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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

#331

Post by swat535 »

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…

I love how you belittle one of the most successful package manager systems out there..

We can apply the same logic to almost anything.. Because nothing is truly original and "difficult/impressive" are pretty broad metrics. Feel free to give us your definition.

Software engineering is about building functional systems for humans. Quite frankly, Google needs to hire more people that are able to deliver products that actually work.. From the looks of it, hiring people that can solve "impressive" and "difficult" sorting algo puzzles yield to the Sluggish Gmail mess we have at the moment.

Maybe google needs to start hiring competent people instead of anyone that can recite the corporate gospel.

Just my 2c.

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

#332

Post by [deleted] »

guelo wrote: post #287
kstenerud wrote: post #284

Google believes, as so many before them have, that the ideal candidate can be found through numbers: pure, unbiased, beautiful numbers. Because once you reach a certain size, your biggest threat is no longer your competitors, but rather your regulators, and that means that you must not expose yourself to regulatory (at the core, social) risk. Bias is bad. Discrimination is bad. And if you're big AND bad, you get fine…

Weird to me how a certain type of mind sees "Political Correctness" in everything they don't like. It's a very conspiratorial mindset.

[deleted]

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

#333

Post by joshuamorton »

hueving wrote: post #183
ender7 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The system is _highly_ prejudiced towards suppressing false positives. This is the right decision, This is textbook Google propaganda that has been repeated at least since I last worked there 5ish years ago. It's bullshit though because the ratio of competent to incompetent engineers was the same as at FB, MSFT and NFLX (with the latter tending to prune the fastest). Just because you generate a system that spits out…

>This is textbook Google propaganda that has been repeated at least since I last worked there 5ish years ago. It's bullshit though because the ratio of competent to incompetent engineers was the same as at FB, MSFT and NFLX (with the latter tending to prune the fastest).

But those companies use hiring practices that approximate, to a high degree, what Google does. Facebook and Netflix certainly do, and Microsoft has a high enough rate of bad hires that you are required to reinterview to switch teams, so that high performing teams can keep reject bad candidates who are already at Microsoft.

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

#334

Post by wil421 »

expertentipp wrote: post #230
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…

FAANG companies don't pay anything near 300k USD annually in Europe, it doesn't happen. Probably 20% above the local market average. Their (certainly Google's) recruitment process in Europe is still the same demanding though. These are yet another companies in one's job application queue, and annoying ones.

Developer salaries are notoriously low in Europe and I’m not even camparing crazy SV or NYC salaries. I worked with devs in Europe working on the same platform and domain as me for half the salary. I haven’t heard of many low 6 figure developer jobs in and around the EU.

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

#335

Post by mrfredward »

guelo wrote: post #287
kstenerud wrote: post #284

Google believes, as so many before them have, that the ideal candidate can be found through numbers: pure, unbiased, beautiful numbers. Because once you reach a certain size, your biggest threat is no longer your competitors, but rather your regulators, and that means that you must not expose yourself to regulatory (at the core, social) risk. Bias is bad. Discrimination is bad. And if you're big AND bad, you get fine…

Weird to me how a certain type of mind sees "Political Correctness" in everything they don't like. It's a very conspiratorial mindset.

Attack the idea, not the "type of mind" that posted it.

My point of disagreement would be that BigCos making "safe" hiring choices and having overbearing, one-size fits all HR policies is a phenomenon that predates modern political correctness. Having a policy of making interviews into arbitrary objective tests isn't just to prevent twitter mobs and hold off political rhetoric, it's a way of making hiring more predictable, combat nepotism, and select for people who aren't too individualistic to succeed in the corporate environment. The downside, of course, is you throw away and turn off a lot of good candidates who don't fit the mold.

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

#336

Post by auiya »

plesner wrote: post #90

I conducted many interviews while I worked at google and I wouldn't trust anyone who tells you the interview situation as one particular, well-defined, thing. Individual interviewers have their own style, approach, goals. Even if people start from the same place because they go through the same interview training they inevitably drift in goals and interpretation of what the guidelines mean over the years. What your i…

This is exactly correct. I conducted dozens of interviews for Google myself, and while most went okay, some did not. Those were failings on my part, and I did my best to learn from those mistakes. That the interview process isn't more streamlined is a failing on the company's part however. Good interviewing techniques aren't formally taught there, and only learned via shadowing and sitting in on other interviews. This isn't just the case at Google either, but most large companies are generally bad at training employees how to conduct interviews intended to draw out sufficient hiring information on candidates. And yeah, interview quality there varied wildly from office to office, and especially across the remote sites.

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

#337

Post by joshuamorton »

philsnow wrote: post #146
joshuamorton wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll almost always be quoted for a single, perhaps 2 levels. No one is going to be considered for both an L6 and L4 role.

Isn't that exactly what MTS ("Member of Technical Staff") and "slotting" were at google, at least up until around 2012? They hired people not knowing exactly where to level them, and after an introductory period, they were placed somewhere along L4 to L6.

I had to look this up because I'd never heard of it.

Slotting and MTS existed, but indeed hasn't been done since 2011 or 2012, and hadn't applied to L3 or L4 candidates for much longer, which means it likely was a way to differentiate between borderline L5 and L6 candidates or borderline L6 and L7.

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

#338

Post by strangerlands »

walrus1066 wrote: post #272
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…

'I'm willing to bet that when a company wants to hire a two sigma candidate they don't go through all this nonsense' 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.

Either (a) they want you or (b) they want someone like you. If (a), they find any reason for hiring you, if (b) they find any reason for not hiring you. This explains most of the interview dynamics, especially at large companies.

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

#339

Post by C1sc0cat »

Someone1234 wrote: post #270
C1sc0cat wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No the OP and your self was being overly sensitive about being asked about manhole covers.

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

#340

Post by moate »

kstenerud wrote: post #284

Google believes, as so many before them have, that the ideal candidate can be found through numbers: pure, unbiased, beautiful numbers. Because once you reach a certain size, your biggest threat is no longer your competitors, but rather your regulators, and that means that you must not expose yourself to regulatory (at the core, social) risk. Bias is bad. Discrimination is bad. And if you're big AND bad, you get fine…

The Goal of BigCorp, at any point in which they've been crowned the market leader (or sometimes monopolist) is to maintain the course. They become risk averse because you're less likely to get fired for making the same amount of money as last year than you are for making less. Yes, that might limit you from making MORE money than last year, but that's just how the human mind works.

There's several logical fallacies that wind up happening in these sort of processes (confirmation bias, survivor bias, etc) but the people making the decisions are fine with making them as long as things are working as expected. Eventually entropy takes over in all systems, including human social systems, and things break down irreparably. There's no stopping this in BigCorp, because that is their nature. There's no stopping this at Small Co. either, because in that system there's so few people that a single hiring mistake affects such a large % of the total work force.

TL;dr- All human systems involve humans, and that is best point of entry for problems.

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