Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

> Thanks for your email. I'm very interested indeed. I have nothing against an interview. However, there is one condition: I have to be interviewed by the person I will be working for. By my future direct manager.

This kinda misses the point. I can't speak for any companies besides Google, and this is all my personal sense and not the company line, but anyway: speaking with a hiring manager who wants you is actually less useful than speaking to a disinterested stranger. Hiring at Google is done by committee and actually regards feedback from a hiring manager with some suspicion. Here's why:

Google allows for a lot of mobility. Internal transfers are common, projects are scaling up all the time, sometimes new engineers don't gel with their teams and want out, and we strongly prefer to keep people within the company when projects scale down. Given this, hiring an employee solely on the basis of an enthusiastic manager's word is a recipe for lowering the overall level of engineering. Even if Yegor had the strong support of a manager who wanted him, he'd still have to go through the same raft of interviews and be judged by the same hiring committee.

Alright, fine, I hear you say, but if a manager likes you, surely that's still a positive signal? Well, in the best case scenario, sure: you're talented, the manager is wise enough to spot a good engineer when they see one, and they express their assessment honestly. But the best case scenario involves the manager acting as though they were a disinterested outside, so why not get the opinion of an actual disinterested outsider? However, what if the manager is short-staffed and just needs whatever help he can get to meet their goals? What if the endorsement is made on some biased basis, such as going to the same school or assessment of talent in an area unrelated to engineering?

For all their warts, whiteboard-based interviews are the state of the art in assessing the capabilities of a large number of candidates within reasonable time and cost. They're not foolproof, and smaller companies can afford to (and should) use more bespoke methods. However, at the scale of Google and friends, they're unfortunately the best thing available. But I won't lecture hacker news on scale. We all know expectations have to be adjusted as systems grow.

In fact, I spend a non-trivial amount of my day personally looking for, and reaching out to, prospective candidates, with no recruiter involved.

With that in mind, Amazon recruits so widely that I couldn't possibly talk to every prospect; there just aren't enough hours in the day. So I think it's important to have recruiters doing the basic screens, and am delighted to take over from there.

Anyone who wants a job at one of the big companies should understand that there's going to be some bureaucracy on the intake side just because the volume is unbelievable. If you feel like you've had a bad experience with Amazon in particular, please reach out and let me know and I'll see if there's anything I can do about it.

I think I can get further ahead than a job at Google for that kind of time investment. I don't mind big expenses, I just expect corresponding rewards.

This is a negotiation, they aren't entitled to know how much you make nor do they have a good method of checking up on it.