In October 2013, I attended a conference in Baltimore and I left my resume and contact information at the booth of Google during a career fair.
I received an email in April 2014 from an HR in which she asked me for an informal interview/conversation over the phone. Since I'm still pursuing my B.S., the interview process will consist of a technical interview over the phone and an onsite interview if I was successful during the first round. In my conversation with the HR, we just went through all my academic background and we agreed on a date for the following technical interview.
I had the technical interview on May 15, 2014 and it consisted on two programming questions using bit manipulation. I got to choose the programming language to use on that interview and I chose C since I have been working with it lately. However, I was fully aware that I was not knowledgeable enough with the programming language and although I tried to prepare as best as I could, I knew that my performance was going to be far from stellar.
I managed to give decent responses for the problems, although in my second question I did not get a correct implementation. We were trying to use a Google doc to write down the question and for me, to code the answer. However, for some reason, the Google doc was extremely slow and sometimes wouldn't update at all. I tried to code my answers over a simple text editor and then paste them to the Google doc but at the end the interviewer and I gave up and I emailed my coding answers to my HR contact instead.
A week later, I received a call from the HR with some feedback about the interview and unfortunately, I didn't make it to the second round. Overall it was a good experience and my very first technical interview. It gave me more insight into what I need to focus whenever I have opportunities like these in the future. It was a very good learning experience and both my HR contact and interviewer where very nice, professional, and detail-oriented in their attention.
