Google’s quiz show approach to interviews has been getting a lot of buzz these last few weeks. Some great posts are here, here and here.
For today’s strategy post, I want to talk about Google interview questions for a couple of reasons. Most notably, I think that getting someone inside Google passionate about hiring you is a much, much better approach than trying to crack the nut on random questions of math and logic.
I speak with some experience here because two former employees at my Startup 1.0 now hold high-profile positions at Google, one in engineering and one in user experience. Neither person went through the interview process that people have been talking about lately.
The engineer, for example, was at Microsoft when Google came knocking. Now he may have rounded-out his education since he worked with me and eventually landed at Microsoft, but I know his college GPA wasn’t the bellwether Google claims because he didn’t go to college. I’m not even 100% sure he finished high school.
But he’s a brilliant coder within his realm and he loves defining and adhering to standards. A couple people inside Google lobbied hard to bring him in and, a few years later, he’s led engineering on some of Google’s biggest engineering initiatives.
As for the UX guy, I caught-up with him not long after he started at Google. He said he met Google when he was speaking at a UX conference on behalf of Bank of America. (He went to Bank of America shortly after Bank of America Ventures put money into my first startup.) Marissa Meyer liked his presentation and personally asked him to come interview with her at Google. I don’t think her first question at the conference was how a pirate would maximize his gold, or what his GPA was in Australia.
The point here – if there is one 
– is that a prospective Google hire would do much better to network on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter to find the people already at Google who can be your hiring champion. Conferences and events are great if you can afford them, too. I went to the Shop.org Annual Summit 2009 in October, and Google had people there looking at everything from tech to talent.
In case you still enjoy spending time on those brain teaser questions, I will say that I notice a certain trend. The answers to a number of questions share that same “Wow, weird!” moment as a book that inspired my senior research paper in college. Micromotives and Macrobehavior by economist Thomas C. Schelling makes the point that the macro behavior of a system often moves contrary to the motivations of individual participants in the system.
One example starts by assuming that people are tolerant of other races in their neighborhood, as long as no more than 70% of their neighbors are a different race than themselves. Start by putting the first citizen on an imaginary grid, then flip a coin to place neighbors randomly on the grid only re-flipping when more than 70% of a citizen’s neighbors are a different race. No matter where the first citizen goes or how the coin flips, the grid tends to segregate despite the apparent tolerance of the neighbors.
Wow, weird! And definitely relevant when thinking about the difference between the macro-solution for a collection of pirates hording gold vs. the apparent individual motivation of the top pirate to be greedy.
