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Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

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Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#11

Post by clairity »

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

i had a similar experience wrt a product position. interviewer was fixated on a particular 'right' answer to a trivia-based question. was gladly not a fit there.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#12

Post by Traubenfuchs »

mtmail wrote: post #6
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #2

This website is unusable on my iPhone 13 pro with increased font size. Light grey text on white background with the menu constantly open and half transparent.

Try https://outline.com/CcLGrw as alternative

That worked, thanks!

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#13

Post by tylerhou »

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

That’s a terrible interview question. I haven’t been at Google long enough to comment on hiring practices a decade ago, but nowadays I wouldn’t be surprised if an engineer who asked that type of question got feedback from HC to change their question.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#14

Post by akgerber »

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

I had a similar experience in a problem in which I was requested to extract the digits of an integer before performing some other task. I proposed doing this by converting it to a string and extracting the digits from the string, and that was rejected arbitrarily even though it solved the problem at hand just fine. So I spent entirely too much time during that session recreating an algorithm to extract digits via repeated division/modulo operations that would likely be much slower in practice.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#15

Post by necrotic_comp »

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

This happened with my onsite interview as well. I was working on local, user-based systems and hadn't done anything with networking/web-scale/sharding/etc.

I did very well with data structure questions, and had one difficult interview and one question about sharding a globally scaled system. I had never dealt with anything on that scale, and didn't even know how to think about it.

I realize that there was a gap in preparation, and I'm confident that that one interview out of 8 is what nixed my chances.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#16

Post by xxpor »

tablespoon wrote: post #7

> It was the design of the recruiting system itself that became his problem: At some point, Google decided Watt (who was working as an associate professor at the time) was interviewing to be a site reliability engineer, despite never indicating an interest in that role himself (he was interested in a more management-focused position). > "It just never seemed to get through. They were so focused on whatever categoriza…

I believe the incident you're thinking of is the guy who wrote brew interviewing with them.

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#17

Post by AJ007 »

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

I wonder how dependent Google’s hiring pipeline has been on just having a huge % of every qualified candidate attempting to get a job at Google? If that is the case, then the interviewing process just needs to be good enough to have a low false positive rate. The false negatives don’t hurt them.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#18

Post by bingohbangoh »

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

Most interviews these days ape off Google interviews too. See most FAANG-style companies. Very few deviate from coding or systems design questions. Thus if you're studying for one, you're kind of studying for all.

I never hear reasonable alternatives to this. Surely you'd rather a coding exercise than a take home coding practice you never feel will be complete enough for people. Or to do what Basecamp does and work for 2 months only to be given the boot.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#20

Post by lastofthemojito »

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

I would see university admissions as a closer comparison than university tests. If I'm applying to jobs (or universities) I'll want to apply to several in case some don't accept me, some feel like a bad fit once I'm in the process, etc. I won't want to cram for each. I'll want to reuse the same cover letter or admissions essay to the extent possible.

Once I'm in the university and enrolled in classes, I'll know what to focus on and I'll be willing to study hard for tests.

I know some people see it differently, but I've always considered multiple potential employers simultaneously and I definitely haven't been willing to play the "devote weeks of your life to try to get hired by a specific company" game. On the other hand, some people find that worthwhile, and more power to them.

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