Google: An Interview Primer
November 25, 2008
Peteris Krumins’ “My Job Interview at Google” is a useful summary of the interview procedure at the GOOG. You can find his narrative here. For me, the most useful portions of his experience with every-so-smart Googlers is the list of links to other potential hires’ narratives about the process. What emerges from Mr. Krumins’ narrative and several of the others is the free form approach the company takes to determining who is Googley and who is not. For me the most interesting comment in the narrative was:
I was asked to write an implementation of a very well known data structure. While coding I made a mistake and forgot to initialize part of a data structure that I had malloc()’ed! The program would have segfault’ed in real life and I would have noticed the error, but Google engineers are very serious about it! If you have an interview don’t ever make any mistakes!
The notion of not making errors is admirable. However, Mr. Krumins flew across a number of time zones, had a hectic schedule, and endured conversations with Googlers from different teams. I wonder what Google does to Googlers who make errors that cause Gmail to fail or Web sites to disappear from results lists. My hunch is that the notion of perfection has one meaning for a jet lagged outsider and another meaning for Googlers lucky enough to be on the inside. Contractors don’t count.
Stephen Arnold, November 25, 2008
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