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

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

#91

Post by diskcat »

underwater wrote: post #89
andrewstuart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because so many posts on HN are cookie cutter - usually you don't need to read the post to know what the (same old) message is. You know: "Why my startup failed" (cause I built something no-one wants) "Why we switched from this technology to that technology" (because the old one sucked but the new one will solve all our problems) "How we built a startup that fixed hiring" (they didn't) "How to hire great people"…

If everyone is talking and no one is listening what is the point?

to generate a lot of data to sell microprocessors to people who make internet bots

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

#93

Post by rdtsc »

asuffield wrote: post #90
rdtsc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straightforward: you tell us what your strongest areas are, we'll give you interviews that line up with those areas. There's no strict guarantees and you should expect a spread of different questions, but whatever it is that you're good at, expect us to offer you a cha…

Ok makes sense. I should also apologize, Google didn't really give me trick questions when I talked to them 4 years ago or so (but other companies did), so didn't mean to imply they did as well.

Google had a list of technoliges as you described, and I was asked to rate myself on each one. I think it would have been slightly better if they explain why or how it is used.

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

#94

Post by kobayashi »

exabrial wrote: post #58
andrewstuart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because so many posts on HN are cookie cutter - usually you don't need to read the post to know what the (same old) message is. You know: "Why my startup failed" (cause I built something no-one wants) "Why we switched from this technology to that technology" (because the old one sucked but the new one will solve all our problems) "How we built a startup that fixed hiring" (they didn't) "How to hire great people"…

^^^ This post is awesome

I'd like to believe that both paxunix and andrewsteward wrote those comments after having read the article, but pretended like they didn't for the Internet points. Actually makes the comments a bit funnier.

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

#95

Post by dkopi »

jethro_tell wrote: post #76
rdtsc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Meh, I ask it on a couple technologies now and again but only for broad tech. It does two things for me. One is that for some of my positions, I need a candidate to be good at some but not all things my team does, like windows, linux or net ops. So it helps me focus my questions on what the candidate feels comfortable with. It's not a trick. The other thing that you can often see with it is how much a person doesn't…

When you ask them to configure something, do you let them sit in front of a laptop with man pages, google and stack exchange? Or do you expect them to memorize all your most used command line tools?

Do you expect them to remember the parameters to ifconfig, or do you ask them to craft a script/command line to print only the MTU for each interface?

When you ask them about top, do you expect them to remember what top is? or do you allow them to google for top, and ask them to craft a command line (or shell script) that finds which user is using the most memory on the system?

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

#97

Post by piva00 »

xvolter wrote: post #83

I've seen dozens of articles about how Google, Amazon and other large tech companies hire the best. It's a terrible assumption that these tech giants hire the best, they simply can't be picky with their hiring, they need to grow teams to keep up with progress, and replace the members who are leaving. They need to hire quickly, so they refine their hiring process to get qualified candidates, but not the best candidate…

I think a better way to see is that they must be really "efficient" on hiring, even though these companies need a lot of people hired quickly they try to hire the "best possible" with those constraints. So not the best but the best possible for a given timeframe and position.

I don't know how much sense this make outside of my head but that's how I see it, they had to "scale" the process and it kinda works.

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

#98

Post by Rapzid »

asuffield wrote: post #87
Rapzid wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) You did not have a phone screen. What you are describing is the initial contact with a recruiter, to establish what roles you're interested in, explain how the process works, and arrange dates. Had you proceeded past this, you would probably have had a phone screen next, which would be with an engineer giving you a technical p…

You are probably correct. It's been a few years but I do recall not being super impressed with the questions after the hassal of a bit of phone tag and a scheduled call. He likely picked up on my disinterest. I could have sworn though that there was this ackwardness based on my responses. Like he couldn't reconcile my answers with my profile.

My not be considered a "phone screen" in the process but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.. :)

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

#100

Post by vonmoltke »

asuffield wrote: post #90
rdtsc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straightforward: you tell us what your strongest areas are, we'll give you interviews that line up with those areas. There's no strict guarantees and you should expect a spread of different questions, but whatever it is that you're good at, expect us to offer you a cha…

> I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straightforward: you tell us what your strongest areas are, we'll give you interviews that line up with those areas. There's no strict guarantees and you should expect a spread of different questions, but whatever it is that you're good at, expect us to offer you a chance to show us that you're good at it.

My one experience with getting to a Google onsite is that, despite repeatedly telling various recruiters my strongest areas, they ended up interviewing me for what they wanted me to do rather than what I was good at. In fact, one of my interviewers literally had to throw out all his prearranged questions and make shit up as he went because my background and experience were so misaligned with what he had been added to my loop to ask me about.

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