My Nightmare Interviews With Google • Hacker News Board

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#121

Post by nekoniaow » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 1:47 AM UTC

jtbarrett wrote: post #118

webwright wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interview process in this case worked fine. But it's silly and probably causes them to miss a LOT of good candidates. It's measuring a subjects ability to think critically... quickly and while under a lot of pressure. Is SPEED of critical thinking important? How many positions at Google require people to think on their feet? How many positions require them to be comfortable/effective talking to strangers on the p…

With regards to your last point: I don't doubt that the vast majority of hiring processes aren't correlated with on-the-job success, but Google is definitely the kind of company that would strive for objective measures and to refine their process. They at least claim it's working. I think it was on the Stack Overflow podcast that I heard a discussion of Peter Norvig's remarks about this in Coders at Work. He evidentl…

It would be very interesting to know how Google measures on-the-job performance since you obviously can't talk about correlation without numbers backing it up. I seem to recall having read that on-the-job-performance is not as easily measurable than Norvig seems to imply but I guess that if they successfully managed to reach this Holy Grail they probably won't share the numbers, even less the methods.

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#122

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 1:48 AM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #107

nostrademons wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll have hard data on your own products, but you can still only make guesses about your competitors' products, your complements, and other variables in the marketplace. Joining a company doesn't eliminate uncertainty, it just shifts the uncertainty from that company's numbers to everyone else's numbers.

Not really, not unless you're very small. People buy market research for a reason: data trumps guesses.

A lot of data is kept strictly confidential; unless there's a mole somewhere, a market research firm isn't going to have it. Many of these estimates are made by applying data that you know about your own company's operations to public information available about your competitors.

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#123

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 2:07 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #106

anigbrowl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is such a terrible thing, although clearly this adversarial approach to testing ideas isn't for you, or everyone. Enrico Fermi used to challenge grad students with similar questions, the famous example being 'how many piano tuners in Chicago?'. I don't think it's a stupid or impossible question, but one that seeks to establish how you go about estimating tricky things and thus identifying fruitful…

Maybe it's the traditionally educated engineering in me (I was trained as a mechanical engineer), but I don't see a point in this purely theoretical hand-wavy math. There are established ways for us to get good estimates of a great deal of information - including your hairdresser problem - that involve seeking out real data. Sitting in a void of zero knowledge and postulating wildly, even if it gets you in the ballpa…

I don't disagree. If you actually asked me for informational purposes, I'd have started with the Yellow Pages and then go look for a trade association or something.

On the other hand, that's not always practical. Sometimes the facts aren't readily to hand or you have to make some decision that's time sensitive. For example, working in film production it's not so unusual to have to eyeball something and estimate your needs for time or material - you try to anticipate as much of that as possible in advance, but say you come to the set one day and the lead actor has fallen ill, so now you have to rearrange your shooting schedule on the fly...in which case it's not uncommon for a few key crew members to huddle, deliberate, and then split the difference rather than obsess over further optimization.

This isn't to say one should rely heavily on gut decisions, since that's likely to be self-defeating; on the other hand, you don't use a slide rule and protractor to drive.

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#124

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 2:15 AM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #96

anigbrowl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What surprises me is the reasoning path she took (ie estimating customer behavior). I'd have tried to guess how many servers they need for that (uuuuh...100,000?) and how much they cost a year ($1000 each, $100m?) and what's an acceptable profit margin (20%? So about $300,000/day in earnings). Then again you could figure Google makes about $5 billion a year in profit, say a tenth of that comes from gmail, and the pro…

To be honest, I think the approach she took is a lot more reasonable. The whole point of building a product business is that your revenue scales differently from your expenses. Your example has an implicit assumption that Google is somehow artificially regulating demand so they can keep their profit margin at 20%. The profit margin on Gmail could be 5% or 99%. Who knows?

No argument here. The only reason I went down this road was because I figured any guesses I made about actual click rates of users would be mostly based on a sample of 1 and thus even more laughably off than guessing the minimum viable earnings...of course, this is why one should never be ashamed to say you don't know. It's one thing to speculate and exhibit your thinking process, but when you start getting confident about it it's all too easy to slip in bullshit artistry, and I'm sure they'd rather avoid that trait in hiring.

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#125

Post by DaniFong » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 2:31 AM UTC

zachware wrote: post #43

This wasn't an interview, it was a test. I had a similar experience with a startup. I was interviewing for a Marketing Communications Manager position. Essentially PR. One of the unofficial interviewers (at 24 year old MIT engineer working as an email marketer) challenged me with the question "How many barbers are in San Francisco?" We proceeded to map it out the analytical process on the whiteboard. He wanted to see…

Isn't the sizing of markets something of marketers need to do, all day long? You can't blow $20k for a Gartner report every time you imagine a new market. You need to be able to make some ballpark estimates.

These 'stupid impossible questions' have a long history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

(Barbers cut the hair of half the population (the male half) around every two months. The population of San Francisco is about 750k. A haircut takes about 30 minutes, and about 50% of the time a barber is cutting hair. This gives about 8 cuts per day, or about 60x8 = 480 haircuts per every two months. So to service 750k/2 of the population you need about 750k / (2 x 480)) = about 781 barbers. Or roughly one out of a thousand people is a barber.)

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#126

Post by araneae » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 2:53 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #74

harpastum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that she was under some pretty severe stress, but a marketing manager that thinks gmail earns ~$70,000 a day? Or that each user will click on seven ads a day? “Google places four ads per e-mail opened in Gmail. Advertisers get to pick their click-through rates, which can be as little as $0.05...Say each G-mail user opens seven new e-mails a day. They would see 28 ads. If they click on ¼ of those ads, then o…

What surprises me is the reasoning path she took (ie estimating customer behavior). I'd have tried to guess how many servers they need for that (uuuuh...100,000?) and how much they cost a year ($1000 each, $100m?) and what's an acceptable profit margin (20%? So about $300,000/day in earnings). Then again you could figure Google makes about $5 billion a year in profit, say a tenth of that comes from gmail, and the pro…

The internet claims 4 mill http://erictric.com/us/how-much-money-does-google-make-per-d...

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#127

Post by timcederman » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 2:56 AM UTC

mronge wrote: post #45

timcederman wrote: post #41

For an associate product manager position, it only gets harder. I quite enjoyed the back of the envelope calculations during the early calls, as well as talking about interesting products I had encountered recently. It got quite interesting on-site. I really enjoyed the first couple of days of interviews, which focused on design ("design a shopping mall"). The last day was still fun, but less enjoyable, as it involve…

Those were questions for an engineering position right? Not a a product manager position?

No, APM.

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#128

Post by danbmil99 » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 4:36 AM UTC

My Google interviewer had a toothache. I didn't get an offer. Their recruiters are notoriously independent; not sure that's a good thing. I was actively sought out, but had no chance because the interviewer had a bad day.

Question: is it more important to keep out the bad ones but lose some good ones, or vice versa? (ie, what's the correct balance between false positives and false negatives?)

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#129

Post by ellyagg » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 5:00 AM UTC

donaldc wrote: post #117

webwright wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interview process in this case worked fine. But it's silly and probably causes them to miss a LOT of good candidates. It's measuring a subjects ability to think critically... quickly and while under a lot of pressure. Is SPEED of critical thinking important? How many positions at Google require people to think on their feet? How many positions require them to be comfortable/effective talking to strangers on the p…

Speed of critical thinking for simple questions like the $0.10 ad-click question probably is important. If someone can't figure out the answer to that one pretty fast, they're probably not going to successfully figure out really hard problems at all.

True, although I have to wonder if she couldn't have figured it out easily under less stressful circumstances. What's baffling to me is how anyone could think interviews are a good technique for identifying job talent. Many, many (most?) people perform FAR below peak under pressure and that sort of pressure is almost non-existent in most jobs. This isn't pro basketball here.

Re: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

#130

Post by ggrot » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 5:36 AM UTC

ig1 wrote: post #94

tomsaffell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree that she was not right for the job, but the process was a bit nightmare-ish : “That’s all. Good luck with your job search.” The phone clicked-- I was stunned. In my previous job I conducted a lot of interviews of an analytical style. Some people bombed so badly that is was clear well before the end that they wouldn't make the next round. In those cases, I used the remaining time to either talk to them a…

That's debatable. Many candidates would rather just end a failed interview early and do something they'd like with their time.

Maybe, but I can't imagine they would be very upset by the interviewer continuing to take a little more of their time either. At the very least, it gives you the feeling that the interviewer fairly assessed you instead of dismissing you because of one flummoxed question. When I interview someone who quickly seems unlikely to pass an intervew, I try to use as much time as possible to make sure my initial impression was correct and the candidate just didn't get unlucky and/or just happens to be overly nervous. Some people are great employees but are bad at being interviewed.