Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

I so totally agree! Forgetting stuff is as important as learning new one, because it forces you to learn/re-learn quickly.

I wrote millions and millions of lines of code in my 30 years career, I was once a top shot mac developer, and I was once a top shot computer geometry expert, and an OpenGL expert and all of that, and I've forgotten most of it... If someone asked me a trick question, I'd look like a fool.

Simply because I don't need it. My strength over all these years is my capacity at learning stuff quickly, and that doesn't come up in a trick-question interview.

So for these data structures questions: In 30 years I once had to implement a binary tree for any sort of problem I had in my job. Now it's not the same for hashes, lists, queues and many others, but trees? Quite frankly it's a CS toy. You know it's on the shelf in case it's needed, but it very rarely get a dusting.

Yeah, I totally agree with this actually. Amazon totally should have done everything you say. As it happens, I know that Google is really good at doing the things you list.

The fact that Amazon screwed up doesn't mean that the author of the blog post didn't also screw up though. He really should have figured out what he was getting into before getting on a plane.

My take on the blog post is that everyone involved was incompetent.

I liked this post do much! I totally relate to what you are saying. A friend of mine recently interviewed to Google (true story), and told me about the process. Hearing about the questions he was asked completely blew away my esteem of Google, and my desire to work there. Exactly the kind of algorithm efficiency questions you describe, which is something completely unrelated to the job he was interviewing for. Also, some questions like "estimate the size of area covered by all roof tops in the city" which is nonsense to me.

I wrote this article a while ago about how I hate that kind of interviews, and actually how I personally interview. Swear to god this was before that friend told me about his process, but they miraculously managed to exactly ask all the questions I considered wrong in that article!

http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/07/07/how-i-interview

I don't know how it has changed since I left but when I was at Google and interviewing folks the idea was to find smart people who could get things done and then figure out what to do with them if they decided to join. As a result it was literally impossible to have your "future manager" interview you, because that person was only identified after you accepted[1].

But "recruiting" in the sense the author discusses is really more like a lottery for people calling themselves recruiters than it is actually finding of talent.

There are a number of these people that email hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, while simultaneously creating a "resume" out of information they found out about them online and submitting that to companies. Then when the company says "we'd like to see Bob" then they go back and figure out who Bob was and they contact Bob and try really really hard to get Bob to take an interview with the company, and if this match works they pocket anywhere from 15 to 25% of Bob's annual salary as a finder's fee.

So low overhead work that can be pretty easily automated with the occasional out sized payout? That is the recipe for a fishing business and that is what we get.

I got an email from a friend who had my "resume" cross their inbox. They emailed me to tell me my resume skills had really plummeted, what with a bit of my LinkedIn page, some Github repos, and snippets of broken english mashed together. I tied the source back to one of the "recruiters" who had sent an email saying they had companies asking for me to apply (no I didn't respond). We speculated whether the resume mashup had been done in house or if there was some Turker somewhere who was doing 'resume assembly from accessible data'.

Bottom line is that there is money to be made so people will come out and try to get that money.

[1] There were some exceptions of course and certain skills or disciplines but it was the general rule.

Maybe he should talk to Google's contract recruiters. I got interviewed by my manager, my interview was extremely relevant to the tasks that have since been expected of me... it was good times.

Between the perks, the pay, and getting to work on various projects that always have me learning new and exciting things about front-end development I think the fifteen minute investment I made in exchanging pleasantries with a recruiter has paid off. Though that could just be my morning coffee talking.