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Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

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Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#171

Post by coldcode »

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…

I am not a standardized programmer, so I have no interest in Google's standardized interview. I tell their recruiters I am not interested as I doubt you would hire me anyway given I don't fit your standardized system. When you design your system for some specific person type, that's all you will get.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#172

Post by davidw »

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…

> I'd rather hire someone who knows exactly why it's O(n^2)

"How do we satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources?" - economics to the rescue again.

Everyone would love to hire Linus Torvalds for that matter, but there are plenty of programming jobs where you don't really need to, or don't want to, or can't spend that kind of money. There are plenty of useful, productive positions for people who aren't up on their O notation. The important thing is to be clear what kind of person you're looking for.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#173

Post by ghoshbishakh »

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…

Optimal algorithms are not the only most important thing that a software developer should know. It depends entirely on the type of the job. In most cases an experience of "design patterns" is most important.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#174

Post by fizixer »

The lesson based on your experience could be the advice you gave. But it could also be:

Don't get your expectations too high. If you have achieved something in your programming career already, you've done it. Something to be proud of. "Bad" interviewing practices of top companies, and the outcomes that follow, don't and shouldn't undermine your self-worth. Just take the whole interviewing experience as a chance to meet new people, have a mentally stimulating exchange, and that's it. If they hire you, great; you were able to capitalize (in one very specific, and by far not the only, way) on your achievements. If they don't, you go back to doing the great stuff you're already doing.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#175

Post by saycheese »

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…

There are vast amounts of basic information in the world that provides opportunities. In turn, knowing that information provides the opportunity to learn new information that is now "basic" as a result of learning the prior information.

To believe any concept is so basic everyone should know it seems unlikely, since if everyone knows it the odds of being able to find someone that knows it are high and the odds of gaining value from it are small.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#176

Post by stcredzero »

mmmpop wrote: post #164
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...

Just saying you're giving an awful lot of credit here...

I did spend awhile as an expensive "consultant" where often I was hailed as a genius just because I applied that tidbit of knowledge and sped up the application by some large fraction. However, I've also noted that there are some mainstream programming communities where people know this about string concatenation and spread this knowledge around.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#177

Post by Alex3917 »

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…

> 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.

No one is arguing that there isn't any value in knowing CS. Rather, the argument basically is that for the vast majority of developers, studying algorithms is a net loss because it's time that could be better spent learning more valuable skills.

If you're the person whose job is creating Redis then yeah you should probably know something about about algorithms and data structures. For most other people, having a cocktail party level familiarity with that stuff and a good understanding the phrase "tools not rules" is probably good enough.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#178

Post by jcadam »

fecak wrote: post #154

Being an agency recruiter in 2017 is becoming impossible in that fewer and fewer people are even willing to talk to you, which is one reason I've diversified into resumes and coaching. I have almost 20 years in the industry, led a large successful users group for 15 years, have published tons of content for tech pros (often critical of recruiters), and have a pretty solid reputation in the industry, I write targeted…

I used to respond to just about every recruiter email/call. Problem is, as you noted, that so much of what I receive these days is spam that I've stopped bothering to reply to most of them.

Now, occasionally I'll receive a well crafted email that was obviously specifically targeted to me and I'm so impressed that I have to reply :)

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#179

Post by [deleted] »

yomly wrote: post #149
valuearb wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#180

Post by perlgeek »

rb2k_ wrote: post #136

At Facebook you can usually chose which team you will join after bootcamp, so asking to be interviewed by your future manager is a bit of a problem.

The recruiter could just reply with such an explanation, and then explore of if something could be done to satisfy the candidate's desired to be interviewed by a specific person.
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