On site interview after passing phone screen phase.
Interviewed by five people.
First Interviewer:
Asked me to solve a graph/search problem.
She/He said the following phrase/expression several times: "We are not evaluating your solution but the way you think ..."
In the end, she/he looked at my solution in the board with a little bit of arrogance, pronounced "It's the way you think", and went out of the room ...
Second Interviewer:
Asked a similar graph search type of problem.
This time I quickly jump into coding my solution. I have selected Java as my language of choice. Since we all know that Java is not suited for recursion, I used a separate stack to implement a DFS routine.
In the end, this time, I had the time to run tests agains my code.
The interviewer looked at them and said "Well, I thought this won't work, but it does ... ", she/he also said "I thought about coding a recursive solution".
I thought he was, again, kinda arrogant.
If the interview was in Python or Scala, I would have probably try recursion ... but since I am a seasoned Java developer, I thought it would not be an acceptable approach. I explained it to him/her, seemed to convince him/her somehow, and also calculated the complexity of my algorithm (linear time solution). In the end, she/he gave me a compliment, telling me that I have coded the best solution.
Third interview
This time, the interviewer approached me saying things like "Your job is much more difficult than mine. Congratulations". And in the end, he/she said that I have coded the right solution. (So fake, plastic, and unnecessary! )
Fourth Interview:
Same as third (he/she approached and gave me the same compliment as the previous interviewer. Does someone tells them to treat people like this?)
Again, so fake, plastic, and VERY UNNECESSARY
5 interview:
I was exhausted. I did bad and do not have nothing to complain about.
Conclusion:
The recruiter called me on the next day telling me that my feedback was to negative and that they would not continue with the recruitment process.
When I asked him/her about reapplying, he/she said that with such a negative feedback, I would have to wait at lest 18 months.
I was devasted.
The phone screen interviewer (an American) was polite and respectful (and I am not saying this because I was approved on that phase).
Regarding the onsite team at Google Belo Horizonte, I simply don’t understand why they treated me this way.
Google, this is really bad. I have years of experience and worked very hard preparing myself for this interview.
You don’t need to treat me with that kind of fake plastic sympathy to just give me harsh feedback in the end. It was disrespectful and unnecessary.
