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Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

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Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#371

Post by chris11 »

btilly wrote: post #140
ryandrake wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people I've found this to be decidedly not true, from many recruiter contacts. They have a role in mind they're trying to fill and if you point out that it's far more junior than what you're looking for, the conversation's over. Think about how must companies hire. The hiring manager fights internally and finally gets a req for a very s…

I've seen the opposite, from close observation on both sides. The recruiter may start out with a role that they are trying to fill, but they have plenty of other roles that they could be happy to put you in. And furthermore for the right candidate, they don't have to figure out the role up front. When I was hired by Google, SRE poached me out of a pipeline to a different group. (Accepting that offer was a mistake on…

I'm interested in your experience with SRE. What did you like and dislike, and why was it a mistake?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#372

Post by joshuakarjala »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #137
city41 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make it a point to reply to recruiters. But there's many different types of recruiting email. I completely ignore (and sometimes even filter straight to the trash) blatantly shotgunned form emails. If the email shows any effort whatsoever, mentioning a project I worked on, mentioning my current job, pointing out the role in question would fit my skills and it actually does, basically anything at all that suggests i…

A CEO of a small company once sent me what might have been a really interesting opportunity and I was going to reply but then I noticed the tracking links and realized it was just a very-well-crafted form letter. I stopped considering it then.

Keep in mind - the CEO in question could be writing personal e-mails out from an ATS / Sourcing tool that helps keep track of communications.

Tracking links are not always == shotgun approach

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#373

Post by SmellTheGlove »

digler999 wrote: post #187
SmellTheGlove wrote: post #134

I'm up in the northeast and at a level where I'm not going to get emails from Google/Amazon/etc for an engineering position. But I do get a ton of what I consider recruiter spam - usually something tangentially related to my background, and often fairly junior (I'm on the very low end of the executive ranks nowadays). I used to ignore it, but I've decided since that while I'm not going to be remotely interested in th…

> I never get a response to those. Exactly. Thats what makes this such a difficult game. If you pay enough , filling positions won't be a problem. The problem comes when you try to fill positions while simultaneously suppressing wages to the lowest tolerable level. Even the dumbest monkey will learn to do tricks if you offer enough bananas.

But nobody wants to pay enough. I hate to be a presumptive asshole, but if I get 5 different emails from 5 different recruiters for what appears to be the same position with the same client - all either form emails or in barely readable messages (or incomprehensible voicemails), I'm going to presume they're not offering anything reasonable relative to the work asked.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#374

Post by countryqt30 »

lettersdigits wrote: post #310
roguecoder wrote: post #230

The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in i…

> The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with That's a very bold (even arrogant, sorry) statement about 57,000+ (googled it) employees. So 57,000 are worse devs then you ? This is what i hear from your statement, correct me if I am wrong .. Many extremely talented people want to work for Google. They will take the tests, even if they don't agree with th…

Just as a matter of correctness: only 1/3rd of Google employees are engineers/development guys.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#375

Post by stcredzero »

ashwinaj wrote: post #338
dpark wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers won't necessarily come back after you rewrite your product to deal with all the perf problems your naive implementations caused. I'm all for striking the right balance with perf concerns, but in my experience that's not "just deal with it later". Giving no thought to performance is as bad as micro optimizing at the beginning.

True. It's a balance, it's hard, and there is no silver bullet. I believe I should learn from my mistakes and move on rather than have rabid obsession over big O. If something is obvious or caught by code reviews, fix it then and there else move on.

I believe I should learn from my mistakes and move on rather than have rabid obsession over big O.

It's not even an obsession. Those pieces of knowledge could be fully mastered in about a half hour. It's first principles knowledge, like chemistry or thermodynamics. I can tell in a minute that something like "Solar Freakin Roadways" is a scam, whereas so many people gave that scam literally millions of dollars. Knowledge is literally power, in a very concrete way that expresses itself directly as dollars!

Instead of having some basic first principles knowledge to spot such things ahead of time, benefiting from the collective experience of your field, you'd rather just labor in ignorance and run into everything for the first time and get out the profiler? Imagine scaling that up to the size of the Amazon or Google workforce?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#376

Post by ceronman »

roguecoder wrote: post #230

The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in i…

How many Google Engineers do you know?

I know quite a few of them. All of them, without exception, are incredibly brilliant engineers. You might think this is just anecdotal evidence, that's correct. But also think that Google Engineers are responsible for many top quality, world class software projects. How could that be possible without really good engineers?

Yes the interview process is tedious and can be frustrating. But negating the fact that they have some of the best software engineers in the world is just silly.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#377

Post by uladzislau »

I never had any luck with incoming recruiters and often it turns out into huge waste of time. Scheduling/re-scheduling, they don't call on time, there's a delay, there's something else. In the end it looks like they are not really hiring otherwise they'd treat you with more respect.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#378

Post by biztos »

roguecoder wrote: post #230

The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in i…

What are these "agencies" you speak of, and how do you tell the good ones from the bad?

(This is a serious, non-ironic question: I don't know what you mean, but it sounds interesting.)

Edit: I guess you mean recruitment agencies? How does one find the "good ones," other than through bitter experience and/or luck?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#379

Post by yawaramin »

enraged_camel wrote: post #208
rpdillon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that traversing a binary tree requires expertise in algorithms seems questionable to me. I view basic tree traversal as table stakes for a developer with more than a year or two of experience (IIRC, it's discussed in Intro to Algorithms in most CS curricula). OP says that his field is object-oriented design, which links to a page where he announces that "We've started work on a new programming language". T…

Funny you bring up the CS curricula. In response to not knowing the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test, Albert Einstein replied: "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." This is even more true today with the vast trove of easily searchable called the Int…

Sounds like Einstein was a Sherlock Holmes fan.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#380

Post by klodolph »

ethbro wrote: post #343
perfmode wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third party apps wouldn't fail if they were correct in the first place. Failing gracefully on unexpected input is the way a competent engineer would structure their program.

Is there a functional difference between "my production code suddenly stopped processing work because it rejected a newly nullable input value" vs "my production code suddenly stopped processing work because it crashed on a newly nullable input value"?

Ideally it's more like "my production code skipped over 1% of batch jobs because it didn't expect the null values" or something like that. Handling errors gracefully is a bit of an art unto itself.
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