[seahawks78]

Really!!! I am surprised to hear this. I always thought that Google is akin to "Chocolate factory" for programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers. In my circle, Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life". Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard. In my opinion, they are at least 5-10x notch harder than interviews at FB, MSFT, AMZN and other tier-1 places for comparable level.

[VRay]

Hey buddy, I'm going to pull back the curtains a little on those coding interviews. Solving coding interview questions is a skill that you can learn, just like playing musical instruments or solving mystery novels or mastering a type of video game.

If you hit up TopCoder or Leetcode or one of those other corny interview programming sites and grind away at it for a few months, you can get to a point where you have a really solid chance of getting past any coding interview.

Google is a little sneaky, since they take "Can solve a leetcode question" as a starting point, then crank the difficulty up on the questions even more so you have to be able to solve the base question in ~10 minutes and then expand on it. It's like "OK, you solved the locked room mystery. But now can you talk me through a locked room mystery solution.. WHILE PLAYING DARK SOULS?"

There's a ton of luck involved too. I've run into a lot of interviewers who ask questions they themselves don't actually understand very well. Then I'm in the unenviable position of wondering "Do I tell the interviewer he's wrong? Is it a trick, or is he just an idiot? Is he going to get mad if I tell him?" Another problem is that coding interviewers will ask a question, not try to code up the answer themselves, and just assume it's way easier than it really is.

If you want to get hired by the GAFMAN, just grind out those coding questions (and write working code answers in your IDE of choice or on the command line with vim/gcc). Brush up on your CS when you come across a concept you don't understand. Then get some referrals to get past the HR filter, and roll the dice.

BTW, when you get an offer, don't sell yourself short. Check levels (dot) fyi and/or talk to your peers to make sure you're getting the market rate for your skills.

[unclekev]

> programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers

Programmers at Google make no decisions. The only people 'making decisions' are the product owners and project managers.

> Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard.

A hard coding interview is not a valid metric on how good a place is to work.

> Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life"

I've known people who feel like this as well. Some of them are still at Google and it's the best thing they ever did for their career.

On the other hand, I know people who felt this way, got a job at Google and it completely destroyed any passion for programming/computers that they had, to the point where they never worked in tech again.

Personally I feel it's dangerous to attach "you made it in life" to getting a job at Company X.

[planet-and-halo]

My general impression is that there are only three broad ways to be happy in life:

1. Genetically (i.e. your brain just works that way)

2. Luck into it

3. Iterate towards it (continuously)

The whole concept of "get job X and now I'm done" doesn't really fit well into any of those. A job could be a good iteration or you could get lucky and have it turn out to be a wonderful team/position/whatever, but the likelihood of your plan being "I need to do x" and then you do x and are then happy seems immensely unlikely. Like Samuel Johnson said, "Life is a progression from want to want, not enjoyment to enjoyment."

[shados]

It used to be, long ago. Lots of other places caught up and they went down.

Of course, like any very large companies, it's going to be fragmented. Some groups at Google are really that awesome. Some are awful.

It's no longer "the place to be" for the top engineers though who will frequently pick other places, though it does look good on your resume.

For the interview being harder, they give you a flier that tells you almost exactly what they're going to ask, and they expect you to prep specifically for those things, so it's a lot more of a test of will than a test of skill. If you "really want to get a job there", you just cram your head with whatever the PDF says you should know and repeat it during the interview and you should be in. It's of course not that simple for people with personal situations that prevent them from just cramming reading material, and they're somewhat famous in some circles for discrimination (especially gender based, from anecdotal evidence).