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Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People

thecooperreview.com

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Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People

#65
post #27

I didn't even read the article because I know there is no secret. We don't hire the best people. We hire average people, some good people, some great people, some mediocre people, and some people who aren't very good at their jobs. Some of those mediocre and average people turn out to be great people after all. There's no secret to it. We like telling ourselves there is a secret because everyone likes to feel special…

Incredible to me that someone would write such a lengthy comment based on a headline alone.

And by doing that, completely missed the point of the article.

Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People

#67
I like telling my AWS interviewing story. They forgot to call the first time. Then they were "impressed" and invited me for an onsite. All seemed well, except they forgot about me coming that day or just people who were supposed to interview me were gone. Everyone asked pretty much the same "leadership principles" questions, which I refused to parrot back through my "life experiences" -- I guess it went against my own personal "principles".

Oh and they forgot about me during lunch. Not that I was hungry, but it just added to the "oh it can't be as bad as the blogs say, surely..." factor. So sat in the office looking around. After a while started wondering around the hallways, hoping someone would say "Are you allowed to be here? Can I help you?". So that was fun. And that's not all though, also said they'd call within 2 days to let me know the results, which of course ended up being 3 weeks.

It was worth it though -- it made for a great story!

Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People

#68
post #27

I didn't even read the article because I know there is no secret. We don't hire the best people. We hire average people, some good people, some great people, some mediocre people, and some people who aren't very good at their jobs. Some of those mediocre and average people turn out to be great people after all. There's no secret to it. We like telling ourselves there is a secret because everyone likes to feel special…

You probably should've read the article.

Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People

#69
post #55

So true. I had an Amazon interview where I wanted to hang up. There were moments where I would get questioned or berated for not using such great AWS tech like Opsworks and Cloudformation. Instead of being impressed with my completely valid approach they fixated on the fact I didn't use their stuff and it became a bit combative/snarky. So Amazon certainly isn't for me. Thanks for EC2 and two day shipping though.

I had a phone screen from Google I wanted to hang up on because I knew where it was going. They reached out to me for an SRE role in Australia. After a few unscheduled calls at poor times (at the DC doing work) we setup an "interview". It was just a screen where they ask you to rate your self on a bunch of random technologies; between never heard of it and wrote the book. Rated myself 4-6 on most haha. The " intervie…

I never understood the rate yourself bit. Is it designed to fuck with your head? "So you think you are good? We'll show you. How about this obscure trick question from C++17 spec -- see not as good as you thought"
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