271–280 of 432 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.
Sounds like a pretty inefficient way to fix bugs.
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…
Can testify to this, interviewed via referral, was still asked some algo-trivia, didn't do too well on that but still got a decent offer, mainly because referee vouched for me based on their experience working with me.
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…
If they reject candidates who don't/can't consider algorithmic complexity of a particular solution, then they'll likely reject some candidates who would have performed well at a job there. But they won't extend an offer to a candidate who wouldn't perform well. Hiring an underperforming employee has several costs. Obvious costs: time consuming gathering evidence to let them go, management doesn't like delivering bad news. More subtle reason: opportunity cost of team morale for a high-performing team. IMO it is exhausting being on a team where everyone frequently chooses the least challenging design options, frequently ignores process/follow-through, frequently ignores opportunities to innovate and improve.
Does the interview process in place actually help achieve this goal? I'm not sure, but I'd wager that it might actually come closer than any other interview process.
All that said, being on the receiving end of these rejections is a real disappointment. But from everything I've read, you may have to buckle down and commit lots of preparation time in order to get an offer. I haven't done that, and I suppose I should expect to get rejections until I do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity
I've interviewed three times in the last five or so years there, and I don't get the feeling the depth is as claimed in the article. Perhaps, it's also the interviewers not implementing it as intended. If these points were indeed important, I'd expect feedback addressing them. All feedback I received was about doing well or not well on certain questions. No meta whatsoever. I didn't make it for good reasons, but I fe…
I interviewed for a Product Manager role at Google and my experience was awful. Put this things in perspective, I was a Director of PM managing a team at my current role and working a lot with customers, presenting in speaking engagements etc as part of my day to day. I get into the interview and the person on the other side seems to know very little of my background. He says he is a PM and starts with how much is go…
> He pauses and says give me a dollar value. He asked you for "how much is google's spend" and you finished your estimations without giving him a dollar value? Did you forget his question? > He doesnt want to understand the logic behind the calculations. From your description that sounds like a false assumption to me. It sounds like despite your estimations you didn't give him an answer to his actual question, and so…
He didn't say he finished without ever giving him an answer. He was simply explaining that he tried to give an explanation of calculating the amount and the interviewer cut him off and asked for a number. Its absolutely stupid that the interviewer for such a question would only be interested in the number and not the candidate's thought process for arriving at that number. For a question like this its also absolutely reasonable for the candidate to assume that the interviewer wanted his thought process, because from an objective standpoint, that's the only scenario where this specific question wouldn't be a complete waste of time.
>From your description that sounds like a false assumption to me. It sounds like despite your estimations you didn't give him an answer to his actual question, and so he had to prompt you.
This sounds like an assumption on your part. You might be right, but you could also easily be wrong.
To me this feels like a case of unconscious bias: I think many people who interview genuinely believe they are looking for some set of criteria {A,B,C} but they're evaluations/recommendations actually reveal a bias towards {X,Y,Z}. So as a candidate, after you've been interviewed enough times you realize that X,Y,Z is really the name of the game and posts like these just seem totally out of touch.
* I wonder if anyone has tried introducing some kind of control group or blind study mechanism where some small % of candidates are actually secretly employees of the company. Probably would be hard for in-person interviews because people might be recognized, but maybe more practical for phone screens. The trained decoy candidate could basically attempt a problem in exactly the same way for many interviewers and then data could be analyzed on the outcomes to detect what biases are present.
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.
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…
Regardless, I don't think qualifications like this should bypass the interview. The author almost sounded a little entitled when describing the rejection. That said, I don't think his achievements got sufficient weight while evaluating him as a candidate.
See my comment [1] regarding what these interviews are selecting for -- it might be a bad process, but it might come closer to the intended goals than other processes do.
I've interviewed at a couple of FAANG companies, some multiple times. I've yet to get an offer, despite feeling like a (considerably?) better-than-average candidate. I get the distinct impression that their hiring methods get them tolerable sensitivity and excellent specificity [1]. But I have a hard time believing this author's claim that "it's not about solving the problem." If they reject candidates who don't/can'…
I don't know what our offer rate is, but I think it is probably well below 50% even once you make it onsite, so being above average wouldn't be enough.
Our hiring process is also tuned for low false positive rate, at the cost of high false negative rate. Maybe it's optimal, I don't know, but two of my referrals ended up going to Facebook after not getting offers at Google, and doing very well there (one exceptionally so). We definitely should have hired them and we didn't.