I left an interview early too, with Google in fact. I told them I obviously did not fit in their culture at least for that very position (SRE) , as we had divergent views, and that I wanted to abort the interview process. No need for them or I to lose time if I was going to refuse anyway.
The guy (technical person) was shocked, as if this was impossible. He also insisted more than 5 times to continue with the process, which, I refused.
Later on, they contacted me, telling me that they marked me as "failed interview process" (ie: do not hire in the future).
That told only one thing, that indeed, I wasn't a fit for that culture - probably at any position then.
Funny thing I even believed in it. After having failed the last interview I looked around and realized that there are many companies that do things that I consider more interesting than what Google does.
Some companies outside the software industry are much worse.
At least around the time I graduated college, the recruiters for Caterpillar were obnoxious. At a job fair, I overheard a situation where someone apparently didn't meet the minimum GPA requirement and the recruiter was publicly and loudly berating the person for wasting his time. I talked with some of my friends who were in the engineering school and they said that this was fairly normal behavior for Cat recruiters.
I'd really like to hear more of this story as the incredibly vague description of an SRE I was recently contacted about sounds like something I could potentially be very interested in.
SRE jobs at Google are something like a 15 month (or so, i forgot the exact number) job (after which they can decide to put you in another position, fire you, or put you there again but in a different team).
you need to have problem solving skills, program easily in different languages, solve performance issues in the code, or, anywhere they pop up really, and so on.
The interviews focuses on problem solving and optimization, you can find them by, heh, Googling around ;-)
I'd like to know more too. Steve Yegge gave a data point about SREs in his recent liberal/conservative software rant: he said SREs are extremely conservative, and that he finds it normal given their duties. So it follows it's not a good position for a liberal dev.
It certainly would seem logical that an SRE would be software conservative.
I seem to be a macro liberal who holds specific conservative positions. Perhaps not surprisingly, a friend and fellow engineer who I believe I've done some of my best work with would seem to be a complimentary opposite.
"failed interview process" sounds to me like it might mean that they recognized this as an example where the google interview process had failed them. Are you sure it means "do not hire"?
It seems weird that HR would go out of their way to tell you you are permanently blackballed, when they have enough trouble responding to people who they are open to hiring in the future, and since it is such an obvious embarrassment and legal risk to have a policy of telling candidates they are blackballed.
It might have been easier for the interviewer to fill out his evaluation form with "Did not answer the provided questions" (or similar) rather than "Not interested in working for us".
HR might not have got the full story.
Still weird that they'd make a point of saying he wasn't welcome to come back and try again.
The guy (technical person) was shocked, as if this was impossible. He also insisted more than 5 times to continue with the process, which, I refused.
Later on, they contacted me, telling me that they marked me as "failed interview process" (ie: do not hire in the future).
That told only one thing, that indeed, I wasn't a fit for that culture - probably at any position then.