hey tech late here and welcome to the
tech elite show it is the tech least
coffee time I'll be your host the tech
lead the tech lead now I wanted to talk
today about how I got into Google as a
software engineer why don't we go on the
drive well actually I'm a little tired
so we can do this here now I gotta tell
you that it was really quite a journey
and it took me ten years over ten years
of applying to Google you know every
single year since 2006 through 2014 when
I finally got into Google I have been
applying every single year and you can
see there are email logs where the
recruiter is just talking to me asking
me about questions and I remember in the
final interview where I finally landed
the job the interviewer could see the
huge history of my applications that he
would just say why you must seem like
you really wanted to get into Google and
I'd say yeah that's right I really
wanted to get in and you know I think
that's a funny thing is that a lot of
people I see junior engineers they may
get into Google and they would quit
within a few months you know they're
very inside though they're very spoiled
they got the easy and these days also
hear about people who aren't giving as
much respect as they should be to Google
engineers or X Google Tech leads like
myself you know people would just say
that it's not that great it's not that
cool anybody can get in they've lowered
their hiring bar oh you're just another
tech worker with Asperger's you're
stealing our jobs you're not so cool
you're not that smart right oh maybe
you're smart but you can't communicate
you don't have empathy and there's been
a lot of criticism over all for tech
workers even friends and family members
they would just say things like well
yeah maybe you got into that company but
I would never want to work for a company
like that you're a sellout but for me it
was a grueling 10 years of work to get
into the company and I never took that
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off your first website one reason that I
got into the company was that I applied
every single year and I was very
persistent about this you know I know
some people though only apply once and
they fail the interview and then they
yeah forget it right they didn't one
that worked there anyway they were good
they're fine and they kind of take it as
criticism upon themselves and they don't
want to deal with that criticism they
can't take it they don't want to feel
like a loser and they just give up or
they just become content with their jobs
and they somehow manage to convince
themselves that they don't want to apply
for that but for me I would just make it
a game for myself where I would say okay
it's that time of year where I'm just
gonna go try and ply to Google I just do
it once a year every year and give it a
go and even then I can tell you that I
made a lot of mistakes along the way and
I have a few tips for you that I think
can help speed up your process but
really the first tip is to remain
persistent you know sometimes it's not
necessarily your fault sometimes it
could just be that there's no openings
maybe when you're they need somebody
with your skills maybe the next year
they don't just be persistent and keep
that going the second tip I have for you
is to carefully navigate your career so
for me when I first got out of college I
was really into game programming but
little did I know that that is an area
of computer science that is quite
perpendicular to Silicon Valley tech
right the prestigious tech companies up
until recently with a VR they really
didn't have much business doing computer
graphics they're really more focused on
web and mobile development and these
were areas that I had no experience in
because they didn't seem very fun they
didn't seem very interesting and I only
wanted to do game programming and one
thing I will note here is that the game
programming industry is notoriously
competitive and treats employees poorly
they'll make tech programmers work very
long hard hours for low pay low benefits
and they're just psycho through and burn
out a bunch of junior engineers and
that's fine and that's really other
looking for and this may even apply to
technologies right like if you were
really focused on say Microsoft
technology like dotnet stack ASP
Silverlight all of that stuff then it
may lock you into that specific segment
of technology and then your chances of
getting into a company like Google
Facebook Twitter Netflix you know those
companies are generally on a non
Microsoft tech stack so that can also
lock you in and you know there may be
situations where you may be
to use very proprietary strange
technology strange languages you know
you get into a company and they want you
to become a professional Ruby on Rails
developer and that could get you locked
into say the Ruby on Rails stack so what
you need to do here is to carefully
navigate your career and this is a very
key piece of information and advice
years to make sure that whatever
technology you're learning or working on
whatever you're developing proficiency
in that it can also help you land your
next job right it can get you to your
next place you know you never really
want to lock yourself down such that in
one or two years you find out that your
expertise is in something completely
proprietary and then when it comes time
for you to switch rows or to apply to
Google you find that you don't have any
valuable skills that the company with
one so my story is that I was working on
computer graphics a Sony Pictures over
in Los Angeles and Southern California
has a lot of these graphics based gaming
companies EA rockstar games you know
companies like that and they just cycle
through a bunch of interns and college
grad students and stuff like that so I
was doing my stuff there and you know it
was low pay it was fun and I enjoyed the
work and what happened was I started
building some of my own apps my web apps
and luckily for me those web apps took
off and at that point I had quit my job
and just focus only on Web Apps it was
quite a career shift to go from computer
graphics C++ OpenGL into web
technologies and most of my co-workers
had no idea what web technologies would
be you know something just fun that
people may dabble in here and there but
that also helped open the path for me to
get into companies in Silicon Valley
which are really more web dominated not
the other interesting thing to note here
is that these days many of the interview
questions that tech companies used to
ask are banned because they're just so
tricky and they're so ridiculous right
people would ask questions like why are
manhole covers round how would you climb
to the top of Mount Fuji how many gas
stations are in the United States people
would ask MP complete problems like the
Traveling Salesman problem just to see
how far you could get they would as
totally ridiculous questions and a lot
of these are just banned these days but
when I was going through the interview
process I was being asked a lot that
this stuff and the whole thing just kind
of got me
and for me I just decided that I did the
one that wastes my time studying any of
this stuff I didn't see how it would be
really relevant you know I just refused
to prepare for that and not only that I
didn't really believe in preparing I
thought that if I was a good programmer
that my skills should show for
themselves and I really believed in
going in there and talking about all the
projects that have been building but
unfortunately a lot of the people were
not really interested in the projects
you know a lot of interviewers are not
well trained and they really only want
to hear if you can explain why manhole
covers are round believe it or not I was
also a little afraid that I would study
so much that the interviewer would
actually ask me a question that I would
already have heard of and then I thought
well what would I do then and I didn't
want to try to study too much because
then I would know every single problem
and then you know people would say hey
you've heard that problem before you
must have been studying you know that's
really not the right way to go about
this these days actually I've heard so
many of these problems that if I were to
go to an interview loop I would probably
have heard like 30% to 50% of the
problems already
and then the rest would be variations on
some of these problems a lot of these
are fairly routine things and you know
that's one piece of advice for you is to
just go through a site like say leet
code hacker rank and just try to
understand and get as much broad
coverage of these problems as you can
there's really not that many different
types of coding problems that people
will be throwing at you and there's not
all that many different algorithms and
the data structures that people are
using you know there's a few basic data
structures stacks queues hashmaps
arrays that's pretty much it you know
and then it's just how can you combine
them to do different types of things and
as for algorithms people don't do
algorithms anymore everyone's just using
machine learning so no one's even asking
algorithm questions anymore if I
remember one time I went to a Google
interview and they would ask me like
well would you want to do here and I
just thought that was the most
ridiculous question and so I answered
the question by saying yeah I want to
just change the world I'm here to make a
huge impact on the world I want to just
make the world better I want to do
something huge and improve the world for
the better that's what I'm here to do
and you know it's like well yeah and
that's true right that's the question
that
my answer right what else that I want to
do I want a million bucks right why do I
want to work at Google so I can become
an ex-googler Clete that's why you know
people aren't stupid and everybody knows
that the interview process is broken and
it can't be improved but there's just
not really a good solution there's not
really a good way to improve it
especially across a huge large
organization and usually the feedback is
along the lines of well if a candidate
really wanted to get into the company
they would prepare they would study up
on their data structures algorithms time
serious analysis that's the game those
are the rules of the game that have been
laid out and if you want to win you're
gonna have to play that game that's what
I had to understand and I had to begin
really taking it seriously and studying
for it and preparing for it now my
fourth piece of advice here is to make
sure that you're using the right
language to write technologies so here's
what happened to me when I started
building my own apps I have been using
PHP my sequel Linux Apache the lamp
stack and when I would go into Google
interviews I would be using PHP and that
should be okay right usually recruiters
will just tell you that you can use any
language you like interviewers are going
to be language agnostic and you know
even though Google doesn't even use PHP
across most of their tech stack I could
still use PHP and it would be fine and
so that's what I did
and I found that time after time I could
not get through the interview process
because usually interviewers they look
at that PHP code and they just think
it's garbage code I remember I would be
writing code and then the interviewer
would have to ask what is that dollar
sign syntax is that does that mean
variable and that have to explain that
stuff and I could tell that interviewers
were just never quite pleased with the
code and especially if they asked one of
these problems like reverse a linked
list or something
it would be harder to write in PHP which
doesn't really have pointers so for me
my big break came when one time I was
out in Japan just traveling around
working on my own stuff and I decided to
get into iPhone development because I
had a bunch of websites games and apps
and I wanted to translate those over to
iPhone and so I picked up objective-c
and then I remember that your I applied
to Google as I usually did and I applied
for a web role but they told me that
since I seem to have some iPhone
experience they wanted to slap me in for
mobile as well
okay fine we can try that so this time I
would do the interview in the mix of
languages I would use some objective-c
which I had learned I would mix them
some standard C and C++ I would tend to
rely on PHP and JavaScript which I was
more comfortable with but then when it
came time to coding I would actually
translate those into say pseudocode or C
like syntax such that it would just be
more comfortable for the interviewers to
look at and we wouldn't have to debate
about the language syntax at the time
there's also a huge shortage and Iowa's
engineers and actually at that time I
remember YouTube was not that popular
and so they offered me a role in
YouTube's iOS engineering which I took
up but I remember it's funny even then I
was thinking I didn't really want to
join the YouTube team I thought that the
Google team was more prestigious it
turns out in the end that YouTube has
exploded in growth and the YouTube iOS
app has become one of the top apps in
the App Store largely in part thanks to
yours truly now the funny thing is at
the time I landed this Google job offer
I also landed two other job offers so I
had a total of three offers to pick from
and I just remember acing all of these
interviews at the time I remember in the
past I would stumble through these
technical interviews because I just
chose not to prepare for them
I used strange languages I didn't take
the process seriously in the past I
didn't want people to know that I was
trying to get into these companies I
felt it would be too humiliating to
myself if I told people that I was
trying to interview for this stuff if I
told them I was serious if I was
actually putting in time and preparation
and effort into any of this stuff and
then to lose personal time and effort
and to not get the job offer would just
be too humiliating for myself plus I
didn't really seem to believe in myself
either I just thought that a lot of
these people at these top tech companies
were probably geniuses people with super
high IQs PhD academia people and so then
I would just put in a half-baked effort
so it's just funny that when I finally
got into Google I found myself
surrounded by complete idiots
these were people that only focused on
interview preparation and had no idea
how to do any practical coding
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I landed a job offer at Google if you
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bye