I had such an experience going over Google hiring process that I wanted to share with you all! :-D
First, got approached by a recruiter over LinkedIn, we had the talk and they asked for my CV - probably to ingest data into their system. They also explained to me the whole process I was about the experience.
After sending them the document, they had a phone call with me, the recruiter said the team looked at my resume and decided to skip the 1st phone screening and moved me straight to virtual onsite - I have about 7 yoe in the field.
That was very surprising, but well, what else can I do other than prepare myself?!
They were kind enough to provide me some interesting links for what to expect from their onsite and other materials to check. I started preparing myself - I wasn't currently looking for anything, to be honest.. but, Google is Google anyways.
I started the preparation, LC, cracking the coding interview, AlgoExpert, I checked behavioral preparation as well, I checked the Amazon management guide as well and split my studies between Algorithm and Data Structures. I was able to cover pretty much most of the topics usually they cover, BST, Graphs, Tries, Arrays, Linked List, Hash Tables, Tree traversal... I also did common interview questions list from LC. I had a couple of weeks to prepare. But, 1 day before the scheduled onsite, I had a family emergency. I sent them an email like 1am, I was totally honest, I told them I took the day off but had to deal with family emergency and so on... They understood it and allowed me schedule it again.
However, I had scheduled vacation :-D
They were very nice and told me to relax and get back to them after my vacation! Quick pause to highlight how great the recruitment team is! Very kind.
So, I spent my vacation enjoying family and studying for the onsite at night - yeah, I did that. I don't know how, but I did.
I came back and scheduled my onsite. All day long, full of interviews. 4 coding + 1 behavioral. No design interview. After some time talking to the recruiter, they said I was going to be interviewed for L4 position.
After some days recruiter comes back, they say they collected feedback and so on, I had strong communication skills, good behavioral results and just 1 note on algorithms. They didn't tell me much about it,. though. I tried to get more, but nothing else. They say like I got positive feedback but they would consider me for L3, instead. I said ok, no problem! Go ahead.
Then I asked a few questions about the situation, we went back and forth with my questions, mostly related to position, immigration stuff... At some point they said HR would take care of it later on.
They took a couple more weeks to get back to me - probably with some offer. But, a different outcome, they called me and told me the hiring committee analyzed my application and decided not to move forward with my application. That was very surprising, though. They should have done it before instead of giving hope :-(
So, no offer. I tried to get more feedback, about what to do better, areas to improve, and all they say is: get optimal solutions. I won't go over details about questions, but I was very communicative, I talked to interviewer about my approach, the algorithm I was thinking about, the complexity and only wrote code after making sure I had enough to do it. I always checked if the solution was good, I added some test cases and we discussed it together. Only 1 question I had hints, I came up with the good approach but I wasn't able to finish it on time. All other questions I had the impression I did well. Maybe this one was enough to drag the whole application down. I don't know.
I asked them when I could apply again - even though I haven't, they invited me and they said usually in 1 year.
Overall, it was good to know the process, but it was very exhausting and in my opinion they should have done it slightly different.
But yes. Maybe I can "apply" again. At least I used it to polish up algorithm and data structure skills and kind of motivate myself to keep doing it!
*** Update ***
I meant Amazon Leadership Principles instead of management guide
TC: 130k
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comments
SXLu1: Everything from code quality, metrics analysis, design process and thoroughness on top of the complexity of the systems you end up working with are all way beyond stuff I was doing before. At Google it feels like things are a bit over engineered which might be true but I think it's partially due to how they've been focused on scalability and flexibility. There's also well thought out and executed tools for everything so you're spending most time working on business logic for your domain.
Google will often have to retrain folks on how to do things so that they meet company standards. I knew it mattered and tried to soak up as much as I could, but it really hit me once I left for a place with not so great engineering practices. I dunno how Google maintains such a talent bar with so many engineers. I'm sure there are duds here and there but on average people are pretty smart.
Now that's not to say that other places don't have really smart people or good engineering, but Google being in the position it's been in, has been able to do this at scale. When you get there just go through the codebase. Look up random terms or check out some of the core services
i have 10 YOE, and have passed Amazon L5 bar 5 years ago....
i want to say, f**k off google..
Ah, Area120. The concept is great but I am not sure if it actually produces any meaningful thing.
Lets trend this on blind.
Almost everyone I know is from sone random state school or equally unimpressive place, and guess what, it’s impossible to discern them from the MITers anyway.