71–80 of 130 posts
> Google offers are very competitive, some might say generous, and very thorough. Interesting, I've always heard Google doesn't pay very well. Similar to game companies, they can take advantage of the fact people really want to work there and know candidates will accept lower pay because of it. I've heard that from several Google employees past and present. Perhaps things have changed?
In norvig page, norvig.com it is said that a good method to increase the power of the team is to choose someone that is better that someone at google. The author did a statistical simulation to show the positive effect of this strategy compared to another one. There is someone working at google that was working at apple and is good at social blogging (I don't remember now his name) but he didn't pass the test and he…
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg...
and the argument is that you should try to "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees", rather than just hire people better than the worst you have.
I find the part where he talks about hiring for project vs. hiring for the company a bit more interesting.
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Exactly. The process is designed to reduce false positives. The downside is there will be some false negatives. It is not 100% accurate and it can take months to get through the process, but if we do it right we will be spending years together. So, it is worth the investment in time. Don
Don, IMHO, you're using the wrong techniques. Tests of random knowledge and focussing strictly on quick answers to logic problems will get you lucky left-brainers -- they're the ones who happened to know what command options are available for sed and awk, and are good linear thinkers. Google should be doing better than that -- much better.
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They've actually said as much. They understand that their process generates false negatives but they don't want any "crud."
Exactly. They've also said that their high false negative rate is why they clear out their records every couple of years. If you got rejected a couple years ago you can apply again and they won't be looking at your previous attempt's performance.
It kind of goes against Google's entire corporate culture to ever delete information like this. Sometimes I wondered if their interview process isn't designed more as a data mining process to find out what interesting things technology leaders are working on.
What Google should do if they want to hire really good candidates is to go with a contract to hire approach. Find good candidates, do one phone interview and a second in-person interview in the space of a few days (not 4 or 5, stretched out over months). If they pass your initial 2 interviews, hire them as a 6 month contractor.
See how much they accomplish in 6 months. If they are contributing and integrating effectively, hire them full time. If not, just wish them the best and don't renew their contract.
This is the way it works in most effective large companies. The cream that rises to the top gets offered a full time job within a 6 month to 2 year timeframe. My current job is like that. I've worked there for 4 years and started as a contractor. It became so expensive to pay my hourly rate that they were begging me to become full time after a while. I was doing a valuable job for them and was very effective at it, so I got the full time offer.
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Perhaps the position they were interviewing you for actually involved writing efficient software, and thus required thorough knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science (data structures and algorithms &c) and systems programming?
And certainly your day-to-day work would involve answering questions about those data structures and algorithms in real time, with your future career depending on it, without external references.
How many people actually solve problems in their day to day jobs without every looking anything up online? Or at least checking to make sure they are correct. Just having a syntax highlighting editor is light years ahead of a white board and dry erase marker.
edit: Sorry, my sarcasm detector doesn't work. I think we're agreeing.
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False positives are way worse for most companies than false negatives. Interviews processes are generally designed around this principle.
This is asserted as a truism, and perhaps in Google's case it is, but if the difficulty in the hiring process dissuades enough people who have other options from applying I can see it hurting the job pool. If you were to get 100 applicants, and you were only interested in hiring the top 5% (5 people), and 3 of the good people decided to accept decent jobs they could get without giving blood samples and their first bo…
I'm sure they knowingly turn away bright & competent engineers simply due to the large size of the applicant pool.
Smaller companies would be wise to heed your advise though.
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Perhaps the position they were interviewing you for actually involved writing efficient software, and thus required thorough knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science (data structures and algorithms &c) and systems programming?
SRE (Site Reliability Engineers) according to Tom Limoncelli (a Google's SRE) is a kind of sysadmin, I doubt that this would ever be the case.
I would think the senior SRE engineers know enough about the code base to poke around and make suggestions ("found a bug in module.py at line XYZ that causes bad performance when thousands of users hit it"), but I got the impression that most of their top developers probably would be bored in SRE.
The thing that is ironic is that most of the people interviewing me were not in SRE, but were pure developers. How many companies do you know that let the developers interview sysadmins? I had guys asking me CompSci questions I hadn't heard since college. If the tables were turned, do you think I'd be asking a prospective developer a question about how to configure DRBD replication and heartbeat from one Linux server to another? Even though some devs might know these things from hobby-like experimentation in their free time, they are not going to be doing it on a day to day basis.
It just strikes me as a very broken interviewing system when you have developers interviewing sysadmins.
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I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true? One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job. Personally, I don't like my current job bu…
Are those interviews so frustrating that you are willing to take 2 low-paying jobs instead?
I'd rather have the flexibility to move anywhere, the stimulation of constantly meeting new people, and some leftover desire for personal projects when I get home than to have a programming job I don't like.
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False positives are way worse for most companies than false negatives. Interviews processes are generally designed around this principle.
I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true? One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job. Personally, I don't like my current job bu…
Our interview process mostly consists of asking you questions you should know the answer to. If your answers make sense and you seem pleasant, welcome to the team. Oh, did I mention you'll probably make twice as much here than at Google?
Incidentally, more people want to work at Google than want to work at Bank of America, even though there is plenty of interesting code to write at the Bank, and plenty of boring paperwork to do at Google. It doesn't make sense to me.