My Nightmare Interviews With Google

Post by cdibona » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 6:05 AM UTC

roc wrote: post #82

cdibona wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people are downvoting you. I can tell you that I've seen the same thing and having dealt with the fallout of bad hiring, I'd rather miss some good or even great candidates rather than hire someone bad. Edi: To clarify: I work at Google.

You always run the risk of hiring someone bad. Interviewing, particularly rigorous interviewing, is a game that doesn't map very well onto work itself. That's why the true test of a hiring process is the firing process. If you can get rid of people that can't hack it, rather than letting them gather as detritus in your system, you'll be far better off than if you simply pretend that you can actually avoid mistakes.

Post by Dilpil » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 7:02 AM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #115

roc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You always run the risk of hiring someone bad. Interviewing, particularly rigorous interviewing, is a game that doesn't map very well onto work itself. That's why the true test of a hiring process is the firing process. If you can get rid of people that can't hack it, rather than letting them gather as detritus in your system, you'll be far better off than if you simply pretend that you can actually avoid mistakes.

Hiring two people so you can fire one is a lot more expensive than interviewing 10 to start.

Post by moultano » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 8:19 AM UTC

nekoniaow wrote: post #121

jtbarrett wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by andreyf » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 12:07 PM UTC

danbmil99 wrote: post #128

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?)

Post by Keyframe » Sat, Nov 14, 2009, 2:10 PM 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.