
My Nightmare Interviews With Google  - Hunchr
http://www.businessinsider.com/my-nightmare-interviews-with-google-2009-11
======
zachware
This wasn't an interview, it was a test. I had a similar experience with a
startup. I was interviewing for a Marketing Communications Manager position.
Essentially PR.

One of the unofficial interviewers (at 24 year old MIT engineer working as an
email marketer) challenged me with the question "How many barbers are in San
Francisco?" We proceeded to map it out the analytical process on the
whiteboard. He wanted to see formulas to understand how I would arrive at the
answer.

It was a stupid, impossible question. In a similar way to this girl's
experience, he jabbed repeatedly critiquing my logic.

He wrote me later to explain that he posed the same question to his
girlfriend, an MIT engineer herself, and she couldn't come up with an answer.
Neither could he.

They offered me the job and I declined solely based on this guy and his
misguided, silly behavior. I would have hated to work with him.

When a company misguidedly challenges potential employees in this way it hurts
the quality of its hires. Sure, Google can afford to be picky but does it
really need an engineer in a Product Marketing role? Perhaps for dev-facing
apps but such an interview process is overall misguided and immature.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't think this is such a terrible thing, although clearly this adversarial
approach to testing ideas isn't for you, or everyone. Enrico Fermi used to
challenge grad students with similar questions, the famous example being 'how
many piano tuners in Chicago?'.

I don't think it's a stupid or impossible question, but one that seeks to
establish how you go about estimating tricky things and thus identifying
fruitful territory for more rigorous research. Let's walk through it, with the
awareness that we're trying to refine our techniques of estimation rather than
caring about the actual number of barbers.

'Barber' implies haircuts for men. This is good, because the number of
hairstylists that cater to women depends on fashion, which is hard to
quantify. On the other hand, hair cutting is more related to hair growth.
There's about 3/4 of a million people in San Francisco. Roughly half of them
are men, so we have 375,000 potential customers. Most men wear their hair
short, off the ears. Of course some wear their hair long and have it cut very
infrequently, while others like it much shorter, eg with a buzz cut and have
it cut more often...but some of them may cut their own hair, since a buzz-cut
isn't too challenging. I'm going to assume the number of hippies cancels out
the number of close-cutters because San Francisco has a bit of a hippy
reputation. So much for hairstyling.

OK, so I've postulated 375,000 men who average out to a 'regular hairstyle'.
And I've postulated that a regular hairstyle means not having your ears
covered, ie the old 'short back and sides'. While it's growing, you could comb
it out of the way or let it cover the tops of your ears, but once it gets
half-way down then you're either growing it out or it's time to visit the
barber. How much hair is that? My ears are about 2 inches high, but I have
small ears. 3 inches sounds pretty big though...I'll guess the average is 2.5
inches, so half of that is 1.25 inches. That's already pretty fluffy
though...let's round it down to 1 inch. OK, so 375,000 men get a haircut
whenever their hair has grown by more than an inch.

How long does that take? Hair grows at about 4 inches a year, so let's say 3
months. Which gives us 1.5 million male haircuts a year for the whole city.
(we could have started calling the population p and the rate of hair growth
g[h] and so on, but why bother, it's a chain of reasoning we're concerned with
here). A haircut takes, what, 20 minutes? it could be faster, then again some
want a more difficult style. So let's guess that there's half a million hours
of actual hair cutting (including the bit with the sheet and the sweeping up
etc) going on in a year in SF.

Now we're getting somewhere. How much does a barber work? I'd say 45 hours a
week. Some barbershops open early for the business crowd, but then they're
closed on Saturdays. Monday-Saturday seems reasonable, as does 2 weeks'
holiday. So one barber could spend a maximum of 2500 hours per year cutting
hair. Only, that seems a bit high. Sometimes you wait in line, but I don't
usually think of barbers as busy flat-out most of the time. 30 hours of
cutting and 15 hours a week of of waiting for a customer seems more realistic.
So 1500 hours of haircutting per barber (edit: 1650, but who cares). And
dividing that into half a million hours of cuttable male hair per year gives
me 333, the number of people needed to cut all that hair.

At this point you can start arguing about whether someone that caters to both
men and women is truly a barber, or whether women can be said to be barbers
even if they only cut men's hair. If your answers to those questions are no
and no, and we go with the stereotype of a barber as a man who only cuts other
men's hair, then I'd halve these numbers and guess that the number of 'pure'
barbers in SF is 75-100.

OK, so this is 10 minutes of my life I won't get back, but if I was going to
market something specific to barbers then I now have a decent guess at the
number of potential customers in my local metro area.

Of course, you could have just said 'pass me a copy of the Yellow Pages and
I'll tell you'. So having done the above, I went and looked that up and got
131 results at
[http://www.superpages.com/yellowpages/C-Barbers/S-CA/T-San+F...](http://www.superpages.com/yellowpages/C-Barbers/S-CA/T-San+Francisco/)
...with 2 or 3 cutters at each shop, that would suggest somewhere in the 3-400
range, but some of these entries are for Salons and some are in Daly city or
Sausalito, not quite in San Francisco. Still not definitive, but not too far
off either. Sure, there's a _lot_ of guessing and hand-waving here...but the
important thing is that I arrived at an estimate that roughly correlates with
reality. In this case I was able to check that reality (by looking up the
number of self-identified barbering businesses) but once you become adept at
this technique you can use it for anything, and then get on with solving the
problem instead of feeling stuck by a lack of information.

~~~
potatolicious
Maybe it's the traditionally educated engineering in me (I was trained as a
mechanical engineer), but I don't see a point in this purely theoretical hand-
wavy math. There are established ways for us to get good estimates of a great
deal of information - including your hairdresser problem - that involve
seeking out real data. Sitting in a void of zero knowledge and postulating
wildly, even if it gets you in the ballpark, is wildly inefficient and I'd
hate to be involved in it as part of a professional company.

A number out of your ass - regardless of how soundly backed with logic - is at
the end of the day a number out of your ass. This isn't to say that all
inference or estimation is bad - but rather that estimations done in a
_complete_ void of background data is practically useless.

A more concrete example: estimate the number of users our chief competitor
has. I can go through this like a logic puzzle and come up with a number that
has zero verifiability... or I can go look up relevant data (their page rank
on Google, other available metrics on their site, etc) and arrive at a far
better conclusion.

I agree with the GP that these exercises are pointless and unrelated to the
job for which you are interviewing. As a traditionally educated engineer, my
training teaches me not to guess whenever facts are available. Don't try to
memorize and infer numbers - keep your references within reach at all times.
An engineer who makes few assumptions about his data is one who makes fewer
mistakes and costs less money in damage.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
"As a traditionally educated engineer, my training teaches me not to guess
whenever facts are available."

Ah, but the most lucrative questions are about products not yet invented, for
which there are few facts. They are lucrative _because_ there is not yet any
competition. If there were lots of facts available, ripe for the picking, then
by definition the net margins would be terrible.

For instance, suppose you were a grad student at the MIT Media Lab in 1995.
Does it make financial sense to join the work on an electronic ink product?
The answer to that question could only have been derived from a series of
guesses and wild deductions. You cannot just look up how efficient planar
electroluminescent backlights are going to be in 10 years. Or how expensive
and power-hungry non-volatile memory devices are going to be in 10 years.

For a research organization to invent and capture a new market, they have to
be good at making and using wild guesses about the future. (Looking up answers
is valuable too, but for different reasons.)

~~~
potatolicious
I think you're badly mistaking what I'm talking about with "looking up
answers" - what I'm talking about is considerably more than that.

How efficient will planar electroluminescent backlights be in 10 years? That's
a good question - and one we can make an educated stab at given the right
historical data, the right experience in forecasting, and a little bit of
plain luck. Heck, you're now talking about an entire field of mathematics and
engineering in and of itself!

Compare this to the Google interview though - where they expect you to pull a
number out of your ass, with no opportunity to consult historical data, no
field experts to interview... no due diligence done at all. It is either an
extremely poor approximation of real-life problem solving skills, or everyone
at Google is recklessly cowboy and trying to deduce every decision ever by
sheer will of logic alone.

------
jrockway
Sounds like she is the "recite facts" type, rather than "quickly think
critically" type. Google wants the second type of person, and it appears she
is not that. So the interview process worked perfectly; she didn't get a job
she wouldn't be good at, and Google doesn't have an employee that doesn't fit
with them. I fail to see how this is a nightmare, other than that she'll have
to work somewhere that makes her buy her own lunch.

~~~
tomsaffell
Totally agree that she was not right for the job, but the _process_ was a bit
nightmare-ish :

    
    
      “That’s all.  Good luck with your job search.”  The phone clicked-- I was stunned.
    

In my previous job I conducted a lot of interviews of an analytical style.
Some people bombed so badly that is was clear well before the end that they
wouldn't make the next round. In those cases, I used the remaining time to
either talk to them about the career hopes/goals, or to explain how they could
have better approached the problem (these skills are partly learnt..) to help
prepare them for their next interview. The way I saw it was that they were
expecting 30 mins of my time, so they would get it, even if they weren't up to
the job. It a courtesy, and it's also self interest - burnt interviewees make
a lot of noise on campus.

When I was 'senior' I never applied to McKinsey, because I'd heard so many
horror stories about their interviews - I just didn't want to go anywhere near
them. I landed a job with one of their main competitors and spent 5 happy
years there...

~~~
ashishbharthi
Googlers are not that bad at ending interviews either. I think this was just
one perticular person (Anna) thing.

~~~
mbrubeck
Agreed. I was rejected from Google after an on-site interview, but they were
quite polite and professional about it.

------
dlevine
I worked for Google for a few years, and did a lot of phone screens. Most of
the people who I interviewed probably felt the same way as this lady. The
process may seem brutal, but it is impossible to invite everyone in for an on-
site interview, and the phone screen does a pretty good job of filtering out
the definite nos (although I'm sure that some good candidates are rejected).

I could count the number of people who passed one of my phone screens on one
hand (and I considered myself a fairly easy interviewer).

~~~
dangrover
I can't stand talking to people from companies like Google, they're always so
smug and judgmental like that.

Part of my decision to drop out of the job market and focus full-time on my
company (to pretty reasonable success this year) is because I like being paid
based on a judgement of my work/products, rather than some half-assed
assessment of me as a person made in an interview.

~~~
blinks
> rather than some half-assed assessment of me as a person > made in an
> interview.

Any judgement made in a 45-minute (or less!) interview is going to be half-
assed. That's the unfortunate way of the world. How do you think people should
interview?

(Genuinely curious; I do interviews, and I think I do pretty well, but it's
difficult to honestly examine one's own methods without feedback.)

~~~
cookiecaper
If I may interject, I think in most cases it's much, much better to use a
network of connections rather than random walk-ins. You're much more likely to
get someone that not only performs well, but also fits in well with your
company's personalities.

If you have to interview strangers, I think it's good to inquire into their
technical background until you have ample confidence in their technical
abilities, and take the rest of the time to discuss career and company goals,
personalities, hobbies, etc., in a lax and non-rushed manner. I'd invite the
candidate back for a follow-up interview and talk more and then invite him to
work out of your office for a few days (with pay, of course).

I think it's much better to have a relaxed and friendly decorum and perform a
series of informal "interviews" because you'll learn a lot more about the
candidate if he feels confident and open than if he's rushed to answer a bunch
of silly logic puzzles and give diatribes on his five-year life plan.

~~~
azanar
_If I may interject, I think in most cases it's much, much better to use a
network of connections rather than random walk-ins. You're much more likely to
get someone that not only performs well, but also fits in well with your
company's personalities._

It is possible that this person is being interviewed by Google as a result of
a referral by another employee within the Google, or even a referral from the
hiring manager themselves.

Unless what you mean is that a hiring manager only consider people whom he and
every other potential interviewer already know before the interview process
even begins. The odds of ending up with such an arrangement at a place the
size of Google, or even a place 1/100th the size of Google, seem insanely
remote.

Someone on an interview loop at a large organization is bound to not know you
from every other candidate who walks in the door. Even with phone interviews,
odds are they call people based on factors entirely other than "do they know
this person?" The best he may know about you is that some other person in the
organization referred you, but it is not obvious whether they'll appreciate
knowing this or be pissed off that their objectivity is now screwed. Some
interviewers really prize trying to be as objective as possible in interviews,
because interviews have a habit of being horribly imprecise anyway. But then,
so do referral from J. Random Employee ("I have this cousin who's really good
with computers; he helped me setup Outlook and everything. We should hire him
a as software engineer.")

But then, maybe that is your point. If a company ends up at a size where they
can't rely on connections, they're too big already.

------
jazzychad
These were just questions for a position as Associate Product Marketing
Manager. During my senior-year interviews with Google for a Software Engineer
position, there were 3 rounds, each getting increasingly harder, chock full of
nothing but technical questions: some trivia (name all standard network port
associations), some implementation (design a chat server), some theory (what
is the big-O runtime advantage of doubling an array size upon copy over just
adding new entries linearly), etc, etc...

Each time they said "this interview will take about 30 minutes," but each one
ended up being around 1.5 hours.

It was grueling, but fun. I'm not sure what happened because I didn't hear
back after the 3rd interview. It was at least a nice feeling to know that all
of my classes in school had helped me with the answers.

~~~
cdibona
Have you considered interviewing again (I'm assuming some time has passed)? I
think its usually a pretty good sign when interviews go long. I think it might
be worth your time. Feel free to email me if you'd like.

~~~
jazzychad
I have actually been contacted twice since then by Google for subsequent
openings (once in the past couple of weeks!). I am currently working on my
startup, but I will certainly keep this option open in the future.

------
scscsc
' “Say 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?” I froze. The problem sounded
easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it. '

The problem only _sounded_ easy? Isn't this what you learn in 3rd grade? When
you can't do this stuff you shouldn't be allowed near numbers.

~~~
rudd
Yeah, it's easy. When you deal with logic problems all day. Or if you're used
to solving problems in your head.

Personally, I solved it easily in my head. But, I had to read the problem the
first time, then read it again slowly getting all the numbers into the proper
places in my head. An interview is a stressful place, so easy things can get a
lot harder.

~~~
dantheman
She spent 5 minutes on it, 5 Minutes...

~~~
christopherdone
Yeah, I worked it out just as the interviewer explained it. $0.1 per click, 20
out of 100 visitors click, that's 20*0.1=$2.0 per 100 visitors. We need $20
dollars so we need 1000 visitors. This really is child's play. Honestly I
think the pressure must have crippled her.

------
wallflower
Rigorous interviews will increase the false negative rate, at the expense of
false positives. It's part of the culture at Microsoft and Google and other
companies.

~~~
cdibona
I don't know why people are downvoting you. I can tell you that I've seen the
same thing and having dealt with the fallout of bad hiring, I'd rather miss
some good or even great candidates rather than hire someone bad. Edi: To
clarify: I work at Google.

~~~
roc
You always run the risk of hiring someone bad. Interviewing, particularly
rigorous interviewing, is a game that doesn't map very well onto work itself.

That's why the true test of a hiring process is the _firing_ process.

If you can get rid of people that can't hack it, rather than letting them
gather as detritus in your system, you'll be far better off than if you simply
pretend that you can actually avoid mistakes.

~~~
tedunangst
Hiring two people so you can fire one is a lot more expensive than
interviewing 10 to start.

~~~
Dilpil
But what are the relative probabilities that each method will result in
exactly one good employee?

------
boredguy8
I liked the "quiz" question someone posted on the linked "Business Insider"
article:

You work for a digital age media company who has already achieved superior
market dominance in an industry rife with failure and turnover. Your company's
stock, though depressed, still sells for multiples above its competition and
the option pool is pretty full and limited.

The company's single main product continues to grow its revenues nicely but
has failed at virtually all attempts to broaden its product line so it remains
reliant on its single huge product which may come under government anti-trust
action at some point in the future to say nothing of two leading competitors
aiming to unseat it. It's only other breakthrough products are given away free
or at nominal charge with no discernable profitable business model.

Is it a good career choice to join or stay with this firm even though they
pride themselves on asking stupid quiz questions to gauge your intelligence
and make you feel very special if you are offered a position?

~~~
jrockway
Speculation is for investors. As long as you get your paycheck, who cares?
(And "when" they stop giving paychecks, Google will look pretty good on your
resume'.)

Why are people so upset about the "quiz questions"? Is it unreasonable for an
employer to expect you to think? (Is the "right answer" ever the goal of these
questions?)

~~~
boredguy8
I don't know why people are upset. I don't, however, think there's a category
of "thinking" to which these questions provide insight. I use a completely
different toolset when answering quiz questions than when I'm answering "real
life" questions. "Railroad crossing watch out for cars, can you spell that
without any R's" is a typical 'quiz' question that asks you to abandon ways we
know people interact. Asking someone, "How many pounds of tonails are cut
every year?" is asinine.

------
Shana
I'm her age. This is essentially a case question straight out of a consulting
book. I'm out of practice for it. Way out of practice. Meanwhile, I'm scared
stiff of applying for jobs because my entire class has gone crazy about how to
behave, what to say, what is the right answer to questions like this. I know
I'm not perfect already. I know I have work to do to get better. and the bAck
of the evenvelop question is one of my weak points. And I know it.

First thing I discovered though from helping other people on other sorts of
collaborative projects on the web:

Get paper for this stuff if you are out of practice, and ask to wait for an
aswer while you write it down, and if you forget something, as to repeat.
Always good to write somehting down- shows you are listening. She didn't.

Be a little more wild with your answer. Not over the top. But just a little. I
got that last night from someone at McKinsey. Was talkign to a class of mine
about the history of business. Someone asked. Don't be too much though.

And reach out about your humanness. Not everyone is perfect. If your weak
point is Back of the envelope stuff, then it is your weak point.

Speaking of which, since I am taking my time (becuase I can't freak out any
more, I just can't) How do I brush up on those questions? And that way of
thinking. I'm good on the creative side with large data sets and how to sort
out problems, but not on the calculations side...which sucks.

~~~
dsplittgerber
You sound like you're going to break down any minute. Seriously, please relax!
If a company seriously cares about the exact wording of your answers, you
obviously would not want to work there. Management consultancy is a load of
stuff any intelligent and hard-working human can do, they just want to test
your basic intelligence and reasoning and check to see if you seem like a
sufficiently nice human. Don't sweat it that much, your live doesn't depend on
what McKinsey thinks of you.

~~~
Shana
I realize that. I also don't want to work for McKinsey. I don't think
management consulting would be a good fit. Really, I think I have too much of
humorous subversive streak for that.

I realize I can do a lot of things with time and effort. I feel pressure on
the time part, Overloaded. I'm doing a bit too much on top of that. I'm a
little less that one week to my bachelor's critique in new media/internet art.
We're a crazy bunch of folk, them artists. Long term I want to switch to
learning coding, and haven't had the time to sit down and even think yet...

Or really apply for jobs yet. That's uhhh after next week, after I finish
classes. When I know where I'm living/doing. That's normal for a college
student though where I am...jumpy folk, mostly halfway through a very short
midterm cycle...BA nearly got deleted, those sorts of things. still coming off
of that sort of thing.

------
drewcrawford
I interviewed with Google a year ago and was pretty disappointed. One
interviewer was a no-show, another was over half an hour late.

I know Google is a big company and all (sampling space fail) but that really
turned me off.

------
wglb
In engineering school, we got pretty familiar with BOEC (back of the envelope
calculations), in some part to give a double check on calculations, and in
other part (ahem) to double-check on slide rule calculations and exponent
correction.

But that is a useful skill, particularly in conjunction with a _problem-
solving attitude_ which they repeatedly emphasized us to do.

And the book _Innumeracy_ by Paulos gives examples of good problems to check
with: "Is there a cubic mile of human blood in the world" and "How long would
it take to move Mount Fuji" as a couple of examples.

It doesn't sound like a good sign if your latest math was as a freshman if you
are looking for a software career.

~~~
mronge
This was for a marketing position though, not an engineering position. I
wouldn't expect someone trained in marketing to be good at BOEC or be as
analytical as an engineer.

~~~
yummyfajitas
She also bombed a middle school level math problem.

One question (paraphrased): _$0.10 cpc, with a 20% of visits resulting in a
click. How many visits needed to make $20?_

 _After five painful minutes the annoyed interviewer gave me the answer...She
made it sound so easy; I felt like a moron._

She is innumerate.

If I were illiterate, I'd probably describe an interview at McGraw Hill as
nightmarish. "After five painful minutes of trying to sound out the words the
annoyed interviewer read the sentence to me...She made it sound so easy; I
felt like a moron."

~~~
biznerd
Or she was just very nervous. Your cognitive abilities decline if you're put
on the spot. Have you ever said something stupid while speaking in front of a
group?

The girl goes to Syracuse, which is a somewhat selective University. She would
not have gotten in if she couldn't do the math (her SAT scores simply wouldn't
be high enough.)

This question would have been easy for me and actually would have probably
boosted my confidence during the interview. But that's because I'm a
quantitative person. Throw a question I was completely unexpecting though and
I could be stuttering and saying stupid things. I'm sure there would be some
questions or exercises the author could complete far more smoothly than I
could.

Calling her innumerate (and making the analogy of her being illiterate and
thus incompetent) for this slip makes me think you haven't been on many
interviews yet.

~~~
dsplittgerber
Who cares about her SAT score (which someone can spend months preparing for)
if she can not perform under pressure? It's not Google's job to make sure she
can withstand the pressure of a stressful job (interview).

------
mrshoe
Google has interviewed tens of thousands of candidates in this manner. Other
companies have interviewed even more, using roughly the same process. With all
the preparation this girl put into her interview, I don't see how she possibly
could have been surprised by those types of questions. The first piece of
advice anyone will give you is that the final answer is not _nearly_ as
important as talking through the process you would use to solve the problem.
Obviously she never even read that first piece of advice, because she blurted
out a wild guess to the very first question. Don't let this happen to you!

Google's interview process isn't a nightmare. It's entirely typical. If you
plan on interviewing for any job, you should spend a lot of time studying the
interview process and how to excel in it. If you're interviewing for
programming jobs, this course is an _invaluable resource_ :
<http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/>

Read all the handouts 5 times, and you won't be caught off guard like this
girl was.

~~~
d0mine
Direct links to handouts:

[http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...](http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_Interview_Handout_1.pdf)

[http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...](http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_Interview_Handout_2.pdf)

[http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...](http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_Interview_Handout_3.pdf)

[http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...](http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_Interview_Practice_Questions_Person_A.pdf)

[http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...](http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_Interview_Practice_Questions_Person_B.pdf)

------
ganley
Oh, please. Perhaps they care about pedigree and GPA for new grads, but what
else do they have to go on? I'm 40, and they didn't seem to care at all where
I went to school nor what my grades were. The interview was challenging, but a
lot of fun (the good kind of challenging), and certainly not a "nightmare."

~~~
kscaldef
I agree. Whenever I read one of these articles, I feel like I should post my
own story of how I interviewed at Google and it was completely reasonable, if
expectedly rigorous. I really only had two complaints: 1) they sent me to
lunch with a guy who works on AdSense, and at the time I was working at Yahoo
on their Content Match system, so we had a pretty awkward time trying to
figure out what we could talk about without disclosing anything confidential,
and 2) it took a really long time after my interviews for them to actually
produce an offer (maybe 4 weeks or so), although their recruiter did give me
regular updates of what was going on in the process.

FWIW, they did ask me for a lot of awfully detailed information about my
current and past compensation packages and what other companies I was
interviewing with. I mostly declined to provide that information, and they
didn't push it.

------
jlees
I wouldn't really say _nightmare_ per se, although it probably felt like that
at the time. She just wasn't very practiced at estimating and making
reasonable assumptions.

Back when I was in my final year of uni I interviewed for a set of blue-chip
graduate recruiters who threw similar questions at me. I distinctly remember
sitting in a Data Connection office somewhere trying to work out how many
petrol stations were in the UK. I was terrible. But there are ways to get
better at this and it's really no secret that Google asks these kinds of
questions. I think they reveal two things about the candidate - how good they
are instinctively, and how well they prepare.

Obviously Google asks candidates who get past a certain point to sign a NDA,
but there's still a surprising amount of information out there. I was recently
helping a friend (and have previously helped an ex) with interviews and
preparing for the logic and theoretical comp.sci. parts was actually quite a
lot of fun. Maybe because I didn't have the pressure!

~~~
Shana
Correct. I'm here age, and for those of us who have to reteach themselves all
sorts of math for a variety of reasons, BAck of the envelop questions are
frightening under pressure. First thing you should do is take off the pressure
and see if you can be collaborative with the person.b People tend to panic
very easily.

------
friism
The questions mentioned in the article don't seem particularly odious. They
sound like standard "think-on-your-feet" case-based questions that management
consultants and bankers also love. Demonstrating creativity and problem
solving grit is more important than producing a correct number.

~~~
sown
I think it was more about how they treated her. or at least her perception of
how they were treating her.

~~~
sown
I also can't help but notice that some of the interview questions were
confusing or misleading when taken into context with the other questions.

The engineer says that he got lost when she mentions ads might have a 25%
click through rate but in another question the click through rate was 20%, as
an example. She probably thought, but did not write that her earlier estimate
would have been ok or acceptable which would be confusing given the engineer's
reaction.

Also, if said question was meant to test reasoning skills and not a raw
answer, then a wrong estimate for click through shouldn't "lose" anyone. After
all, if you haven't worked in search or heard of google or the internet ad
business internals, how would you know what the click through rate should be
more like? Advertising is but one of many industries.

I think google needs to be a bit more careful about how they ask questions or
at least have interviewers talk to each other. Probably too difficult since
they all have other tasks and duties to do.

------
aaronblohowiak
These seem like soft-ball questions all around. Phone screening is such a pain
in the ass, I am surprised that more people don't have a timed web form or
similar setup so we can avoid having to waste the hours talking to people that
aren't going to make the cut.

~~~
jazzychad
> avoid having to waste the hours talking to people that aren't going to make
> the cut.

chicken/egg... how are you going to know that without talking to them?

However, to that end, could you just raise the bar on the resumes and also the
subequent first-round phone screens to reduce the number of 2nd-, 3rd-round
interviews? The Google application (for non-college recruits) is already
extensive and probably acts as a weed-out mechanism for many people deciding
to just apply on a whim.

------
te_platt
I thought it was funny that the link she gave to "15 Google Interview
Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid" has wrong answers in the solutions.
See if you can beat their answer for the two egg problem - Bonus prove your
answer is actually the minimum possible.

~~~
andreyf
They also got this one wrong, both in asking the question, and in answering
it: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game>

------
jmount
"Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job." Uh, maybe
for a second job- but when you are still a senior in school your GPA is one
(admittedly crude) measure of how well you were doing at your last occupation
(student).

~~~
chris100
As a hiring manager, I'll take internship or side-project coding experience
over GPA anyday.

Sure, a good GPA is good. But if you back it up with _experience_ , you are
ahead.

~~~
gaius
At any large company HR will have designated a minimum GPA merely as a
mechanism to manage the volume of incoming CVs.

------
timcederman
For an associate product manager position, it only gets harder.

I quite enjoyed the back of the envelope calculations during the early calls,
as well as talking about interesting products I had encountered recently.

It got quite interesting on-site. I really enjoyed the first couple of days of
interviews, which focused on design ("design a shopping mall"). The last day
was still fun, but less enjoyable, as it involved coding on a whiteboard,
estimating the computational complexity, and then improving its efficiency.
Then I was asked to spec out the requirements for adding unit tests to a
programming language.

I felt the interviews were fair and well-balanced, the main sticking point for
me was the emphasis on GPA and academic history.

~~~
mronge
Those were questions for an engineering position right? Not a a product
manager position?

~~~
timcederman
No, APM.

------
danbmil99
My Google interviewer had a toothache. I didn't get an offer. Their recruiters
are notoriously independent; not sure that's a good thing. I was actively
sought out, but had no chance because the interviewer had a bad day.

Question: is it more important to keep out the bad ones but lose some good
ones, or vice versa? (ie, what's the correct balance between false positives
and false negatives?)

~~~
andreyf
I've heard from several Googlers that false positives are orders of magnitude
worse than false negatives. In reality, I think it's more clear-cut - there
are those developers who know all about tries, algorithms, parsers, GC
strategies, unit testing, OS level details, networking, etc., and those
developers who know how to program in Blub for Blub libraries. For most
positions, Google wants the former.

------
giardini
I am mystified that companies use interviews in hiring despite the
overwhelming academic evidence that interviewing does not work,

I conjecture that what we are discussing is primate social behavior (yes,
"monkeys in a tree") and social hierarchy in action. Of course we _are_
primates, so maybe it _is_ vital that Google hire enough "alpha males" or
whatever.

------
ilkhd
I once came on interview with a very big company, a lady that interviewed me
slowly began to become medieval and very angry - for no reason, so I got
afraid of her and just walked away myself, for goodnes sake. A guy before her
was friendly.

------
Gilson_Silveira
I think those kinds of quizzes doesn't extract how good or bad the person is
for the job.

I wouldn't work for a company that rate a person by quizzes or tricky
questions.

------
antirez
Non critical thinking people are not worse as they can have other strong
skills like immagination or creativity or ability to understand user feeling
or simply a lot of taste. I think that with this kind of interview Google is
creating a monoculture inside the company. The effects may be the fact Google
has some problem pushing web services where technological strenght can not do
a real difference.

------
presidentender
Her last answer really did her in, I think. She said she was "wishing [the
number of graduating seniors] was higher" since she was amid a job search.
That would mean more competition for jobs. That indicates a lack of critical
thinking skills.

~~~
kalid
I think the gmail answer would have sunk her too. Google is an advertising
company -- 1/4 (25%) clickthrough on Gmail ads (not even search) is just
crazy. People click search ads because they're looking for something, Gmail
ads probably get an order of magnitude less click through (people aren't in
gmail to find new things). For someone applying to an advertising company, she
needs to know their basic business model and assumptions.

If she thought about her own usage, she'd realize that it was an insanely high
number (had she ever clicked on a single gmail ad, let alone 25% of them?).

~~~
zck
>If she thought about her own usage, she'd realize that it was an insanely
high number...

It's dangerous to generalize from yourself like that.

~~~
gloob
Better to generalize from one data point than to generalize from none.

------
zackattack
That wasn't a nightmare interview; she is clearly unqualified for an
analytical role. She should get a job in advertising instead.

~~~
jxcole
To be honest, a moderately intelligent 5th grader could have answered that
question about the 10 cents per ad. I know that math isn't her field, but on
some level one is expected to be well rounded.

~~~
Shana
I've taught some very intillegent third graders. No. No they wouldn't have
under the time constraints and pressures. People blank with pressure. The
first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on.
Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak.

First easy thing to do which isn't describe. Tell the person to sit down with
a pen and paper. And then talk about the why and how. That was the demeaning
part. Antoi-collaborative, very scary.

~~~
camccann
_People blank with pressure. The first thing the interviewer should do is lay
off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak._

Even at Google, a job is not a vacation. Wanting to hire people who react well
under pressure is completely valid.

The mistake, which is not at all unique to Google, is to think that "high
pressure interrogation at a job interview" is usefully similar to the kind of
pressure that might occur on the job. For _some jobs_ it will be. For many
others, it's completely different.

Compare these scenarios: "QA just found a huge, unexpected performance problem
in this server application and no one knows what's causing it. The application
goes live in 48 hours and you and your team have until then to make it handle
ten thousand times as many users as it does now." vs. "You just landed after a
10-hour flight and will be meeting a major potential customer in 30 minutes.
TSA blew up your laptop because it looked suspicious and the airline sent your
luggage to Albuquerque so instead of a carefully-prepared presentation all you
have are a couple index cards with vague notes about the product. If you don't
make a sale, your company will be bankrupt in a week."

~~~
Shana
No job is a vacation: I've done work under pressure as well for both school
and other land.

Google is not going to be bankrupt in a week. If your interviewer is really
smart, do the Seth Godin thing: freelance the person for a few weeks, or offer
them a real life case they are currently working on to see what that person is
actually going to do.

One of the ways I figured out I would make a horrible teacher was I worked as
a teacher. I really believed and worked very hard as a teacher. Ultimately, I
needed a more collaborative environment, and I was stressed out because I met
some really smart kids who were flunking half of exams on purpose when I
confronted them about it. They would not work with me to fix these skills in
third grade, particularly when there were background issues going on, and I
was not the primary teacher. I found it not appropriate for me. I found that
really high pressure, and not appropriate for me. Meanwhile, I know I will
stay up all night on my own unpaid looking for affordance of different
websites and how they can be applied for different business reasons. There you
go? That seems to be appropriate for me. I just wish I knew more people in
that field, and I wish I had the time to learn to code (after first round BA
critiques....)

Interviewers need to sit down and know what is the pressures of the job, Half
that interview would not have helped her at all. Furthermore, It is can I work
with that person on the job, and help me and her reach a goal under pressure.
That's a reasonable expectation. Very reasonable.

