How I Got a Job at Google (as a Software Engineer)

Ex-Google Tech Lead explains how he landed a job offer at Google as a software engineer. The road to Google took me a brutal 10 years to travel. Even still, most never make it. I share the story about the path I took that led me to success, and all the failures and missteps on the way there. Get your beautiful website started at , use code TECHLEAD for 10% off. http://squarespace.com/techlead Join ex-Google/ex-Facebook engineers for my coding interview training here. http://techinterviewpro.com/ Watch 100+ programming interview problems explained: (20% off now, limited time) https://coderpro.com/ Sign up for my FREE daily coding interview practice: http://dailyinterviewpro.com/ Learn how I built a $1,000,000+ business on YouTube and the behind-the-scenes strategies of running a successful YouTube channel: http://youtubebackstage.com/ Get your 2 FREE stocks on WeBull (valued up to $1,400): https://act.webull.com/k/S4oOH2yGOtHk... 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Transcript: ( Note : This transcript is auto generated by YouTube and may not be completely accurate.) 00:00 hey tech late here and welcome to the 00:02 tech elite show it is the tech least 00:03 coffee time I'll be your host the tech 00:05 lead the tech lead now I wanted to talk 00:08 today about how I got into Google as a 00:11 software engineer why don't we go on the 00:13 drive well actually I'm a little tired 00:17 so we can do this here now I gotta tell 00:20 you that it was really quite a journey 00:21 and it took me ten years over ten years 00:24 of applying to Google you know every 00:26 single year since 2006 through 2014 when 00:29 I finally got into Google I have been 00:31 applying every single year and you can 00:33 see there are email logs where the 00:34 recruiter is just talking to me asking 00:36 me about questions and I remember in the 00:38 final interview where I finally landed 00:40 the job the interviewer could see the 00:43 huge history of my applications that he 00:45 would just say why you must seem like 00:47 you really wanted to get into Google and 00:49 I'd say yeah that's right I really 00:51 wanted to get in and you know I think 00:53 that's a funny thing is that a lot of 00:54 people I see junior engineers they may 00:57 get into Google and they would quit 00:59 within a few months you know they're 01:00 very inside though they're very spoiled 01:02 they got the easy and these days also 01:04 hear about people who aren't giving as 01:06 much respect as they should be to Google 01:09 engineers or X Google Tech leads like 01:11 myself you know people would just say 01:13 that it's not that great it's not that 01:15 cool anybody can get in they've lowered 01:17 their hiring bar oh you're just another 01:19 tech worker with Asperger's you're 01:20 stealing our jobs you're not so cool 01:22 you're not that smart right oh maybe 01:24 you're smart but you can't communicate 01:25 you don't have empathy and there's been 01:28 a lot of criticism over all for tech 01:29 workers even friends and family members 01:31 they would just say things like well 01:33 yeah maybe you got into that company but 01:34 I would never want to work for a company 01:36 like that you're a sellout but for me it 01:39 was a grueling 10 years of work to get 01:41 into the company and I never took that 01:43 for granted this video by the way is 01:45 sponsored by Squarespace check them out 01:47 from websites and online stores to 01:49 marketing tools and analytics 01:51 Squarespace is the all-in-one platform 01:53 to build a beautiful web presence and to 01:55 run your business check them out 01:57 squarespace.com slash tech lead get 10% 01:59 off your first website one reason that I 02:02 got into the company was that I applied 02:04 every single year and I was very 02:06 persistent about this you know I know 02:08 some people though only apply once and 02:11 they fail the interview and then they 02:13 yeah forget it right they didn't one 02:15 that worked there anyway they were good 02:16 they're fine and they kind of take it as 02:19 criticism upon themselves and they don't 02:21 want to deal with that criticism they 02:23 can't take it they don't want to feel 02:24 like a loser and they just give up or 02:26 they just become content with their jobs 02:29 and they somehow manage to convince 02:30 themselves that they don't want to apply 02:32 for that but for me I would just make it 02:34 a game for myself where I would say okay 02:36 it's that time of year where I'm just 02:37 gonna go try and ply to Google I just do 02:39 it once a year every year and give it a 02:41 go and even then I can tell you that I 02:44 made a lot of mistakes along the way and 02:46 I have a few tips for you that I think 02:47 can help speed up your process but 02:49 really the first tip is to remain 02:51 persistent you know sometimes it's not 02:53 necessarily your fault sometimes it 02:56 could just be that there's no openings 02:57 maybe when you're they need somebody 02:59 with your skills maybe the next year 03:01 they don't just be persistent and keep 03:03 that going the second tip I have for you 03:05 is to carefully navigate your career so 03:08 for me when I first got out of college I 03:10 was really into game programming but 03:12 little did I know that that is an area 03:14 of computer science that is quite 03:17 perpendicular to Silicon Valley tech 03:19 right the prestigious tech companies up 03:23 until recently with a VR they really 03:25 didn't have much business doing computer 03:27 graphics they're really more focused on 03:29 web and mobile development and these 03:32 were areas that I had no experience in 03:33 because they didn't seem very fun they 03:35 didn't seem very interesting and I only 03:37 wanted to do game programming and one 03:39 thing I will note here is that the game 03:40 programming industry is notoriously 03:43 competitive and treats employees poorly 03:46 they'll make tech programmers work very 03:48 long hard hours for low pay low benefits 03:50 and they're just psycho through and burn 03:52 out a bunch of junior engineers and 03:54 that's fine and that's really other 03:56 looking for and this may even apply to 03:58 technologies right like if you were 04:00 really focused on say Microsoft 04:03 technology like dotnet stack ASP 04:06 Silverlight all of that stuff then it 04:09 may lock you into that specific segment 04:11 of technology and then your chances of 04:13 getting into a company like Google 04:15 Facebook Twitter Netflix you know those 04:18 companies are generally on a non 04:20 Microsoft tech stack so that can also 04:22 lock you in and you know there may be 04:24 situations where you may be 04:26 to use very proprietary strange 04:28 technology strange languages you know 04:31 you get into a company and they want you 04:32 to become a professional Ruby on Rails 04:34 developer and that could get you locked 04:36 into say the Ruby on Rails stack so what 04:39 you need to do here is to carefully 04:40 navigate your career and this is a very 04:43 key piece of information and advice 04:45 years to make sure that whatever 04:47 technology you're learning or working on 04:50 whatever you're developing proficiency 04:52 in that it can also help you land your 04:54 next job right it can get you to your 04:57 next place you know you never really 04:59 want to lock yourself down such that in 05:01 one or two years you find out that your 05:03 expertise is in something completely 05:05 proprietary and then when it comes time 05:07 for you to switch rows or to apply to 05:08 Google you find that you don't have any 05:10 valuable skills that the company with 05:12 one so my story is that I was working on 05:14 computer graphics a Sony Pictures over 05:17 in Los Angeles and Southern California 05:19 has a lot of these graphics based gaming 05:21 companies EA rockstar games you know 05:24 companies like that and they just cycle 05:26 through a bunch of interns and college 05:27 grad students and stuff like that so I 05:29 was doing my stuff there and you know it 05:32 was low pay it was fun and I enjoyed the 05:34 work and what happened was I started 05:35 building some of my own apps my web apps 05:38 and luckily for me those web apps took 05:40 off and at that point I had quit my job 05:42 and just focus only on Web Apps it was 05:45 quite a career shift to go from computer 05:47 graphics C++ OpenGL into web 05:50 technologies and most of my co-workers 05:52 had no idea what web technologies would 05:54 be you know something just fun that 05:57 people may dabble in here and there but 05:59 that also helped open the path for me to 06:01 get into companies in Silicon Valley 06:02 which are really more web dominated not 06:05 the other interesting thing to note here 06:07 is that these days many of the interview 06:09 questions that tech companies used to 06:11 ask are banned because they're just so 06:14 tricky and they're so ridiculous right 06:16 people would ask questions like why are 06:18 manhole covers round how would you climb 06:20 to the top of Mount Fuji how many gas 06:22 stations are in the United States people 06:24 would ask MP complete problems like the 06:26 Traveling Salesman problem just to see 06:28 how far you could get they would as 06:30 totally ridiculous questions and a lot 06:32 of these are just banned these days but 06:34 when I was going through the interview 06:36 process I was being asked a lot that 06:38 this stuff and the whole thing just kind 06:39 of got me 06:40 and for me I just decided that I did the 06:42 one that wastes my time studying any of 06:44 this stuff I didn't see how it would be 06:46 really relevant you know I just refused 06:48 to prepare for that and not only that I 06:50 didn't really believe in preparing I 06:52 thought that if I was a good programmer 06:54 that my skills should show for 06:56 themselves and I really believed in 06:58 going in there and talking about all the 06:59 projects that have been building but 07:01 unfortunately a lot of the people were 07:03 not really interested in the projects 07:05 you know a lot of interviewers are not 07:06 well trained and they really only want 07:09 to hear if you can explain why manhole 07:11 covers are round believe it or not I was 07:13 also a little afraid that I would study 07:15 so much that the interviewer would 07:17 actually ask me a question that I would 07:19 already have heard of and then I thought 07:21 well what would I do then and I didn't 07:23 want to try to study too much because 07:25 then I would know every single problem 07:27 and then you know people would say hey 07:29 you've heard that problem before you 07:30 must have been studying you know that's 07:32 really not the right way to go about 07:33 this these days actually I've heard so 07:35 many of these problems that if I were to 07:38 go to an interview loop I would probably 07:40 have heard like 30% to 50% of the 07:43 problems already 07:44 and then the rest would be variations on 07:46 some of these problems a lot of these 07:47 are fairly routine things and you know 07:49 that's one piece of advice for you is to 07:51 just go through a site like say leet 07:53 code hacker rank and just try to 07:55 understand and get as much broad 07:57 coverage of these problems as you can 07:58 there's really not that many different 08:00 types of coding problems that people 08:02 will be throwing at you and there's not 08:04 all that many different algorithms and 08:06 the data structures that people are 08:08 using you know there's a few basic data 08:10 structures stacks queues hashmaps 08:13 arrays that's pretty much it you know 08:15 and then it's just how can you combine 08:16 them to do different types of things and 08:18 as for algorithms people don't do 08:20 algorithms anymore everyone's just using 08:22 machine learning so no one's even asking 08:24 algorithm questions anymore if I 08:27 remember one time I went to a Google 08:29 interview and they would ask me like 08:31 well would you want to do here and I 08:34 just thought that was the most 08:35 ridiculous question and so I answered 08:37 the question by saying yeah I want to 08:40 just change the world I'm here to make a 08:42 huge impact on the world I want to just 08:44 make the world better I want to do 08:45 something huge and improve the world for 08:47 the better that's what I'm here to do 08:49 and you know it's like well yeah and 08:51 that's true right that's the question 08:53 that 08:54 my answer right what else that I want to 08:55 do I want a million bucks right why do I 08:58 want to work at Google so I can become 09:00 an ex-googler Clete that's why you know 09:02 people aren't stupid and everybody knows 09:04 that the interview process is broken and 09:06 it can't be improved but there's just 09:08 not really a good solution there's not 09:10 really a good way to improve it 09:11 especially across a huge large 09:14 organization and usually the feedback is 09:16 along the lines of well if a candidate 09:18 really wanted to get into the company 09:20 they would prepare they would study up 09:22 on their data structures algorithms time 09:23 serious analysis that's the game those 09:26 are the rules of the game that have been 09:27 laid out and if you want to win you're 09:29 gonna have to play that game that's what 09:31 I had to understand and I had to begin 09:32 really taking it seriously and studying 09:35 for it and preparing for it now my 09:37 fourth piece of advice here is to make 09:39 sure that you're using the right 09:40 language to write technologies so here's 09:42 what happened to me when I started 09:44 building my own apps I have been using 09:45 PHP my sequel Linux Apache the lamp 09:48 stack and when I would go into Google 09:50 interviews I would be using PHP and that 09:53 should be okay right usually recruiters 09:55 will just tell you that you can use any 09:56 language you like interviewers are going 09:58 to be language agnostic and you know 10:00 even though Google doesn't even use PHP 10:02 across most of their tech stack I could 10:05 still use PHP and it would be fine and 10:06 so that's what I did 10:07 and I found that time after time I could 10:10 not get through the interview process 10:11 because usually interviewers they look 10:13 at that PHP code and they just think 10:15 it's garbage code I remember I would be 10:17 writing code and then the interviewer 10:19 would have to ask what is that dollar 10:21 sign syntax is that does that mean 10:23 variable and that have to explain that 10:25 stuff and I could tell that interviewers 10:26 were just never quite pleased with the 10:28 code and especially if they asked one of 10:30 these problems like reverse a linked 10:31 list or something 10:32 it would be harder to write in PHP which 10:35 doesn't really have pointers so for me 10:37 my big break came when one time I was 10:40 out in Japan just traveling around 10:41 working on my own stuff and I decided to 10:44 get into iPhone development because I 10:46 had a bunch of websites games and apps 10:49 and I wanted to translate those over to 10:50 iPhone and so I picked up objective-c 10:53 and then I remember that your I applied 10:55 to Google as I usually did and I applied 10:58 for a web role but they told me that 11:00 since I seem to have some iPhone 11:02 experience they wanted to slap me in for 11:04 mobile as well 11:05 okay fine we can try that so this time I 11:08 would do the interview in the mix of 11:09 languages I would use some objective-c 11:11 which I had learned I would mix them 11:13 some standard C and C++ I would tend to 11:15 rely on PHP and JavaScript which I was 11:18 more comfortable with but then when it 11:19 came time to coding I would actually 11:21 translate those into say pseudocode or C 11:24 like syntax such that it would just be 11:26 more comfortable for the interviewers to 11:28 look at and we wouldn't have to debate 11:29 about the language syntax at the time 11:32 there's also a huge shortage and Iowa's 11:34 engineers and actually at that time I 11:36 remember YouTube was not that popular 11:37 and so they offered me a role in 11:39 YouTube's iOS engineering which I took 11:41 up but I remember it's funny even then I 11:44 was thinking I didn't really want to 11:46 join the YouTube team I thought that the 11:48 Google team was more prestigious it 11:50 turns out in the end that YouTube has 11:51 exploded in growth and the YouTube iOS 11:54 app has become one of the top apps in 11:56 the App Store largely in part thanks to 11:59 yours truly now the funny thing is at 12:02 the time I landed this Google job offer 12:04 I also landed two other job offers so I 12:07 had a total of three offers to pick from 12:09 and I just remember acing all of these 12:11 interviews at the time I remember in the 12:13 past I would stumble through these 12:14 technical interviews because I just 12:17 chose not to prepare for them 12:18 I used strange languages I didn't take 12:21 the process seriously in the past I 12:22 didn't want people to know that I was 12:24 trying to get into these companies I 12:26 felt it would be too humiliating to 12:28 myself if I told people that I was 12:30 trying to interview for this stuff if I 12:32 told them I was serious if I was 12:34 actually putting in time and preparation 12:36 and effort into any of this stuff and 12:38 then to lose personal time and effort 12:40 and to not get the job offer would just 12:43 be too humiliating for myself plus I 12:45 didn't really seem to believe in myself 12:47 either I just thought that a lot of 12:49 these people at these top tech companies 12:51 were probably geniuses people with super 12:53 high IQs PhD academia people and so then 12:57 I would just put in a half-baked effort 12:59 so it's just funny that when I finally 13:01 got into Google I found myself 13:03 surrounded by complete idiots 13:05 these were people that only focused on 13:07 interview preparation and had no idea 13:10 how to do any practical coding 13:12 whatsoever now one way to land the job 13:14 offer at Google is to show initiative by 13:17 starting an online 13:18 business you can do that with 13:19 squarespace.com slash tech lead get 10% 13:22 off 13:23 Squarespace will help you get an online 13:25 business all set up build your online 13:27 presence and this is going to be 13:28 something that is going to look 13:29 absolutely fantastic on your resume and 13:31 into interviews when you're talking to 13:33 people about how you're building this 13:35 website that Squarespace handle building 13:37 out a beautiful online web presence for 13:39 you getting your landing page set up 13:41 building that online storefront getting 13:43 all your e-commerce marketing sales 13:45 email marketing campaigns all set up 13:47 such that you can focus on building the 13:49 product whether it be an app game coding 13:52 framework or library whatever that's 13:54 going to be the more users you get the 13:56 more impressive your project is going to 13:57 look and the thing I like about this is 13:59 that Squarespace is essentially your 14:01 personal team of UI designers artists 14:04 marketers front-end web engineers 14:06 ecommerce people and they'll help you 14:08 get your product launched faster such 14:09 that you can focus more time and energy 14:11 on whatever project you're trying to 14:13 bring to market so by using Squarespace 14:15 you will be able to amplify your 14:17 projects magnified the amount of impact 14:19 that you have and just make your project 14:21 seem that much more impressive check 14:22 about squarespace.com slash tech we get 14:25 10% off so those are my top tips on how 14:27 I landed a job offer at Google if you 14:30 liked the video give the like and 14:31 subscribe and I'll see you next time 14:32 bye

How I Got a Job at Google (as a Software Engineer)

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