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I had a Google interview a few days ago. I thought I did very well. Most problems I wrote out complete solutions to, while others I at least discussed in depth and it was clear that I had the solution. In each case I communicated, asked clarifying questions, discussed my approach to the problem, dis/advantages, diagrammed, considered other approaches, and discussed runtime/memory complexity easily. I split the problems up into smaller pieces and produced straightforward algorithms. I prioritized getting a right answer over optimizing. I stepped through my code and corrected issues if I encountered them. In several of the interviews I exhausted the interviewer's questions in the 45-minute time and got to ask questions of my own. I felt I had a good rapport with the interviewers in at least the majority of the cases. I actually really had fun. I had come into the interview feeling apprehensive, but left feeling confident, feeling that if I were the one interviewing me I would have had no problem making an offer. One week later, the recruiter contacted me and told me that I had been rejected. My feelings are hurt, but beyond that I'm simply confused. I really don't know what I could have done better short of just knowing the questions ahead of time and writing down the answer. Due to Google policy (which I don't understand either), the recruiter was about as vague as can be about why the answer was no. The most detail I could get was that two out of my five interviews had gone well, from which I take that the other three had not. Obviously no one reading this knows how my interview actually went. But given my perception of the interview, what could have caused me to have been turned down? What was I likely doing wrong that cost me the offer? If there's anyone reading this at Google, what is it that you look for in a candidate, that based on what I wrote above I might have come up short on? How can I improve? |
It's possible that the interview really did go that well. But it's also possible that there were two or three other interviewees that had equally successful interviews, but Google is only going to hire one of you. They may end up making the choice by looking at distinctions so fine they might as well have been random. If that's the case, they'd be hard-pressed to explain why they chose one really good candidate over several other really good candidates, which would explain why you couldn't get a sensible explanation out of them (1).
Now of course this might not be the explanation, but it's certainly a possibility. You of course want to learn something from every interview you go to, but you have to keep a cool head about it, and remember that each interview is to a certain extent a roll of the dice.
(1) Also keep in mind that companies (at least in the U.S.) do not like to give any feedback about interviews at all.