Google’s backdoor [31/100]

When I applied for an internship at Google, I had two phone screens. For the first one, the interviewer and I just clicked. He seemed pleased that I said I preferred algorithms and data structure problem-solving to coding — the reality was that I knew those areas well but hadn’t done much on-the-spot coding. Somehow at the time, they seemed like two very different things — I could figure out a time-efficient algorithm but…what if I didn’t know the exact syntax of my “preferred” language!? So he went through a high-level problem with me, and I said the right things about a brute-force solution, and then the optimizations by hashing (isn’t it always?). I had just returned from China the previous summer and mentioned that the work I did in Hunan had made me interested in internationalization. He was delighted, and said that he was from that province.

The second phone screen I had was just for team placement. I talked with my intern-host-to-be and he asked me some open-ended question about how I might implement directions a la Google Maps. And then described something data-mining-ish and asked if that sounded interesting. Sure, I said.

So I was in for the internship. But in my two interviews, I hadn’t written a line of code. I carried this secret with me, thinking that I had somehow bypassed normal procedure. At the end of my internship, I had two conversion interviews. The first was pretty algorithm-y and again, I did well. The second was to write a C++ implementation of an Array, handling resizing, etc. I had worked in both C++ and Java that summer, and without the security of Google (the search engine) and sample code to look around at, I was forced to ask a ton of embarrassing questions about correct syntax for function declarations or allocating new arrays. I thought I bombed.

I received and accepted a full-time offer, but I still carried this guilt that I hadn’t gone through the rigorous 8-interview panel I’d heard so much about. The only reason I had gotten the internship was because I lucked out and they didn’t have me code at all. And then I got lucky again and had a good intern host, and the positive review he wrote must have barely cancelled out the horrible interview feedback from the one coding interview I had. It took a lot of time and rationalization and hearing other coworkers’ stories (“oh yeah I thought they hired me by accident too!”) to come to terms with the idea that maybe I didn’t just slip in the backdoor.

When I left Google a year and a half later, I knew I was making the right decision to see what else was out there. But a small remnant of doubt deep within me whispered, “What if leaving is a horrible mistake, and you barely made it in in the first place? And later you realize you want back in, but they don’t want you anymore?”

Thankfully, things have worked out. I must be pretty lucky.

This isn’t really a specific memory. More of a memory of a lingering general feeling of self-doubt and imposter’s syndrome.