August 24, 2010 at 08:37Internship at Google 2 (Part 1)
Once I wrote about how I managed to intern at Google in Switzerland. Then I promised a report on my next internship - the second time at Googleplex in California. And now this time has come - my second internship is coming to an end, and I have something to tell !: o)
Disclaimer: My personal experience, as always, does not pretend to be universal.
And again, all over again ...
After my first internship in Google ended, having a little rest and recovering, I decided that this experience must be repeated. Fortunately, I was still a full-time student at my university (being a student is a prerequisite), I was (and am) less than 34 years old, so I met all the formal criteria. After which I asked a friend who works in Google to send my resume for review, they examined me and wrote me a standard Google letter “Hello, we want to talk with you about the possibility of an internship ...”.
Together with the opening letter, they sent me a bunch of any links to online forms. Some of them were bureaucratic - I had to write if I was not a member of terrorist organizations, write places to study and work with contacts, and all that jazz. The second part was somewhat more interesting - it was suggested to write down what I would be interested in doing on three points: the architectural level ( front-end or back-end ), the field of computer science (artificial intelligence, distributed computing, low-level programming, compilers, etc.) and programming language.
I chose a distributed back-end in C ++. True, I rather vaguely imagined what it was, especially since my first internship was not even a front-end, but a clean design in Photoshop and with the active use of Javascript / HTML / CSS. Looking ahead, I want to say that I got exactly what I wanted. And “it was difficult, but we could”: o).
Process
For starters, I want to note that for those interns that were already interns, no concessions are provided. They are interviewed along with everyone else. It is possible that for those who were returning to the same team the next year, and at the previous internship, everyone was happy with each other, everything was much simpler. But this was not my case - I was going to go not even to the other team, but to a completely different country.
So, after I filled out all the forms, they again wrote and assigned 2 telephone interviews for 45 minutes each. Since I was interviewed in California, engineers called me directly from Googleplex. Therefore, they gave me an interview quite late in local Czech time. At 20.00 and 20.45. Fortunately, many programmers, including myself, are owls, so an interview in the evening was just that!
Before the interview, I had 10 days left and I began to prepare. For those who are interested, you can read my long-standing post about the interview. And for those who have non-violent multibook, the summary of my training was as follows:
By the way, I want to note that I was lucky with the design pattern: o). When during an interview I was asked, “How would you design a system that makes X?”, I blurted out “Oh, this is a design pattern of U!” and described in detail how he works, its pros and cons, which seems to have made a serious impression on the interviewer. Needless to say, this was the only pattern that I studied in preparation for the question about the “favorite pattern” ?: o)
Interview
The interviewers on Google are completely different. There are those who responsibly approach the process, send an online document in advance where the code will be written, call on time and they have 10 questions ready - in case the candidate turns out to be a genius. And if there are complete opposites - there is no document, they call late and give the impression of some unpreparedness.
I came across for interview both of these options. The first interviewer called me on time, and 20 minutes before the interview I sent a document where I had to write the code. While the second one called after 10 minutes with an apology that he had forgotten about me, and in the end I had to dictate the code by phone. Yes, yes, it is “the parenthesis opens, int and, inties, the parenthesis closes”: o). Well, at least it was not boring.
I won’t tell specific questions, I can only say that the questions were pretty standard - find something in the array, do something with a string, write code for all this. Even at the beginning of the first interview, a small survey was arranged for me on the knowledge of the most basic foundations - like sorting complexity, the difference between a process and a stream, and what is an abstract class. These questions were not even part of the interview, but rather a test for “IT sanity” - it is unlikely that someone who does not know the answers would have at least some chance.
I also want to note such a moment. Since recently on the Internet there have been many sites that deal with the publication and analysis of questions from interviews, simply being smart is far from enough. There are simply questions that are actually far from simple - for example, string rotationwithout using additional memory. And if a person does not know the solution to this problem, then it is not a fact that he will just think of it. At the same time, since this problem is encountered on all possible sites with questions for interviews, those who have minimally bothered with the preparation (and there are quite a few of them) will know the solution. And when the interviewer sees 9 people who immediately say the solution (yes, they knew it), and one who sees this task for the first time and thinks for a long time, then this one has no chance.
This, of course, is my subjective opinion, but an interview in Google is no longer an “interview for geniuses” (well, not only in Google, for justice). A simple exam with a large list of questions. Who prepared - and well done. And who is not prepared, even if he is objectively smarter than the one who has accumulated everything, he may find himself in flight. So if you are considering going through an interview in Google, then do not underestimate the factor of preparation and stuffing your hands. If your thinker works well, then this may not be enough.
After the interview
In the USA, the recruiting process works much more clearly and faster than in Zurich (I don’t know about other offices). I don’t dare to judge whether this is due to the fact that there are more recruiters in Googleplex, or that it is customary to work more and more productively in the USA, but after an interview a week and a half passed and I already had an offer for an internship. While in Zurich, the process lasted 2 times longer.
I was also very lucky with the recruiter - she always answered for 12 hours and constantly kept me informed of what was happening. After some experience communicating with recruiters (not only in Google, but also in other companies), I can say that this is very rare - in my memory there were cases when they did not answer me at all or answered after 2 weeks to a question marked "Urgent ". So a good recruiter is an exception rather than a rule.
But it is, a digression: o). After the telephone interviews have passed, candidates are being offered to different teams. The recruiter collects all the information about the candidates - resumes, interviewers' reviews - and, in accordance with the wishes of the potential intern, sends his information to several teams. After that, the future intern manager will interview his potential interns and choose one for himself. Or he doesn’t choose anyone, but this, I think, is rare.
Those who were not selected do not drop out of the game and are sent to other potential managers. It is easy to guess that for some candidates this process can take a very long time. And some, even without being refused after a telephone interview, may still be left without a team and, accordingly, not get an internship.
Getting ready to move.
Going for an internship in Google is very simple. Google helps to resolve issues with a visa and sends all the necessary FedEx pieces to your home. Google pays all the costs of moving (a fixed amount that covers everything and something else remains). Google, however, does not help solve the housing problem and reserve a plane. But with minimal social skills, this is also not a problem - especially in California: o).
In the process of preparation, Google also creates a special group for interns. You can write your questions there, look for and offer housing - in my experience, the group turned out to be an extremely useful thing. Even before I arrived, I already knew a lot of things about how and what in the office, when buses go and where it is better to go shopping: o).
And by the way, in 99% of interns in the United States are recruited from American and Canadian universities. I don’t know why this is so - whether people from other countries do not want to go so far, or whether American Google does not want to especially recruit foreigners and make them visas. I rather tend to the first - because Canadians also need J-1 visas and Google takes them without problems.
About the types of interns
Since Googleplex is 10 times more than Zurich, then the teams here are completely different. Therefore, if in Zurich all interns were of the same type - Engineering intern , then in California the situation is much more complicated.
There is, of course, a large bunch of non-engineering interns - marketing, sales, product management, hr ...
And a couple more comments
Continued here
Disclaimer: My personal experience, as always, does not pretend to be universal.
And again, all over again ...
After my first internship in Google ended, having a little rest and recovering, I decided that this experience must be repeated. Fortunately, I was still a full-time student at my university (being a student is a prerequisite), I was (and am) less than 34 years old, so I met all the formal criteria. After which I asked a friend who works in Google to send my resume for review, they examined me and wrote me a standard Google letter “Hello, we want to talk with you about the possibility of an internship ...”.
Together with the opening letter, they sent me a bunch of any links to online forms. Some of them were bureaucratic - I had to write if I was not a member of terrorist organizations, write places to study and work with contacts, and all that jazz. The second part was somewhat more interesting - it was suggested to write down what I would be interested in doing on three points: the architectural level ( front-end or back-end ), the field of computer science (artificial intelligence, distributed computing, low-level programming, compilers, etc.) and programming language.
I chose a distributed back-end in C ++. True, I rather vaguely imagined what it was, especially since my first internship was not even a front-end, but a clean design in Photoshop and with the active use of Javascript / HTML / CSS. Looking ahead, I want to say that I got exactly what I wanted. And “it was difficult, but we could”: o).
Process
For starters, I want to note that for those interns that were already interns, no concessions are provided. They are interviewed along with everyone else. It is possible that for those who were returning to the same team the next year, and at the previous internship, everyone was happy with each other, everything was much simpler. But this was not my case - I was going to go not even to the other team, but to a completely different country.
So, after I filled out all the forms, they again wrote and assigned 2 telephone interviews for 45 minutes each. Since I was interviewed in California, engineers called me directly from Googleplex. Therefore, they gave me an interview quite late in local Czech time. At 20.00 and 20.45. Fortunately, many programmers, including myself, are owls, so an interview in the evening was just that!
Before the interview, I had 10 days left and I began to prepare. For those who are interested, you can read my long-standing post about the interview. And for those who have non-violent multibook, the summary of my training was as follows:
- I read Shen ’s book “Programming: Theorems and Tasks” and solved problems from it to the maximum. This book can be found and downloaded and is very good for preparing for such interviews.
- I looked at many tasks from careercup.com and geeksforgeeks.org
- If possible, I repeated everything that was written in my resume - well, that case if I had suddenly been asked, “How is TCP different from UDP?” or “Describe your favorite design pattern”
By the way, I want to note that I was lucky with the design pattern: o). When during an interview I was asked, “How would you design a system that makes X?”, I blurted out “Oh, this is a design pattern of U!” and described in detail how he works, its pros and cons, which seems to have made a serious impression on the interviewer. Needless to say, this was the only pattern that I studied in preparation for the question about the “favorite pattern” ?: o)
Interview
The interviewers on Google are completely different. There are those who responsibly approach the process, send an online document in advance where the code will be written, call on time and they have 10 questions ready - in case the candidate turns out to be a genius. And if there are complete opposites - there is no document, they call late and give the impression of some unpreparedness.
I came across for interview both of these options. The first interviewer called me on time, and 20 minutes before the interview I sent a document where I had to write the code. While the second one called after 10 minutes with an apology that he had forgotten about me, and in the end I had to dictate the code by phone. Yes, yes, it is “the parenthesis opens, int and, inties, the parenthesis closes”: o). Well, at least it was not boring.
I won’t tell specific questions, I can only say that the questions were pretty standard - find something in the array, do something with a string, write code for all this. Even at the beginning of the first interview, a small survey was arranged for me on the knowledge of the most basic foundations - like sorting complexity, the difference between a process and a stream, and what is an abstract class. These questions were not even part of the interview, but rather a test for “IT sanity” - it is unlikely that someone who does not know the answers would have at least some chance.
I also want to note such a moment. Since recently on the Internet there have been many sites that deal with the publication and analysis of questions from interviews, simply being smart is far from enough. There are simply questions that are actually far from simple - for example, string rotationwithout using additional memory. And if a person does not know the solution to this problem, then it is not a fact that he will just think of it. At the same time, since this problem is encountered on all possible sites with questions for interviews, those who have minimally bothered with the preparation (and there are quite a few of them) will know the solution. And when the interviewer sees 9 people who immediately say the solution (yes, they knew it), and one who sees this task for the first time and thinks for a long time, then this one has no chance.
This, of course, is my subjective opinion, but an interview in Google is no longer an “interview for geniuses” (well, not only in Google, for justice). A simple exam with a large list of questions. Who prepared - and well done. And who is not prepared, even if he is objectively smarter than the one who has accumulated everything, he may find himself in flight. So if you are considering going through an interview in Google, then do not underestimate the factor of preparation and stuffing your hands. If your thinker works well, then this may not be enough.
After the interview
In the USA, the recruiting process works much more clearly and faster than in Zurich (I don’t know about other offices). I don’t dare to judge whether this is due to the fact that there are more recruiters in Googleplex, or that it is customary to work more and more productively in the USA, but after an interview a week and a half passed and I already had an offer for an internship. While in Zurich, the process lasted 2 times longer.
I was also very lucky with the recruiter - she always answered for 12 hours and constantly kept me informed of what was happening. After some experience communicating with recruiters (not only in Google, but also in other companies), I can say that this is very rare - in my memory there were cases when they did not answer me at all or answered after 2 weeks to a question marked "Urgent ". So a good recruiter is an exception rather than a rule.
But it is, a digression: o). After the telephone interviews have passed, candidates are being offered to different teams. The recruiter collects all the information about the candidates - resumes, interviewers' reviews - and, in accordance with the wishes of the potential intern, sends his information to several teams. After that, the future intern manager will interview his potential interns and choose one for himself. Or he doesn’t choose anyone, but this, I think, is rare.
Those who were not selected do not drop out of the game and are sent to other potential managers. It is easy to guess that for some candidates this process can take a very long time. And some, even without being refused after a telephone interview, may still be left without a team and, accordingly, not get an internship.
Getting ready to move.
Going for an internship in Google is very simple. Google helps to resolve issues with a visa and sends all the necessary FedEx pieces to your home. Google pays all the costs of moving (a fixed amount that covers everything and something else remains). Google, however, does not help solve the housing problem and reserve a plane. But with minimal social skills, this is also not a problem - especially in California: o).
In the process of preparation, Google also creates a special group for interns. You can write your questions there, look for and offer housing - in my experience, the group turned out to be an extremely useful thing. Even before I arrived, I already knew a lot of things about how and what in the office, when buses go and where it is better to go shopping: o).
And by the way, in 99% of interns in the United States are recruited from American and Canadian universities. I don’t know why this is so - whether people from other countries do not want to go so far, or whether American Google does not want to especially recruit foreigners and make them visas. I rather tend to the first - because Canadians also need J-1 visas and Google takes them without problems.
About the types of interns
Since Googleplex is 10 times more than Zurich, then the teams here are completely different. Therefore, if in Zurich all interns were of the same type - Engineering intern , then in California the situation is much more complicated.
- Engineering interns are ordinary interns and there are most of them here. Their tasks usually include writing some kind of utility that will immediately simplify life for everyone.
- Research interns are interns that do not write utilities, but they investigate all sorts of different algorithms and their applicability in Google. They usually write code in the spagetti style, but these are prototypes, so they can (unlike engineering interns). But they need to write Google research paper based on the results of their research.
- Operations interns . Operations is a team that monitors the progress of the office. How to make sure that there is an optimum temperature everywhere, so that all googlers have enough food and all in the same spirit. One intern of this group known to me, as a task, got to optimize the lid of some water pump, so that less water evaporates from it. In my opinion this is very cool and it is a pity that I do not know the details: o)
- Designer interns, Testing interns - well, everything is clear. Almost the same as the engineering intern, only with a bias in any specific specifics.
- Linux engineering interns, Site reliability interns - I have no idea what they are doing. But I know that they exist!
There is, of course, a large bunch of non-engineering interns - marketing, sales, product management, hr ...
And a couple more comments
- In fact, the age limit of 34 years does not necessarily put an end to those who are older. I am familiar with two interns (one of which is Canadian and made a visa), which is more than 34.
- It seems to me that the desire of the team to take an intern is more important than telephone interviews. I know about one case when a team literally "wrote out" an intern. It's just that this person, as part of his PhD, wrote some kind of system that was used in Google. And they decided to take this person for an internship. I don’t know if he was interviewed, but I’m very sure that his knowledge of this system was much more important for Google than the ability to answer the question about string rotation, which was a very big plus for him.
- Another intern went through an interview with a not very good result. But he had excellent knowledge in one particular area, so the team that was involved in this field tore off his hands (as I understand it, it was quite problematic for them to find a good specialist in this field).
Continued here