This information is for outside and inside the company. When you interview someone you cannot go with a predefined answer that you want the candidate to achieve.
Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
261–270 of 432 posts
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#262[deleted]
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As far as I can tell, everything you just mentioned is totally orthogonal to coding/algorithms intelligence, so it’s not clear what point you’re making.
GP seems like it’s venting or speculating rather than trying to make a point; the post starts off with “I’m going to provide no justification.”
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#264All 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…
It is true that you will almost never work with somebody who interviewed you.
In some ways, this is absolutely terribly for hiring. I worked in a part of Google where domain specific knowledge was key, and it was next to impossible to hire people because nobody on our team could interview them "officially". So we'd pre-screen people with the knowledge we needed, and then pass them off to others to officially interview. They would almost invariably fail, because their non domain-specific knowledge was not in the top 1% or whatever it takes to pass a generic interview. So we were left with the choice between hiring contractors, or training somebody internal who could leave at any time. We hired contractors.
EDIT: See the sibling comment regarding the homebrew author. This situation was exactly like that. Imagine wanting to hire somebody to make an internal package manager, and not being allowed to hire the author of one of the most popular package managers because his whiteboarding skills were lackluster, so he got a poor interview score from people that have no idea (or concern) what he does or what he's being hired to do.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#265Earlier 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.
That would be hilarious. Most of the value of a developer doesn’t straight out come from the code they wrote, but everything around that (design, maintenance, hardening). Getting free code isn’t actually that helpful without a lot of other stuff around it.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#266I have fond memories of my google interview. It was a really fun process.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#267Earlier 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…
Package management is a task filled with subtle pitfalls that is much, much harder than it looks on the surface.
It's a lot like syncing files - e.g. how Dropbox looked similarly deceptively easy to build but really wasnt.
IMHO the fact that the homebrew guy didn't get hired and that golang package management was a dumpster fire for years isn't coincidental. Both were part and parcel of a systemic bias that plagues Google's culture that they're blissfully unaware of.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
My link from Glassdoor has feedback from interviewees from as recently as days ago. You can see the types of interview questions Google is asking right now. The sentence you're referring to was in the context of the FIELD which is why it said as much, and the specific question is a very well known stereotypical example: > But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has b…
"If you browse my link you'll see that Google continues to ask off-topic questions, even if they aren't riddles or brainteasers. " I have read literally thousands of interviews at Google (both on hiring committees for 10+ years and in the group that reviews hiring committee decisions), and i just don't encounter them much. I can't even remember the last time i read this type of question. I suspect your definition may…
The problem is off topic questions, especially for more senior developers who have specialized extensively. For example, I haven’t used or seen used dynamic programming since college because my area doesn’t really use it. If I didn’t cram in interview prep for these questions, I’d be toast.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens is the hiring committee will disregard the interview report, and send feedback to the interviewer, saying "don't do that". (There are generally 4-6 interviewers on an interview panel, so if one interviewer does a bad job, there are other interviewers who will be providing signal to the hiring committee. A single bad interview report won't sink a candidate.) Google's interview training is pretty specific…
Asking a question well takes skill. It is possible that an interviewer screwed up asking the question rather than that the candidate screwed up. Most interview systems don't have a systematic, ongoing way for accounting for this especially given that interviewers are self reporting. In my opinion, most interviewers are undertrained/underskilled at asking specific questions and at interviewing in general. They don't i…
It’s almost as if interviewers need to be tested as well. An interviewing contest where a faux candidate rates interviewers and suggests area for improvement.
Of course, that would be rediculously expensive, so at best some canned training is used instead. Still, it might make sense for higher value teams.
Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
#270> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is? I'd actually argue that for many companies this post is true (i.e. that getting it "right" is less important than the journey) but I still won't forgive companies that design th…
Why do you think "why are manhole covers round?" is "disrespectful and unprofessional "? As compared to say "are you going to have kids - to a woman "
> As compared to say "are you going to have kids - to a woman"
That's not only disrespectful and unprofessional but potentially also illegal. But it isn't a contest to see who can be the most disrespectful or the most disrespected, so I don't follow your point.