Google Reject

A while back I scored an in-person interview with Google. I prepared as best I could for it beforehand . I was intimidated and nervous for sure; here was the company that had transformed not only the landscape of the internet, but also the global economy.

So I was surprised when I felt really good walking away from the interview. I had met with three different engineers for about an hour each, answering various engineering and algorithm problems on a whiteboard, and honestly I felt like it went really well. You can imagine my disappointment then, when my recruiter contacted me several days later to notify me that I was a Google Reject.

Since I had felt like I rocked the interview, I started to get worried, and wondered if I even knew how to rock at all, or if I was capable of recognizing rock even if I was in its presence. Here was a company that the instructional video assured me valued “creativity and not necessarily the correct answers”, and I certainly had that in spades (incorrect answers). So what happened, I wondered?

I asked my recruiter for detail about where I went wrong. After a bit of pleading she finally forwarded me the notes that everyone who had met with me had taken. I’ve included the notes below so that others may learn from my folly. Even though I felt great about my interview, and still don’t know what I would have done differently, something must have triggered a red flag.

(Please return these notes to the HR representative once the candidate leaves)

Notes from HR:

Mr. Anderson arrived 5 minutes early for his scheduled interview. However, he spent 10 minutes trying to push open the front door, clearly marked “pull”. He eventually followed another employee in, and then commented to himself about his resourcefulness, and muttered something to the effect of “so the game is afoot” in a Sean Connery-esque accent.

Notes from Engineer #1:

Before I had a chance to ask him his first question, Mr. Anderson spent the first 20 minutes of our time talking about how good he was with dogs. He went on at length about how he loved to come home to his chocolate lab “Hershey”, and hoped to breed her someday. I was finally able to squeeze in a question about sorting elements in an array.

Ten minutes into solving this problem, he burst into tears and admitted that he had lied, and in fact was not very good with dogs at all, that he was, in fact, allergic to dogs. He then asked me if I still liked him. When I suggested that perhaps he just focus on the problem at hand, he muttered to himself “you’re the problem at hand”, crossed his arms, and stared at the floor. We spent the remainder of our time in silence.

Notes from Engineer #2:

When I asked Mr. Anderson his first question, he said that it was a question for nerds, and that he was in a rock band and one of the “cool kids”. He asked if I thought if any of the other nerds here would be intimidated by his coolness when he started working here. He never did get around to answering any of my questions.

Notes from Engineer #3:

After I introduced myself, Mr. Anderson said that since he had worked for XX company in the past that he understood himself to be a “shoo-in” here and understood this all to be a formality, and that if we wanted to spend our time talking about cool cars or Monster Trucks, that would be ok with him. When I asked him what he did for his company, he said it was “classified”, and then asked me who I thought would win in a fight: Truckasaurus or a 1970 Camaro.

Overall Assessment:

While we believe that Mr. Anderson interviewed better than most of our candidates, we feel that the lack of Spring and Hibernate experience disqualifies him from any open positions. We invite Mr. Anderson to reapply in the future after correcting his experience deficiencies.