So, does this only happen on chrome or something?
Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
81–90 of 111 posts
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#82I have a serious question : If google uses a person's search results internally to determine that they are a person of interest for hiring, whose to say they aren't using a similar process to strip Intellectual property from searches as it relates to projects they are working on? i.e : They are internally working on self driving cars and, in particular, are looking for ways to integrate algorithm 'X' in their solutio…
It would be way more efficient to mark their IP not at the search processing level (where they only have so many milliseconds to go around) but at the indexing level... Where they can bring to bear a lot of CPU power.
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#83This creeps me out for several reasons. One, we don't know why they're targeting certain people. It could be based on their search term, it could be based on their search history. It's a little coincidental that this guy happened to need a job at the appropriate level. Secondly, it's trying to make this horrible recruitment-hoop-jumping bullshit fun. Imagine asking a worker from...basically any other industry to do e…
> Secondly, it's trying to make this horrible recruitment-hoop-jumping bullshit fun. Imagine asking a worker from...basically any other industry to do exercises for 2 weeks before you'll consider them for an interview.
So true.
I was not sure if I was missing something or plain cynical when when I read he had worked for 2 weeks to get an interview.
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience was not so stellar. Interviewer tagged me and I thought I'd go along with it for the fun. I'm a systems engineer not a developer so YMMV. First stage interviewer put me through a basic aptitude test ("what is netstat?", "what's the expected output of dig?") which was fine and I answered them all with a fair degree of correctness but the questions quickly went on to different programming languages, and w…
As someone who did a lot of interviewing at Google I can say your interviewer didn't do his job and that definitely should not be the usual experience. That said how are questions about "netstat" and the "expected output of dig" programming questions? Also for anyone planning to join Google as a sysadmin you should note that even Google's sysadmins do a fair amount of code since Google loves automation. Python will p…
those questions were not the programming ones, I don't remember the programming ones, but they would be considered pretty tame by most programmer standards, I simply lacked the knowledge at the time..
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, not parent commenter, but I'd expect, y'know, the recruiter to actually remember giving the exact same preliminary interview to the same candidate a week earlier.
Was it the same interviewer? Maybe there are 10 interviewers going off the same script. Interviewer 1 called OP and asked questions. Then it was lunch time and he forgot to put result in the CMS. So the same guy popped up a week later to Interviewer 2. He was reading off the same script, so of course his questions are the same. Not his fault, or Google's per say - Interviewer 1 happened to forget a step. (Which is sa…
it was the same guy, we'd spoken before on Linkedin.
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#86[deleted]
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#87> Google’s recruiting process is well documented online, and from this point my experience was pretty typical.The only difference is that I didn’t need to go through a technical phone screen since I had already demonstrated some proficiency with coding through the foo.bar exercises. > For my interview, I spent a day at Google headquarters in Mountain View solving problems on a white board. So what's the point? A phon…
What is absolutely baffling to me is that companies assign coding tests as a pre-qualifier for the usual whiteboard interview despite the coding test being a far more adequate measure of the abilities of an engineer. I've had interviewers tell me that my coding samples went above and beyond what they usually receive (exhaustive docstrings, tests that make sense) and yet rather than discuss, say, how my code worked or why I chose one algorithm over another, they insist on making me solve puzzles on the whiteboard as the ultimate decider.
The ideal hiring process for me would be introductory culture fit phone call, in which working hours, benefits, vacation policy etc are discussed to see if there is a lifestyle fit between prospective hire and employee (not 'Do you rock climb and crush brews?' culture BS), then a coding challenge, and then an in-person discussion of your code. The in-person discussion could involve throwing new requirements and hypotheticals at the problem to see how the candidate thinks on their feet, but it would still be relevant to the work they did at hand rather than some arbitrary puzzle pulled from Cracking the Coding Interview.
I would be interested to know how the hoop-jumping-to-whiteboard process came to be standard. To me it does not make any sense why the determining factor for receiving an offer for a software engineering job should be dependent on one's improvisational problem solving abilities over actually writing code that runs and satisfies requirements. Is it because a whiteboard interview is much more cut and dry than code evaluation? Because every software company wants to think that they are Google?
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#88ITT: people complaining about google's interview process that never made it all the way through
IMHO if you think google is wasting your time with their interviews just don't apply with them, nobodies forcing you. complaining about how bad and broken it was after you got rejected makes you look like a sore looser
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#89> Google’s recruiting process is well documented online, and from this point my experience was pretty typical.The only difference is that I didn’t need to go through a technical phone screen since I had already demonstrated some proficiency with coding through the foo.bar exercises. > For my interview, I spent a day at Google headquarters in Mountain View solving problems on a white board. So what's the point? A phon…
What is absolutely baffling to me is that companies assign coding tests as a pre-qualifier for the usual whiteboard interview despite the coding test being a far more adequate measure of the abilities of an engineer. I've had interviewers tell me that my coding samples went above and beyond what they usually receive (exhaustive docstrings, tests that make sense) and yet rather than discuss, say, how my code worked or…
> What is absolutely baffling to me is that companies assign coding tests as a pre-qualifier for the usual whiteboard interview despite the coding test being a far more adequate measure of the abilities of an engineer.
A coding test doesn't tell you how well a candidate can collaborate. Can you toss them an idea, and have them successfully expand it and put it to use? Can you give them a couple of half ideas, and they expand them to full ideas? Would they be able to work together with you? Can they understand you? Can you uderstand them?
Those are all vital components to success, and you can't see those answers from a test. But white boarding is excellent for answering all those questions.
A quick word about hoop jumping. Being willing to jump through hoops means you're willing to cooperate and go the extra mile, and that you want to work at the company in question. This is a useful filter for the employer. They might lose some of the least patient and dedicated engineers (and perhaps some of the most talented) developers in the process.
Re: Google Has a Secret Interview Process and It Landed Me a Job
#90> Google’s recruiting process is well documented online, and from this point my experience was pretty typical.The only difference is that I didn’t need to go through a technical phone screen since I had already demonstrated some proficiency with coding through the foo.bar exercises. > For my interview, I spent a day at Google headquarters in Mountain View solving problems on a white board. So what's the point? A phon…
> You can contribute to open source, have substantial github projects, complete coding challenges, have years of experience: all of this just helps you get the interview. Once you are in the companies hiring pipeline everyone is put through the same process, none of the other stuff really matters after that point.
This reminds me of "90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102