Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing • Hacker News Board

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#31

Post by commandlinefan » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

I always wonder the same thing... either an interview process is so brutal that they would end up not hiring anybody (so they'd eventually relax it), or it's just the "right" amount of brutal, and people who are complaining about it are experiencing a bit of sour grapes. And don't get me wrong, I've interviewed for jobs and felt lousy about getting rejected and tried to convince myself that it was "their loss" even though it was a job I really wanted at the time.

On the other hand, I get the sense from people who've been through the Google treadmill that the problem isn't so much that it's hard like university courses are/can be but that it's arbitrary.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#32

Post by the_only_law » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

I understand this was a decade ago, but god this is the type of stuff that makes me want to leave the field.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#33

Post by dolni » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

AJ007 wrote: post #17

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

I wonder how dependent Google’s hiring pipeline has been on just having a huge % of every qualified candidate attempting to get a job at Google? If that is the case, then the interviewing process just needs to be good enough to have a low false positive rate. The false negatives don’t hurt them.

I'd be willing to bet that has a lot to do with it.

In my younger years I remember being in awe of the simple fact that a recruiter from Google actually reached out to _me_.

A decade changes a lot, though. I don't think I would ever want to work at Google now. I'd be curious to know if my shift in perspective on Google is common, and if they're even aware of it.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#34

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

> The answer he was actually looking for depended on the knowledge that open() returns the smallest possible file descriptor number -- so close stdout, and simply call open() again.

That should never pass any code review.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#35

Post by tablespoon » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

> I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no?

No. That logic is just superficial pattern matching.

The point of university is to spend the time and energy to master the subject, test or no, and the knowledge gained is usually valuable in and of itself. The kind of interview prep in question is basically learning how to jump through some arrogant company's hoops, which likely has little to do with anything, including their actual job.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#36

Post by tylerhou » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

akgerber wrote: post #14

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

I had a similar experience in a problem in which I was requested to extract the digits of an integer before performing some other task. I proposed doing this by converting it to a string and extracting the digits from the string, and that was rejected arbitrarily even though it solved the problem at hand just fine. So I spent entirely too much time during that session recreating an algorithm to extract digits via rep…

> repeated division/modulo operations that would likely be much slower in practice.

… but that’s exactly how conversion to string works, so handrolling an algorithm would likely be around the same speed.

I don’t know enough about the question, but it’s possible that the interviewer wanted to test this specifically. I’ve had interview questions which were literally “implement itoa.”

In this case where itoa was part of a larger question, if I was conducting the interview I would let you convert to string for now so you could continue, but I would let you know that I wanted to revisit the digit conversion later.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#37

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #27

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

An example context where it wouldn't work is if stdin is closed, e.g. `./a.out <&-`. Awful question, I'm sorry you got hit by it.

[deleted]

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#38

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

akgerber wrote: post #14

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

I had a similar experience in a problem in which I was requested to extract the digits of an integer before performing some other task. I proposed doing this by converting it to a string and extracting the digits from the string, and that was rejected arbitrarily even though it solved the problem at hand just fine. So I spent entirely too much time during that session recreating an algorithm to extract digits via rep…

[deleted]

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#39

Post by cosmotic » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

When I last interviewed they sent out a huge pile of PDFs that said "think out loud" and "explain your thought process". During the interview, I explained every solution I'm not considering and why. The interviewers appear to have interpret this as 'candidate thought this would be a possible solution' and kept steering me back to the optimal solution, which I was on my way to explaining. This resulted in interview feedback that I needed some guidance.

The kind of folks that can plow through hacker rank etc want to show everyone how good they are, even candidates. Google's process may result in selecting good SWEs, but it also selects for bad interviewers.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#40

Post by the_af » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

The brutal interviews become useless if they assess trivia you won't use in your job and you would google if you had the time, and also if they don't measure your ability to learn and adapt, or to take things seriously and responsibly.

People rail against these because they are not only brutal, they are a waste of time. We also suspect they have little correlation to actual employee performance once hired.

Steve Yegge, ex-googler, also mentioned the common phenomenon of the interview anti-loop that used to happen at Google: two interviewers in your queue would not have hired each other, so the attitude/knowledge which would satisfy one of them will actually get you rejected with the other.