JustKernel

Recently I attended an interview with Google and I didn’t clear and was given usual reasons. (yeah, you might think if I would have cleared I would not have written this blog post. May be you are true. But….. here is my brain dump).

But the big questions that that always comes to my mind is that is Google really worth it just for its name sake ??

I attended the usual long interview rounds. Some interviewers were nice experienced people, and others fresh graduates or mid experienced employees who claim they have got training with google regarding interview process and Google trust them that they will be able to judge senior people by asking a one programming question… let me give you an example:

I was interviewed by this person (fresh graduate or mid level engineer) who said he works on chrome browser and he asked me a question about scheduler. I had extensively worked on Xen scheduler and was explaining the concepts to him based on that. Do you think the interviewer will have the breadth of knowledge or the mindset to understand the scheduler and its concept from a much detailed perspective . (Xen a baremetal hypervisor and its scheduler handles a lot more workload than what a chrome scheduler would have done.) But yes, Google trusts him that he will be able to provide correct feedback as he has undergone training.

Another example: Another round of interview and another question. I was given a task of designing a circular list. It was a simple task and I used dynamic allocation to design it. But interviewer expected me to design a static list because he mentioned that we are under sever memory constrain. Ok. Accpeted. Now, we argued that how can we handle the end node and time was over. Can’t the interviewer be wrong. No, Google thinks that interviewers are always right as they have been trained…

Another weird thing I noticed during interview process is that no one talks about their work or the quality of work. They talk about building, its facilities but nothing about the work !!! Does one should join Google just for these artificial things. Not me… Ah yeah, you may argue that they decide on the work after you have been cleared the interview.. Another of Google’s thought that they believe in…. And one funny thing happened while going through the lift with google employees. I was repeatedly told that we are re-writing its algorithm.. 🙂 . Oh man. Is that a big thing… Writing algorithm for a lift is something to boast about..

During lunch time I had interaction with employee and you get the feeling that their employees are just normal human beings (not from special planet) with average knowledge doing average quality work , thats all. Some are here because of good salary, some because there is no politics and good culture and some because of facilities. But I do believe some will be there because of quality of work.

SO yes, I have my answer. Yes, google is worth it, like any other mid sized company, if it can give me good quality work that I enjoy doing it and is my passion. But, its defiantly not worth it for the name sake.

Just my personal thoughts. I may be wrong. Not grudges against anyone.

comment or share your thoughts: anshul_makkar@justkernel.com