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Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

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Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#41

Post by paxys »

Google has hired ~100,000 people in the last decade. They have probably interviewed 30M+. Broad generalizations like "their interview process is failing" are pointless. You don't build a $2T company with a broken hiring process.

This keeps coming up but is worth repeating – the goal of any large company's recruiting process isn't necessarily to hire the best possible candidates 100% of the time. There are always trade-offs. Every interview takes time away from employees. There is no way to predict 5+ years of performance from a 1 hour interview slot. Education, credentials, experience are all valid data points but again not a great predictor of success. Hiring is ultimately an exercise in balancing many different priorities and hoping for the best result. Some able candidates miss out, which sucks, but that's factored in. It's also much more important to keep a bad candidate out than ensure every possible good candidate is hired.

Every single one of these articles/tweets/anecdotes boils down to "Google didn't hire me and I'm very smart so their system is totally broken".

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#42

Post by hogFeast »

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

The stakes at university are miniscule. If your kid needs shoes, if your landlord is calling before the interview asking where their money is, if you have a medical condition (which universities account for, but most employers do not)...I am not having a pop at you, but what world do you live in? The purpose of university is to study, the purpose of a job interview is not to study. As I explain below, it is clear to me why Google make this error in confusing the too...it is baffling that anyone else views this as logical.

Btw, be totally clear, this has been a bad outcome for Google. Google's failure has been well-hidden by the fact that they have a monopoly product that is a cash machine requiring low/zero marginal investment...once you start from that premise, you realise that management has destroyed monumental amounts of capital (your comparison with university is very apt, Google is functionally a bureaucracy operating like a 11th century monastery, you have to spend years studying pointless trivia to get in, a totally institutional mindset).

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#43

Post by dolni »

the_af wrote: post #21
dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

Out of curiosity, which kind of position within Google were you applying for? And how did you sell your own expertise? This sounds like a really bizarre and very specific question for the interviewer to fixate on, unless it was particularly relevant for the position. Knowing the details of how to best do the redirect doesn't seem relevant for a generalist interview; this is the kind of thing you end up, well, googlin…

It was an SRE position. My technical experience has always been fairly general but largely infrastructure-focused and I had a computer science BS when I interviewed.

C only came up because I was asked to provide a list of languages I knew, and rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how well I knew them. At the time when I interviewed, I said I knew a little C (I had used it in a bunch of my CSCI coursework and some small personal projects).

So yes, it was an absolutely stupid thing to focus on.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#44

Post by daniel-thompson »

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

> University tests [...] have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy.

It's reasonable for universities to have that expectation because being a university student is considered to be a full-time occupation. It's unreasonable to have that expectation for working professionals. But Google and other big tech do it anyway because there are thousands of people waiting in line to interview.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#45

Post by pengaru »

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

Usually such a question is used not to fail you for not having the specific answer, but to observe your ability to reason about it and collaborate with the interviewer on pursuing the desired answer. What questions you ask, what resources you consult, experiments you perform, creativity you demonstrate, openness to alternatives, etc.

If you just fixate on your specific first solution and choose to dig in and argue over it despite your interviewer not liking it, it's not a good sign you're someone pleasant or frictionless to collaborate with.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#46

Post by Brian_K_White »

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

So a Google engineer specifically wants code that relies on side effects?

This is one of those cases where you can be proud of a criticism rather than embarassed by it.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#47

Post by taurath »

pengaru wrote: post #45
dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

Usually such a question is used not to fail you for not having the specific answer, but to observe your ability to reason about it and collaborate with the interviewer on pursuing the desired answer. What questions you ask, what resources you consult, experiments you perform, creativity you demonstrate, openness to alternatives, etc. If you just fixate on your specific first solution and choose to dig in and argue ov…

Eh, maybe, but I’m guessing not in this case. Poor interviewers abound.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#48

Post by lordnacho »

I reckon that coding as part of an interview is really just to make sure the person isn't a total fraud. There's that guy who for some reason thinks he can nab a high paid job by blagging it, and then there's the guy who thought he was a coder but it turns out that writing some VBA macros isn't quite the same thing. Those kinds of people will be found out immediately if you ask for a FizzBuzz type question, and that is maybe a reason to do it.

Beyond that, there's no point. You won't discover whether the guy who passes is the kind who writes undocumented spaghetti, or if he doesn't know how git works, or if he doesn't know how to assess an OSS library.

What seems to always work for me, having hired dozens of people over the years, is a technical chat. Tell me what's interesting. What's the difference between this language and that one? Why did you make the choices that you did? You talk, not me.

Someone who can say substantive things about different techs has spent the time. Someone who has formed opinions has spent the time. Someone who's spent the time won't run out of opinions.

I will concede that while this has worked for me, a hiring manager in small financial teams, there's a fair chance it won't work for Google. For one, nothing I've just recommended can be measured. It also can't be taught to junior interviewers, and thus relies a fair bit on the reputations of the firms on the CV for filtering. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there's a big difference between the decision maker doing the interview and someone who is just an advisor (ie an agent) for them, in that the agent needs to have something concrete to say to his boss as well.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#49

Post by usrusr »

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

University test participation is far from worthless if you happen to come in second amongst dozens of participants. There are many winners.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#50

Post by the_only_law »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #15
dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

This happened with my onsite interview as well. I was working on local, user-based systems and hadn't done anything with networking/web-scale/sharding/etc. I did very well with data structure questions, and had one difficult interview and one question about sharding a globally scaled system. I had never dealt with anything on that scale, and didn't even know how to think about it. I realize that there was a gap in pr…

> I realize that there was a gap in preparation

I had a similar, but not the exactly same issue recently, and about 2/3s through the interview I was stopped and the interviewer kinda poked at my resume and successfully deduced that my prior work experience was just not at the level/scale the company was looking for. How do you prepare for that without having actually worked on that scale. Oddly, I ended up getting an offer for a different position after that though.

I can read about subject X all I want, but I would never be confident enough in an interview at just that. And large scale applications isn’t something I can just something I can replace with a side project.

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