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Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

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Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#161

Post by mavelikara »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #159
mavelikara wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See comment from gedy elsewhere in the thread. Multiple people have pointed out these kinds of questions being asked well past 2006. Since there is no incentive for a large number of engineers to cook up stories about their interview experience at Google, I am calling this smoke as having some fire behind it.

But what's the incentive for a large number of Google engineers to surreptitiously ask questions of a style that's explicitly banned? I think there is incentive for failed interviewees to cook up stories - or at least to tell something very one-sided - because none of us like to believe we failed at something and feel better if we persuade ourselves it was stacked against us.

> But what's the incentive for a large number of Google engineers to surreptitiously ask questions of a style that's explicitly banned?

An incentive to maximize the value of their job position and already acquired leetcoding skills?

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#162

Post by lsc »

pmiller2 wrote: post #97
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I went through the interview process and I actually really enjoyed it. My attitude going in was that I was evaluating what it would be like to work there, and I treated the interviewer as a coworker solving a technical problem, where I was taking the lead. The questions I got were pretty much exactly the sort of hing you see on LeetCode, but I hadn't seen any of the questions before. I know from studying for ot…

Here’s the thing: patterns you will spot doing Leetcode problems are almost useless for anything else. The only purpose for working enough problems to see those patterns is to have more successful interviews.

I personally think we'd be better off if there was more focus on these puzzles and less focus on 'cultural fit' - but that's just me.

If nothing else, interviewing is an important part of your working life. To get a competitive job, you are probably going to have to practice something. I personally can get a lot more excited about competing on puzzle solving abilities than competing on social skills or social protocols, even if those puzzles might not be used very often once I'm at work.

(I'm not saying algorithms are completely unrelated to the work we do- I'm saying that even if they were, i'd still prefer to be tested on puzzles than to be tested on social skills)

I mean, the subtext here is that we're all getting interviewed for jobs we don't know how to do. All companies have their own infrastructure and their own way of doing things; you can't hire people with experience on that companies codebase unless you want to limit yourself to ex-employees. So all companies are interviewing to try to figure out who could learn how to do the job in question, and that's... pretty difficult to do.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#163

Post by joatmon-snoo »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #122
MarkSweep wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everybody was super nice, they all wanted you to do well I had the same experience. Afterwords I thought I did pretty well because I got to a solution to all the problems eventually. Later when I discussed not getting the offer when a friend who works at Google. He said they try to guide the interviewee to a solution before the time limit. Which is reasonable, you want the interviewee to feel more confident and not…

I haven't been on the interviewing side, so I can't really comment on some of this. But the impression I got as the interviewee was that every question ramped up in difficulty. The slope of the ramp-up depended on the question. So maybe in your case, you didn't get as far on the difficulty ladder as other people that were interviewed. I was pretty shameless in asking for hints when I needed them, but it was typically…

"I see this tradeoff here, and my gut says to do X, is that reasonable?"

YMMV with interviewer, but personally, this is the type of thing that gets positive feedback from me - someone who understands and explains the tradeoffs involved.

Also, fair warning: LC has its uses, but it is not the same as an interview.

Yes, ramping up in difficulty is certainly a thing.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#164

Post by vfc1 »

The problem is that there is almost no correlation between how candidates do in whiteboard interviews, and the ability to perform the job on a day to day basis.

Also, and the article says it: you are being tested mostly for personality compatibility with the interviewer, which again has nothing to do with the ability to perform the job.

This plus the fact that the interviewers are volunteers, creates overtime an effect where lots of people in the workforce have similar personality traits, which is not a great thing because it creates an imbalance in the normal personality balance that a group needs to work properly.

Personality imbalances in groups usually lead to dysfunctional situations over time: too many sloppy people who just cowboy code until dawn, too many excessively cautious people that won't touch a line of code any more with fear of breaking something, etc.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#165

Post by neilwilson »

I suspect all large company interview systems are about ensuring you have a large sunk cost of effort in the ‘debit’ column so that you’ll be pleased to accept substandard terms if you get to the end point.

Much the same as the student degree systems with its non-defaultable loans designed to keep you firmly in the rat race with no time to question whether three hour commutes and twelve hour days are a sensible way to organise a society.

The singular most useful skill anybody can master in IT or any other profession is the ability to write off a loss and not let it worry you.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#166

Post by zerr »

ender7 wrote: post #115
starpilot wrote: post #24

Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar: - Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative. - Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you. The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is coopera…

Some perspective from the interviewer's side may help here: - A Google interviewer's (and I would assume any interviewer's) primary goal is to come out of the interview with enough confidence to give a positive or negative score. If they sit down to write feedback and have to give a neutral score, the interview wasn't productive. This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a positive score a…

Do you (and the company) try to find new ways to interviews such that e.g. mid-career candidates don't need to practice in advance?

The current interview process at Google and probably at other companies as well seems to be frozen in time - one needs to be a fresh grad or prepare weeks/months in advance or be "into" competitive/sports programming, which in most cases has nothing to do with the daily job.

So no plans to have a fresh look on this?

Or maybe you keep these practices (and other companies follow) so that it is harder for engineers to change jobs easily?

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#167

Post by echevil »

ender7 wrote: post #115
starpilot wrote: post #24

Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar: - Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative. - Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you. The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is coopera…

Some perspective from the interviewer's side may help here: - A Google interviewer's (and I would assume any interviewer's) primary goal is to come out of the interview with enough confidence to give a positive or negative score. If they sit down to write feedback and have to give a neutral score, the interview wasn't productive. This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a positive score a…

> The system is _highly_ prejudiced towards suppressing false positives

I wonder if the algorithm centric interview style at Google can really achieve that. From my experience, algorithm centric questions + plus white board coding have bias towards academic people. (Maybe that’s fine for google) However, the way to crack that kind of interview is really just practice like hell on leetcode. Just take a minute and think, who are most motivated in doing that? Good, experienced engineers have no trouble finding jobs in Bay Area, and why would they waste their time on leetcode for skills that are mostly going to be useless in real work? New grads and engineers that have trouble finding jobs are most likely to spend hell of their time on leetcode. I think the interview style at Google is in fact increasing false positives instead of suppressing it. It also has high false negative for sure.

There are tons of other ways of doing interviews, in which interviewer gets a lot more and very relevant signals from candidates while keeping candidates pressure low, and not wasting their time, but Google is not doing it, like asking practical questions, letting candidates write and test their code in their own computers, has a debug session, etc.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#168

Post by brobdingnagians »

This seems like a highly optimistic, happy path description of a nigh-impossible process. Testing for leadership in an hour long interview one-on-one? Yeah right. Sounds like a way of hitting your talking point of "we hire for great leadership!" Don't get me wrong, what they say they are trying to hire sounds great, and I think they think they are trying to find those things, but I'm highly skeptical of both the process and effectiveness. Any large corporation has a problem with diffused goals. If you are a small business owner, you interview and have direct skin in the game. You might do a bad job, but you are close to the metal in terms of what you think you are hiring for, and you get the results of your choices. If you personally believe you can spot a leader, then maybe you can, great. But a large company that puts out talking points about hiring great leaders and team players probably can't even elucidate what that would mean (especially when the team member isn't interviewing, so you go for the generic common denominator and average blandness, with no real idea of what it means in particular), and if they can then I'm skeptical they are finding it-- there's a limited number of great leaders around and they typically aren't interested in doing the grunt work of maintaining an obscure cog in an obscure system in perpetuity, reporting to a faceless committee so they can make more ad revenue. You usually find great leaders somewhere more exciting and independent, it's the nature of the beast.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#169

Post by joshuamorton »

mavelikara wrote: post #161
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's the incentive for a large number of Google engineers to surreptitiously ask questions of a style that's explicitly banned? I think there is incentive for failed interviewees to cook up stories - or at least to tell something very one-sided - because none of us like to believe we failed at something and feel better if we persuade ourselves it was stacked against us.

> But what's the incentive for a large number of Google engineers to surreptitiously ask questions of a style that's explicitly banned? An incentive to maximize the value of their job position and already acquired leetcoding skills?

I don't follow how that would do that.

And in fact there's no need for explicit animosity by the failed interviewee. Someone who misunderstands a question badly enough to call it a brainteaser when it isn't is also likely to have performed badly on it.

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