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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

#381

Post by kelvin0 »

davedx wrote: post #119
ryandrake wrote: post #31

Unlike most of HN (it seems), I like hearing from recruiters, because despite the very low signal-to-noise ratio, there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job". It's zero cost to me to politely reply to a recruiter and ask for more info, and I try to at least respond to everyone. What I've found is that they must have a lot of candidates they're juggling because fall…

My partner works at a recruitment company. Here's the thing: most recruiters are not very good at what they do and are only chasing placements. To get the most out of recruiters you need to be more pro-active, and find a recruiter or two who really understand your skill set and career ambitions. Build a relationship with them, and don't waste time with the other 90% of batch mailed crapshoots.

Yup, we need Meta-recruiters: recruiters that can find the right recruiter for you!

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#382

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

Apocryphon wrote: post #349
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have an open source example; I tend to actively avoid such projects, and so I tend to accumulate lists of the ones that seem well engineered rather than the opposite. The Quora app, though: If I'm writing a reasonably long answer and I delete a paragraph, it can take more than 10 seconds to complete. There's some profound inability to understand algorithms in there somewhere, I can guarantee it. There was jus…

Given that the Quora interview process is reputably difficult [0], and not lacking in algorithms questions [1][2], this is quite a puzzling situation. [0] https://www.quora.com/Which-companies-have-really-hard-algor... [1] https://www.quora.com/challenges [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-test-you-have-to-pa...

Interesting.

I wonder what the history of their mobile app is, though? It feels like it's a hybrid app, and it feels like it's developed iOS-first, Android-as-afterthought, so it may be the ugly stepchild of the team that gets no attention. "Does it build on Android? Ship it!"

Also, if it is hybrid, it may be a JavaScript team -- and JavaScript still has that "top developers love to hate it" aura [1], so it may be that some of the least talented Quora developers populate the team? (Apologies to the Quora app team, but ... 10 seconds to delete a paragraph?)

The worst of the problems seem to be when I'm also using the SwiftKey keyboard, so they may not see them internally. Somewhere along the way they're doing something pathological, though, because SwiftKey works like lightning in other apps, and only in the Quora app can get bogged down and end up so slow that I have to disable it and use the standard keyboard just to type anything at all. There's also a bug where I sometimes can't hit enter after a link I've pasted, and again I have to switch to another keyboard.

SwiftKey may be reacting to notifications that the text has changed, for instance, and Quora is sending 200 change notifications, one for each character changed, and then SwiftKey is querying the entire source document again each time... Or some such. Don't know.

It's not just SwiftKey related issues, though. Whatever they were using for rich text editing has been broken in different creative ways every few months, where edits wouldn't take, or what you're actually seeing would vary from what gets posted, or you can't edit the link text, or you can't GET OUT of the link text, so all the new text you type ends up part of the link, or ... It's been broken in so many ways that I've lost count. A recent bug I encountered was when I was pulling the text down to get to the top of what I'd written, I scrolled it down once too often, and that triggered a "refresh" ("drag down from the top" to refresh) which lost all of my text. Sigh.

The Quora app is really in need of a solid team experienced in app development, robust data handling, and proper UI behaviors. If it has competitive programmers working on it, they're solving the wrong problems.

[1] I used to be guilty of this, but JavaScript got better, linters now help prevent the worst legacy JavaScript issues, I changed my opinion in large part, and I use TypeScript now anyway. :)

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#383

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #305
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have an open source example; I tend to actively avoid such projects, and so I tend to accumulate lists of the ones that seem well engineered rather than the opposite. The Quora app, though: If I'm writing a reasonably long answer and I delete a paragraph, it can take more than 10 seconds to complete. There's some profound inability to understand algorithms in there somewhere, I can guarantee it. There was jus…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13691303

Yes, this link! Thanks!

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#384

Post by yawaramin »

protomyth wrote: post #351
ethbro wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

If the crash gives an attack vector for a security threat then there is. Personally, "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" is a bad policy in the modern world. It should be "Be conservative in what you do, be strict as if you don't trust them in what you accept from others".

'Liberal in what you accept from others' in this case would mean being prepared to handle nullable JSON fields.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#385

Post by stcredzero »

hueving wrote: post #202
stcredzero wrote: post #148

There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. Let's presume this is out of preference and not ability. It's a pretty basic concept. If your preference stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn't seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts. Nearly e…

>Let's presume this is out of preference and not ability. It's a pretty basic concept. If your preference stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn't seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts. This same exact argument could be used to require every interview candidate to know assembly. >and the person who likes to think about such things…

This same exact argument could be used to require every interview candidate to know assembly.

Have you ever done the standard Comp Sci compiler implementation class? Do you write C++ and use the C++ standard library? If you answered yes to both questions, then you should know from first principles how just about everything in the standard library is implemented, and can use those tools with complete knowledge of when they can fail or must be used differently.

I find that developers who constantly get caught up in the performance of individual algorithms will waste incredible amounts of time optimizing them and will miss major optimizations that come from seeing the system as a whole.

Those developers are merely exhibiting yet another kind of ignorance.

For example, I would rather take the developer who points out that a particular program can make use of the fact that most of the code doesn't need sorted widgets rather than the one who spent the whole time optimizing the widget sorting algorithm.

It's the developer who has a clue about algorithms who is more likely to make the valuable insight. The needless optimizer is just doing some Cargo Cult algorithms analysis. (Probably motivated by signalling geekiness, not producing useful results.)

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#386

Post by digler999 »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #373
digler999 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I had to fight for it, dealing with some really skeezy recruiters for a contract position that advertised/expressed a rate of $x5/hr, once I passed one of the 3 phone/skype interviews, and they realized I was a viable candidate, they immediately tried to insinuate that they couldn't afford anything more than $X0/hr or a fulltime salaried position at $(X-10)/hr. I said shove it, and lo and behold, they called back and the $X5 rate was yet again available. I complete 2 more interviews, and they get ready to draft an offer and they tried again to get me to accept $X2/hr, then $X3, for no explicable reason. I said no, and in my offer letter they wrote $X5/hr *{rate may change at time (sic)}. I made them re-draft it, flew to the client site, and after a tense 2 weeks (worrying if I got paid the full amount), I finally got paid what they advertised.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#387

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

Since Google is an advertising company that even hires their own chefs, I would not expect 100% of their employees to be software developers.

It's more on the order of 20k developers, not 57k.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl...

>Have you found any correlation between poor code and being able to pass Google's interview ?

cough cough Angular 2

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#389

Post by Jach »

stcredzero wrote: post #148

There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. Let's presume this is out of preference and not ability. It's a pretty basic concept. If your preference stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn't seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts. Nearly e…

I'd rather hire someone who can actually get the job done in a timely manner. We can optimize it later, especially after profiling to know exactly what we need to optimize, and especially if there are security implications that mean we can't ruthlessly optimize everything. People who optimize too soon end up with solutions that are hard to change later, or solutions that don't even do the job they're supposed to. It's all too easy to get a half-working version that's super fast by focusing on the speed part more than the working part. https://alibgoogle.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/scheme-vs-c/ is worth a read. "Real efficiency comes from elegant solutions, not optimized programs. Optimization is always just a few correctness-preserving transformations away."

There are some "free" optimizations I'd expect a lot of seasoned programmers to be familiar with, like as you mention the string concatenation issue, but those are easy to catch during code review. Similarly for certain optimizations that are even 'freer' in the sense that modern compilers will take the easier-to-read (if naively slower) version and produce the fast version, I expect to not have to tell people during code review that the 'slower' version isn't slow because the compiler does the right thing.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#390

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

stcredzero wrote: post #344
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This same exact argument could be used to require every interview candidate to know assembly. ...because knowing assembly is actually useful to a high level developer? If it were, then yes, I'd say they should know assembly too. But I know assembly; I've written entire published games in assembly language. And yet I don't believe knowing it is actively useful any more. Knowing the basic concepts like how strings, i…

...because knowing assembly is actually useful to a high level developer? If it were, then yes, I'd say they should know assembly too. But I know assembly; I've written entire published games in assembly language. To expand on what you are saying: If you're doing "high level development" on a business app in C++ 11 then knowing assembly and having been through a bog-standard undergraduate CS Compiler Development cour…

> If you're doing "high level development" on a business app in C++ 11 then knowing assembly and having been through a bog-standard undergraduate CS Compiler Development course will actually help you use a whole bunch of things in the C++ standard library

Agreed, and my understanding of assembly does help in those ways. I actually feel like compiler design was one of a very few classes in college that really, really taught me something.

But if I'm hiring a Python or JavaScript developer, I'm not going to require they know assembly. If only because that would restrict the hiring pool so much that I'd likely never find an employee.

A senior developer, though, probably should understand what's happening at the low level. And most teams should have a senior developer to keep the team from making rookie mistakes. There are plenty of programming jobs that can be done with less skill or deep knowledge. Like the ones that are discussed in the Wired article on coding being the next "blue collar" job. [1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/programming-is-the-new-blue-co...

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