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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

#201

Post by nolemurs »

kabes wrote: post #182

I've been working as a software engineer for quite a few years now and I'm sure I'm a much better software engineer now then when I graduated. I now have years of solving varying real life problems with real-life constraints (budgets, deadlines, ...) using a big amount of different technologies, working with a lot of different people, ... However, I'm also pretty sure I'd have a better chance on the Google interview…

> However, I'm also pretty sure I'd have more chance on the Google interview right after graduation then now, when all the theoretical stuff was fresh in my brain. So I'd have more chance while being a (in my opinion) less useful engineer.

The thing to understand is that Google is more interested in not hiring potential bad hires than in hiring every good hire. Part of the reason the interview process works the way it does is to filter for people willing to put in some effort. If you want a job at Google, it's not a big deal to spend 3-5 hours a week for a few months getting sharp on the basics. If you're not willing to do that, then that's a good sign that you're not really invested, and may not be the best hire.

Google will totally lose some good hires this way of course. But their philosophy is explicitly that it's better to lose a good hire than make a bad hire. I think they're probably right.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#202

Post by hueving »

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…

>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.

This same exact argument could be used to require every interview candidate to know assembly.

>and the person who likes to think about such things is more likely to spot the potential problem and avoid it altogether!

I find that developers who constantly get caught up in the performance of individual algorithms will waste incredible amounts of time optimizing them and will miss major optimizations that come from seeing the system as a whole.

For example, I would rather take the developer who points out that a particular program can make use of the fact that most of the code doesn't need sorted widgets rather than the one who spent the whole time optimizing the widget sorting algorithm.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#203

Post by codeonfire »

In my opinion Google hiring is corrupt. They are under federal investigation and a civil lawsuit. The reason recruiters contact a large number of people that won't be hired is they need a lot of no-hires to make their stats balance out and keep up appearances. Other big companies do this as well, Google just purports to be better.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#204

Post by welder »

volkk wrote: post #84

Personally, my biggest issue with interviewing at large companies like these by people whom you aren't necessarily going to be working with, is that not everyone is in a position to interview people. I personally hate interviewing other people and having to be responsible for their futures. I was never trained for it, and I don't want to ever deal with it. I just want to code and make sure the product I'm working on…

Facebook has a "shadower" who is in your room just to learn to be a better interviewer. A shadower pairs up with the interviewer for each round.

You can't just say inexperienced interviewers can't interview, then how would anyone ever get experience?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#205

Post by Adverblessly »

metaphorm wrote: post #68
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…

the problem with the way Google interviews is that, despite it being heavily standardized, it is not sensitive to non-algorithmic skills and talents that interviewees have. It will _only_ pass candidates who are unusually good at algorithm puzzles, on whiteboards, under time pressure.

When I was interviewed for a job at Google I was told there would be 5 different interviews measuring 5 different things:

Pure Algo (which I view as "let's see that your CS grades were earned and not bought")

Pure Coding (let's see if you have a reasonable coding style and design and are proficient with at least one language)

Algo & Coding (a bit of both that makes sure you can solve a simple problem and code it [i.e. work entirely through a problem])

Software Design (so more on your skill in designing code - finding the right abstractions and interfaces etc.)

Systems Design (your ability to design complete, large scale systems at a very high level)

And this is more or less what I got, which seemed fair and logical to me. I agree that it is not tailored to the interviewee's individual skills (for example, your special training in cyber security is unlikely to give you an extra edge), but it makes sense for "good overall software engineer", and if you aren't also a good overall software engineer in addition to your special training in cyber security, then you are probably not what Google is trying to find. Also, it does look at your skills in coding and design which are both non-algorithmic.

Now whether or not this experience is shared with other interviewees, or matches what you are looking for is something else :X

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#207

Post by aorloff »

glangdale wrote: post #193
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 agree. Personally, I'm a bit horrified at the idea that someone who wants to be an "expert at object oriented design" would turn up their noses at "binary-tree-traversing questions". It sounds like a formula for aspiring Architecture Astronauts. It's also not realistic, given the wheat-to-chaff ratio out there, for a manager to interview all the candidates directly without an elaborate screening process, although t…

Well said. The problem is, many recruiters actually wouldn't understand that sarcasm. And that's the problem the OP is talking about. For a lot of recruiters, they are so excited to be working at a big tech firm that they don't understand why anyone else would be any less excited.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#208

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

Funny you bring up the CS curricula.

In response to not knowing the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test, Albert Einstein replied:

"[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think."

This is even more true today with the vast trove of easily searchable called the Internet. A competent programmer should have high-level knowledge of different algorithm types, but should not strive to memorize their implementation (e.g. for interviews), since it is trivial to look that up.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#209

Post by hibikir »

nolemurs wrote: post #165

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 pro…

I look at it backwards: Rejecting a candidate to day doesn't mean that they won't be exactly the kind of person I'll need to hire 3 years later, as both my needs ad theirs have changed, and therefore, I think that a good candidate experience is crucial. I want people that are rejected, or that leave the process early, to remember the experience positively.

Thus, I do not expect anyone to do research on the interview process: Before anything other than the basic recruiter chat, every candidate should receive a pretty good picture of how the recruiting process goes: Number of interviews, style of content, time to wait between an interview and its next steps... If a candidate is ever surprised, It's the company that fails.

If a shop that has a couple of hundred developers can do that in a cost effective way, so can the bigger tech companies. If they fail, it's because their standards for how to run a company are way too low.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#210

Post by VLM »

the_watcher wrote: post #109
rarec wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody does that because being smart is of no guarantee that this person can be of any use to a business.

Are you entirely excluding university recruiting from this? Because consulting firms and investment banks routinely recruit smart people without any demonstrable experience doing what those companies plan to train them to do.

That's almost exclusively ivy. We need a Yale guy, any Yale guy, doesn't matter who, just need it for the list of accomplishments. Then we can use our new "ivy atmosphere" to get that specific guy from Stanford or whatever.

The only place hiring generic warm bodies at random state-U is Starbucks.

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