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A project manager at Google was upset that my 'bot literally ran circles around theirs (it was 2010, Android based robots were just starting) and told me that I was just a hobbyist and my project did not exist. So I gave him one of the spare logic boards (open design anyway). And wrapped my hand around his. And squeezed. And asked him, if it doesn't exist, why is it making you bleed? He watched impotently as the peop…
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What specifically are you objecting to? That specific question? Writing code on a whiteboard? How would you interview software engineering candidates?
I think the best way is to give them access to a code base, give them 48 hours and have them submit a pull request for a feature. That way you can see that they can learn the codebase and implement the feature in their own time. During the interview, you can discuss their code and the reasoning behind the implementation details.
Last week I walked away from a Google offer that included a 70% raise. A large portion of this was a rather dehumanizing interview process, along with the realization that the process doesn't select for people I want to work with, and weeds out most people who I do. I managed to do just enough in my interviews to squeak through, but in doing so realized that it wasn't for me. Walking through the cafeteria made me fee…
Really smart people who are really insecure about their intellect?
We're trying a different approach at Sourcegraph. In addition to looking at a candidate's prior work in open source if available, we ask them to complete tasks that approximate the job as closely as possible (i.e., coding on a computer): https://sourcegraph.com/blog/programming-interview Would love to hear people's thoughts and feedback!
Yours sounds like an approach that measures how well someone codes in a vacuum, instead of how they operate on a team. It very much skews the results... Not to mention for a qualified professional candidate, it feels an awful lot like you're asking them to work for free.
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It seems that almost everyone here knows better than Google how to hire employees for Google. Given that you can see why it is trivial to see through hours-long hiring committee decisions in just two seconds. Edit: as pointed out by others, the hiring decision probably does not take a few hours, but under an hour. Still, the point is valid.
I'm pretty sure the hiring committees do not actually deliberate for hours on one candidate. Maybe in very rare cases.
It's not because candidates aren't worth it, it's that if you can't come to consensus in that time period, you are unlikely to be able to :)
At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Succeeding at these whiteboard questions requires weeks of preparation. You need to practice, practice, practice. After enough practice, you are pretty likely to pass. So ultimately, it is more of a test of "how…
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These types of interviews work really well for the "I got 1600 on my SATs and went to {insert high profile school here} crowd" There are books out there just to prep you for Google interviews I see these as very similar to SAT test prep books. I'm not so sure Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer.
Think of the problem from Google's perspective though. At some point, you have tens of thousands of candidates and you need a system to quantify how good they are. Further, it's reasonable to have false negatives (people you don't hire that should have been hired) but really bad to have false positives (people that you hire that you should not have). Together, these boil down into the de facto whiteboarding interview…
We're trying a different approach at Sourcegraph. In addition to looking at a candidate's prior work in open source if available, we ask them to complete tasks that approximate the job as closely as possible (i.e., coding on a computer): https://sourcegraph.com/blog/programming-interview Would love to hear people's thoughts and feedback!
just playing devil's advocate, but how do we know the reason for the no-hire was the reason the OP thinks it was?