Process:
Recruiter reached out to me and had a phone screen. I was then provided info about the rest of the process. They tend to hire for generalists, so you won't know what team or role you're actually interviewing for until after they've decided to hire you. Also, you're given a lot of information about what the types of interviews will be and how to prep.
Next a phone interview with a PM to go through some product sense questions, ability to explain technical concepts, and how you work cross-functionally.
For the onsite, interviewed with an engineering manager and 4 PMs, and also had lunch with another PM. Overall, logistics went reasonably smooth, although I did wait for quite a while when I first arrived in the lobby and the first person I met with was not the person mentioned in the email as who I would be speaking to first (never ended up talking to that person).
Why this was a negative experience:
- Really seems like they expect you to have no job and prep for this interview 40hrs/week. They give you a ton of things they expect you to study and don't really care much about your experience, focusing on how you think, break down problems, and your technical knowledge. These are reasonable thing to evaluate for, but the amount of expected prep doesn't really bode well for those currently with jobs.
- 4/5 interviews, while at times challenging, made sense and we're clearly testing my abilities, knowledge, and thought process in some way. In 1 of the interviews, the interviewer seemed to make up a question without much thought and one that didn't lead into much deeper discussion, even with probing questions. His additional questions similarly didn't seem to have any purpose or try to ascertain anything. This interview didn't make sense and didn't really go well, and as you might expect at somewhere like Google, if any part doesn't go well, you're probably not going to get it.
- Because you don't know what team or position you're going for, you can't really get that great of info from the interviewers. Your more general questions will be answered very quickly and you get details about the team or what you might be doing. I asked an interviewer (the same one from above) about how he collaborates with the different teams he works with, to which he just replied that it's a basic PM skill and later asked if I was currently a PM. I've been a PM for many years and obviously know that skill, I was simply asking how he did it at Google, which may differ from a small startup given the size. Really very insulting.
- For lunch I chatted with another PM and this is considered not an interview. The whole time he seemed like he didn't want to be there and wasn't much for conversation. The moment I finished the last bite of food on my plate, he led me to the next interview room (about 20 min early) and left.
- Afterwards, took them over 2 weeks to reimburse my travel expenses and it was a lot of back and forth emails to get it sorted out.
In the end, if it weren't for 1 interviewer, I probably wouldn't have rated it a negative experience. He just didn't seem to have good questions prepared or any objective from his line of questioning. Perhaps it's because he hadn't been at Google for a really long time and came from an acquired startup. Seems like the hiring committee should vet the interviewers and their questions better.