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Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

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Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#41

Post by daenz »

Torwald wrote: post #26
daenz wrote: post #9

I've had Google recruiters reach out to me multiple times over the years and I've never taken them up on an interview. This last time, I told the recruiter I just wasn't interested in going through the process, and his response was a shocked "but why??" Is it so shocking that I don't want to subject myself to grueling demoralizing interviews to likely be rejected? I can get good work, with people I know, making good…

> Is it so shocking that I don't want to subject myself to grueling demoralizing interviews to likely be rejected? Yes, it is. And this is a problem bigger than Google, this is simply one of the things that are going wrong on this planet. It is however one of the problems that are _relatively_ easier to fix.

I'm not sure I follow. It's shocking because I should want go through a Google interview even though I have many other more interesting and just-as-lucrative options available to me? I'm not a stranger to taking risks and doing extremely difficult things, but Google has demonstrated to me, anecdotally through other talented and gifted interview candidates who failed, a high degree of randomness and subjectivity that is not proportionate to the difficulty of their interview process.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#42

Post by oculusthrift »

DannyBee wrote: post #36

For all the complaining here, Google's system actually works for Google, so i'm unsure why people expect something to change. The average interview score from a panel of interviews correlates very highly with performance at Google, interviewees report high satisfaction, etc. If those things changed, i'm sure Google would change it. But why would they change it otherwise?

i thought they said average score doesn’t correlate at all with how you do once you’re in? a lot of high performers only get in 2nd or 3rd time and barely.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#43

Post by WalterSear »

esoterica wrote: post #25
jakelarkin wrote: post #22

"its not about the problem" but if you cant correctly code one of these 200 algorithms on a whiteboard in sub 15 minutes while under extreme stress youre not getting an offer either.

Clearly some people can do that, since Google hires thousands of people every year. Why shouldn't they be hired over you?

Because the people they hire can't do all the algorithms at interview speed either - they were just lucky to have reviewed the right material recently.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#44

Post by [deleted] »

an4rchy wrote: post #14

I am not sure if this is in the interest of any company but why not provide feedback, as it can only help the interviewees in the future and the companies attract better talent. Even if it's not standardized, a rubrik across X attributes with a scale and a number. (Which is what I am assuming they are doing anyway -- as it sounds likes the interviewers are rating them across different dimensions) Not sure if this is…

[deleted]

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#45

Post by jakelarkin »

esoterica wrote: post #25
jakelarkin wrote: post #22

"its not about the problem" but if you cant correctly code one of these 200 algorithms on a whiteboard in sub 15 minutes while under extreme stress youre not getting an offer either.

Clearly some people can do that, since Google hires thousands of people every year. Why shouldn't they be hired over you?

i'm fine but thanks for your concern.

i just think its annoying because lots of companies cargo cult google and what thet do is a largely tangential skill set from the rigors of day to day programming work and knowledge. its a ritual from when they were hiring small numbers of graduate students with no real programming experience to measure them on. also the whiteboard is a relic of a time before there were laptops with hotswap 2nd screens.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#46

Post by SilasX »

joshuamorton wrote: post #38
an4rchy wrote: post #14

I am not sure if this is in the interest of any company but why not provide feedback, as it can only help the interviewees in the future and the companies attract better talent. Even if it's not standardized, a rubrik across X attributes with a scale and a number. (Which is what I am assuming they are doing anyway -- as it sounds likes the interviewers are rating them across different dimensions) Not sure if this is…

Experience says that in addition to liability, failed candidates just try to argue and get upset. People claim they want feedback but then claim that the interviewer must have misjudged them. More work for the company, and leads to even more negativity in the process.

Interviewers can also be stubbornly wrong about their reason for rejecting your answer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070001

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#47

Post by kamalkishor1991 »

I keep reading about how bad Google's interview process is. But has anyone done any proper large scale research on what is the best way to hire software engineers? All the comments here seems like opinions of people based on themselves and no one provides a proper alternative. Just curious!

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#48

Post by tytso »

ben_jones wrote: post #7
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is? I'd actually argue that for many companies this post is true (i.e. that getting it "right" is less important than the journey) but I still won't forgive companies that design th…

To me OP seems to assume a competent, unbiased, and well meaning interviewer: always giving hints, knows exactly what they want, will field and answer questions comprehensively. At Google's scale with hundreds of thousands of interviews on the books, thousands of interviewers who like all human beings have good days, sick days, angry days, and depressed days, this will not always happen. What happens when its the int…

What happens is the hiring committee will disregard the interview report, and send feedback to the interviewer, saying "don't do that". (There are generally 4-6 interviewers on an interview panel, so if one interviewer does a bad job, there are other interviewers who will be providing signal to the hiring committee. A single bad interview report won't sink a candidate.)

Google's interview training is pretty specific about what is expected of an interviewer, and the interviewer has to write up fairly comprehensive reports about the questions that were asked, and how the candidate answers them, what hints were given, etc. Most interviewers ask questions that they have asked multiple times before, so they will include things like, "The candidate (TC) took twice as long to code this a very basic warmup question that was designed to motivate a more in-depth distributed computing question; unfortuantely, what a strong candidate could do in ten minutes, TC couldn't get working C code in 45 minutes". (Current best practice is to try to avoid revealing the gender of the candidate in the interview notes, hence the use of TC instead of he or she. The goal is to try to avoid triggering any unconscious bias on the part of the members of the hiring committee.)

Now, there are some screening questions that are asked by recruiters as part of an initial phone screen when they are hiring for SRE candidates. Those questions are multiple choice and are really basic questions designed to screen out old-school operators who are quite good at mounting tapes (for example) but don't have any understanding of what TCP might be, and who think an SRE job is no different from a traditional system administrator position. Those are not asked by an engineer, but by a recruiter; the goal is to avoid wasting everybody's time.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#49

Post by tananaev »

adamnemecek wrote: post #28
esoterica wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly some people can do that, since Google hires thousands of people every year. Why shouldn't they be hired over you?

Because it's not a good measure of your programming skill. To be honest, I legit don't care whomst Google hires, what I hate is that there are all these other people who start adopting these attitudes and it can have a really shitty influence on the whole industry.

I don't think you need to worry about it. Google does interviews like this because they can afford to reject many good developers because they have much more candidates than they actually need to hire. I guess only most popular tech companies can do that. I bet it will never become a standard for the whole industry.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#50

Post by adamnemecek »

tananaev wrote: post #49
adamnemecek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a good measure of your programming skill. To be honest, I legit don't care whomst Google hires, what I hate is that there are all these other people who start adopting these attitudes and it can have a really shitty influence on the whole industry.

I don't think you need to worry about it. Google does interviews like this because they can afford to reject many good developers because they have much more candidates than they actually need to hire. I guess only most popular tech companies can do that. I bet it will never become a standard for the whole industry.

> I bet it will never become a standard for the whole industry.

It's going away now but it kinda was not too long ago.

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