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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

#291

Post by justin66 »

fizixer wrote: post #174

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 me…

> Just take the whole interviewing experience as a chance to meet new people, have a mentally stimulating exchange, and that's it.

You're not wrong, but if one needs to put a premium on their time it's a little more complicated than that. Particularly if you need to take time off and travel for an interview, it'd be nice if the whole thing was more than a minor social experience.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#292

Post by ashwinaj »

sidlls wrote: post #261
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…

Conjecture: the majority (by far, probably on the order of 75%-80% or more) of programming and engineering problems to be solved in a typical company or typical application will not see significant differences in performance by selecting a naive implementation. For example, in your string concatenation example, the naive solution is good enough except in situations where large numbers of strings are to be concatenate…

> Select candidates who are keenly interested in and knowledgeable about algorithms for positions where it's important (i.e. part of the regular course of development), not because of that slight chance there is one edge case where one adjustment to a more efficient algorithm might possibly be useful at some indeterminate point in the future.

Well put! At the end of the day, it's way more important to get your product out to customers/users rather than holding a microscope over every line of code you write and endlessly obsessing over big O numbers. It's fine if you're in academia, but it can be a death knell if you're working in a crowded domain. You can always go back and improve code later; customers/users are not going to come back later.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#293

Post by Rapzid »

nolemurs wrote: post #222
VLM wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it's not a big deal to spend 3-5 hours a week for a few months" 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.

I mean, all the big tech companies use a similar white board/algorithm centric hiring process. If you're interested in working for one of them, 40-60 hours is really not a big investment to be in a good position to apply to all of them. I totally understand if that sort of job just doesn't interest you, but I'd be really curious as to where you think that 40-60 hours will get you a better ROI.

If you already have a good job? Exercise maybe.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#294

Post by CaptSpify »

perfmode wrote: post #255
roguecoder wrote: post #230

The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in i…

But Google's code quality is quite high...

I think that highly depends on what you value in code.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#295

Post by korzun »

perfmode wrote: post #255
roguecoder wrote: post #230

The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in i…

But Google's code quality is quite high...

That's a bit biased.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#296

Post by perfmode »

krzyk wrote: post #284
perfmode wrote: post #258

How is the author going to create his programming language without tree traversal algorithms?

He can learn them on the go, he doesn't need to prepare beforehand. That's what most people do when they face a problem, they try to learn how to fix it.

He just said he has no interest in learning them ever.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#297

Post by yawaramin »

perfmode wrote: post #255
roguecoder wrote: post #230

The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in i…

But Google's code quality is quite high...

I don't know about their code quality, but we consume some of their data via APIs and they periodically randomly change their non-nullable data types to nullable. Fun times hotfixing those in prod.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#298

Post by gravyboat »

felixgallo wrote: post #213

As a hiring manager at Amazon, I'm super excited to talk to candidates. A new job is, after all, an incredibly important life decision on the same level as getting married or buying a house. And as a manager, making sure I hire the right people to build the kind of diverse, respectful, collaborative, representative, professional, mentoring, balanced and focused team that I can is the most important thing I can do on…

The recruiters at Amazon are pretty bad in general. They don't give enough details about positions, salary, or anything else to make it worth discussing. I get contacted a few times a year and I always ask to just be added to the 'do not contact' list, but then the next year I'm always contacted again. At this point the teams at Amazon are such a crap shoot that it's not even worth talking to them (plus the pay is trash most of the time if you don't want golden handcuff equity). I always turn them down, but even that first contact is a pretty bad experience.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#299

Post by beachstartup »

gcp wrote: post #79
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'?

I thought it was pretty well understood that you should never name a number, and if you're forced to, you should say 5 times the number you had in mind.

that's absurd. you should name the price you expect, and not go below your minimum.

would you hire a plumber that refuses to name his rate, and then when pushed, tells you a number 5 times higher than normal? why do you think any other employment negotiation is any different?

if you "never name a number", the person on the other end is going to know you're inexperienced and operating on cargo cult mythology, and will simply take advantage of you.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#300

Post by perfmode »

ingsoc79 wrote: post #279
perfmode wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google's code quality is quite high...

Have you ever worked with the Android SDK?

In my opinion, Android's code organization is a result of questionable architectural constraints applied early in the development of the platform.
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