Why I fail candidates as a Google interviewer

so back in 2022 I worked at Google as a software engineer and got trained to interview candidates as an interviewer it was a lot of fun meeting all of the candidates but I also got to see how much they struggled what surprised me more than anything else was that data structures and algorithms were not the number one issue that most people had you're probably thinking that there's no way that's true but when you're at this interview stage for a really big tech company it's really known that the candidate can code so they have to kind of differentiate them by other metrics um and the biggest one being communication to better explain it might make better sense to explain how the entire interview process works at Google I'll talk a little bit about how it works at each of the stages starting at the application then the online assessment the phone screen and finally the on-site for the application if you're in University you'll probably meet one of the big tech companies like Google at a career fair um at that point you should be talking to one of the recruiters and trying to see if they would be interested in your resume if you're out of school or you're not a university student then you'll have to kind of cold apply and a lot of you might be wondering if you need a referral but to be honest these companies are so big that they kind of treat a referral like any other application so you usually don't need to worry about something like that if I could give one piece of advice at this stage it's to apply early because way too many people are procrastinating at this stage and it's way too competitive towards the end of the application cycle so apply early and that'll definitely help your resume get looked at if your resume has enough technical knowledge on it then you'll be invited for an online assessment this is the part where they're trying to figure out if you can actually code if you can actually show the skills that you have on your resume what you can expect at this stage is to be solving coding problems similar to what you would see on Le code most of them are medium in difficulty so definitely prepare for those about half the candidates drop off here so if you make it to the next stage you're doing really well sorry let me turn off my phone okay we're good so the next stage is the phone screen and the really cool part about this is you'll finally get to meet someone who's a software engineer at the company they'll be throwing a real coding problem at you and it's going to be a little nerve-wracking and that's because it is they used to do this on Google Docs but over the years they changed it to have their own internal IDE which feels a lot more like VSS code you're not going to have to run any real code on it but it's nice to have the syntax highlighting at this stage they're trying to figure out if you'll be successful on the on-site and they'll be able to do that by giving you a real on-site question it's only going to be one or two and it's just going to be this one interviewer but definitely prepare for that and if things work out you move on to the on-site if you're nervous about this something most people don't know is that you can actually ask Google or some of the other big te companies for a monck interview here they'll be able to give you an experience of what you can expect on the phone screen or onsite to prepare for those interviews what's even better is that they'll give you feedback on things that you could be working on so definitely check it out apparently people who do these mock interviews are twice as likely to get an offer than people who don't if you found this video helpful so far definitely subscribe it helps this channel a lot the last stage is the onsite if you made it to this point then congrats because most people do not make it here and even fewer get an offer just a few more interviews and then you'll be able to make your own Day in the Life video or engineering videos like this one anyways it's going to be at least three coding interviews and they're all going to be testing you on more than just your coding skills because at this point everyone knows that you can code and now they have to figure out other metrics like your communication collaboration skills so Google and most other companies will tell you that they legally can't give you feedback about why things didn't work out but at least I can share like the general idea of common patterns or mistakes that most people have made that I can share with you so the biggest mistake that most candidates make is not clarifying the question I think people are a little bit too eager to start coding that they start solving the wrong problem or start forgetting a few test cases the simple thing that most people can do to start clarifying the problem is just to ask questions about it um understand what the limits of the problem are um defining their own test cases and understanding what the input should be for the expected output the next issue that most people have is that they're a little bit too quiet and I get it um a lot of us try to like code on our own late at night um without talking to anyone but when you're in the workforce you have to show how well you can communicate with others and the best way to do that is by thinking out loud so when you're writing your code definitely Express what you're thinking line by line as you're coding it out loud the next topic I want to talk about is that people tend to strugg struggle a little bit with the running time um and by what I mean by this is that most people feel like they have to just blurt the running time or answer it like it's like a multiple choice exam or some other question for their homework when someone asks you what the running time is people don't want you to just say it's linear or n squ or whatever they really want you to explain different areas of your code and what the running time is for those areas if you can do that you'll stand out a lot more than people who are just treating it like another exam question and the other most common mistake that I've seen other people make is assuming that their code works and what I mean by this is that after they go through the entire interview they're just so glad to just write down all the code that they forget to test if it actually works or does what it's supposed to do so what candidates should be doing here is to actually go through their code line by line against one of the test cases that they outlined at the beginning of the interview if you do that then it's not just assuming that it works it actually does work and it shows the interviewer that you can really communicate your code and what's going on I hope this video is helpful and if you have any questions about interviews um definitely leave it in the comments I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Alex Nguyen

Views: 33,145

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Id: 7FJ5LQNOPmc

Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2024