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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

#251

Post by lallysingh »

rademacher wrote: post #218

All anecdotal evidence points to arriving at the correct, optimal solution as being key to passing the interview. It also seems like often times the interviewers are not even going to be working with the candidate so their opinion on a 'working relationship' is mostly irrelevant. The objective of asking these leetcode style questions is to find candidates who are willing to put in the time to study. Success signals t…

Actually you just have to say "Hashtable" three times and they have to give you a job.

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

#252

Post by School-Cotton »

komali2 wrote: post #138
Hysterisis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally aren’t asked to implement a specific algorithm. You’re asked to solve a broad open ended question. You get 45 minutes, sometimes more if the interviewers can see that you’re close. These days Google offers the option of a chromebook instead of a whiteboard.

>These days Google offers the option of a chromebook instead of a whiteboard. This definitely isn't advertised, I interviewed there on Friday for frontend and was presented with an entire wall to write on. Would have preferred the Chromebook, could have done a final test run of the code, written out params and comments, tests, etc.

You don’t get to actually run the code. They just let you type it in a google doc. I guess it’s not done universally, but it was when I interviewed there.

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

#253

Post by aiisjustanif »

vonmoltke wrote: post #237
esoterica wrote: post #65

Anyone who interviews at a "prestigious" company and then complains about how difficult the interview is kind of hypocritical. Google, and other FAANGs/unicorns, make you solve hard algorithms questions because they believe - correctly or wrongly - that in order to succeed as a company they have to filter out the vast majority of candidates who have poor algorithmic skills. They also pay a lot of money because that's…

> They also pay a lot of money because that's the only way to attract enough candidates who can pass their hiring bar. If they stopped asking hard interview questions and increased their candidate acceptance rate they wouldn't need to pay people 300k/year to fill their open positions. I have 16 years of total experience. Their initial offer to me indicated they thought I would take $231k/year for the privilege of wor…

Oh . . . Okay.

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

#254

Post by aiisjustanif »

nness wrote: post #212
esoterica wrote: post #65

Anyone who interviews at a "prestigious" company and then complains about how difficult the interview is kind of hypocritical. Google, and other FAANGs/unicorns, make you solve hard algorithms questions because they believe - correctly or wrongly - that in order to succeed as a company they have to filter out the vast majority of candidates who have poor algorithmic skills. They also pay a lot of money because that's…

I'm going to provide no justification; but just say that that sounds very "drink the cool-aid." If you have such a high hiring bar — and you still get a sexist memo, or vocalised hate-crimes on your platform, or salary suppression, or workers being disallowed from using the bathrooms, or 20,000 employees staging a walk-out because of bonuses awarded to perpetrators of sexual assault... Maybe your a hiring bar is lowe…

People that get pissed at that memo shock me. I get everything else today, but still to this day, he only presented what was observable at the time.

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

#255

Post by kod »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #37
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…

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…

My experience at facebook was being told I could use any language, choosing the language my preferred project was implemented in... and then having the interviewer repeatedly and incorrectly argue with me about syntax trivia.

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

#256

Post by eitally »

username90 wrote: post #206
chaosite wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters ask horrible questions. If the recruiter has to ask you a technical question, it will be a bad question, because the recruiter doesn't have the expertise to understand the answer. So you're left with bad questions which have single answers, mostly involving rote memorization.

But the recruiters are told by the SRE team to ask questions like this to candidates before they get a phone interview. I don't see any value in that, but then I don't work as a Google SRE so I don't know what is important to them. It is also possible that they are lacking SRE interviewers so they need to ask stupid questions to get down the amount to reasonable levels.

Another thing that isn't transparent to outsiders is how frequently candidates are shopped around if it becomes obvious they aren't a great fit for the role they were recruited against. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked if I'm interested in candidates that started out as SRE, CE, PM, or other roles. As mentioned, recruiters are paid on hire rate, and it's in their interest to ensure that strong Google candidates are identified and presented to as many potential hiring managers as practical.

Additionally, it's common for interviewers to interview for multiple different groups (as an additional tech interviewer, a xfn interviewer, a Googleyness interviewer, etc), so exposure to job requirements can be reasonably broad at the interviewer level.

As I imagine many suspect, calibrating interviewers is hard, and always has been, for a company hiring roughly 10,000 people every year.

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

#258

Post by Sacho »

kaidax wrote: post #214
akudha wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5-6 years ago, I went for an interview in a real estate company. The introductions lasted all of 2 mins. Then they took me to a computer, showed me a bug in the code base that I would be working on, if I got hired. Then they said "please fix this". Took me about half hour or so to hunt the bug down and fix (it wasn't hard, but it wasn't a cosmetic bug either). Then they asked me how I found the bug. I explained, they…

Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.

How is this useful? The interviewer still needs to evaluate the code and conduct the follow-through questionnaire. They could just spend that time fixing the bug instead.

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

#259

Post by unstuckdev »

kasey_junk wrote: post #232
kaidax wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.

People claim this all the time but is there any actual evidence? It would be one of the worst possible grifts of all time.

I think it's more common in creative fields. Companies even solicit free design work (for example) under the guise of contests.

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

#260

Post by notyourday »

School-Cotton wrote: post #244
rvn1045 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didnt the creator of home-brew not end up getting a job at google?

I always see this trotted out as proof of how bad Google’s interview process is, and I always wonder: what makes people think creating homebrew was particularly difficult or impressive? Package managers are a dime a dozen. It has also never been conclusively explained what “invert a binary tree” means (see the tweet a sibling comment linked to — that’s what the Homebrew guy claimed he wasn’t hired for not being able…

There are more people in the world using homebrew than what most of Google engineers single handedly wrangled or produced -- excluding google products that came out of Google Labs that we now use. So if you want someone who can take shitty lemons and create a tasty lemonade out of it he is definitely your guy.

Here's the thing - outside some special projects for which people are hired without going through the standard interview process Google does not want those who can take shitty lemons and convert them to tasty lemonade. Google wants specific kinds of butts that fit into a specific kind of seat. It wants the most homogeneous high output monkeys that would do what they are told, such as spitting out a code to invert a binary tree.

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