Hire Me, Google

Apparently, living in Canada gets you a few extra phone interviews before you can be flown in for the real interviews. Technical blogger Mohit Muthanna recently accepted a job offer from Google. In his oppinion, the interviews weren’t that difficult:

To anyone else who’s interviewing at Google: don’t sweat it. There’s a lot of posts on the web where people talk about Google interviews being outrageously difficult, and something only PHDs can get through; but that’s just blown way out of proportion.

But then again, when you can whip up articles such as How OS X Executes Applications and Using Spotlight from the OS X Commandline without breaking a sweat, I guess a simple job interview isn’t that much of a challenge.

Dav Glass (a bald tatooed biker who builds clustered web farms in his spare time) interviewed with Yahoo! and Google on the same night. Interestingly enough, he liked the Yahoo! interview better.

Gary C from Zürich, Switzerland accepted a job offer from Google while on vacation in Cape Town. He used to work for Monzoon Networks, a Swiss provider of Wireless hotspot tools.

I assume this hiring has a lot to do with Google’s plans to provide free Wi-Fi in San Francisco and their patent application for location based Wi-Fi advertising (a brilliant idea if you ask me).

Paul Makepeace (yes, that is his real name) of realprogrammers.com fame was hired by Google in December 2005. He has now become a member of the Google Hiring Squad. As such, he offers a few tips to those interviewing with Google. He also explains the interview process a bit:

Apart from an initial phone screen by the technical recruiter the engineering interviews are conducted by engineers: two phone interviews then the famous four hour back-to-back experience. So even just for a potential hire that six engineers doing 45min interviews (in practice most of mine were longer) …

It seems that 5 - 6 interviews before being offered a job at Google is not that uncommon. Indian blogger Vardhman Jain was recently offered a job at Google Hyderabad.

Jain hasn’t accepted the offer (yet?):

Surprizingly the choice between the companies (my first offer and this one) is not easy to make. I do have some time to decide and so the decision is postponed for now.

T. Pascal’s got to interview number two before Google turned him down. Pascal kindly lists his interview questions and judging by the nature of them I’d say he was interviewing for a network admin job. In the end he received a polite rejection e-mail from Google Staffing.

I can’t help but wonder if his post on oral sex had anything to do with him being turned down (no, you don’t get a link to that post - find it yourself).

Chen had a difficult decision to make: Google or Microsoft?

So in the end, my decision was really between Google and Microsoft. I talked to a few people from both sides and they all had convincing arguments.

He ended up signing with Google, a choice most readers of this blog can probably sympathize with. In the end Chen made the decision based on wanting to work as a software engineer rather than a project manager.

Since Google and Microsoft tend to hire only highly qualified people this must not be the first time such a choice has come up. It would be interesting to know how many choose Google over Microsoft due to the difference of image and public perception.

After a lot of interviewing, hoping and waiting Delly Marie (previously covered) has finally received a job offer from Google. Judging from her blog post she is going to accept. Delly’s blog has a fairly detailed account of what her interviewing process was like although she doesn’t reveal what takes place during the interviews. Of course, at least some of that information is available elsewhere. Stay tuned for a post on that.

Update: Delly has apparently locked the entry I linked to above. She has another post in which she talks about receiving an official offer up instead.