I have interviewed twice at Google now and it seems pretty par for the course. They didn't tell me the interview date and time until the day before, and despite having to rearrange my schedule on short notice, they couldn't have the courtesy of being on time.
After showing up to the call half hour late, we got started. My interviewer was quite verbally irate when I asked clarifying questions and had some connection problems. Then he asked me to explain my code over the phone, brace-by-brace, colon by colon. I asked to share a document it was declined, I asked if we could talk about the algorithm and pseudo-code, but he wanted the C++. Afterwards he told me it wouldn't compile because it was missing some semicolons.
A few months later I tried again, thinking it was a fluke. Second interview started much the same as the first. I just hung up, not worth my time.
> I have interviewed twice at Google now and it seems pretty par for the course.
I had a phone screen with Google earlier this year and it had great audio quality and used a shared Google Doc.
It is really sad to hear that you and others are having such a different experience.
I wonder if the quality of people's interviews are affected by the location and position they're interviewing for. I was interviewing for a smaller location instead of the main campus.
I second this. I just finished interviewing on-site at Google. The phone screen was fine -- I was given a link to a Google Doc ahead of time. Audio quality was fine and the interviewer was personable. I actually found the on-site interviewers to be significantly nicer than other places I've interviewed at. I mentioned this to one of them and he said that all interviwers are required to go through special training. This was on the main Mountain View campus.
After Google missed the first scheduled interview, I had the same experience the last time I interviewed. I'd hardly call it a good experience because the call was clear and they used a Google doc, however. I will never understand the idiocy of asking someone to code over the phone (and then not giving them either the time or space/privacy to work in), but if it must be done, at least use an appropriate tool. The code I wrote was JS and there are at least a handful of online realtime JS interpreters like jsbin etc. with proper indentation handling, code highlighting, and most importantly, the ability to run the code so you don't spend time figuring out where the semicolons should be or where missing parenthesis might be. While I have no doubt that age discrimination is happening at Google and elsewhere, one can answer all the questions in the phone screen correctly and still not pass so it'll be quite difficult for the lawsuit to prove its claims.
Google's interview process is a bad joke, but frankly the (internal Google) recruiters I've spoken to appears to be as fed up with it as candidates - anyone interviewing with Google who has a bad phone interview should bring it up with the recruiter, as at least sometimes the recruiters can get the phone screens thrown away.
(source: first hand experience with Google recruiters, and first hand experience of being sent further in the process after explaining the long list of ridiculous flaws in the phone interview I had, all of which the recruiter agreed with me on. I declined to continue the process, though, after it became clear that if I had gotten the job I would have been managing the guy who gave the phone screen; I had no desire whatsoever to ever work with that person based on the way he acted).
A friend went through a Google phone screen at a satellite campus two or three years ago. The interviewer asked him to solve a simple problem first, which my friend answered. The interviewer followed up with a tougher problem, and before my friend could think for a minute about questions to ask the interviewer, he was told that the interviewer would be leaving to go to the restroom. The interviewer set the phone down.
Twenty minutes later, he returned and asked for a solution, which my friend didn't have. The interviewer ended the call and my friend was turned down. He raised his objections to the process to his recruiter, who apologized and agreed to send him a Google branded mug and T-shirt for his troubles (what a joke). He still hasn't received them.
It's understandable if people find it ridiculous to read their code line by line but it's not at all clear from the article this is what was being asked as opposed to asking about the general approach to the problem. I feel like if the person's English was not that good, one thing that the interviewer might have wanted to know was whether the person could communicate effectively with coworkers.
Indeed, the article even says that the interviewer could not understand what was being read. For someone so senior, it's likely that he would have had to mentor junior developers. Seems like it would be a bad experience if they were unable to understand him and vice versa.
> I feel like if the person's English was not that good, one thing that the interviewer might have wanted to know was whether the person could communicate effectively with coworkers.
person = interviewer, or candidate?
The interviewee may have wanted to know the same thing about Google employees...
Yeah, sounds ridiculous, but, well, I don't know, maybe it's on purpose… Like to get a feeling of how able is that person of communicating with his colleagues and explaining code without appropriate media at hand or whatever. It's debatable if this is really what interviewee should be tested for, but ideas about the best interviewing strategy and "what the team needs" diverge drastically, so I guess it's his business.
One more possible scenario: some manager thinks your team absolutely needs more people. You don't think so, because there's some limit on how many people are needed to change a light bulb. So you, in fact, actually aren't that interested in the candidate unless you see that he is perfect fit, somebody you just cannot lose only because you don't need more people right now. And I cannot judge you, it's, well, _OK_ to not to hire someone. Yeah, in the perfect world everybody is always polite and sincerely interested in others and so on, but c'mon, lets just allow people do their job and keep them away from all these political bullshit.
After showing up to the call half hour late, we got started. My interviewer was quite verbally irate when I asked clarifying questions and had some connection problems. Then he asked me to explain my code over the phone, brace-by-brace, colon by colon. I asked to share a document it was declined, I asked if we could talk about the algorithm and pseudo-code, but he wanted the C++. Afterwards he told me it wouldn't compile because it was missing some semicolons.
A few months later I tried again, thinking it was a fluke. Second interview started much the same as the first. I just hung up, not worth my time.