Comment by marcell
11 years ago
I used to do interviews at Google, and most likely, the interview process just failed in this case. Typically a candidate will do 5 technical interviews, where the Google engineers can ask basically anything they want to (eg. invert a binary tree in this case) and score the candidate. If the candidate trips up on one of these interviews, that can be enough to reject them. The process will sometimes randomly reject qualified people.
Additionally, I think people have a mis-perception of the skills required to work at Google:
> writing incredibly complex, highly performant algorithms for say search indexing, machine learning, ai, etc...
...
> Google was looking for a Computer Scientist here, not just another developer
This is not really the case. The large majority of positions are for basically "just another developer" to maintain an internal Java tool, or some web UI, or whatever. They are complex in that they have many dependencies and often lots of legacy code, but not all to different from Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, or any company with a large code base. In my several years at Google, 0-5% of my time was spent coming up with complex algorithms.
Then why do they put people through those extreme paces? If you have the chops to get through the Google interview process, you are not "just another developer." If I were enough of a star to get through the process, got hired, and then was put to work maintaining some internal Java tool, I'd be pretty pissed off.
Yes, in fact that is exactly what happens. Many of the people at Google who are level 3/4 SWE's (about 70% of engineers are at that rank, it is considered a junior level) feel that they are under-utilized, and there is a lot of angst at that level. Those people would probably have more important/impactful roles at other companies. Some do in fact leave for other companies, but many end up tolerating the situation as other aspects of working at Google compensate (stable, brand name, perks, etc.).
As for why management continues this interview process: probably because they can. Lots of people apply to Google, and they have a high acceptance rate for offers extended. There is also a historical aspect to it: "we have hired this way in the past, and it worked, so why change it?" and fear: "if we lower our standards, the company culture is at risk" The problem of low-level SWE discontent showed up on management's radar around the time that I left, so I'm not sure if they are doing things to change that.