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

161–170 of 674 posts

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#161

Post by CJKinni »

stcredzero wrote: post #148

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 e…

> Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that.

You and I live in different worlds, or have vastly different definitions of 'programmer.'

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#162

Post by stcredzero »

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…

Scheduled call. They forgot to call.

Back in the 90's and early 2000's in non Silicon Valley tech companies, this was Simply Not Done. I find Silicon Valley tech culture a little loose when it comes to interpersonal morals.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#163

Post by valuearb »

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…

There is a ton of development that doesn't require knowing advanced algorithms. When I develop for iOS, most of my data structures are provided by the OS, including generic data storage. There are compelling reasons to use them, most importantly speed of development, and the fact that my apps simply won't have performance issues noticeable by my customers.

Once in a blue moon I will have a hot spot that is noticeable. So I'll break out a hash table, not a book on algorithms, and solve it in a few minutes.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#164

Post by mmmpop »

stcredzero wrote: post #148

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 e…

> Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient

Now that's what I call naive! Or maybe hopeful. Just saying you're giving an awful lot of credit here...

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#165

Post by nolemurs »

There's tons of information online about what the big companies' interview processes are like. If you show up to an interview without bothering to do any research or preparation (like the author clearly did), then it's not going to be surprising when it doesn't go well.

Maybe I'm setting too high a bar, but I feel like it's not unreasonable to expect someone to spend an hour or two doing research on the interview process before flying out to Seattle. If he had, he'd have realized it was going to be heavy on the white boarding and algorithms, and then could have chosen either not to waste anyone's time, or to really prepare.

The recruiter totally should have let him know what to expect of course, but it's a strange sort of entitlement that leads someone to be upset when they don't get a job just for showing up.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#166

Post by kefka »

inimino wrote: post #83
beachstartup wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"how much you make" i.e. disclosing current or previous salary, not how much you want to make.

Yeah, I engaged a recruiter who seemed pretty decent at the onset. Then when I expressed interest in 2 positions, they demanded that I provide detailed salary for the last 3 jobs I have worked in.

I gave express disinterest in doing that, and had no issue with providing salary expectations. But I made it clear that this behavior was completely unprofessional and unbefitting of a recruiter.

I then told them in no uncertain terms that as long as they have this policy on their books, do not call back. If however, they change this, I would consider them again.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#168

Post by lallysingh »

pmontra wrote: post #112
codazoda wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the type of employee Google is looking for, in which case, it works great.

Maybe it's not what they are looking for. Maybe it's only the easiest test, like looking for the keys under the lamp post. It could also be that this way of hiring people turned the company into a specific direction, more attention to the sw and less to the customers.

Or visa-versa, that the company always cared more about the sw than the customers, and the hiring methodology reflects that.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#169

Post by petelevinea »

rpdillon wrote: post #99
fernandopj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If she would have started her email with "We're looking for an algorithm expert," we would never have gotten any further and would not have wasted our time. Clearly, I'm not an expert in algorithms. This phrase precedes the one you mentioned. He's saying the process he has been through completely ignored his background and field.

The notion that traversing a binary tree requires expertise in algorithms seems questionable to me. I view basic tree traversal as table stakes for a developer with more than a year or two of experience (IIRC, it's discussed in Intro to Algorithms in most CS curricula). OP says that his field is object-oriented design, which links to a page where he announces that "We've started work on a new programming language". T…

I agree, especially when designing programming languages that it's a bit weird to not know how to traverse a tree.

There is one thing I want to point out though. Before starting my algorithms course I knew how to solve problems recursively. I had done project euler tasks and what not. I just never knew the words abstract syntax tree or binary search tree. I could guess what they were prior to the course but I didn't know what they were off the top of my head.

Do you think that it's possible that a self taught engineer would know how to solve these problems given time and enough questions to the interviewer? Maybe get frustrated with "How do you balance a search tree?" questions under pressure?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#170

Post by whorleater »

oblio wrote: post #150
stuckagain wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and most likely the NSA

And all of them (well maybe not the NSA not sure on that one) do the entire "algorithms quiz".

Post reply on HN