Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

This style guide entry suggests a course of action in the event that one of these keys currently has a null value.

The style guide isn't prohibiting nullable keys.

This is not a rare event. We have data on this from running Triplebyte. Almost no engineers passes all their interviews. The top cohort on Triplebyte goes on to pass about 80% of their interviews. These are strong, strong engineers (successful startup founders, ICPC national winners, Google staff engineers), and they still fail. Almost no one can consistently pass more than 80% of interviews.

One reason for this is just incentives for companies. False positives (bad hires) are far more expensive to a company than false negatives (rejecting a good person). So companies rationally bias toward rejection. To a certain extend we just have to accept this as rational. (Although I do think that companies tend to assume that everyone they reject is bad, and discount the cost of false negatives).

But I DO think the situation can be significantly improved. Interviewers vary significantly between companies. Some companies want everyone they hire to understand low-level systems and concurrency and thread scheduling. Others think this is irrelevant and want everyone they hire to be very fast and productive in modern web frameworks. Some think that CS is important, others think that it's bookish and irrelevant.

All of this makes sense (different companies do different things). The problem is that you can't tell from the outside what a company wants to see (oddly what the company wants often has little to do with the type of engineering they're doing. It seems to just be an engineering culture that develops over time). And companies themselves often are not aware of how what they want is different from what other companies want. Each company just says that they want to hire "excellent engineers", and think that that means the same thing to them as to everyone else. It's the cognitive bias where everyone thinks that the things they are good at are the core of the discipline.

This adds noise to interviews. At Triplebtye, one of the big things we do is measure this (by evaluating engineers already working at companies, and updating our model with the feedback on each candidate we send). I'd love to see this sort of approach take hold across the industry (and companies get better at advertising honestly what skills they care about).

They are liars. They most definitely will e-mail you whatever it takes to get you into the first part of the funnel. They'll tell you its a "special project" or try and make it seem like somehow you're exactly what they are looking for. It's not true; I've been down the route a few times and have easily been able to spot the deception at second phone call. I do wonder how many brilliant people are abjectly turned off by these tactics and don't make it into these companies. But I rather think that's a good thing, call it bio-diversity. No one company should get too many very smart people.

And, unlike the OP, I can actually solve the bizarre algorithm questions they ask. Although I 100% believe they tell you absolutely nothing about the person but their ability (read: desire/motivation) to read and comprehend a basic text on the subject. No, you don't need this knowledge (unless specifically required) to be effective at your job despite what others here are posting on about.

Tech companies, once they reach a certain size, become little more than meat shops; corporate behemoths, not unlike other large companies that run the same dog and pony shows but for different kinds of human talent and capital. This is not to say they can't be good places to work, or have cool and creative teams within them, but the chances of you getting hired into one have nothing to do with the recruiting process, unless the hiring manager or manager of a specific team reaches directly out to you. If it's a recruiter doing the reaching, you'll be forced through the opaque funnel and likely lied to or manipulated in some way. Its just the nature of their job.

By far the best way to find a great job is to:

If you don't already have contacts in the industry or niche you want to work in: Go to work for a startup in the space to build your network and domain expertise.

If you do have a contact, have this person refer you from the inside. In many cases your interview process will be completely different. Following this I've actually not had to deal with recruiters much at all; maybe only as a formality.

I have a friend who was interviewed at Google, rejected, then interviewed again a year later, rejected again, and then a year later a Google recruiter got in touch to see if they'd like another interview. They said it started to feel like a cruel joke.