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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

#411

Post by vonmoltke »

fixermark wrote: post #329
vonmoltke wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, from my perspective, is that I (as a candidate) have certain things I want to work on. You might have something I can do, but is it something I want to do? I don't want to be hired into a general pool; I want to be hired for one of the specialties I am interested in.

The problem is that what interests you now may not be economically valuable next year. They want you there past one project, because the future is too murky to guarantee your current role will continue to be needed. Google et. al. are hiring generalists because they want people of a mindset such that when the entire special-purpose they hired them for dissolves, they're willing and eager to ramp up on a new project a…

You are taking a much too narrow view of "specialization". If project foo is really the only project at Google that uses the skills I like and know best, I am probably not going to apply there.

I get that there are people who don't care (much) what kind of code they are working on. If those are the people Google exclusively wants, that's fine. I just won't have a place there. I do not think this is a generally-advisable strategy, though, as the GGP I was responding to indicated. In fact, I'd argue that well-crafted teams of specialists are superior to, but harder to staff than, teams of generalists.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#412

Post by rdtsc »

euyyn wrote: post #235
rdtsc wrote: post #40

> I learned my lesson two years ago, when Amazon tried to recruit me. I got an email from the company that said they were so impressed by my profile and couldn't wait to start working with me. They needed me, nobody else. I was naive, and the message did flatter me. I learned mine with AWS as well: Scheduled call. They forgot to call. Waited like an idiot for an hour. Ok fine big company yadda, yadda. Had the phone i…

Shitty experience of not showing up apart, I know that, at Google, the fact that the hiring manager isn't involved in the selection process is done on purpose, to reduce bias.

That makes sense then. But in my case I was definitely looking forward to talking to him and he was supposed to be there.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#413

Post by gaius »

felixgallo wrote: post #213

As a hiring manager at Amazon, I'm super excited to talk to candidates. A new job is, after all, an incredibly important life decision on the same level as getting married or buying a house. And as a manager, making sure I hire the right people to build the kind of diverse, respectful, collaborative, representative, professional, mentoring, balanced and focused team that I can is the most important thing I can do on…

That NYT expose has scared anyone you would want to hire away from your pipeline altogether.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#414

Post by ashwinaj »

stcredzero wrote: post #375
ashwinaj wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Knowl…

We agree to disagree.

I absolutely don't disagree with optimizing when it's obvious (two for loops instead of one, etc.) All I'm saying is that, when you have thousands of lines of code (millions?) and even more complicated/intricate connections in your head of different modules, all the while when trying to reach a deadline, things aren't as obvious. You have to make compromises, it's inevitable.

Amazon or Google did not scale up magically in one go by following established guidelines. I am very certain they had growing pains and I know that they had "hacks"[0] while figuring out the right solution for the problem at hand.

[0] As attested by a former Googler who works at my current workplace

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#415

Post by hota_mazi »

Manishearth wrote: post #185
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…

A colleague of mine gave me some excellent advice here. She redirects recruiters. I am very happy with my current job so I'm not generally interested in emails from recruiters. However, I do hav many friends who are at jobs doing things below their potential. It's always good to see if the job fits anyone's profile, even vaguely, and redirect the recruiter to them. (I don't redirect all recruiters, though, so there's…

> I am very happy with my current job

The best time to interview is when you're very happy with your current job.

Zero pressure, zero commitment and potentially huge upside in terms of pay and title increase.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#416

Post by fixermark »

vonmoltke wrote: post #411
fixermark wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that what interests you now may not be economically valuable next year. They want you there past one project, because the future is too murky to guarantee your current role will continue to be needed. Google et. al. are hiring generalists because they want people of a mindset such that when the entire special-purpose they hired them for dissolves, they're willing and eager to ramp up on a new project a…

You are taking a much too narrow view of "specialization". If project foo is really the only project at Google that uses the skills I like and know best, I am probably not going to apply there. I get that there are people who don't care (much) what kind of code they are working on. If those are the people Google exclusively wants, that's fine. I just won't have a place there. I do not think this is a generally-advisa…

Ah, I see what you mean and I think I agree; "well-crafted teams of specialists" are, hypothetically, one of the advantages of attempting to tackle a problem as a startup company as opposed to pulling the resources together within a large corporation to skunkworks the problem (though in terms of eventual success or failure, I don't know where to place that advantage relative to, say, having the luck / foresight to choose a problem that the market needs to solve and doesn't have a good solution already in the pipeline somewhere [and will need to solve long enough for a startup to reach minimum viable product] and the startup's capacity to trade equity for a staff that will work their bloody asses off).

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#417

Post by hota_mazi »

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…

> It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview

Rrright.

> Personally, I love working with people coming out of the good agencies

What does that mean? What agencies? What makes these people good to work with?

I'm seriously flabbergasted by most of the points you make.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#418

Post by ryandrake »

stcredzero wrote: post #308
ryandrake wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Most companies SAY they want algorithm experts and API ninjas, and computer science wizards, because it sounds like the right kind of thing to say. But most of the actual work out there is either 1. plumbing some data from one layer in the stack to the other (typical CRUD app) or 2. writing glue code to integrate one vendor's middleware to another vendor's middleware, or 3. fixing bugs in some 10 year old le…

But most of the actual work out there is either 1. plumbing some data from one layer in the stack to the other (typical CRUD app) or 2. writing glue code to integrate one vendor's middleware to another vendor's middleware, or 3. fixing bugs in some 10 year old legacy application, or if you're lucky, 4. getting an application to work barely well enough in order to ship it on time. And most of a lifeguard's job is sitt…

I'm not sure the lifeguard analogy is apt. There are plenty of programming jobs where algorithm knowledge is helpful but not strictly necessary. You and I might not find ourselves in them but they exist.

It's more about testing the range of skills that will actually be applied. To toss in another incomplete analogy: If you're interviewing someone to build you a deck in your backyard don't spend 90% of the interview time asking him how he'd chop down trees for wood and manufacture the nails. You probably also don't need to ask him his opinion on the local building height restrictions or if he knows how to install an attic fan. You want to know that he can build a deck.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#420

Post by BeetleB »

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…

>Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that. I'd rather hire someone who knows exactly why it's O(n^2)

I'd love to hire a programmer that knows this is actually O(n^3), and not O(n^2).

(Well, it is if you are naively concatenating N strings, each of length N characters).

(Had a manager who insisted it was exponential. Wisely did not argue with him).

(I await attempts to recruit me based on this comment).

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