
Help wanted: Google hiring in 2011 - shawndumas
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/help-wanted-google-hiring-in-2011.html
======
alecco
They called me, made me endure multiple long phone interviews and it all ended
up with a 1 line rejection email 1 month after the last interview. Some of the
interviewers were ugly and just trying to find a weak spot in my memory of
obscure acronym names.

They contacted me again the following year and I asked never to be contacted
by Google HR anymore. They are unprofessional and almost disrespectful. And
for jobs paying below industry average. Don't waste your time.

~~~
cdavid
The rejection without rationale is frustrating. I understand it is common
procedure in the US, but it isn't in most other countries.

~~~
spenrose
It's common because the legal environment around hiring is so fraught. It's
not merely a cultural habit; there's significant money at stake.

~~~
cdavid
I was not saying it was not required - I am sure there is a good reason
(although there are big companies which do give feedback). But when you are in
European or Asian market, where it is not common, it is a disadvantage for the
company.

It first gives a bad impression if you are rejected, and maybe even worse,
since you don't know why you are rejected, you don't know whether you should
try reapply later, etc... so they loose a few good potentials I guess.

------
dadkins
"There’s something at Google for everyone"

...except for the 99% of applicants they reject.

~~~
brown9-2
As someone who didn't make the cut, seeing blog posts like this or job
postings from them pop up on my RSS reader _really_ stings.

~~~
matwood
Use the rejection as motivation. Go build something that Google will want and
have them buy you out. You get to become an employee and they end up paying
you way more for the privilege of hiring you.

I look at a place like Google the same way I looked at grad school. A place to
go where you can hopefully meet a co-founder :)

~~~
apike
Even better: go build something that Google will want, then reject their
buyout offer and build a profitable company. Best revenge ever.

~~~
bane
And then grow to be bigger than Google, buy Google, then fire the people who
rejected you.

~~~
hugh3
And then achieve enlightenment and overcome petty grievances, hire back the
people who rejected you, and have a big ol' group hug with them.

------
thetrumanshow
I setup a poll to see how many of you won't ever apply to Google simply
because you don't think you have a snowball's chance.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140822>

------
shawnps
I've been chasing internships and jobs at Google on and off for the past two
years or so. I'm still in college, and I met a recruiter for SREs at a
conference. After talking to her on the phone, I decided it wasn't worth the
stress, and called off any further interviews. I suck at interviewing (I get
nervous pretty easily), so I've tried to do various things on the side where
the pressure isn't so high (competitions, side projects, etc.) but companies
still don't seem to care. So I think I'd be happiest working for myself, on
something that I'm passionate about :)

~~~
olegious
Why not just try to get better at interviewing? Although working for yourself
is great, many of the skills you use in an interview will serve you well in
other areas of life.

~~~
shawnps
I'd like to, but I feel like I've exhausted my options. I've interviewed all
over the place, and I'm generally a nice guy and I think I'm pretty smart, but
people seem to never want to hire me, I dunno why.

I forgot to add this: the most recent interview that was discouraging was with
a large travel-related company. A recruiter reached out to me (so, I didn't
even apply), gave me a few questions to complete that I spent hours on. I
worked super hard, typeset it in LaTeX, and figured it was way beyond what
they normally receive from candidates. The recruiter even told me they were
very impressed. I went in to interview, chatted with some engineers (and I
even taught the second guy a few things, like the rename command), and never
heard back. I emailed the recruiter and asked why. The recruiter said that the
team simply needed to hire a senior candidate. I felt stupid for wasting my
time.

Something similar happened with Jane Street; they wanted solutions to
questions in OCaml. I spent a long time on the problems, submitted them in
Scheme, Python, and OCaml, all using recursion, higher order functions, etc.
After submitting the code, they turned me down.

Yelp also turned me down after I spent a long time on the problem they gave
me. I did what the problem asked, including writing unit tests. It was fun to
write since it was in Python, and I like Python. But again, turned down after
submitting the code.

Also, I figured it wasn't a problem with the code, as I had friends who were
hired by Amazon and Google review it and they said it looked fine.

These are the types of things that are making me want to stop interviewing.

What I'd like to do is become more active in the HN community, and eventually
start working on projects related to studying Japanese or learning about
Japan. I'm working on a small project now that will show a new Chinese
character per day, because kanji-a-day.com is currently the top result in
Google for "kanji of the day", and it's not nice looking.

~~~
ekanes
Hey Shawn, a couple pieces of admittedly unsolicited feedback in case it's
helpful. a) It'd be great to check out your website rather than a linkedin
page. People want a sense of who you are as a person rather than just a
resume. b) Building something (anything) will give you more credibility as a
doer. c) re "First place in National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition,
2010" -- Congrats! That's pretty amazing.

~~~
shawnps
I always welcome feedback, thank you! I didn't realize how important a
personal site is. I actually recently bought the smallest Linode available, so
I'd like to get shawnps.net up soon. I've been doing schoolwork and working on
the Kanji website, but I'll try to get a personal site up soon.

And thanks, my team and I worked hard at the competition. I always thought it
was kind of cool that had a post about us on the White House blog. The website
is down now, so here's a cached copy:

<http://tinyurl.com/5uzs5yp>

------
siculars
What is interesting is how entrepreneurial and "start-upy" this post is. He is
basically trying to appeal to all the engineering candidates who would be
qualified to work for Google and not any of the other opportunities that are
available to them.

Is this part of the change in leadership-think at Google with Larry taking the
reins? I know that Wall Street had a huge allergic reaction to the numbers
Google had been posting in r&d/hiring/talent. And I think Google backed off
for a while on all that to their detriment. Now with new leadership perhaps we
will see a renewed vigor to solidify talent.

Talent, by definition, is scarce. Time will tell.

------
Smerity
I applied for a summer internship with Google between 2009-2010 (remember:
Australian summer!). I ended up making it through but even for an intern there
were four rounds of phone interviews. To be honest I actually enjoyed those
interviews though I did spend a long time preparing for them. I also enjoyed
being able to poke and prod and ask questions.

The process was grueling however and I know a large number of my highly
competent friends never made it through. Some of it is due to Google having a
policy of "assume the worst" in order to try and reduce the number of bad
hires but I think some of them was as the interviewers were too harsh. One of
them had a phone interview ended almost immediately if not getting (what to me
seems like a trick) question.

"Given an infinitely long linked list which you can only traverse once select
a random item with O(1) storage."

Google tried to get me as an intern again the following summer but I'd decided
to instead intern at a local startup[1] that are doing well. The CEO trusts
me, gives me enough power to really help the company and is showing me how a
real startup works, both good and bad. It's an atmosphere that Google just
doesn't have anymore.

To be honest I do miss a number of things from Google, such as the stunning
internal developer tools, the academic/computer sciencey atmosphere and the
amazing people but I still far prefer the startup I'm in currently. I just
don't think Google registers as a startup anymore.

[1] <http://www.freelancer.com/>

~~~
vlad
If a data structure can be arbitrarily long, this implies some kind of a data
structure involving a linked list to avoid wasting memory. Unfortunately, it
really is a bare-bones linked list, which means that we don't know the length
until we traverse it.

What would we have done if we knew the length? We could pick a random number
between 1 and the length, and then traverse that many items to get to our
random item. Since we don't know the length, it means the question is, how
will you know where to stop?

Constant growth for storage means you start with a fixed number of slots (lets
call this number X) and keep them through the process. You could put items
into these X slots, such as one out of every ten that you pass. That would
mean you could pick items by rolling a 10-sided dice that shows a 10, and put
them into one of the slots.

A problem is that you would have to remove past randomly-selected numbers to
make room for new ones, and you would be biased towards items that appear
later in the series. This would not be random.

And what about a string one character long (in this case, we can pretend we
had been given an array, a string, a queue, or whatever) ? What if, at the
start, we always select the first item to be the random choice? That would
mean that an abrupt stop would give us the correct answer for a length of one.
Another interesting thing is that we can store item one into a single
container, instead of needing X (where X is a constant) slots.

What about two? Well, we would compare the container with item two and decide
that the random choice for the container should be either what it already
contains (item one) or item two, with a 50/50 split. Great! So our algorithm
works for a length of one as well as two.

This is starting to feel like we've established a base case (what happens when
the list has only one item?). We may be on track to show that constantly
looking at the next item and comparing it to the one in the container may just
work. If so, we could have a proof by induction.

So if we were at item three where the whole list is only three items long,
then a random generator would have picked it with a probability of 1/3. So if
we're comparing item three to whatever is in the container, then if a 3-sided
dice rolls a 1, we can set container to be item three. That works. But what
about the other 2/3 chance, where it could be item one or two? In that 2/3
chance, we pick the container. The container contains only one item (the first
or the second, whichever one won the first coin flip previously.) For this to
be a valid idea, both item one and item two should have had a fair chance to
be in the container currently with a 50/50 split, correct? And we know that it
was.

So when we come to item four, we replace the container with item four with a
probability of 1/4, or use the value in the container with probability of 3/4
(e.g. 1-1/4 = 3/4, or the rest of the time.) The point is that at each step,
the container contains the random value of the previous n-1 number of items.

~~~
evo
Another neat way to look at it--the probability of any given element is the
probability of it being swapped in times the probability it isn't swapped out
in each successive item. For A[p]:

(1/p) _((p)/(p+1))_ ((p+1)/(p+2)) ... ((n-1)/n))

e.g. the fifth element's probability in an eight-element list is

1/5 * 5/6 * 6/7 *7/8

Since the numerator of each successive term cancels out the denominator of the
last, the product is always 1/n.

------
prpon
The post mentions _Google is still the same entrepreneurial company it was
when I started, encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high-
reward opportunities._

I do not know what the current salary/options numbers are but is it really
high-reward for the top notch engineers they are seeking at this point in the
game?

~~~
slewis
I used to work there, started post-IPO, left in December 2010. IMO the answer
is absolutely. But that's all I feel I should say.

~~~
dotBen
Maybe you can't comment/it isn't appropriate to comment slewis but my
experience is that Googlers who leave with just their regular option grant
don't really walk away with anything spectacular in terms of wealth from the
stock. Also factor in that salary tends to market-rate and rarely more.

However, it is known for engineers working on successful teams and products to
obtain additional grants that can lead to them leaving Google with several
$million worth of stock.

I'm not sure if slewis's 'absolutely' answer is based on something like the
latter - in which case you have to make sure you are working on high-value
projects that are going somewhere.

~~~
slewis
Sorry, didn't see this earlier. In addition to project awards (which are
significant as you say) there are individual bonuses and stock refreshers for
top contributors that can also be 'significant'. Sorry for the vague terms.
Further, getting promoted to the upper levels can be rewarding as well.

But you are competing against 'top-notch' (to quote op of this thread)
engineers for those types of awards. You'll also sometimes hear complaints
about politics in the promotion process. It seemed mostly fair to me based on
the promotions of engineers whose work I was familiar with.

------
cynest
I just got back from my university's career fair (Caltech). It was a bit
interesting to see that while Google had poorly-advertised information
sessions, it was Facebook who had people on the floor recruiting. It seemed
like Google was content to stay in their high castle, while Facebook was
actually willing to try and recruit possible talent. If this continues, I
doubt Google is going to compete with Facebook getting the influx of talent
they say they want in this post

~~~
dye
Google never even bothered to show up while I was at Tech... I'm at Facebook
now - come join us!

~~~
cynest
Physics major.

~~~
fourstar
I hear they make the best programmers...

~~~
hugh3
I'm a computational physicist, and let me tell you: physicists make _lousy_
programmers. (I refer less to myself and more to the folks who wrote the
indecipherable code I have to work on...)

------
cletus
Speaking as someone who has been through the process now twice [1], once
unsuccessfully and once successfully, I can certainly sympathize with the
frustrations, particularly the lack of feedback.

The unfortunate thing is that Google wants to avoid their system being gamed.

There can be some luck of the draw both when it comes to recruiters (mine was
excellent) and interviewers. Effort is made to normalize for that sort of
thing but no system is perfect.

My experience has been that the top tier companies are all selective and keen
to avoid false positives. Google is really no different in this regard.

I can say that being a Googler of only a few months now it is an amazing place
to work and well worth the effort, frustrations notwithstanding.

[1]: <http://www.cforcoding.com/2010/07/my-google-interview.html>

~~~
alecco

      > My experience has been that the top tier companies are all selective
      > and keen to avoid false positives. Google is really no different
      > in this regard.
    

That's not what I've seen. One of the dodgiest tech managers I've ever
encountered went to work on a very, very senior tech development position in
Google. This guy regularly spied on other manager's email inboxes every night
(disrupting regular email backups) among other things. He had no
qualifications other than being political and a bit lucky. Zero. The team he
left behind improved a lot afterwards (and he quit suddenly, being very
irresponsible.) The delusion of googlers is ridiculous. A big part of getting
to Google seems to be plain luck with moment/position and interviewers/HR
involved. Outside Mountain View and a few teams here and there (like
V8/Chrome), Google is just another big software/advertisement company.

~~~
cdavid
So your argument against false positive is one special case ? This happens
everywhere, you cannot avoid it at scale. The only meaningful number in that
aspect is the ratio of false positive compared to the number of hired people
(they should also control false negative, ideally, but that's much harder to
do I think).

~~~
alecco
A very obvious false positive for somebody so unqualified for such a senior
position. My point is Google's hiring system is not as good as what (lucky)
googlers who got through believe. From my limited exposure it looks there's
selection bias at play.

------
bnoordhuis
Any chance of Google opening more offices across Europe? Not everyone wants to
emigrate for a job, no matter how sweet it is.

~~~
diN0bot
Anyone work at Google in GermanY? What do you work on? What is it like?

~~~
silvajoao
You can see a description of what Google does in Munich here:
<http://www.google.de/intl/en/jobs/germanylocations/munich/>. Have a look at
the Software Engineer openings.

The Munich office is also growing, so if you'd like to work for Google in
Germany, now is the time to apply :-)

------
latch
Seems like they have a pretty serious perception problem to address. They've
set themselves up so high people, obviously some worthy and some not, simply
won't apply. I wonder how sustainable it is..are there enough CS PHDs
(essentially what people think is the only thing Google will even interview)
interested in working at Google to keep their staffing where they want? I hope
not.

------
alanh
Words not found on this page: “Design”, “UI”, “UX”.

Compare to: “Engineer” (3), “Develop” (1+) and technology name-dropping.

I expect 2011 to bring more of the same from Google.

~~~
NickPollard
I'm pretty tired of this sentiment. Yes, Google might value engineering above
UI, but that doesn't mean they don't value UI at all. Look at the piece on
Chrome Tab behaviour that was on HN earlier today [1].

Chrome has by far the best UI of any web browser I've used. Google Search has
the best UI of any search engine I've ever used. Google Calendar has the best
UI of any electronic calendar I've used. And so on.

Do they have as good UI as a specialist graphic design company? Maybe not.
Against any tech company however, they stack up pretty damn well, despite what
Gruber might claim.

[1] <http://theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/>

~~~
bengoodger
I am the engineer that added much of the behavior described in this post, and
also the manager of the Chrome frontend team. We are always looking for
engineers excited by design challenges and who have an intuition for user
experience. Within the Chromium project we design all our UI ourselves and
rely on our engineers having good taste and judgment. Any engineers who love
UI like this and are comfortable (or can become comfortable) with C++ or
Objective C should please drop me a line (beng at google). I'd love to talk to
you.

~~~
tomdale
Is your team responsible for the recent changes to the Web Inspector?

------
martincmartin
So if Google and Facebook are the sexy places to work, and can offer
programmers less because programmers would rather work with cool people on
cool project than on something boring, what are the unsexy companies that pay
more?

Oracle? Something else?

~~~
rdouble
Large scale ecommerce is pretty boring and usually pays a lot. Try Amazon.
Likewise, any sort of big ERP package consulting pays a lot and is boring.

The other direction is a combination of hard and unsexy. VMWare had the
highest base pay in the Bay Area when I left. I'm in Australia now and it
seems like the highest pay for a software developer is to work with a mining
company. Of course, if you are in NYC, there's always some financial thing.

Then again, I'm on the market and have been poking around and thought the
proposed compensation at places like Apple and Google was pretty good. If your
career goal is a stable job that pays $250K a year, software isn't the right
field.

------
ajju
A while back as I was pondering whether to change my job or start my startup,
I got a call from a Google recruiter looking for QA folks.

I had just spent 2 years working for a very large software company as a
research engineer after the startup I worked for got acquired. I wanted to
return to a role where I would be closer to customers so I could see my work
benefit the end user first hand. I reasoned this meant joining a small product
team as a developer or a larger team as a product manager. So I told the
Google recruiter I may be interested in a product manager role, and may be a
developer role if it was a smaller team.

I was flabbergasted when he told me "Frankly, you have no chance of getting
those roles at Google in the near future." I have a Masters in C.S. from a top
engineering school and classmates / ex-colleagues at Google in those exact
roles, so I suppose this guy just wanted to hire me for the role he had been
assigned, but what a shitty way of trying to do it!

May be this was an isolated incident. My friends who have worked at Google
have uniformly had a good experience actually working there. So I hope Google
finds a way to hire or train their recruiters better to avoid incidents like
this.

------
goodgoblin
Does anyone know what a senior dev @ google w/a Masters degree in CS could
expect to earn a year?

~~~
helperguy
100K$ base + stock options (Annualized) / bonuses 15~10k $ = 115k $ per year
pre tax. if you are really experienced add another 10~15k to your base and
same to your stock + bonuses = 135 ~ 145 k$ per year.

if you are a star dev, you can always try your luck on wall street firm, D. E.
Shaw., Knight Capital and such.

~~~
nostrademons
That's quite low for a senior dev with a masters. Pre-raise, you might have
gotten $100-115k in base and bonus + stock of $30-50k. Post-raise, add 10% to
that base, and some of the bonus compensation has shifted into base.

------
ecaron
It is really a telling point of Google's internals about how much better the
site (<http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html>) works in Chrome vs.
Firefox/IE.

------
liedra
One day I hope to see a company like this advertise for a technology ethicist.
:-)

edit: okay, perhaps I should explain: not because I'm looking for a job (I'm
happily employed!) but because it would suggest a desire to actually be
proactive about social and ethical issues, which, sadly, so many companies are
not (or deliberately avoid).

~~~
dspeyer
I think an ethicist has to be recruited from the existing engineering ranks to
have the internal prestige needed to be effective.

~~~
liedra
Effective from whose point of view? There's a lot to be said from a fresh
perspective on things, especially when it comes to identifying potential
problems. I've done a lot of interviews with engineers and worked in industry
myself and when you're within the box you don't tend to be able to carry out
the necessary reflection very well, if you even think about doing it at all :)

Of course it does help to understand what's going on in a company to be
internally effective, and it might take a while before an external person is
accepted (as always), but in order to identify potentially negative social and
ethical impact it can really help to have someone who is open minded and not
tied to the particular traditions of the group.

------
mlinsey
Since Google has always been hiring at least some people even through the
recession, does a blog post like this mean we're back to the torrid expansion
of 2005-2007?

~~~
unoti
To me it indicates that competition is quite fierce. Not just from other
attractive companies, but competition from startups and from people deciding
to go indy. The opportunity available for someone doing their own thing is
better right now than it ever has been before.

For example, in 2000-2005 I had all kinds of ideas for things I wanted to do,
but ultimately got discouraged by the fact that, even though I had excellent
software development skills and great ideas, I lacked the capital and
knowledge to, for example, set up a rack of servers or a bank of fax machines
in a closet somewhere. Today, in stark contrast to even 2005, those kinds of
hurdles are totally gone. It's very easy to get servers set up in the cloud to
do whatever you need.

Also it's far easier to succeed independently than it was a few years ago. In
the computer games space, where I make my money, self-publishing is a
seriously viable alternative now (I'm living proof!), where a few years ago
you mostly needed to work for a game studio to actually make a living.

Google is still a god-like entity that many of us would love to work for, but
there's a comparatively new form of competition that's probably hitting Google
harder than ever before: the fact that it's 10x more viable to do your own
thing today than it was in 2005 or 2007.

~~~
DenisM
Very well said, unoti.

In my words, the power of the capital over labor has diminished, as labor
increasingly can do without (external) capital. To that the capital responds
by upping salaries and instigating the bidding wars over the talent that is
still up for sale, at least for now.

------
zemanel
i'm currently waiting for the results of a couple of phone interviews, for a
position here in Europe. It's the 2nd time i've applied. The 1st time i didn't
make the 1st phone call, i was very nervous and almost didn't manage to answer
the most basic of questions. This time, i came across a tweet from a googler
who attended a GTUG event, announcing available positions in Europe, i ping'ed
him and he booted my profile on their recruitment system. A few days after, i
got an e-mail and a call from a recruiter and we had a nice talk, the guy was
great and most helpful even after the 1st screening. I was setup 2 phone
interviews with engineering googlers from Mountain View and i did my best to
comply, although being interviewed by professionals that have been eating
complex algorithms for lunch leaves a feeling that you'll hardly impress
whatever you do or say. My overall experience with the recruiting process has
been OK and if i don't make it would basically by not being match with their
goals i guess. Also, i'd guess the number of applicants is immense.

------
phunel
I've seen a few trial tests for HN "Help Wanted" pages - I believe a Google
doc spreadsheet was one of the more active. Anyone have any idea what is
currently the most active service for querying the HN community with projects
in search of contractors, etc.?

------
zachcb
The way I look at it, is if you didn't go to an Ivy League school, don't even
bother thinking about getting a job at Google.

~~~
simonw
I didn't go to an Ivy League school and I got an offer (about 5 years ago). I
know of plenty of Google employees who aren't Ivy League.

------
mkramlich
I've been the target of Google recruitment attempts a few times and it
generally gave me a "body shop" sort of vibe. Very impersonal with very rigid
process, and, at least initially, focused on the wrong sorts of things looking
to try to find "easy outs" to filter folks. They weren't looking for why I'd
be great for them, only for how I might be imperfect. That said, I gave them
the same treatment in return. In return, from my perspecitve, I think, "Twenty
thousand employees and what that entails. Arrogant attitude. Big emphasis on
code performance optimization rather than innovation or entrepreneurship. High
share price, post-IPO, lots of FUIFV folks already. Low job title. Uninspiring
pay rate. Don't care about their cafeteria. Don't _want_ to live a Google-
oriented life." Therefore... no. Those were my own easy outs. And there are
tons of other companies to work for, and other folks coming after me. I can
even have big colored balls and toys to play with, if I so choose. My own
private office, etc.

~~~
nostrademons
I expected something like that and was pleasantly surprised that my recruiter
was fairly personable and pretty willing to bend the rules for me. Perhaps it
was because I was hired in the trough of 2009, when there were 4 recruiters
doing the work of 1 and everyone was fearing for their jobs.

Basically...YMMV. I suspect that a lot of any individual candidate's
experience will come down to which recruiter and interviewers they happen to
draw.

