Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

yegor256.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 674 posts

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#431

Post by loop22 »

kelvin0 wrote: post #381
davedx wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

But how to keep out the spammy Meta-recruiters? We'll need Meta-Meta recruiters!

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#432

Post by nawitus »

chadgeidel wrote: post #426
lwhalen wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it one step further: the email address on my resume is a black hole. Its only purpose is to feed an autoresponder who kicks back a warm, generic, email thanking the recruiter for their time, acknowledging they have a difficult job, and lays out my requirements for any position: what I am and am not interested in doing, my salary/hourly/per-project requirements, my location requirements (100% remote), etc. At t…

I'd pay at least a few dollars per month / tens of dollars per year for this service. I'm not kidding. Dear HN reader, please steal this idea!

If everyone does this, then recruiters will simply start to spam the yesireallydidreadthisgiganticemail2017@mydomain.com emails without reading the autogenerated "profile".

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#433

Post by hashseed »

enraged_camel wrote: post #331
RandomOpinion wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That story about Einstein doesn't illustrate what you think it does. Einstein was a theoretical physicist, not an experimental physicist; there's no reason for him to have known the precise value. However, you can bet that Einstein knew the theory quite thoroughly (review his writings if you believe otherwise) and would have been rather less than impressed by anyone calling themselves a physicist who did not. And asi…

I'm not sure I buy that distinction. Do you believe that experimental physicists know every single formula and can recite it off the top of their head? Because unless they use those formulas constantly in their work, they end up having to look them up. Same thing with algorithms like tree traversal. You should know the theory behind them, but unless you regularly implement them, there is zero reason to commit their i…

But imagine Einstein having to look up how to derive x^2. I'd say that's a pretty close equivalent to knowing tree traversal in CS. It should just come naturally.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#434

Post by btilly »

chris11 wrote: post #371
btilly wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

SRE is a difficult role because you need someone with the mindset of a sysadmin and the skills of a programmer. So Google (at least used to) will hire one and hope to find the other half. As a result a large fraction of people hired into the position are not a fit. And Google had no mechanism to identify and rectify this common problem.

I am a programmer. I tend to dive into things in depth and context switching is unusually hard for me. A sysadmin needs to be able to operate on relatively limited knowledge and rapid context switching is par for the course. I was therefore a poor fit in that role.

After I left I was shocked at how many people I met who had known someone else whose story matched mine pretty closely. I would hope that Google has solved this organizational problem since. But rumor from those I know that are still there indicate that things have gotten worse over time, not better, so I don't think that it has.

However it was quite educational. I wish things had worked out differently but I definitely learned a lot that has served me well since.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#435

Post by jonthepirate »

I get so many obnoxious unsolicited recruiter emails that I have set an email autoresponder that triggers when the word "opportunity" comes in from someone I don't know. Here's the template:

-----

Hi,

I get a lot of messages like these. Since time is valuable, I promise to fully read your original email plus any job web pages that describe the opportunities you are hiring for for $100. You can paypal me at .

For $500, I'll even do a coding exercise or come in for an onsite interview.

Cheers,

-----

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#436

Post by literallycancer »

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…

>So 57,000 are worse devs then you ? This is what i hear from your statement, correct me if I am wrong ..

He never said they are worse.

>Many extremely talented people want to work for Google.

"Most people do/think XYZ."

Do I have to explain why that's not a good argument?

>They will take the tests, even if they don't agree with the hiring system at all.

Other people don't mind shitty treatment, so what?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#437

Post by nulagrithom »

attractivechaos wrote: post #313
sidlls wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conjecture: the majority (by far, probably on the order of 75%-80% or more) of programming and engineering problems to be solved in a typical company or typical application will not see significant differences in performance by selecting a naive implementation. For example, in your string concatenation example, the naive solution is good enough except in situations where large numbers of strings are to be concatenate…

Details do not matter until they show up. Still take string concatenation as an example. Suppose you want to highlight some particular words while a user is actively typing characters in a dialog. If you naively concatenate every character, the user may have responsiveness issues or at least wastes CPU cycles/battery unnecessarily. Small cases like this add up in a big project. My conjecture is that a big fraction of…

I tend to run in to more critical issues than performance, like shipping the product/feature at all, meeting deadlines, writing maintainable code, and writing documentation.

In your highlighting example, instead of working with someone who will optimize, I'd much rather work with the guy who will realize we can just debounce the dialog, write a one line comment about the performance issue, and then move on to the next thing.

Maybe I'm biased though. I've worked with the performance guy; he was brilliant and the code was clever and highly performant, but he was also slow and didn't write clear, maintainable code. We didn't ship in time and I had to find a new job when the project got scrapped. Damned if it wasn't fast though.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#438

Post by gamblor956 »

ryandrake wrote: post #123
taway_1212 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My logic is that if something needs to be actively sold (pushed via recruiters), it's most likely average at best. I'm betting that the best jobs don't go through recruiters (or maybe they do if that's the company-wide policy, but the hiring manager already has a candidate in mind when they posts the ad).

You've hit on a truth here. Most of the jobs available through recruiters are what I like to call "dog jobs". The ones that aren't filled internally and don't instantly get a line of top candidates because they are so good or pay so well--the ones that NEED someone to sell them. Those are the jobs that are available on job boards and that recruiters and are trying to fill--not the awesome ones. Think about it like th…

The housing market in the Bay Area is very different from the housing market literally everywhere else in the US (except in some ways Manhattan). Pre-listing sales are very rare outside of SFBA and Manhattan, and the vast majority of domestic residential sales (>70%) are of MLS-listed houses/units, even in major metros like Chicago and LA.

The "dog properties" don't get listed on MLS at all; there is a cost to listing on MLS and the dog properties generally don't generate enough interest to justify the expense (and usually don't even attract a realtor willing to invest the effort).

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#439

Post by bluebomb »

nawitus wrote: post #432
chadgeidel wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay at least a few dollars per month / tens of dollars per year for this service. I'm not kidding. Dear HN reader, please steal this idea!

If everyone does this, then recruiters will simply start to spam the yesireallydidreadthisgiganticemail2017@mydomain.com emails without reading the autogenerated "profile".

then we make them go through an animated slideshow and do a quiz to get to an email address

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#440

Post by hashseed »

Jach wrote: post #389
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'…

Often enough, implementing the optimal solution is not really more time-consuming than the brute force solution. Often it's not about micro-optimizations, but a difference between O(n^3) and O(n*logn).
Post reply on HN