Google Interaction Designer Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Aug 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 3 months)

After being recruited by Google for an Interaction Designer position I spent 3 months going through the infamous Google interview process. From the start I told the recruiter I was interviewing for a position that I didn't have the required technical skills listed in the description (Computer science degree). He told me Google was trying to incorporate designers that were more creative and the description was out dated. Sounded good so I moved forward. I had three seperate phone interviews that went well, followed by a 3 hour design "test". after which they asked me to come in for the big group interview.

The in-person process is strange in that you don't meet with anyone that you will directly work with, it's all people you might work with. Every employee is required to interview potential new hires a few time a month along with taking interviewees to lunch.

When I first showed up at 8 AM they rushed me into a room with 5 strangers and they began to immediately attack the 3 hour "test" project I submitted two weeks earlier. It was annoying nitpicking for 40 minutes straight. Once I was finally able to go into my presentation showing my work and history they didn't seem interested, I was only able to get through a few screens in the remaining 15 minutes, they asked me every question possible about the technical aspects of my work with little about the design, claiming they were trying to get at how I think.

After that I went to one on one interviews, with each person focusing on a different topic. Everything seemed to be going much better then the presentation until I met with the technical interviewer. Turns out they wanted someone who could hand code in HTML, they wanted me to code a site on a white board and place some code that would make the site not work. Even though I explained to the recruiter in the beginning of the process that I'm a designer/creative director with some coding skills, but by no means an expert.

When I received my call two weeks later I was told they passed me up for a designer with more technical skills then myself. BIG waste of my time, if any of the people that I would actually be working with looked at my work before bringing me in they would have realized I wasn't a programmer and could have made the call on whether I would work in that position. It was a good learning experience though, one I won't go through ever again.

On a side note, the campus is amazing but it seemed every corner I turned there was some sort of company centric "I love Google" propaganda. It's a bit much especially when one of my interviewers told me he hated his life for the first 4 years of his time there.