Starting my freshman year of college here in Colorado in August so I wanted to also look into career paths as well.
As it would turn out, my step dad is friends with this guy who is actually a chairman at a company called ServiceMax. Well, luckily I got in touch with him. Talked to him a bit and he got me in touch with people at Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Already sounds too good to be true right? Only it isn’t.
I heard back from an engineer that works closely with the accessibility department at Google. He wants to talk to me this Friday about an internship at the Boulder campus.
I’m a little shocked at this point. Even though it’s just an internship I really appreciate the lengths everyone has gone through to even make it a possibility.
I was just wondering if anyone had any experience with interviews and how I should approach the situation as a whole.
It’s probably not going to be very technical (at first). If you’re not a team player, don’t like open office and collaboration, etc. be ready to either fake it until you make it or consider a different organization.
When they do ask you technical questions, getting it right isn’t as important as demonstrating your critical and logical thinking abilities. Rushing through to get a hacked answer will award you less “points” than drawing/rationalizing your logic and almost getting there.
Your mileage may vary, but this has been the case in my experience.
As someone who conducts interviews for a tech based company, demonstrating you can figure something out is more important than demonstrating you ‘know it all’ as others have said make an effort to emphasize your critical thinking.
Be confident, look into the background of Google (current and past), don’t bring up any of the (many) negatives of them, don’t lie about anything (unless you’re a very confident liar and can pull it off).
Try to avoid canned responses you got from a site, be willing to admit you don’t know things, and express a genuine interest in the company, especially the areas you’d be working with.
I work at an Alphabet company. Here’s my experiences with their interview process.
Your onsite interview will be between four and six sessions of 45 minutes each. One of these will probably span a lunch session. The lunch session is where you focus on “culture fit” (how well you fit the personality makeup of the team/project/bet you’d be joining). The other sessions will have open ended problem solving questions. These questions have a lot of nuance to them, and there’s honestly no right answer. The interviewer is more interested in HOW you think through the question, and less concerned with what answer you give. Practice thinking out loud, and demonstrate sound logic in your problem solving. It’s OK to ask the interviewer for guidance during the questions. Asking for surrounding information required to solve the problem is NEEDED. If you skip this, you will seem cocky and less reliable than someone who thinks well in a team environment.
Other questions will be technical with the intent of verifying experience. These you should be able to recognize, and answer firmly and confidently.
#1 piece of advice I can give is to never bullshit them. These companies chew through thousands of resumes, and perform a large number of interviews. If you don’t know the answer, do NOT make up an answer. Fakes are easy to spot.
Remember, you’re going for an internship. Being able to describe how your educational and professional goals align with whatever the project is working on is more important than being a polished and complete candidate.
This has me thinking there should be a hierarchy pyramid of what makes for a good interview, ala Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Things like knowing what you will be expected to do for the role. Followed by confidence etc.
One suggestion I have is be yourself and if that isn’t good enough for them then find a job where it is. With that said best of luck to you with the interview and if you get the job hopefully one day you can make Google a better company.
