I had my phone interview with google, and it went pretty badly. I knew it was going to be bad after the engineer kept asking about my experience. Yes yes yes.. I know, I’ve been in the Air Force as a bus driver for six years. I have no big-business experience. Get over it.
So, after about 10 minutes of talking about my background, he finally moves on to technical stuff. The person who setup the phone interview gave me a link with a bunch of algorithms to look over and stuff. I looked it over and was ready! The recruiter asked, “Say you have a billion star coords. XYZ values. How would you find the thousand closest stars?” Well, one of the algorithms on the page was about locating close objects on a grid. So, I’m thinking I have a field of stars in front of me and I need to find the thousand stars that are grouped closest. I’m talking about creating a sphere and running collision detection/bounds checking/etc. He kept asking me if there is a better way, and I kept stopping to rack my brain wondering if there is a better way of grouping objects on a grid… finally he mentioned that he wanted the stars closest to the earth. Um.. shit… So then I get into sorts and whatnot. After that he said, “Yea, that’s good.” Then he asked me what the different between private/public was. Blah. Simple stuff.

And then the best part. It’s been about 25 minutes at the point. He said the interview would be 45minutes to a hour. And he says, “I’m being kicked out of my conference room so I need to go. It was good talking to you.”

So, I’m giving up on it. If they don’t want to really test me then it’s their loss. I’m more pissed about it than anything. I still haven’t heard back from the recruiter, but I get so annoyed when people think no work experience equals the inability to program. (I admit, there are some things that can only be taught from experience, but how do you get that experience if not for doing it? How much experience does a masters degree equate to?)

So, yea, my whole last week was finishing papers for school, 12 hour shifts at work, and an awful interview. At least I still have tellme flying me out to test me. I’m sure I’ll do ok during that. And, in the long run, it’ll prob be a more enjoyable job since I know people. I don’t get to speak Japanese (per se) but it is still programming and it’s an interesting system to work on. So all is not lost.

Well, back to work. Later.

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ November 15, 2007 7:37 am

Tags: google, job search