Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#141

Post by jff » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

> some programmers who didn't know a thing about my profile asked me to invent some algorithms on a white board for almost four hours.

Yep. Did the phone interview after weeks of back-and-forth, told them what I was interested in, told them I was only interested in working on such-and-such, then they drop me in the standard "write memcpy for us" interview. The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months."

If someone like David Presotto or Rob Pike want to recruit me directly, fine, but after similar experiences with Amazon I've decided the typical mega-startup interview process is for the birds.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#142

Post by Someone1234 » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #120

40acres wrote: post #26

There is no standard way to interview a software engineer. Whenever one of these threads come up we see multiple posters explaining their process, and while each process has it's upsides and downsides, no two are exactly the same. For a company the size of Google, with the amount of applicants they receive, I would assume that an interview standard is absolutely necessary. It's not perfect, but for 95% of developers…

What I don't understand is that this person hasn't even had a Google interview... They literally say "I won't accept an interview at Google because: 1. I had a bad interview at Amazon (???) 2. I read a story on HN about someone having a bad interview at Google I'm sorry but that's an awful excuse. As you mention, Google works at an insane scale, and as foolproof as you try to make a process, there will always be a ve…

> They literally say

You cannot claim that someone "literally" says something then make up a fictionalised quote that mischaracterized what they're saying.

None of that "quote" appears in the article. Therefore the term literally and the quotation marks are at best misleading.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#143

Post by nolemurs » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #42

noonespecial wrote: post #4

Its the London Cabbie(1) method. They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people (for the value of smart that fits their biases). They just need as many warm bodies as possible to ram through their test so that a few trickle out the bottom of the funnel to keep the ranks from shrinking. If too many started getting hired, they'd add competitive basket weaving to the skillset if t…

> They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people I've found this to be decidedly not true, from many recruiter contacts. They have a role in mind they're trying to fill and if you point out that it's far more junior than what you're looking for, the conversation's over. Think about how must companies hire. The hiring manager fights internally and finally gets a req for a very s…

> I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this!

I don't know about letting people "define their own role", but a lot of the biggest companies are constantly hiring without a specific role in mind. If you've got thousands of employees then your best strategy is just hire the smartest people you can find, and figure out how to use them effectively - you have enough roles available that you'll find something for anyone to do, and while not every role you need filled is someone's dream job, a combination of internal mobility between teams and great benefits and pay will attract a lot of good candidates.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#144

Post by valuearb » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #40

> I learned my lesson two years ago, when Amazon tried to recruit me. I got an email from the company that said they were so impressed by my profile and couldn't wait to start working with me. They needed me, nobody else. I was naive, and the message did flatter me. I learned mine with AWS as well: Scheduled call. They forgot to call. Waited like an idiot for an hour. Ok fine big company yadda, yadda. Had the phone i…

LOL, your experience was much like mine. They sent me a ton of stuff to study pre-interview, which I thought was odd way to bias my answers (I attribute that to the recruiters trying to game system to get more of their finds hired and look good). When I got there the door was locked and I was trapped in an ante-room with another candidate waiting for 45 minutes. Interviews with a bunch of randoms, half from other teams. Only one whiteboard test which I apparently didn't do well on.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#145

Post by yeukhon » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:18 PM UTC

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 like getting recruiter emails because it kind of means I am marketable, even though some of the recruitments can become an anecdote I can talk about at a dinner party with friends... (you know one of those totally weird recruitments)

But mostly I want to get it because I want to see what these companies are expecting from their candidates, technology these companies are using, and the salary range. DevOps / SRE / Production Engineers are high in demand.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#146

Post by deathanatos » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

lazyant wrote: post #14

Well, in their defense (Google/Amazon/Facebook etc), a team leader or any other particular person cannot interview 500 applicants, so either more people are interviewers or they are way more specific with initial resume (which can be fake to a big extend). I don't like algorithm questions either but at least they optimize by time, the alternative is to have people in for a few days, or spend a day doing chat intervie…

> a team leader or any other particular person cannot interview 500 applicants

While, yes, it often takes interview more than one, and often several people, to find a desirable candidate — it's not that high. Given that any candidate will see probably around 4 interviewers, I don't think asking that the manager interview is that big a deal. I have to agree with that part of the article (though I disagree with it on the whole): meeting your manager-to-be is important. (And I don't think one understands this until one has a bad manager.)

In a prior job, we would also omit the manager interview if it was certain the candidate wasn't going to be a pass.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#147

Post by cr0sh » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

drewrv wrote: post #77

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.

I've found that working with multiple recruiters can be a nightmare if they are all working the same geographic market.

Due to my current situation, I tend to only deal with recruiters who are local to where I live; unless the job opening allows for telecommuting, or it is a "too good to pass up" situation (I have yet to see one) - I will generally pass it up.

Instead, I currently only work with a couple of local recruiters. I have told both what I expect for interviewing (I prefer a practical interview with tests - not a whiteboard pressure interview), and I keep both informed what interviews the other has sent me on, so they aren't both submitting me to the same position opening.

Going beyond 2-3 recruiters in such a situation can and will lead to a tracking nightmare, to keep all of them in synch and not submitting you to the same opening - either at the same time, or worse, after you have already been interviewed once and weren't successful.

I do however, try to review the contacts I do get from recruiters, and if I feel they might be useful in the future, I tell them so, and keep a contact with them (even if it is just a LinkedIn or email contact) - and let them know I am interested in the future. That'll usually be enough for them to keep me in their DB for future potential offers to come up.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#148

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

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.

Let's presume this is out of preference and not ability. It's a pretty basic concept. If your preference stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn't seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts.

Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that. I'd rather hire someone who knows exactly why it's O(n^2) and why adding to the end of an array that doubles when it expands is O(n) amortized. Why? Because a different but analogous situation might well come up in a programming job, and the person who likes to think about such things is more likely to spot the potential problem and avoid it altogether! The fact that the op would actually feature the above sentences as a large text excerpt sets off the "Dunning-Kruger" alarm for me.

That said, the op still has a good point. There is considerable organizational disconnect being displayed here. Those big companies would do well to have developers or a puzzle website do the initial filtering, rather than waste people's time by alternatively telling them they're supposedly wonderful, then supposedly horrible.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#149

Post by yomly » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #115

stuckagain wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've been a developer for 30 years, helped start a half dozen companies. Since college I've never written a single tree traversing algorithm, and would need to Google red-black tree to know what it is. There is a whole world of development that is OS specific, UI specific, shipping commercial applications. Shipping quickly is always a higher priority than performance, because adequate performance is usually trivial t…

I'm not entirely sure adequate performance is good enough when you work at the scale of Google...

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#150

Post by oblio » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

stuckagain wrote: post #74

ubernostrum wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 involv…

Arrogance at its finest.

I'm not arguing that Google doesn't have a huge scale, but I'm pretty sure that Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and most likely the NSA also have unique systems and challenges.