Read previous part I and part II.

The reception area was, predictably, decorated in Google’s funky decor: from the multicoloured chairs you weren’t exactly sure how to sit on, to the lava lamps churning away in Google’s colours. Behind the receptionist on the wall was a giant Google logo and projected over the top was a real time scrolling list of searches (apparently unfiltered). It was an awkward silent moment or two for the receptionist as she tried to attract my attention by waving her hands in the air and shouting loudly.

No, not really, but when I was finally able to tear my eyes from the screen I talked to her and I signed in using the computer which electronically accepted my signature and printed a little label for me. Google is an extremely closed company: later my interviewers would unanimously agree that the worst part about it was not being able to tell people about the cool things you were working on.

But understandably, the company has a lot to protect. Google don’t develop new products as much as get people thinking about new ways in which to use them. Before Gmail a free email provider with 6 Gigs of capacity was unheard of, now 250 meg is the minimum you can expect anywhere. Before Google in fact, search was a solved problem…

The Googleplex is less of an office and more of an idea’s factory. Technology isn’t limited in what you can do: given enough time, money and creativity you can get there. The real question is where is “there”.

I never got the chance to visit Disneyland as a child, but as a nerd, visiting Google was close enough. At the time of my interview I couldn’t even imagine working there - the reputation Google has in the recruitment department is very intimidating. By the time I was escorted in through the big glass doors and saw Lars Rasmussen programming away I’d written of the trip as a holiday, won in a resume raffle of sorts.

At first there was very little to discern that Google was different from any other office, but then I saw the hammock suspended next to the windows overlooking Darling Harbour. And the cubicle covered by camouflage netting. And the free sweets and drinks.

I’d started this quest looking for perks, but had found so much more.

The invisible perk, the one I was most looking forward to - 20% time, was everywhere. I tried, desperately to grab a glimpse of what was going on on those workstations. Did I see anything?

No.

I was lead into a meeting room … I can’t remember if it was called “Denial”  or if that was the room next to mine, or if it was simply something else and I had just imagined that that was it. Regardless, the room reflected none of the decor visible in the rest of the office. It was essentially perk free, plain and unimpressive. It did have, to my dismay, an awful number of whiteboards.

Paint the walls, hang streamers from the ceiling… c’mon Google at least light the area with a lava lamp.

While I spent time waiting there I looked out the gaps in the frosted windows. People were just working, like they would anywhere else, they didn’t look happier. The just looked like employees. Spending 3 weeks reading and watching everything you can about Google inadvertently sets your mind racing with ideas as to how fantastical the whole place is. Had the ceiling opened and a giant candy cane holding Larry or Sergey (or both) descended into my cubicle the place would have aligned with my expectations. Never-the-less I knew that, like most Disney classics, the magic was in the air.

I was deep in contemplation about the object oriented loop like nature of most Loony toons when my interviews actually began. It was a 5 interviews, 45 minutes each back to back.

The structure was simply:

1. Interviewer introduces them-self
2. Interviewer asks you questions relating to projects and experience
3. Interviewer asks you technical questions
4. You get to ask interviewer questions

While I can’t tell you exactly what was asked, lest I set off Google’s very smart lawyers (I signed an NDA) I can tell you the gist. The gist was:

1. Interview introduces themselves
2. Me recognises interviewer from video/website/article/research paper
3. Interviewer asks questions about my previous work
4. Me feels woefully inadequate as I reply about how I stitched simple things together to something really simple on a small scale.
5. Interviewer asks technical question
6. Me racks brain for similar questions, approaches question step by step, writes gibberish on whiteboard while planning, erase gibberish, fill newly erased gaps with more gibberish, restart on new section of while board something that essentially represents my answer.
7. Interrupted by lack of time
8. Quickly ask questions while wracking interviewers face for the slightest inkling of how I did.
9. Write down notes on interview answers.
10. Interviewer leaves, quickly.

The topics covered were pretty much what I studied, in my five interview they were:

1. Working with strings and chars, minimal reliance on API, operator overloading, Big O
2. Sorting, more sorting, sorting under input constraints, Big O
3. Algorithm puzzle, Big O
4. Class design and graph theory
5. problem design, hashtables, XML-RPC (interviewer taught me the basics), interfaces, concurrency, semaphores

I was rejected by a phone call a week later (yesterday), with no feedback given. But I already knew what I did wrong. My mistakes included:

1. Not being able to evaluate (1< 1) - read “is 1 less than 1″.  It’s a surprising result to get “true” when you’re jet lagged and your brain is running on awestruck and you have someone working from Google looking over your shoulder at your code.
2. On one occasion, not listening to the question asked. I was intimidated by the size of what he had asked me to design (something robust) and I instead wrote only what was minimal to get the job done (and grew it as I went).
3. Not asking for any breaks.
4. Not eating lunch in any of the breaks that I didnt ask for.
5. On one occasion even thought I explicitly knew what was going on, didn’t articulate it correctly - partly because I knew what I was doing, but didn’t know what I was saying.
6. Always jumping to the complex efficient solution first and not knowing how to do it, instead of starting at the naive obvious solution and working from there.
7. Not getting to sleep early enough the night before / not practising questions the morning of.

Do these things.

The whole experience was fun. I got a lot out of it, the most important was: How to remain grounded. I’ve been told by everyone what a great achievement it is to get that far - all I can do is wish I could add it to my resume. Maybe I will.

To this day, with no feedback I’m still guessing if I’m just wasting Google’s time. They urged me to reapply, but then again, they tell that to everyone. There is a shortage of CS students. Google does have a high false positive rate. Maybe they just want to see if I will - a sort of test, you know - to see how committed I am to working with them.

It was disapppointing but I have a solution.

That solution is: Finish my degree. Go on a holiday. When I get back, I’ll reapply.

Original story