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Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

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Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#491

Post by kodablah »

enraged_camel wrote: post #455
krschultz wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But 1 bad hire is easily correctable - you fire the person. You won't know that you missed on the good hires. I personally have worked with several awesome people that have interviewed with Google, and none of them got hired. They all said the interview process was flat out insulting. Interestingly enough, most of them ended up at Facebook.

>>But 1 bad hire is easily correctable - you fire the person. Not sure if you have ever been a manager, because firing someone is NEVER easy. It hurts everyone emotionally. The person getting fired feels awful. The person doing the firing feels awful (unless they are a real sociopath). And team morale tends to take a big hit. Here is my stance: if you hire someone who isn't a good fit, unless they actively deceived y…

"it is your god damn job to find a way to make it work"

That attitude is how bloat happens. There is a middle ground here. Not firing bad employees also hurts many people emotionally as does an underperforming, overbloated company. Employees are as replaceable as employers. To use a sports analogy, it's the big leagues and you may not make the team and often times it is hard to know whether someone can make the team without a trial. I believe these draconian interview practices and contract-to-hire approaches are a direct result of the never-fire-bad-employees attitude.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#492

Post by craigyk »

jwecker wrote: post #479
mvalmostnoogler wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be starting at Google in a week and a half. I can't go into specifics, but I can say this: I had two phone interviews - the first had quite a few questions about my prior experience (over a decade) and how to approach real-world problems from a high-level, including some that I had worked on at my current position. The second was primarily purely technical, but did have some more theoretical/project-management-y…

This sounds like a huge improvement from when I talked with them a few years ago.

When I interviewed with them, it seemed the interviewers had quite a large effect on how each session went. I had four great interviews, and two that were unpleasant. This had very little to do with how challenging the questions were and a lot more to do with the style of the interviewer.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#493

Post by smsm42 »

fsk wrote: post #435
liberatus wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't understand bayesian logic! Doesn't understand risk management!

Idiot: We don't want to make any bad hires! Therefore, we reject a lot of good candidates! FSK: If you pass on many good candidates, and you have a small chance of hiring any given bad candidate, then each good candidate you reject actually INCREASES your odds of making a bad hire. Idiot: We made a bad hire once! Never again! Now we reject lots of good candidates to avoid that repeat disaster! FSK: But, if you want t…

Strictly speaking, I think raising the standards also could lower the probability of a bad hire (depends on the model - is bad hire completely random? does it depend on some parameter that is controlled?) together with a probability of a good hire, so I'm not sure it is a robust argument that raising standards always raises chance of a bad hire. I'd be happy to see a more rigorous proof (I know it's complete waste of time but for some people it's fun).

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#494

Post by oh_sigh »

fsk wrote: post #344
thethimble wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This has got to be the biggest hiring fallacy I've ever heard. "It's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad candidate." That's completely false, and anyone who says that is completely ignorant of Bayesian logic. Here are some simple numbers. Suppose that a "good" candidate is a 1-in-100 find. Suppose that a "bad" candidate has a 1% chance of tricking you into hiring them anyway. Every time you pass on a "g…

The difficult thing with hiring bad candidates vs not hiring bad candidates is that you get to experience the bad hire every single day, so it is quite apparent that you made a mistake. With not hiring a good candidate, you don't really know what you were missing. You may just assume that the best applicant you reject is no better than your average employee. But there is a chance that that person would bring something to the table so unexpected that you can't even imagine the world that would have been had you hired them.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#495

Post by oh_sigh »

The problem with google interviews and tech interviews in general is that it is almost impossible to capture what makes a successful candidate in a couple of mini interviews. They don't even pretend that what you do in the interview is what you will be doing in an actual job there. Most of a developers time is spent in meetings, understanding their problem domain, writing documents, or reviewing other developers documents.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#496

Post by WildUtah »

seiji wrote: post #372
mkempe wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "Montessori naivety"?

Primarily my inability to spell naiveté. It's one of those "gift/curse" things. It's good they can challenge assumptions, but they don't realize how wrong they are when they are wrong. There are some notes at http://www.amazon.com/In-The-Plex-Google-Thinks/product-revi... and it's also drawn up nicely in the book itself.

Naïveté

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#497

Post by kragen »

Afforess wrote: post #240
mikek wrote: post #15

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…

I agree. I feel the overpowering urge, when asked this sort of basic interview question, to shout back "WHY?". What does inverting a binary tree have to do with software engineering, at all? Google (and other interviewers) might as well be asking me to name the last 1000 digits of PI. The Kafkaesquen ability to recite how to do the task correctly reflects nothing about the candidate, except the strength of their memo…

This spoof comment is hilarious. The last 1000 digits of π!

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#498

Post by aaggarwal »

mvgoogler wrote: post #282
aaggarwal wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am speaking from personal experience here, they don't count a lot of factors while rejecting a candidate, you make one mistake on their particular set of questions, you are out. They don't even look at your resumes until all your 4 interviews are completed. However, selecting a candidate is a different matter, in that decision they might consider everything.

Does your personal experience include actually being involved in the hiring process at Google? Because in my personal experience - as both an interviewer and a hiring committee member - what you said is completely wrong. > they don't count a lot of factors while rejecting a candidate, you make one > mistake on their particular set of questions, you are out. Completely false. I have personally seen many people get hir…

Yes, I was interviewed at Google last year. This was basically what happened. Sure, they have your resume, I am not sure if they read it throughly, the interviewer didn't even know my major until I told him at the end of the interview. While, they don't stop inteview and say you made mistake, it's competitive and it's not possible to hire you. But, you know at that moment that you are not getting hired. I guess, they need plenty of reasons to hire a candidate, but just one reason to reject. I am not complaining, it seems to work for Google very well.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#500

Post by aaggarwal »

mikek wrote: post #15

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…

This is something I could agree over, Thoughts on technical interviewing. http://ericlippert.com/2015/06/08/interviewing-candidates/
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