Short version: bad experience at Google recruiting/interview, no offer. Longer version: the process of speaking with recruiters and going in for the interview was unnecessarily long and exhausting. It about 3 months, speaking to 5 recruiters (sourcer, recruiter, scheduler) to get something lined up. Initially I was speaking to the SWE org and had the date almost confirmed, then the recruiter emailed me saying he can’t talk to me anymore because I am now being considered for SRE org. After dozens of emailed exchanged and another dozen phone calls I was confirmed to for the interview. Anyway, went in for the full loop on campus. Most interviews went well, however one of the interviewers was borderline disrespectful. Came in set down and instructed me to wipe the whiteboard clean before he would propose the problem. Interview went downhill from here. No offer - no surprise. After this experience I am not inclined to consider Google in the future (when they call again in 6/12 months). I shared this to see if my experience with Google interviews is an outlier or not.
Thats totally unprofessional and completely unacceptable! I'm really sorry you had to go through that.
Thank you!
Did you make it to hiring committee or do you think your bad interviewer shut you down before?
I think it shut me down before making to hiring committee. The recruiter didn’t mention anything about it.
As for lots of time with recruiting. It seems better than them just saying no because there wasn’t any interest in their area. So while it’s inconvenient, it sounds like they did a lot of work to get you onsite. As for the disrespectful interview, that’s never good. However from what you wrote is the only thing they did was ask you to erase the white board? I’m assuming you’re leaving out other stuff.
The interest was there for SWE because they reached out, they scheduled the interview. Asking a candidate to get up and clean the whiteboard before you would care to propose the problem IS disrespectful. One option is to clean in yourself, other would be to say something like “let’s make some room/clean the whiteboard”.
Just out of curiosity where you significantly closer to the whiteboard than the interviewer?
In my experience disrespectful interviewers aren't the norm and aren't representative of the culture in general. I'm sorry you got one. On the other hand, recruiters who inexplicably drag their feet are pretty normal, I'm sorry to say. It's a major source of dissatisfaction when employees work hard to find referrals, talk up the company, and walk them through the application process, and then the referral's first experience with Google is having a recruiter keep them on hold for weeks.
Look, life is not fair. Not everyone is nice. A lot comes down to luck. Stop b*tching and wanting the world to be something it’s not. Do what you can, control what you can control, and forget the rest. No one likes whiney little b*tches.
Speak for yourself. I want to hear about both good and bad interview experiences at specific companies.
Oh like it is anything but random? You think these few anecdotes are statistically significant for a company that has 80k employees? Please
You are not alone. Interviewers at google seems like don’t care about candidates’ experience since they won’t work with you or see you in the near future, they just want to fill out the questionnaire and that’s it
I care for example, but this also should work the other way too. Don't make a drama out of a simple ask.
cleaning the whiteboard is not a problem to me at all, I do it all the time by myself without asking. I’m saying that my overall impression from google interview was not that positive, I can feel people behind the screen was reading a list of questions without caring my answers, and yes, 3 remote interviews within an onsite
The interviewer may not be a native speaker to say this politely. But your reaction to a simple request to cleanup after yourself is not great either. Majority of people would not bother to do this. Imagine your coworker asking you to clean the code after yourself
I am sure you know that issue is not the request, but the way it was made.
There are people who pretend these processes are flawless and judge people by whether they got an offer or not! Unfortunately, there are many of them. I stopped entertaining these years ago and only use my network.
Great to have a good network. Unfortunately with places like Google they would still put you in the random loop, even with a strong internal referral
I was talking about them - don't bother unless you think you'll die if you didn't apply there.
Be less sensitive. This isn't bad. I got far worse in interviews. Some interviewers are being rude on purpose to evaluate how you would work with difficult people.
Yeah, whether you bend over if you need the job or whether you do the right thing and walk out... Has anyone passed such a test by walking out for making your point? If you walk out on someone wrong by any measure, do they call you back and say, "you passed that test!"?
I have had a comparable experience regarding rude interviewer and he openly suggested that he doesn’t think that I am fit to be a Software Engineer, reported this to recruiter just to be brushed off as just another comment and I never bothered to interview with them again
Very similar.. brought this up to the recruiter. He asked me “tell me what I can do about it?”. I answered “what can you do?”. He said “nothing, I’ll make a note”
@twilio how did you report this to the recruiter - email or phone? had a similar experience recently. can one write/email to the recruiter that "the interviewer was stressed and negative from the start" or is to too strong and would just make the candidate look bad?