Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

yegor256.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 674 posts

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#71

Post by soheil »

> There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them.

They are just looking for smart people. If you ever looked it up it's 5 lines of code. That's the whole point they're not forcing you to learn something:

A) so esoteric you will never encounter in your programming career B) so complicated that you'd have to spend days practicing it, etc

In my opinion a lot of these questions are disguised IQ tests wrapped in algorithms since they can't blatantly ask "brain teaser" questions anymore.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#72

Post by onion2k »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #63

See his posts How We Interview Programmers [0] and Hacker-vs-Programmer [1] for more insight. It is ironic, then, that the author is claiming that algorithms, and knowledge of them, are unimportant for a programmer. "There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them." He believes he is a good programmer, and that learning algorith…

It is ironic, then, that the author is claiming that algorithms, and knowledge of them, are unimportant for a programmer

He didn't say that.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#73

Post by metaphorm »

stuckagain wrote: post #37
iainmerrick wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in hearing from people who work at Google, and get to figure out a cool algorithm for solving an interesting puzzle-problem more an about once a year. I bet there aren't very many. In my experience, the stuff you do in this kind of interview has very little relation with the stuff you do in the actual job. (I wish it did! I love those algorithmic puzzles.)

I don't know about the average but at Google I probably write a new call to std::set::find twice an hour, and it's important to know that std::set is a red-black tree, and how std::set::find is implemented and how much that costs and so forth. Fluency with data structures and algorithms is not some kind of brain candy. It's absolutely necessary to get the job done.

I understand the perfomance characteristics of red/black trees very well. I couldn't implement one in 30 minutes on a whiteboard.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#74

Post by stuckagain »

ubernostrum wrote: post #47
stuckagain wrote: post #8

> There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. Interview process: complete success.

Why do they try to "recruit" him in the first place, then, and "waste" recruiter time and phone-screen time on him and people like him? Remember: this isn't people applying to Google out of the blue: this is people Google has actively courted to apply . I did a couple rounds of their interviews a while back just to see if they really were as bad as people said they were (yup!). And that was in response to a very pers…

Here's the thing, nothing personal about you but a true fact about Google. Nobody at Google could possibly care less about your opinions on "application and database architecture" because Google does not have application and database architecture that even slightly resembles anything you have ever seen outside of the company. In fact the less you think you know about architecture the better it would be for all involved, if you were to go work at Google. Also all those things you know about makefiles and maven and ant and ansible and chef? Nobody cares. Google doesn't use those tools. Google has lots of famous engineers and while I believe their expertise and knowledge are valued, their outside experiences are generally not.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#75

Post by shmerl »

ng12 wrote: post #6

Yeah it kind of sucks, but from Google's perspective it's absolutely necessary. So many people talk the talk, run a blog, have a neat looking resume/website/GitHub and just cannot perform. Unless you're an undisputed rockstar in a specific area and they're hiring exactly for your expertise you can't expect anything else. It's a huge waste of time to custom tailor to each candidate when 90% won't receive an offer. > T…

You can't figure out if anyone can perform, by asking algorithms questions. That's rather a waste of time. Instead, they can be given a task to write some real code to solve a certain task, and of course not in 2 hours, but within a day let's say. And then evaluate the result. That can show how people perform. And not puzzle questions about problems that people were breaking their heads for years to crack.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#76

Post by edgan »

010a wrote: post #9

I've turned down actual offers because even some medium-sized companies won't tell you which team you'll be working on when the offer is extended. I get that things can be fluid, but its such a meat machine.

That is when you know they just see you as another cog.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#77

Post by drewrv »

ryandrake wrote: post #31

Unlike most of HN (it seems), I like hearing from recruiters, because despite the very low signal-to-noise ratio, there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job". It's zero cost to me to politely reply to a recruiter and ask for more info, and I try to at least respond to everyone. What I've found is that they must have a lot of candidates they're juggling because fall…

I've been responding with "Sorry I'm pretty happy where I'm at right now, but can I keep your email address and let you know when I do start looking for something new". My goal is to have a giant mailing list of recruiters when I do start looking for work again.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#78

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

numbsafari wrote: post #48
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

figuring out a cool algorithm is not the same as learning 1000 algorithms by rote to prepare for an interview. Just because doesn't feel like doing test prep for an interview, it doesn't mean they don't have the brain capacity to actually solve the business problem when it comes up. If in my day-to-day I need to use an AVL tree, I will get a library for it, I won't be reimplementing it from scratch every single time.

You might not need to implement it, but you needed to know enough to know what an AVL tree is, why you might (or might not) need it, and to be able to do some basic validations on the library you selected to make sure that it does what you are hiring it to do.

agreed, but let's assume you don't know what an AVL tree is or what the trade-offs are between an AVL, red-black or other type of trees: how long does in this age to find that information if you know what you are doing? I mean, you could allow your interviewee access to a computer and based on the type of googling they do it should be fairly obvious if they know what they are talking about.

In your day-to-day you have wikipedia, stackoverflow, hn and so on: software development hasn't qualitatively changed in the past decades to require multi-day interviews when 15 years ago a single 30-45 min interview was more than enough.

It would actually be interesting to compare the length of, say, a google interview a year after company inception compared to now. I am sure that despite the fact that nowadays the impact of a bad hire would be minuscule compared to back then, the interview process is way, way, way longer and more difficult.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#79

Post by gcp »

beachstartup wrote: post #66
arielweisberg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in theory it should totally be worth it as a candidate unless they are coasting on reputation. Otherwise the supply of candidates would dry up. In practice it wasn't for me, but I refused to tell them how much I made just to see what would happen. If you interview at Google and they ask how much you make you should probably tell them or you might get a weak non-negotiable offer. Unless what you make is already fa…

refusing to tell your prospective employer how much you want to get paid is a 'negotiation tactic'?

I thought it was pretty well understood that you should never name a number, and if you're forced to, you should say 5 times the number you had in mind.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#80

Post by henrik_w »

ryandrake wrote: post #31

Unlike most of HN (it seems), I like hearing from recruiters, because despite the very low signal-to-noise ratio, there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job". It's zero cost to me to politely reply to a recruiter and ask for more info, and I try to at least respond to everyone. What I've found is that they must have a lot of candidates they're juggling because fall…

I have the same experience - it's easy to turn down if you are not interested, or if they what they propose is a bad fit. I also think it is good to remember how extremely lucky we are to work in a field where there is such high demand. I have several friends that are in a technical field (but are not developers) looking for new jobs, and they have to work really hard to find anything. For developers, we can just sit back and wait for employers to look for us.
Post reply on HN