A Wretched Google Interview Experience

This is typical for all of the big "A-tier" tech companies I think. I used to do a lot of interviewing when I was at Amazon, and invariably the interviews leaned very heavily on CS fundamentals.

I'm all for CS fundamentals, but in many places it's clearly being used as an approximation of good-code-shipping-ability.

I think part of the problem is that you're not really allowed to interview people in a way that holistically assesses their ability, so you end up doing cargo cult-y things that sort of, kind of sounds like they're relevant. For example, when I was at Amazon, we specifically were disallowed from using real-time typing/sharing tools to conduct coding questions.

Nowadays I find that pairing with someone on a limited-scope coding problem, as well as talking deeply about software design and architectural decisions, is the best way to assess. But then again, I'm also no longer interviewing complete newbies - which I think Amazon/Google/Microsoft's recruiting systems are heavily optimized for.

When faced with a candidate who has a dearth of real-world things to dig into, of course you fall back on data structures and algorithms. When you apply this to experienced professionals, who have a long track record that they can talk in depth about, it becomes silly.

Interesting, especially since I've just started working for Microsoft, in Bing Ads, and a big factor in deciding to come was the interview process. The phone interview involved writing code in a shared environment, the in-person interviews were all nice (hard questions, non-threatening ways to ask), and I (and the other 4 guys who interviewed in my time slot) were told yes/no right after the interview ended.

I assume experiences at large companies vary widely depending on the group, but I was definitely impressed with Bing's interviewing process.

Google's recruiting seems like it must be at least partially the responsibility of short-tenure contractors. Every time I've dealt with people from their recruiting department, even the very nice ones seemed forgetful, inattentive and poor at communication. The actual Google employees who do the interviewing are on average very bright, good at actively interviewing candidates (instead of just rattling off questions), and open to answering questions, even if a couple of them were clearly inexperienced and uninterested in doing interviews.

I'd say the actual experience of the interview can be a good thing, but the process as a whole is a huge waste of the candidate's time - especially if you don't fit the stereotypical niche of what a Google employee is (4+ years of CS education, thinks writing linked lists and trees is exciting, etc. etc.) Their decision to intentionally avoid giving any feedback to candidates probably stops people from gaming the interview process, but it also makes it a net negative for candidates who don't meet the unstated criteria Google is after - criteria that could often be screened for before a candidate ever sets foot on campus. They refuse to interview candidates for a position or a role beyond generalizations like 'software engineer', despite the huge breadth and depth of problems solved at Google - if you're lucky they'll quiz you on the stuff you actually know, but most likely they won't, and the questions will be very mundane. This despite the fact that actual hiring choices ARE partitioned to some degree (as much as they seem to want to pretend they aren't).

Most of the time interviewing with a good company is a 'why not' scenario: The only thing you have to lose is some time, and you'll learn some useful things from most interview experiences (even if occasionally the only thing you learn is 'this company is awful'). Google's interview process feels precisely engineered to avoid letting candidates learn anything whatsoever.

Companies like Microsoft or Amazon or Zynga all at least have a pretense of evaluating a candidate's specific strengths and weaknesses to figure out whether they're useful - if you're a compiler engineer MS will probably have some Visual Studio/DevDiv people grill you with compiler engineering questions, if you're a games dev Amazon will have you talk to people from their games department, and if you're a database guy Zynga isn't going to ask you game design questions. For Google interviews it seems entirely one-size-fits-all, despite the fact that they have core products that obviously depend on niche knowledge and experience.

Are we doing this to ourselves? If we are willing to continually subject ourselves to hours (and days) of interviewing, followed-up by abusive responses (or non-response), it seems like this recruiting behavior will continue.

For the sake of consistency I hope you have the same view when it comes to the NSA. For the sake of the rest of us, I hope you don't.