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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

#451

Post by lettersdigits »

literallycancer wrote: post #436
lettersdigits wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> He never said they are worse

This is why i asked for clarifications. the OP said 'Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with', which implies that the engineers he is looking to work with are NOT there. Google is incapable of hiring them, and since they are top quality devs, someone else (more capable) did.

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

Yes, please explain. Because you only took the first sentence of my argument. the second sentence was that those "many people" are going to do what it takes, even if it means taking 'stupid' tests, smuggy interviers, and some other large corp bureaucracy (which to me personally is more concerning, but is not specific to Google, rather to any large corp). And why ? My guess is that it's probably so cool,curious, challenging to work on something like Google Maps/Balloons/Self driving cars that they will be willing to make a lot of sacrifices and tradeoffs. THAT was my argument.

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

please explain, i didn't understand your point

(edit: spacing)

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#452

Post by nso »

27182818284 wrote: post #422
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 think you're right to thank them for their difficult job. I seriously got bored just reading the description of your setup. What percent get through to the second email? Is it like 10%? 50%?

You did get bored, didn't you. He detailed the numbers in his post.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#453

Post by Jach »

hashseed wrote: post #440
Jach wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I guess I think of programming in a big company as a team exercise. And thus the hiring pipeline can take advantage of specialization and good-enough economics, as well as teaching people more on-the-job. It's a large burden if you demand everyone on the team know the same first principles (of course there may be disagreement on what those are). Even if personally I want to know as much as I can and get along with others who do too, I'm not really going to hold it against a team member if they produce a poor-complexity algorithm that in review I (or someone else, I think it is good to have at least one person on the team who has algorithm knowledge) notice and can suggest an alternative that's easy to use instead. If they do it again (for the exact same thing) I might raise an eyebrow and remind them of the repeat mistake. If they do it a third time I might write them off as incapable of learning new things. But this pattern applies to other aspects of software too. e.g. Getting people to write testable code can itself be a hassle if they haven't been exposed to that before. Or something as dead simple as getting people to use the rest of the team's coding style guidelines, I've seen interns who still had problems with that near the end of the summer internship, I wouldn't be very happy if it was a senior colleague...

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#454

Post by nvarsj »

btilly wrote: post #434
chris11 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I think it's tough hiring for an SRE role. Much tougher than a programming role. Although in Google's SRE book, they say the interview bar is lower than for their software engineers. Odd!

You're looking for the sort of person that could setup a startup from the data center up. On top of that, they need to be good coders so they can automate everything, and also understand the applications running on the things they build. It's generally a much more in-the-trenches job - relying on limited information, and much harder to test things in isolation since there are so many moving parts, and things you can't change or automate easily (network vendor appliances, and so on).

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#455

Post by DesiLurker »

kisstheblade wrote: post #244
stuckagain wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the average but at Google I probably write a new call to std::set::find twice an hour, and it's important to know that std::set is a red-black tree, and how std::set::find is implemented and how much that costs and so forth. Fluency with data structures and algorithms is not some kind of brain candy. It's absolutely necessary to get the job done.

Yes but jeesus here we are discussing an algorithm that I first heard about in literally my first CS course on algorithms in my first year at the university, some 20 years ago. And I had to manipulate red black threes on the blackboard. Haven't seen them since in my 20 years of work in the industry. I you need to write so performance critical code that the choice of tree structures matters then this interview questio…

I've interviewed many candidates for one of the big 4 & sat on the decision loops too. 'Attribute substitution'[1] one thing that does stands out in these interviews. essentially interviewers substitute answering the larger question of judging the candidate's suitability for the job at hand with a simpler but easier to judge (& defend!) problem of solve this particular coding problem that I have 'normalized' over many candidates. Also, deep domain knowledge is often hard to judge.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#456

Post by lazyasciiart »

27182818284 wrote: post #422
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 think you're right to thank them for their difficult job. I seriously got bored just reading the description of your setup. What percent get through to the second email? Is it like 10%? 50%?

They said 200 emails/month to the general and one every six months to the second email, so that's well under 1%

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#457

Post by felixgallo »

gaius wrote: post #413
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-...

That article does get raised quite a bit. Fortunately I've never seen behavior like that in my org. If I ever did, I would escalate it all the way up to jeff, because working like that would be unacceptable and frankly incompetent.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#458

Post by DashRattlesnake »

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.

> Here's the thing: most recruiters are not very good at what they do and are only chasing placements.

Related anecdote: There was a technology recruiter that was constantly calling me at work, despite the fact that my work number is not listed anywhere* and my LinkedIn profile having clear instructions not to do that.

I decided to look him up on LinkedIn. Guess what his previous job was? Debt collector.

* I figure the recruiters get around that by calling the front desk and asking to be transferred to me.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#459

Post by felixgallo »

wott wrote: post #346
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…

Nice! You've managed to stick almost all the corporate recruiting empty buzzwords in a single message.

That's not very charitable. I get where you're coming from, but in this case, I assure you I mean every word, and I'm happy to put candidates in touch with my direct reports so they can verify that for themselves.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#460

Post by pucado »

bluebomb wrote: post #439
nawitus wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And when that gets rigged by some wicked OCR, then a Super Mario simulation where the princess is the realdeal@email.com, and every 10 coins or every level would get them an additional resume-info nugget to consume.

Okay maybe I took it too far.

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