EPTThanks for putting yourself out there and being vulnverable to the TL community.
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purecarnagge
719 Posts
Thanks for putting yourself out there and being vulnverable to the TL community. | ||
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Josh111
United States239 Posts
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rawb
United States252 Posts
I'm in Computer Science myself and I can definitely relate to the feeling of complete failure during an interview, I actually had one called short because I was so nervous. He rescheduled and I did much better the second time around o_O | ||
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
On November 15 2011 12:48 Triscuit wrote: But in that car, following a grueling and painful day of interviews, I realized that Google is able to do this because they hire very, very smart people. People that can wrap their heads around these big problems, boil them down to something manageable, and provide the users with something good. People that are the best. And I'm not the best. Whoa whoa whoa -- that's at best a half-truth. From the interviewee's perspective, you can't see a lot of what happens on the back end. 1) Google does hire very smart people. Chances are that if you got in the door at all, you are one. 2) Google interviews a lot more people than they can possibly hire. Every selective company does this. In my years working at Disney and Dreamworks, different industry but similarly selective, we'd probably interview four or five candidates to each one hired. We passed on plenty of first-rate candidates just because it simply wasn't possible to hire them all. Not getting an offer isn't always a reflection on your qualifications. 3) Interview questions for software engineers at a company with Google's values are meant to be hard, usually unsolvably hard. If they see too many complete solutions in their interviews, they'll pick a different problem. They're looking at your thought process, how you approach the problem, and whether you recognize how close you've come, not your ultimate result. 4) Building great products isn't something people get right the first time, ever. They don't hire brilliant people who get everything right the first time, because those people don't exist. They hire smart people who can see where their own solutions are weak and with the motivation to iterate and try again until they nail it. 5) Not every interviewer at Google is going to place the same priority on the end result of an interview question. Yeah, there will be a few who are negative about a candidate because their answer wasn't perfect. Thing is, everyone else on the team knows who those few interviewers are and deals with this every time they bring a candidate in. To some extent, it's HR's role to ensure that the process isn't dominated by the few negative nancies who find something to criticize in every interview, because ultimately it becomes very costly to interview 10 or more candidates per position. Bottom line: if you were somewhat successful at some of the interview questions, you're probably doing quite well. It's not possible to see how they'll evaluate you without a much deeper knowledge of their internal politics and how they go about what they do than you can ever have from the outside. But, don't stress because your answers weren't perfect -- that's the entire point. Edit: The fact that you saw that you hadn't reached perfect solutions and found this troubling is actually an excellent predictor that you'd put in the hard work necessary to make things you develop work well. Don't underestimate the ability of Google's interviewers to see this. | ||
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HowitZer
United States1610 Posts
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Porcelina
United Kingdom3249 Posts
I am in a completely different field and I have never interviewed for an international giant on par with Google or Microsoft. But right after graduation I went through a few firms that were very big on a national level. Some of those things were devastating. I think what hit me the hardest was that one moment of clarity where you feel like a very small fish in a big pond after having had a lot of experience of the opposite situation. I think I choked two or three interviews before I came to terms with how I had to handle the pressure I put on myself and to actually manage and size that pressure in a positive and productive way. There is nothing wrong with knowing you are not the best. For most people, that is accuracy, not necessarily humility, modesty or anything else. I think that this is a point many people that come from higher education really struggle with. It is easy enough to tell yourself it is the case, it is not that hard to realise on an objective level. However, I think many people, myself included have a very hard time shaking the feeling that not being the best is wrong. I graduated in the top five from high school, I achieved a 4.0 or rather the equivalent for my B.A. I then went on to work in a place where I was clearly brighter than the people around me before I went back for my law degree, where I finished in the top percentile for the year. A lot of that was attributed to wanting to be the best at what I was doing. That was especially true during my time in school. Problems were there to be overcome and conquered. I really enjoyed the learning process of it, to gain more knowledge and in mastering my different subjects I felt on top of the world. I felt that as long as I put my mind to it and I put in as much effort as I could, there were no limits. But the fact of the matter is that there are so many things in my field that I will never be the best at. And to be quite frank, it took me three years of depression and pretty severe illness to come to that conclusion and to accept it as fact. That acceptance is different from the more gentle shoves and tells the world gives you. Because even if you know it objectively, you can figure it out, you still have that voice inside you that tells you it is wrong and that having other people be more competent, smarter or more knowledgeable is a deficiency in your character. Personally, that transitioned into some kind of hopelessness and paralysis. The self sufficiency and the pride that pretty much drove me to excel earlier in my life became a prison. I would imagine it is not an uncommon trajectory for depression in people of a certain character and a certain make. You end up in a state of mind trapped in between the entitlement and thinking that you deserve nothing at all. (As I am writing this right now, I realise that this post has gone in a completely different direction than what I had intended and wanted to comment on. However, I do not really want to delete it and neither do I really want to post my own blog about shitty troubles, so I am leaving it in. Perhaps I can also get back to the point, though I would not bet on it.) I do not blame my problems later in life on my inability to handle interviews constructively. I do think that my case, while perhaps extreme, has some symptoms that are more or less commonplace in a lot of graduates and perhaps in a lot of people who share some of my dispositions. I am not sure there is a universal way to deal with such issues and to deal with interview despair, I suspect that in some cases you just have to deal with the fact that it will happen before you can steer yourself on the path to overcoming it. There are definitely ways to help, but at least personally, reflecting upon my experiences, that I needed those moments to happen. Not because it was a healthy dose of humility, but perhaps rather because sometimes the negative experiences in life prove to be educational as well. Now, as I reel this in, I just wanted to thank Triscuit for making these blogs. They have offered some excellent insight not only into the environment of very illustrious companies, but also into the thought processes and the journey it offered. <3 | ||
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Triscuit
United States722 Posts
Being at Google is an extraordinarily intimidating experience. Even moreso than Microsoft, because there was much less "hi how are you?" and more instantaneously putting you under the gun. Such an experience, and knowing that a large number of people working there have PhD's or at least Master's has a very demoralizing effect, and that's why I think I had a moment like that. I'm actually back to thinking I have what it takes. @ Porcelina: The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. It seems to me that you have continuously busted your ass through school and life in general, never really accepting defeat, and that eventually wears away at you. The more tired you get, it seems the more you slip and fall, and thus the more critical you are of yourself. Honestly I have tried very hard in my life to be reasonable about my goals, and make time for myself, and not beat myself up too hard about failures. I certainly keep myself on the right path, but my GPA has really not been the best. I'm at 3.42 overall, 3.61 CS. That's very good and I'm not going to deny it, but it's not the best because I have never strived to be perfect. But through it all I have always rationalized "well if I just try harder, or want it more, then I can have it easily." It's a slacker's justification for feeling entitled to something when you haven't really done anything. I have gotten where I am not because of extreme worth ethic, but extensive planning and being very quick to learn things. That pretty much failed me here, and I realized in a bad way that my lazy ways weren't going to cut it anymore. Thanks for telling me a bit of your story. Don't take it the wrong way but it is a great cautionary tale. | ||
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
On November 17 2011 10:18 Triscuit wrote: @ Lysenko: Thanks for that. You have very good points, and I know very much that they are correct. I'm no longer so down on myself as I was at that moment, but it was a deep feeling of disappointment in myself that led to such a feeling, and I think that is a very real feeling, worth sharing with others. Absolutely worth sharing! I was just trying to give you a sense for how it looks from the other side of the table. Whether you get an offer or not, unfortunately you are unlikely to ever get the specific feedback that might let you know why. (Edit: well you might get some feedback if you do get hired, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that's the whole story!) Regardless, if you prepare your best and do the best you can, you'll probably do pretty well. And yeah, I've been there myself. Once you work at a high profile company like a Microsoft or a Google or a Disney or a Blizzard you'll find those types of interviews a LOT less intimidating, because while you'll work with a bunch of really great people you'll also know how imperfect and subject to chance that hiring process really is. Until then, I'm glad you got your offer from Microsoft, and hopefully one from Google will be forthcoming!! | ||
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shindigs
United States4795 Posts
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rabidch
United States20287 Posts
But think about it, Google may hire smart people that can figure out how to solve intense problems involving algorithms but always remember creation of software takes much more than that! | ||
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Eternalmisfit
United States643 Posts
As Lysenko said, you should not be too disappointed by the interview experience and not feel that you are not capable regardless of the result. I have talked a lot of my friends who are working in similar fields/jobs and I have got pretty much universal feedback that getting selected for an on-site interview more often than not suggests that you are more capable for the position you are interviewing for. However, getting a job offer depends on what the exact skill-set the company needs at that point and what kind of recruitment philosophy is applied. Some companies follow the philosophy of interviewing multiple people for one post and selecting the best of the them while others have a philosophy of one one candidate at a time for a post. In case of the first method, it is quite possible to be really good but still not get the job just because you were competing with someone better. In any case, congrats on the MS offer and hope you get one from Google too. | ||
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Triscuit
United States722 Posts
I think overall Microsoft is a better fit for me, but I wanted to prove to myself that I have what it takes to be offered a job at Google. I'm not going to take the rejection very hard, I'm mostly just excited for what my future holds. Thanks for reading, everybody. I am going to be writing a blog pretty soon (maybe over Thanksgiving) about what it's like to be a CS major at a university that's considered to be pretty tough (University of Texas at Austin). It's going to be long, maybe twice the length or more of my previous blogs. Hopefully that doesn't turn too many people away. <3 | ||
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StarStruck
25339 Posts
On November 17 2011 07:59 Lysenko wrote: Whoa whoa whoa -- that's at best a half-truth. From the interviewee's perspective, you can't see a lot of what happens on the back end. 1) Google does hire very smart people. Chances are that if you got in the door at all, you are one. 2) Google interviews a lot more people than they can possibly hire. Every selective company does this. In my years working at Disney and Dreamworks, different industry but similarly selective, we'd probably interview four or five candidates to each one hired. We passed on plenty of first-rate candidates just because it simply wasn't possible to hire them all. Not getting an offer isn't always a reflection on your qualifications. 3) Interview questions for software engineers at a company with Google's values are meant to be hard, usually unsolvably hard. If they see too many complete solutions in their interviews, they'll pick a different problem. They're looking at your thought process, how you approach the problem, and whether you recognize how close you've come, not your ultimate result. 4) Building great products isn't something people get right the first time, ever. They don't hire brilliant people who get everything right the first time, because those people don't exist. They hire smart people who can see where their own solutions are weak and with the motivation to iterate and try again until they nail it. 5) Not every interviewer at Google is going to place the same priority on the end result of an interview question. Yeah, there will be a few who are negative about a candidate because their answer wasn't perfect. Thing is, everyone else on the team knows who those few interviewers are and deals with this every time they bring a candidate in. To some extent, it's HR's role to ensure that the process isn't dominated by the few negative nancies who find something to criticize in every interview, because ultimately it becomes very costly to interview 10 or more candidates per position. Bottom line: if you were somewhat successful at some of the interview questions, you're probably doing quite well. It's not possible to see how they'll evaluate you without a much deeper knowledge of their internal politics and how they go about what they do than you can ever have from the outside. But, don't stress because your answers weren't perfect -- that's the entire point. Edit: The fact that you saw that you hadn't reached perfect solutions and found this troubling is actually an excellent predictor that you'd put in the hard work necessary to make things you develop work well. Don't underestimate the ability of Google's interviewers to see this. Lysenko nailing it. Took the words right out of my mouth. Your that guy who wrote the blog about working in the film industry as an engineer several months ago, aren't you? Listen to this man; he knows his stuff. On November 18 2011 08:30 Triscuit wrote: Just got a call earlier. Google decided not to extend me an offer. That's okay though, when I was there I became very concerned that the work culture was not what I was looking for in a company. I think maybe Google wasn't a very good fit for me on a personal level, just as maybe the San Francisco Bay area might not have been a good fit for me on a personal level either. I think overall Microsoft is a better fit for me, but I wanted to prove to myself that I have what it takes to be offered a job at Google. I'm not going to take the rejection very hard, I'm mostly just excited for what my future holds. Thanks for reading, everybody. I am going to be writing a blog pretty soon (maybe over Thanksgiving) about what it's like to be a CS major at a university that's considered to be pretty tough (University of Texas at Austin). It's going to be long, maybe twice the length or more of my previous blogs. Hopefully that doesn't turn too many people away. <3 That's the most important thing. You gained a lot of information about yourself and both companies from the interview process. Looks like your well on your way to a successful career. I wish you the best of luck. | ||
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ellerina
Philippines452 Posts
 + Show Spoiler [slightly off-tangent ramble] + Another thing that struck me in your blog was the realization that you were not the best (although like others said, you're pretty up there to be flown for interviews and offered a job at MS!). Currently, I'm applying to go to grad school. In retrospect, my undergraduate program had many deficiencies in terms of curriculum and teachers, and some of my grades weren't the best either, (which was was entirely my fault). As a result, I'm going up against candidates with lots of research experience and excellent GPAs, and sometimes I feel, why do I even try? I'm nowhere near the best. But I want to at least learn from the best or even have opportunities to work with the best in the future. I might not be able to do so now, but I definitely want to come close to their level or at the least be a solid person in whatever career/research field I choose. Sorry for rambling, and I wish you luck and happiness with your career in whatever company you choose. With what you've shown in your blog, I don't think you can go wrong. | ||
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Charger
United States2405 Posts
On November 18 2011 08:30 Triscuit wrote: Just got a call earlier. Google decided not to extend me an offer. That's okay though, when I was there I became very concerned that the work culture was not what I was looking for in a company. I think maybe Google wasn't a very good fit for me on a personal level, just as maybe the San Francisco Bay area might not have been a good fit for me on a personal level either. I think overall Microsoft is a better fit for me, but I wanted to prove to myself that I have what it takes to be offered a job at Google. I'm not going to take the rejection very hard, I'm mostly just excited for what my future holds. Thanks for reading, everybody. I am going to be writing a blog pretty soon (maybe over Thanksgiving) about what it's like to be a CS major at a university that's considered to be pretty tough (University of Texas at Austin). It's going to be long, maybe twice the length or more of my previous blogs. Hopefully that doesn't turn too many people away. <3 Does this mean you have decided to take the Microsoft offer? | ||
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JeeJee
Canada5652 Posts
On November 18 2011 08:30 Triscuit wrote: Just got a call earlier. Google decided not to extend me an offer. That's okay though, when I was there I became very concerned that the work culture was not what I was looking for in a company. I think maybe Google wasn't a very good fit for me on a personal level, just as maybe the San Francisco Bay area might not have been a good fit for me on a personal level either. I think overall Microsoft is a better fit for me, but I wanted to prove to myself that I have what it takes to be offered a job at Google. I'm not going to take the rejection very hard, I'm mostly just excited for what my future holds. Thanks for reading, everybody. I am going to be writing a blog pretty soon (maybe over Thanksgiving) about what it's like to be a CS major at a university that's considered to be pretty tough (University of Texas at Austin). It's going to be long, maybe twice the length or more of my previous blogs. Hopefully that doesn't turn too many people away. <3 If you don't mind, what is it about google/SFbay culture that put you off while MS did not? You could PM if you prefer. On November 15 2011 12:58 Hot_Bid wrote: There's a moment in a lot of people's lives where a realization like this comes crashing down on top of them. Ugh, this is depressingly true. And yet strangely motivating at the same time. | ||
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The_LiNk
Canada863 Posts
It's unfortunate that you didn't get an offer from Google. Congratulations with your offer from Microsoft. | ||
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Triscuit
United States722 Posts
@JeeJee: Maybe it was less a cultural thing, and more of it just being a very fast city, so I don't think I could really handle living inside of SF. I'm a pretty low-stress, laid back kind of person, so city living is not really for me. Also, I eventually intend to have a house. I know that for a similar sized house, or even a smaller one, a house in the SF Bay area or San Jose goes for about double what it would cost in the Seattle area. I think this was more of a contributing factor than anything. @The_LiNk: Thanks! And tell them to go to as many career fairs as they can. You must master the art of the technical interview BEFORE you really want to look for a full time job. Interviewing for as many internships as you can find will really help that. @ellerina: I can tend to ramble a bit too, but that's okay if you're a decent communicator. In fact, if you're rambling about a project that you've done, or something related to you field in general (but you're doing it in a coherent manner) it shows your passion for the field, which is actually a very good thing. | ||
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SpoR
United States1542 Posts
If they don't offer you anything, then what are you going to tell microsoft, considering that they knew that you had to go interview with google? Me thinks they will be in a better bargaining position for you if don't have two choices on where to work. And that may also be another reason why google passed on you. They knew microsoft might fight for you so they would have to pay you more when they could pay someone else less who has no other offers. | ||
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Triscuit
United States722 Posts
On November 18 2011 16:05 SpoR wrote: I dunno if it was implied by your final thoughts and stuff in the OP but did they actually tell you no already? Or are you just getting the feeling you won't get the job offer? If they don't offer you anything, then what are you going to tell microsoft, considering that they knew that you had to go interview with google? Me thinks they will be in a better bargaining position for you if don't have two choices on where to work. And that may also be another reason why google passed on you. They knew microsoft might fight for you so they would have to pay you more when they could pay someone else less who has no other offers. My final thoughts were just me getting the feeling I wouldn't get the offer, but I posted somewhere up above that Google called me yesterday and said they decided not to hire me. And that's an interesting opinion. I always figured having a competing offer would help me, just because it would show Google that a competitor wants me, so they may try to jump on that to deny a hire to a rival. I don't really know if other offers really would affect Google's offer though. | ||
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