see also: Got the call

I heard an odd third-hand rumor that I wasn't going to take the job at Google. I hope the person that started it doesn't know something I don't, because as far as I know, it's a done deal. I signed and returned my hiring paperwork last week, and turned in a letter of resignation to Pomona on Friday.

My little sidebar tells me that several people have come here looking for information about Google interviews, so for posterity, here is what the hiring process was like. (See, I told you I cared.)

I never actually applied or went looking for a job; I just got a random email from a Google recruiter named Marissa. She described a specific job she was looking to fill ("Site Reliability Engineer") and asked if I wanted to be considered. I eventually responded to say that I already had a perfectly good job, and wasn't looking for a new one, and that I would need a significant incentive to leave, but if she still wanted to talk to me under those circumstances, fine. (This might seem standoffish, which it was, but anybody in this industry knows that tech recruiters are a waste of time more often than not. If Marissa had been working for some third party agency and not Google proper, I would never have responded at all.)

Anyway, Marissa was not deterred, and soon scheduled a first phone screening. She already had my resume; I still don't know how, but then I guess it is Google. So I told her about the previous jobs on there, and she gave me three simple engineering questions from a script. I got two of them easily and blew the third one, which was some algorithmic thing about counting bits. I guess that was good enough, since I was handed off to another Google recruiter, Tod, who scheduled another phone interview.

The two phone interviews, and all the rest of the interviews in fact, were just straight technical questions about how the Internet works: IP, TCP, DNS, ARP, BGP, Ethernet, broadcast, multicast, SQL, HTTP, quite a lot of stuff, actually, and in pretty serious detail. An interesting thing about the second phone interview was that it was scheduled for a Friday, but the interviewer called on a Wednesday morning instead. This was said to be a mistake, and it probably was, but it could conceivably have served the purpose of cutting off any time I was spending studying (which was none, anyway), or finding out whether I would get upset at a change in plans. I must have passed the phone interviews, since Tod got back to me within the promised amount of time and arranged an on-site interview.

I went to Mountain View on the first weekend in November, got a car, and stayed in a funny little hotel where my room came with a Slinky and Rubik's Cube. My interviews were all day Friday, and lasted about an hour each, always with one other person from the department. There were at least six of them, and the only break was for lunch. I never left my little conference room; each interviewer would come to me at their appointed time.

These interviews left me with no sense at all of whether my performance was good, bad, or indifferent, because the style was to ask me to tell everything I knew about X (DNS being a popular value for X), and then to ask me to explain part of my answer in greater detail. This repeated until I didn't know anything more, which meant that every line of questions ended with me not having any idea what we were talking about. (I have since been told that this is the standard procedure for Ph.D. oral exams.) Because of this, and because I was tired of standing at the board and listening to myself talk all day, I left feeling fairly discouraged.

Again, there were lots of questions about protocols and architecture, not too much about specific applications (I get the feeling that Google runs almost nothing off the shelf), some algorithms. I spent one whole hour trying to write a program to approximate the definite integral of a function of n variables over n arbitrary ranges. That might sound horrible but it was actually a relief, since I was a math major, and for me, the questions about computer science were the ones I had to fake.

I spent the rest of the weekend amusing myself in the bustling metropolis of Sunnyvale. Which was tricky, because I didn't know if I was looking for reasons to like living there (in case I got an offer and wanted to take it), or for reasons to dislike it (in case I didn't, and wanted to rationalize how I never wanted to work there anyway).

The last step of the process seems to have been that Google actually did check all of the references that I put down on their form. I'm not sure if they talked on the phone, or just sent emails, but a word to the wise, make sure you have real references and don't just guess their email addresses (wrongly) like I did.

I'm now trying to think about getting ready to move, assisted by the many people assigned to help. Google hired somebody to be my "personal move manager", who hired the van company and the company that is apparently going to take me on a tour of prospective apartments. Each of those companies then referred me to some local affiliate, so there are at least six people involved. None of it really matters yet, since as a member of the renting underclass, there is just no point in trying to find a place to live until the middle of January. So all I have actually done is put my CDs in boxes, as illustrated in the photograph. More news as it develops.

07 Dec 2005 03:30 PT - persistent link - trackback - 1 comment