I just went through Google hiring committee for SWE (assuming L4) and I was told beforehand that I had 3 strong hire interviews and 2 hires (not sure if weak hire is the correct term). I guess that the hiring manager for the team that selected me wrote a recommendation letter for me also. The recruiter said that everyone wanted to hire me at HC except for 1 person and that someone higher up opted to send me to another HC for a do over instead of having me go through additional interviews. Has anyone ever heard of anything like this? I'm sure it's not the case, but I'm jokingly hoping that they're already set to send me an offer and that this is a trick to make me more susceptible to accepting whatever offer they send me without negotiating :). Also, for background, I have 4.5 YOE and a M.S. in C.S. with a specialization in Machine Learning from a top 10 C.S. school. B.S. was in C.S. also.
How long did it take for you in the Team Matching phase?
Only 2 days. My recruiter posted my info where teams can see it at the end of the day and the next morning he already had 2 teams wanting to talk to me (he also said these are the only 2 teams currently hiring in Austin - not sure if that's true or not). He scheduled me for interviews with them the next day and they both told my recruiter that they wanted me right after my interviews. One of the team hiring managers that interviewed me told me that my on site interview results were very impressive and that he definitely wanted me on his team. I hope that wasn't just to entice me to choose his team over the other one, but after my first miss at hiring committee I'm wondering if that's the case.
@op what are the teams of Google in Austin ? I am curious to know
I'm sure there are other teams, but the ones I talked to are Google Cloud and Legal Works. Apparently the Legal Works team is distributed across multiple locations though.
I've served on hc before. The situation you describe is possible to occur. If your ratings are what you say they are, then you shouldn't have much worry. Good luck!
Well that's good news! Thank you for your take on my situation. That's what I was hoping. I was feeling confident going into HC, but then I was having second thoughts about whether my scores were really that great because of the issue I had at my first HC. I've been trying to figure out what my chances are given my interview ratings, but my recruiter hasn't been comfortable saying how strong they think my chances are, which I understand. This makes me feel a little better. I'm just really hoping for this job so I've been nervous about it.
Nah sometimes there's a single holdout because of nits in the transcribed code and they just can't be convinced. HC is supposed to reach consensus. So sometimes they defer the decision up or to another committee
So you can get hired if you have 3 out of 5 good interviews?
They rate each interview based on a 4 category system. The 4 categories may have official names, but I've heard them described as Strong Do Not Hire, Do Not Hire (but could be convinced otherwise), Hire (but could be convinced otherwise), and Strong Hire. So the top 2 categories are both good, but one is better than the other. So basically I had 2 good interviews and 3 really good interviews. The scary thing about hiring committee is that I've heard stories of people getting rejected with all Strong Hire interviews and also of people getting hired with mostly bad interview ratings, but that is supposed to be rare. I think HC has discretion to base their decision on interview results or on anything else they think is more important in a candidate's hiring packet. It sounds like in most cases (from talking to people on various forums, so it's anecdotal and should be taken with a grain of salt) that having at least 1 or 2 Strong Hire interviews and the rest as Hire interviews is enough to pass HC (at least in the L3/L4 interview loop - I don't know what the standard is when hiring at higher levels, but I'm sure it becomes more stringent).
Update: I found out that the 1 hold out on my first hiring committee didn't have a problem with my performance. They thought that my interview questions weren't hard enough :). That's why they were asking for more interviews. I feel better about it now and a little disappointed at the same time. I'll find out tomorrow from the second HC what the verdict is. Hopefully it means I'm at least looking at an offer or more interviews instead of an immediate rejection.
Damn, what were your questions?
I don't want to say what specific questions I was asked since I had to do the whole NDA thing. My phone interview was 2 leetcode medium questions. Onsite was 1 interview with 2 questions not on leetcode, but I would say the first was medium and the second was hard, 1 interview with 2 leetcode easy questions, 1 OOP design interview, 1 system design and scalability interview, and 1 behavioral interview. I would say both design rounds were moderately challenging. I'm sure the complaint was about my round with leetcode easy questions, but I at least solved both of them with optimal solutions in like 15 minutes with no mistakes (I double checked my solutions later to make sure) and then the interviewer said they had nothing else and they let me ask them questions about Google for the rest of the time.
Impressive. Thanks for sharing.
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Recruiter said he would do something similar for me, another HC in a different location bc Pittsburgh had no headcount. But... They never went through with it because nobody else had head count
I'm going for a position in Austin. What do you mean by saying that they had no headcount? Does that mean they're not sure how many positions they have open to fill? My team hiring manager said they're trying to double their size over the next year so hopefully there's no issue with them having room for me.
There was next to no L3 headcount from April until maybe august