Sounds like horseshit. How many of those who didn't solve (or didn't even get on the track of solving) their problems actually ever got hired?
Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
181–190 of 432 posts
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#182Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar: - Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative. - Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you. The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is coopera…
The list contains good tips for avoiding getting nervous about something that's just normal practice, wasting time or running into a dead end. If you are concerned about the process, company culture or have any other concerns, use the time for questions at the end of the "main" interview. Interviewers will have better insights into the actual life of an engineer at G than recruiters. They don't have any incentive to misrepresent anything.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#183Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar: - Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative. - Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you. The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is coopera…
Some perspective from the interviewer's side may help here: - A Google interviewer's (and I would assume any interviewer's) primary goal is to come out of the interview with enough confidence to give a positive or negative score. If they sit down to write feedback and have to give a neutral score, the interview wasn't productive. This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a positive score a…
>The system is _highly_ prejudiced towards suppressing false positives. This is the right decision,
This is textbook Google propaganda that has been repeated at least since I last worked there 5ish years ago. It's bullshit though because the ratio of competent to incompetent engineers was the same as at FB, MSFT and NFLX (with the latter tending to prune the fastest).
Just because you generate a system that spits out a lot of false negatives, it doesn't mean it has done anything to reduce false positives. This should be immediately obvious given that the relationship between the questions asked in G interviews and actual software engineering is non existent.
Don't repeat the trope that Google's hiring system is actually better at eliminating false positives. There is no evidence of it and if it truly was better, everyone would adopt it in a heartbeat and we wouldn't be working with bad engineers who spent a few months on leetcode to get into jobs way over their heads.
The reason Googlers never care to critically question the sorting hat is because it picked them.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some perspective from the interviewer's side may help here: - A Google interviewer's (and I would assume any interviewer's) primary goal is to come out of the interview with enough confidence to give a positive or negative score. If they sit down to write feedback and have to give a neutral score, the interview wasn't productive. This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a positive score a…
>The system is _highly_ prejudiced towards suppressing false positives. This is the right decision, This is textbook Google propaganda that has been repeated at least since I last worked there 5ish years ago. It's bullshit though because the ratio of competent to incompetent engineers was the same as at FB, MSFT and NFLX (with the latter tending to prune the fastest). Just because you generate a system that spits out…
All the FAANGs operate under a very similar hiring model, because they all get far more applicants than they can hire and can afford to have a high rate of false negatives. "Everybody" can't adopt it even if they wanted to, because your average business doesn't get a million applications a year.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some perspective from the interviewer's side may help here: - A Google interviewer's (and I would assume any interviewer's) primary goal is to come out of the interview with enough confidence to give a positive or negative score. If they sit down to write feedback and have to give a neutral score, the interview wasn't productive. This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a positive score a…
I was confused about interviews in big companies before. Especially sometimes you have interviewers from not the hiring team. I was also confused about how leetcode questions are used, and sometimes feel that justification on hiring or not hiring are not based on evidence. Then one day I changed my view. I am seeing interviews a way to evaluate candidates' wanting to a job, and his effort of trying to achieve somethi…
The issue with Leetcode and HackerRank as I see it, is that you're reproving to various companies each time and each interview that you know how to code. However, the only alternative to this seems be an SAT for programmers, which isn't better.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#186Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar: - Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative. - Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you. The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is coopera…
Some perspective from the interviewer's side may help here: - A Google interviewer's (and I would assume any interviewer's) primary goal is to come out of the interview with enough confidence to give a positive or negative score. If they sit down to write feedback and have to give a neutral score, the interview wasn't productive. This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a positive score a…
I don't work for Google, so I don't know how much this applies to you folks. In my experience, while what you are describing is ideally correct, it's often just that -- an ideal.
For example, you'll have people insisting (and consciously agreeing) that their objective is to come out of the interview with enough evidence to give a positive or negative score. In the back of their minds, though, they will often be projecting their own insecurities -- about their expertise, about their career, about their job, about their team. Halfway through the interview, things end up being about something else altogether, like interviewers trying to reassure themselves that they're better than who they're interviewing (it's especially hard not to fall into this if it's been years since you last had to implement a red-black tree and you're interviewing a fresh graduate who dreams this stuff in their sleep).
It's very hard to get past these things. I struggle with them every time I interview someone, and it's very hard to know when to chalk it up to "the system" and when to chalk it up to your own baggage. Pretending that it's only the former only perpetuates this stuff -- and empowers the ones who actively enjoy abusing candidates and making them feel like crap just for the heck of it. Which is very common everywhere -- including, from what I've heard among my peers, at Google.
So far, the most relevant compass I've found for these things is made out of two questions:
1. If I were a candidate, and I'd have gone through this interview, how would I feel about it? 2. If I were to go through this exact interview today, would I still get hired?
If the answer to #1 isn't too good, there's probably some individual-level things you can change, but if the answer to #2 is bad, the problems tend to be more systemic in nature.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#187I'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 was just reading a thread on Linkedin by a recruiter who lined up 30 candidates based on the client's requirements, only to have the client reject all 30 of them. This problem is rampant and I don't think anyone has a handle on it.
A few observations:
- Modern society is so captured by social media, it's easy to make shallow connections but when it comes time to make the deeper connection, an actual hiring decision, hiring managers simply balk, and Loss Aversion Bias takes over.
- Being able to apply via the Internet creates too big a pipeline and shifts burden to the companies, which don't have the resources to handle the screening workload in a way that shows any consideration for the candidate.
- The shifting nature of technology makes the recruiting business hard. How is the average newcomer to recruiting supposed to be savvy enough to suss out the 12 different ways someone can be a "Docker Expert?" It's just absurd.
- Everyone hates the status quo. Job candidates, hiring managers, people who work in the staffing industry all hate the status quo and wish for a better way to guide talent toward the places where it is needed.
I don't see any way in which this is easy to fix.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everybody was super nice, they all wanted you to do well I had the same experience. Afterwords I thought I did pretty well because I got to a solution to all the problems eventually. Later when I discussed not getting the offer when a friend who works at Google. He said they try to guide the interviewee to a solution before the time limit. Which is reasonable, you want the interviewee to feel more confident and not…
I haven't been on the interviewing side, so I can't really comment on some of this. But the impression I got as the interviewee was that every question ramped up in difficulty. The slope of the ramp-up depended on the question. So maybe in your case, you didn't get as far on the difficulty ladder as other people that were interviewed. I was pretty shameless in asking for hints when I needed them, but it was typically…
In both my experience taking a Google interview and conducting a lot of interviews at my own company, I agree that a good question is open ended. For example "write memcpy" is trivial to get sometime working but can lead down many paths when discussing performance and computer architecture.
What gave me trouble, besides being rusty with algorithms, were some trade offs I would never make in the domain I'm familiar with. In my day job my microcontroller has 192KB of RAM, so limiting the amount of data collected to fit is important. I never get to the point where I have to worry about my simple algorithm not scaling to GB of data. Another odd idea was doing lots of speculative computation to reduce the latency of a system.
All of these algorithm things can be studied and after failing a couple of interviews you can start to understand what the interviewer is expecting and how to clarify assumptions.
I do question what sort of company you build if you screen for people who can write code on whiteboards. There is no giant mono-whiteboard where all the software engineers check in their code, so the interview process is not related to what people actually do for the job. On the other hand I have interviewed hundreds of people and I don’t feel like my questions do much better with the same one hour slot given to me by HR. The whole situation is inefficient for everyone.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#189Hiring continues to be a favourite whipping boy on HN and honestly I kind of wish it would die because it's the same arguments every time: - Inconsistent interviews - Luck of the draw questions - "I don't do well coding on a whiteboard" (often framed as "coding on a whiteboard proves nothing") - Bad experience with the process - Etc Personally I don't mind coding on a whiteboard but only if you understand why you're…
The problem with FizzBuzz is that it's too well known. So it's basically something which has very little signal because people can just google it and memorize the solution. Two of my favorite phone screen questions (now unfortunately banned because the have been identified on various web sites like Glassdoor as being Google interview questions) were "validate a UTF-8 string" (the interviewee is given the UTF-8 rules)…
> the experienced coder should be able to knock off in 5 minutes
An inexperienced one will knock off in 5 minutes.
An experienced one will know that the code you'll write in 5 minutes will be way too slow, by an order of magnitude slower than good library implementations.
For UTF8 see this: https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2018/blob/master/Presentatio...
For bignums this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_ADX
As you see, neither is solvable in 5 minutes.
The examples in a neighbor comment are very good, BTW.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a positive score as a negative one -- there isn't an incentive to "getcha" with cheap or tricky questions. This is only true if the interviewer is uninterested in what happens after the hiring process. If they want to make sure they're winning a reputation doing great interviews for more good hires than bad hires then there's an incentive to be cau…
Such a feedback loop -- of identifying which interviewers give the "most accurate" scores -- doesn't exist. Nor is it clear how you would build such a system (how do you quantify a "bad hire" or "good hire" in such a way that isn't lost in the noise?). Interviewers are trusted to do the best job they can. Remember, interviewing is volunteer work, not something that will advance your career. The results of the intervi…
I hope that at least engineers are given courses in "how to be a good interviewer".
It's not a natural skill, dare I say it, especially for an engineer.