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Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

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Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#351

Post by ricardobeat »

fsk wrote: post #344
thethimble wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the problem from Google's perspective though. At some point, you have tens of thousands of candidates and you need a system to quantify how good they are. Further, it's reasonable to have false negatives (people you don't hire that should have been hired) but really bad to have false positives (people that you hire that you should not have). Together, these boil down into the de facto whiteboarding interview…

This has got to be the biggest hiring fallacy I've ever heard. "It's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad candidate." That's completely false, and anyone who says that is completely ignorant of Bayesian logic. Here are some simple numbers. Suppose that a "good" candidate is a 1-in-100 find. Suppose that a "bad" candidate has a 1% chance of tricking you into hiring them anyway. Every time you pass on a "g…

This is not about numbers.

A bad hire can easily cause more friction than if nobody was hired at all. Net effect for the business is negative. You're also probably severely overestimating the likelihood of a bad hire going through.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#352

Post by topher6345 »

In my office, opinions are 50/50 on this.

Interview with Lazlo Bock on Google's hiring practices:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/06/08/yanss-051-how-google-...

Some of the claims Lazlo makes:

As large organizations grow, their workforce trends towards mediocrity. Google * takes special care to counter-act this effect. * researches their hiring/interviewing practices just as much as their machine learning. * publishes their methodologies: https://www.workrules.net/

The algorithm in question is discussed in Coding Interviews by Harry He. http://www.apress.com/9781430247616

I feel the original tweet conveyed a bad attitude, was emotional, reactionary, and ultimately a bad career move on the part of OP.

In my younger days I suspect I would have done something similar. I'd like to think I would see the experience as a learning opportunity and be able to react with humility and maturity, but who knows? Hopefully I can think of OP and not tap the tweet button.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#353

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

CydeWeys wrote: post #173
el_fuser wrote: post #53

Another instance where silicon valley favors the young... he probably would've nailed this question if he'd been only a couple of years removed from school. He also would've nailed it had he been given 10 minutes to do some research to refresh. Silicon valley (and the numerous companies that mock the interview style) are testing for the wrong thing when they hire, then complaining about not being able to find good en…

You're given weeks to refresh your knowledge ahead of a Google interview. They tell you the basic CS fundamentals that are going to be covered. Binary trees are MOST ASSUREDLY on that list. They just don't have time during 45 minute interviews to let the candidate go on the Internet to look things up they should already have come prepared for. Anecdotally, at a previous company, we tried an "open book" (i.e. you can…

Most people who work 9-5 jobs just don't have the time to memorize books of algorithms.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#354

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #330
seiji wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have previously mentioned hallway discussions at Google routinely devolve into bragging about SAT scores and GPAs. Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work. Google's basic theme seems to be "you must be low latency ultra smart in our narrow interest areas" to pass an interview…

> Nothing says Google must accept sub-par technical people, but Google fails to realize you don't have to be the top 0.0001% in absolute algorithms intelligence to do great work. But if you're Google, why wouldn't you aim for the top 0.0001%? It's not as though you have a shortage of candidates.

Because there's no such thing as "the top 0.0001%". Software development is a collection of talents with multiple basis vectors, not a single linear talent you can stack rank.

And even if there were such a thing, you're not going to find the top n% by asking questions from an undergraduate textbook.

And you're certainly not going to find them by pissing off people with proven practical achievements. Acting like that is evidence of anti-intelligence, not a sign of being smarter than everyone else.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#355

Post by bskinny129 »

fsk wrote: post #344
thethimble wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the problem from Google's perspective though. At some point, you have tens of thousands of candidates and you need a system to quantify how good they are. Further, it's reasonable to have false negatives (people you don't hire that should have been hired) but really bad to have false positives (people that you hire that you should not have). Together, these boil down into the de facto whiteboarding interview…

This has got to be the biggest hiring fallacy I've ever heard. "It's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad candidate." That's completely false, and anyone who says that is completely ignorant of Bayesian logic. Here are some simple numbers. Suppose that a "good" candidate is a 1-in-100 find. Suppose that a "bad" candidate has a 1% chance of tricking you into hiring them anyway. Every time you pass on a "g…

Those are simple numbers, but they don't get at the real issue. People say that because 1 bad hire can have negative effects on the whole team, causing others to get less done and leave. Missing a good hire doesn't poison your team.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#356

Post by com2kid »

voltagex_ wrote: post #290
com2kid wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm at Microsoft, FWIW, every engineering team here does hiring their own way) My team does whiteboard questions, but we try to keep them practical. Typically they are the types of problems that we'd expect new engineers to have to look into on their first day. Oftentimes the questions are less "come up and an answer" and more "let's explore this problem domain and see what we can uncover." As an example, the interv…

I'd like to interview at MS next year, I have no formal CS training. Can you give me any hints?

Coding Interviews Exposed covers most questions you'll be answered.

It all depends on the team though, the interviewing process is completely non-regulated here. We get training telling us what to legally not say, but other than that is a free for all.

Teams ask white boarding questions because they heard other teams ask white boarding questions.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#357

Post by BinaryIdiot »

philipwalton wrote: post #322
joshstrange wrote: post #36

To all of those saying ranting on twitter is the wrong move I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is often the ONLY tool that the average person can use to communicate and/or call out large companies on their actions. This is BS and should be made known. Homebrew is an amazing tool and I'd be falling over myself getting the offer papers in this guy's hands if he came to me looking for a job. The fact that google turned h…

My main complaint with the tweet is that it's almost certainly speculation. 1) Most companies (for legal reasons) don't tell candidates why they weren't offered a job. Maybe it was because of the binary tree question, but maybe it was for some other reason. 2) Homebrew is a Mac-only product, so the likelihood that 90% of Googlers use homebrew is very low. Moreover, Google does not track the software its employees dow…

> 1) Most companies (for legal reasons) don't tell candidates why they weren't offered a job. Maybe it was because of the binary tree question, but maybe it was for some other reason.

So when I was declined at Google I knew people who worked for Google. One looked up my profile in whatever system they used and the other simply asked the interviewer why. OP may have done the same but as you say it's unclear either way but knowing is still possible.

> 2) Homebrew is a Mac-only product, so the likelihood that 90% of Googlers use homebrew is very low. Moreover, Google does not track the software its employees download onto their laptops, so there's no way they would even know the percentage.

Most of the people I know at Google use Macs so I don't see why not. I don't know what the majority of them use but a good chunk at least do.

As far as tracking he could simply be tracking it himself and comparing his results of known Google IPs to employee counts. Not as accurate but might give a rough estimation. He may have further analytics based on data collected (if collected) by each machine.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#358

Post by [deleted] »

kenrikm wrote: post #43
mikek wrote: post #15

At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Succeeding at these whiteboard questions requires weeks of preparation. You need to practice, practice, practice. After enough practice, you are pretty likely to pass. So ultimately, it is more of a test of "how…

These types of interviews work really well for the "I got 1600 on my SATs and went to {insert high profile school here} crowd" There are books out there just to prep you for Google interviews I see these as very similar to SAT test prep books. I'm not so sure Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer.

[deleted]

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#359

Post by moonchrome »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #340
mikek wrote: post #15

At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Succeeding at these whiteboard questions requires weeks of preparation. You need to practice, practice, practice. After enough practice, you are pretty likely to pass. So ultimately, it is more of a test of "how…

> At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Only to bad interviewees. You'd be shocked to hear the number of impressive résumés I have seen who turned out to be absolute no-hires after 20mn on a white board. By "absolute no hire", I mean the kind where…

>By "absolute no hire", I mean the kind where some of the interviewers tell me in the debriefing "I will quit if we hire this guy".

That's just a self-reinforcing selection bias - you hire people that are good at these kinds of problems/enjoy them - you filter out the rest by default and it becomes ingrained in the culture - it doesn't say anything about the suitability of the candidates you filtered out. If you said "we hired a guy who had a great resume but he couldn't do algorithmic problems, turned out to be a bad fit for the company" - that would still be a single data point but at least it would be relevant.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#360

Post by joeldg »

philipwalton wrote: post #322
joshstrange wrote: post #36

To all of those saying ranting on twitter is the wrong move I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is often the ONLY tool that the average person can use to communicate and/or call out large companies on their actions. This is BS and should be made known. Homebrew is an amazing tool and I'd be falling over myself getting the offer papers in this guy's hands if he came to me looking for a job. The fact that google turned h…

My main complaint with the tweet is that it's almost certainly speculation. 1) Most companies (for legal reasons) don't tell candidates why they weren't offered a job. Maybe it was because of the binary tree question, but maybe it was for some other reason. 2) Homebrew is a Mac-only product, so the likelihood that 90% of Googlers use homebrew is very low. Moreover, Google does not track the software its employees dow…

In my experience it goes exactly like this just about everywhere:

job: here is your macbook pro, welcome! you:

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