! Haha! Here's a compromise: you're getting a new boss.

and just gets stuff done. Get to work and stop asking questions!

But it's Google, so we know better. Or do we? Seriously, which side are we taking today?

Re:If it were any other company...

[cyberkahn]

The funny thing about comedy is that it is often true.

Re:Best benefit

[Timesprout]

Of course. I arrive into work every day by driving my rolls-royce into my personal pool. I won't even consider working for any company that does not support my rock and roll lifestyle commute.

School education

[Anonymous Coward]

School education has nothing to do with how skilled you are and how well you can get the job done.

Too much spin

[ushering05401]

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 recruiter email

[Ricin]

"I found your contact information on the Internet. I am interested to know
your openness to new job opportunities and find out more about your past
work experience." ... etc

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?

Chief Culture Officer

[Albanach]

Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy

This is from their Chief Culture Officer. Do as I say, not as I do?

Re:Chief Culture Officer

[ez76]

That's not a title. She's a Native American, you insensitive clod.

No interviews required

[El_Muerte_TDS]

All google needs is your unique google id and your name and they can find the rest themselves. Saves both parties a lot of time.

I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago

[skurk]

A bit OT, but could be helpful to others applying for a job at Google:

I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago. I didn't really know what I was getting into, as I applied just for fun.

After the initial emails and phone calls, I was contacted by a local Google employee (developer) for a detailed phone interview. He wanted to ask me "some technical questions" I was told.

Great, shouldn't be a problem? I got ready for C/C++/UNIX specific questions.

He called and we did some minor chit-chat before beginning the interview. But, to my surprise, here's what he asked:

The first question:
"Imagine you have two marbles and a 100-story building. You are told that the marbles will break if they are dropped from a certain floor. Figure out a way, as effectivly as possible, how high you can drop the marbles before they break. Remember, it could be the 1st floor, it could be the 99th."

Second question:
"Let's say you have a computer with 2M RAM. This computer has a hard drive (with lots of free space) and a 100M file which you should sort. Let me know how you, as effectivly as possible, sort the file."

Third question:
"We take the computer from the previous question and replace the hard drive with a network adapter. You have no local storage but the RAM. You will receive one million eight-digit phone numbers through a TCP stream which you shall sort in RAM. You are now allowed to send any data before all the numbers have been sorted. How would you solve this?"

Needless to say, the interview didn't go very well and ended with him saying "Well.. I've heard enough. Buh-bye."

Re:I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago

[ps236]

Woah! You had to answer those questions on the phone whilst he was talking to you?

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? ;)

Re:I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago

[skurk]

Woah! You had to answer those questions on the phone whilst he was talking to you?

Yup, on the phone. I have 22+ years of programming on my back, and I applied for a position named "system developer". If I knew they were looking for some search engine optimizing guru, I wouldn't even bother contacting them in the first place.

BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'? Do they want the file in byte order (..)

Ah, yes. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.

IIRC, the correct answers (according to Google) were:

1st question: Start on the 14th floor. If it breaks, start with the second marble on the 1st floor and increase until it breaks. If it doesn't, go to the 14+13th floor, then 14+13+12th, etc. That gives you a maximum of 14 attempts.

2nd question: Split the file into 2M segments on disk, sort them (for example with quicksort) then use mergesort to get everything back together.

3rd question: Sort everything in RAM using bit vectors.

If you disagree with the answers, contact Google. :-)

Know your audience

[evilviper]

"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.

Do those traits include reading Slashdot at 03:24AM, Monday morning?

*crosses fingers*

Paternity leave

[heffrey]

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).

Here's my inside scoop at a google interview

[dummkopf]

Passed the first stage with HR, then had the interview with one of the engineers. The guy asked the mandatory question "tell me what you do" but after two minutes cut me off as it was clear he was not interested in optimization problems in physics. It was clear from the start that we spoke "different languages" and that lunchtime was looming in Mountain View, i.e., he was in a rush. Then he asked me some test questions. For example: "Suppose I give you a phonebook and ask you for a name, how long would that take?" As you can see, the question and answer are wide open. I told him that if the book had N pages, it would take me worst case N lookups. He was not pleased and asked for a faster solution. Hence I said, OK, I throw it into a hash and then the lookup is O(1). Then he complained that there would be too much preprocessing (although I would expect google to hash things...). He wanted "something in between". Hence I said, OK, let's sort the book and then partition to the name wanted, i.e., O(log(N)). Then the guy asked what log that was. I said that it does NOT matter since, in the O-notation prefactors are irrelevant and as you might know, you can always transform a log from one base to another by just a multiplicative factor. That was not a pleasing answer and he kept asking me to what base. Eventually I told him base 2, if he really had to know, but it did not matter. I admit I did not well in the interview, but the guy at the other end did NO effort in leading a good interview. The next question was (since I do some distributed computing) if I have many clients and they want to upload data to a server, what is the best way to do that. Again waaaaay open. I said, well, the client sends a request and when the server is free it answers and gets the data. Not good. Might overwhelm the server. Of course he would not tell me what he wanted to hear so I poked around a bit to realize that he wanted that the server floods the network with a "I am free signal" and then clients can upload the data. So what about reaching the limit of the network? "Well, that is not an issue here". Aha, I thought, I see, an issue is only what the guy deems to be an issue. At that point it was noon in Mountain View and he suddenly wanted to hang up. No "do you have any other questions?" or anything that shows good manners from an interviewer. Hence I decided to stop him cold and said "I have some questions for you". You could feel how pissed he was about this -- after all lunch is looming around the corner -- and he gave me the probably shortest answers you could think. For questions which I had gathered from whitepapers published by google (and there are only FEW out there) he would always say "I cannot talk about that".

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. Granted, this was one guy only, but letting him onto candidates which are not necessarily computer scientists. Hm... Needless to mention, Ihad a negative email the net day. Note that I did NOT apply for a job at google. One day I had an email from a HR person in mymailbox with the Subject "Hello from Google",and that's when this story started...

Re:Here's my inside scoop at a google interview

[Shados]

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 :)

Re:What they mean to say is...

[e2d2]

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.