<story><title>Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer</title><url>http://blog.lambda-startup.com/2014/03/recruitment-process-for-google-job-sre.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yukichan</author><text>But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&amp;amp;E I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I&amp;#x27;d be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back.&lt;p&gt;The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it&amp;#x27;s silly and personally I don&amp;#x27;t plan at working at companies that interview this way.&lt;p&gt;Google isn&amp;#x27;t special. They&amp;#x27;re just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what&amp;#x27;s got into people&amp;#x27;s brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page&amp;#x27;s whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don&amp;#x27;t want it?</text></item><item><author>tmhedberg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection.&lt;p&gt;I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews, culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it as good interview practice and moved on.&lt;p&gt;A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the blue and asked if I&amp;#x27;d be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for another on-site. Soon after, I was hired!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won&amp;#x27;t count you out after one try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers took you seriously as a candidate. If you&amp;#x27;ve decided that you would really like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a free trip to London.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tmhedberg</author><text>If you don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s worth your time to interview twice at the same company, then simply don&amp;#x27;t. That&amp;#x27;s a completely reasonable point of view, and I didn&amp;#x27;t mean to imply otherwise.&lt;p&gt;For what it&amp;#x27;s worth, Google has a public reputation as a great place to work and as a company that hires &amp;quot;high quality&amp;quot; engineers. Both of these things mean that some people are willing to put more effort into getting a position there. My post wasn&amp;#x27;t meant to say that he must keep trying at all costs, but just to let him know not to be discouraged if he happened to really want that job. In many places, you&amp;#x27;re dead in the water if you don&amp;#x27;t make it the first time, but Google is not like that.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I didn&amp;#x27;t see my interview process as &amp;quot;something I had to go through&amp;quot;, i.e. a laborious means to an end. I enjoyed the challenge and the opportunity to get a glimpse of a company like Google from the inside. Even when I was turned down the first time, I came away feeling glad that I had done it. It&amp;#x27;s not like I had anything to lose from trying.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page&amp;#x27;s whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don&amp;#x27;t want it?&lt;p&gt;Not in the least, nor do I feel that I am doing that. I don&amp;#x27;t work on Google+ or anything related to it. However it may look from the outside, Google is not Google+. It&amp;#x27;s a big, multifaceted organization with opportunities to work on all sorts of interesting things. Much of our work is driven directly by the engineers themselves and not by management whims. And there&amp;#x27;s plenty of mobility to change roles if you decide you don&amp;#x27;t like what you&amp;#x27;re doing.&lt;p&gt;SRE specifically has proved to be a truly interesting and unique position. There are engineering challenges that we face which quite simply don&amp;#x27;t exist anywhere else. Beyond the much-touted perks, that&amp;#x27;s what makes Google special, in my opinion, and well worth the comparatively small effort I put into getting there.</text></comment>
<story><title>Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer</title><url>http://blog.lambda-startup.com/2014/03/recruitment-process-for-google-job-sre.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yukichan</author><text>But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&amp;amp;E I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I&amp;#x27;d be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back.&lt;p&gt;The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it&amp;#x27;s silly and personally I don&amp;#x27;t plan at working at companies that interview this way.&lt;p&gt;Google isn&amp;#x27;t special. They&amp;#x27;re just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what&amp;#x27;s got into people&amp;#x27;s brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page&amp;#x27;s whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don&amp;#x27;t want it?</text></item><item><author>tmhedberg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection.&lt;p&gt;I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews, culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it as good interview practice and moved on.&lt;p&gt;A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the blue and asked if I&amp;#x27;d be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for another on-site. Soon after, I was hired!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won&amp;#x27;t count you out after one try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers took you seriously as a candidate. If you&amp;#x27;ve decided that you would really like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a free trip to London.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>&amp;gt; Google isn&amp;#x27;t special. They&amp;#x27;re just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what&amp;#x27;s got into people&amp;#x27;s brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach.&lt;p&gt;It takes you a while to get to this mindset as a technology worker. Everyone&amp;#x27;s motivation is different though.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m 31, have 13 years of experience, and keep getting rejected by SpaceX for a Linux Admin job at launch operations Cape Canaveral. Yes, I&amp;#x27;m overqualified. Yes, I&amp;#x27;d be taking an enormous paycut. But I want to help send rockets to Mars damn it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not always about the money, nor about the work. Sometimes, you&amp;#x27;re simply irrational about it.</text></comment>