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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

#361

Post by Bartweiss »

bootsz wrote: post #241
rademacher wrote: post #218

All anecdotal evidence points to arriving at the correct, optimal solution as being key to passing the interview. It also seems like often times the interviewers are not even going to be working with the candidate so their opinion on a 'working relationship' is mostly irrelevant. The objective of asking these leetcode style questions is to find candidates who are willing to put in the time to study. Success signals t…

My experience confirms this as well. I’ve interviewed at most FAANGs and many others, and made multiple attempts at some. Brute-force practice (e.g. leetcode problems) and memorization is the only thing that ultimately worked. It would be nice if interviews really were a “collaborative” experience to see “how you think” where finding the optimal answer “doesn’t matter”. But it 100% does.

Years ago, I had the rare experience of being told why I didn't get an offer from a big Valley tech company. (Not FAANG, but perceived similarly.) It was for an internship, and I suspect they wanted to keep candidates interested for full time applications.

The relevant interview was a "find the palindrome" question for which the desired answer was Rabin-Karp. The rejection was explicitly "your solution to the whiteboard algorithm question worked but wasn't optimal, so study your algorithms harder and try again in the future".

At the time, I thought it was pretty stupid that they tried to judge skill by requiring candidates to either have one random thing memorized or reinvent a publication-worthy algorithm in 30 minutes. But given the advice I got, it seems like the core motivation was "we want people who are willing to devote a bunch of free time solely to impressing us". And for that, asking impractical questions and demanding optimal answers works perfectly.

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

#362

Post by zzzcpan »

tytso wrote: post #357
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost as if interviewers need to be tested as well. An interviewing contest where a faux candidate rates interviewers and suggests area for improvement. Of course, that would be rediculously expensive, so at best some canned training is used instead. Still, it might make sense for higher value teams.

After interviewers are trained, they will perform at least two "shadow" interviews where they tag along an experienced interviewer and they want the interviewer conduct the interview and then are asked to write up an interview report. After they finish writing the report, they can see what the experienced interviewer wrote up, so they can understand how the writeup should be done. Afterwards, the new interviewer has…

Sounds very ritualistic and cult-ish.

It won't be possible to extract any useful information from such interviews. But I guess it's possible to convince employees to haze candidates this way. You should feel bad for doing this to people though.

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

#363

Post by DannyBee »

mychael wrote: post #360
DannyBee wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed for any of your view] The problem is that it isn't inconsistent and arbitrary, so that would simply be wrong to admit. There is a tremendous amount of data/studies/etc to back this up, done repeatedly over time. Both independent of Google and not. Certainly much more than any other interview system i've seen suggested or used here. As for the second, general "Googliness" is not used to turn people do…

Whether you work there or not, I'm afraid you are misinformed. Three of my friends (all similar backgrounds) interviewing at Google this year have had completely different interviewing experiences. One even bypassed the phone screen and was flown to Mountain View for an IRL technical screening/interview. These are all for the same role. How does your data reconcile that?

Errr, i'm really unsure of the point you are trying to make and thus can't actually formulate a response.

Is it: You think they should have had exactly the same experience/path?

Regardless, any of the points i can think of don't really seem that relevant to your original point and my response.

Did you respond to the wrong subthread?

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

#364

Post by mixmastamyk »

I'm reminded of an amusing rant by Adam Carolla: "I had no idea how… f*ckin horrible most people are at their jobs." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6GVt35Eoz4

Definitely includes tech-interviewers. As I get older I've started pushing back on these bad interview decisions, but can't help feel it's a losing proposition without support from fellow developers.

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

#365

Post by sidlls »

jpatokal wrote: post #184
hueving wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That isn't really what the comment you're responding to was about. That comment was specifically about the fact that Google purports to target eliminating false positives and the trade off is accepting a high rate of false negatives. In fact there is not necessarily a relationship between the two: or at least not one that Google's process measures.

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

#366

Post by joshuamorton »

zzzcpan wrote: post #362
tytso wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After interviewers are trained, they will perform at least two "shadow" interviews where they tag along an experienced interviewer and they want the interviewer conduct the interview and then are asked to write up an interview report. After they finish writing the report, they can see what the experienced interviewer wrote up, so they can understand how the writeup should be done. Afterwards, the new interviewer has…

Sounds very ritualistic and cult-ish. It won't be possible to extract any useful information from such interviews. But I guess it's possible to convince employees to haze candidates this way. You should feel bad for doing this to people though.

>It won't be possible to extract any useful information from such interviews. But I guess it's possible to convince employees to haze candidates this way. You should feel bad for doing this to people though.

Empirically this isn't the case. It would be much more interesting if you took the time to elaborate on what about this process is cultish, why it won't provide useful signal. Without that, it just comes across as a mean-spirited complaint.

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

#367

Post by joshuamorton »

an4rchy wrote: post #134
joshuamorton wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with the possible liability aspect but if they are doing it already, i.e. taking notes or rubric scoring, then it's just a matter of sending a summarized version of that and hopefully it's feedback from multiple people and not just one person's opinion. The negativity may likely exist from no response/lack of feedback -- which can be frustrating for ppl that spent time/effort), but at least as the previous po…

I meant to post this earlier but forgot to, sorry.

Yes, I can't remember where I came across the data, but providing feedback didn't actually increase interview satisfaction, but decreased it in the aggregate.

Candidates are prone to arguing and trying to nitpick the feedback to get reconsidered. It's counter intuitive, but that's what really happened.

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

#368

Post by akudha »

kaidax wrote: post #214
akudha wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5-6 years ago, I went for an interview in a real estate company. The introductions lasted all of 2 mins. Then they took me to a computer, showed me a bug in the code base that I would be working on, if I got hired. Then they said "please fix this". Took me about half hour or so to hunt the bug down and fix (it wasn't hard, but it wasn't a cosmetic bug either). Then they asked me how I found the bug. I explained, they…

Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.

I don't know if you are joking or serious. How much work do you think you can extract out of a normal developer in an hour or less, especially when he/she hasn't seen the codebase before? And how much effort do you think it would take to schedule the interview in the first place, starting with posting an ad, then screening resumes, scheduling time...? Not to mention someone has to vet/test the bug fix ...

This doesn't seem reasonable to me at all.

On the other hand, I can believe if this happens with those "take home assignments". Those tend to be larger (few hours to a few days) amount of work.

BTW, at least in this case, I did get the offer as they promised, within 48 hours. So I don't think they were doing anything shady. My guess is that they simply got tired of normal style interviewing and found this to be an efficient way to hire.

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

#369

Post by mixmastamyk »

hpcjoe wrote: post #306
kaidax wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.

I had this happen in a previous life, when I was working on designing/building/selling HPC and storage systems. Two of the worst offenders were universities, one was a prop-shop, one a semiconductor processing firm. One uni called me up to tell me they liked my bid, but they wanted me to teach another company how to to what we could do, so they could buy from the other company. The second uni issued an RFP, required…

These seem to be contract negotiations rather than tech interviews, and you learned important lessons about protecting yourself from unscrupulous actors in the process.

> they wanted me to teach another company how to to what we could do

Here one might triple? their rate for a much shorter hourly design contract and leave implementation to someone else. The other two examples might have creative solutions as well.

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

#370

Post by mixmastamyk »

hpcjoe wrote: post #307
kasey_junk wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People claim this all the time but is there any actual evidence? It would be one of the worst possible grifts of all time.

I gave 4 examples of this in an above comment. Yes, it happens. Yes, its wrong. No, people and companies don't care. At the end of the day, this is what sucked the optimism out of me at my previous company. We had lots of people trying to steal from us. Even after I closed it down, I had two people in particular, ask me to help them design something, or give them detail domain/design knowledge, for free. Yes, it happ…

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