A recruiter from Google contacted me in July. We exchanged a few emails and spoke informally over a Hangout in the past week. She wants to start the actual interview process with a phone call from one of their developers sometime soon. I’m honestly thinking of responding with a polite “thanks, but no thanks.”
They probably do hundreds of these a year so I know not to get too gassed about my prospects. Since we talked by webcam I decided to find whatever details I can about the many stages you have to succeed at when you’re vying for a position at the company. I always knew it was hard, but some of this stuff actually makes me lose some respect for Google. Many of my issues with it are related to the whole concept of job interviews, but with Google being consistently ranked so highly in employee satisfaction, I’d think that they’d be the ones to come up with a better alternative. Instead they (along with many other big tech companies) have a system involving lots of coding exercises you have to complete under the supervision of one of their developers. It’s probably great for eliminating the people who couldn’t write a for-loop to save their lives, but it also weeds out a whole lot of really talented people who would’ve been great for the job. The questions I’ve come across online don’t seem to assess how quickly you can think on your feet or problem solving ability, as much as they show whether you happened to memorize whichever algorithms the interviewer decided to throw at you. There’s a whole lot more I want to say about the subject, but I don’t want this to get too long.
The main reason I’m considering not going forward is that I just don’t think I have the time to prepare. I’m studying abroad right now. By the end of the semester I should earn 16 credits taking four classes at a university where the average student takes 5-6. Even with this “light” workload I’m still struggling. At home I wasn’t doing very well either. Despite excelling in high school, I finished my first semester of college with a 2.5 GPA. It’s slowly climbed every semester, but only to the 2.85 where it sat at the start of this (my final) school year. There are lot of explanations for my performance, ranging from health issues, working part time, and a general lack of college readiness common in many other inner city high school graduates I’ve spoken to. Regardless, I should have done better.
At the moment, it seems like studying abroad might kill whatever momentum I’d been building up academically. There was some unexpected difficulty in proving that I had the necessary prereqs for two of my courses. I made sure to attend the lectures anyway since I was still able to look up when and where they take place, but I wasn’t able to submit homework due to not being officially registered for the courses. There was one day where I missed most of my classes because I spent ~8 hours at the hospital receiving treatment for my illness. I got a 2/12 on an assignment worth 10% of my grade in my compiler course. The same class also gave us one programming assignment so far and I’m pretty sure I fucked that one up pretty badly too. I failed a midterm in another class this past week. Haven’t actually seen the grades yet on those last two, but I can feel it. Transitioning has been tough. Unlike in the US where most professors list open office hours, every professor I have here requires an appointment to meet with them. I guess this shouldn’t really be a problem, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m wasting an appointment slot when I walk in without a specific question, but just a general state of confusion. I've cut back on forum time pretty heavily. Only reason I'm posting here right now is because recess week just started. I'll probably spend most of the time reviewing and hopefully reading ahead in a couple of my classes.
Prepping for the Google interview(s) is going to be sort of like its own class. I’m worried that by contorting myself to meet their rigid demands, I’ll only be further hurting my GPA. It doesn’t seem worth it since even people with PhDs have somewhere around a 1% chance of getting the job. After devoting the time and effort to it, I probably still won’t be working at Google and I’m expecting to have a worse chance finding a position elsewhere since some places I’ve talked to so far are a lot more GPA conscious. If I don’t do the phone interview though, I’m worried I’ll have that nagging question of “what if?” years down the line.
