Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#471

Post by alaskamiller » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:36 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #404

alaskamiller wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means dev agencies that contract for projects. Agencies act as general contractors, augment your staffing, or provide consulting services. Agencies build whole or partial products, often times for stuff that you use on a daily basis. For example, there's an agency with relationships with many YCombinator companies and builds most of their mobile app or web apps.

Thanks. Any idea how one finds the "good" agencies? Is it a networking thing?

You hire agencies the same way you hire people.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#472

Post by sqeaky » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:37 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #423

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…

Have you ever actually got a job that you accepted through this method? Also, what wizardry did you use to get 200+ recruiter E-mails a month? Do you just have a highly optimized resume out there on all the job sites or something?

I get between 30 and 50 a month and all I really did was setup a linked in profile.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#473

Post by sqeaky » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

pucado wrote: post #460

bluebomb wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But at least a few people would be employed making this system.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#474

Post by walshemj » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #387

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…

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

Back in the day I worked for a company that had in a single division more engineers that google has employees :-)

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#475

Post by greenshackle2 » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #315

patmcguire wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My conversations have usually gone like this: "Hey, you look like a great candidate for $AWESOME_JOB" "Great, let's talk" "Oh, you're not really what they're looking for, can I interest you in $GARBAGE_JOB or $BASEMENT_AT_YELLING_CORP" But by then I've showed interest, so I start getting calls. Not worth it.

Seen that, but more often than not it's: I see you're working as $ROLE in $COMPANY_A. How would you like the exact same $ROLE in $COMPANY_B? Or worse, How would you like $ROLE-1 in $COMPANY_B. Sorry but it's going to take at least $ROLE+1 to get me to uproot my life and go through that interview gauntlet again. Of course, as I said in another post, the calculus changes entirely if you're unemployed and need "somethin…

Or, even better, would you like to be hired for $UNRELATED_ROLE.

My company has 'Linux' in it's name, apparently recruiters think that means I'm a sysadmin (I'm a dev).

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#476

Post by data4science » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

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%?

(1 per month + (1 per 6 months)/6) / (200 per month) = 0.58%.

The more important nugget is that he is contacted about two attractive opportunities a year for his passive method that have a fairly high probability of leading to offers if he is interested. This enables him to: 1. Accurately appraise his worth to companies, 2. Quickly scale to a much higher number of interesting opportunities through the 14 worthwhile recruiters per year that already value his conduct (even if only 2 per year have opportunities with appropriate fit) by actively involving their aid if he becomes dissatisfied with his current employer/role (or they become dissatisfied with him), 3. Identify hiring trends in his field.

I for one think it is a brilliant strategy, and I'll probably adopt it myself!

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#477

Post by walshemj » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

yawaramin wrote: post #297

perfmode wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google's code quality is quite high...

I don't know about their code quality, but we consume some of their data via APIs and they periodically randomly change their non-nullable data types to nullable. Fun times hotfixing those in prod.

yes some of their api's and tools are a bit shoddy eg unable to parse a xml sitemap to spec and that spec was only a 3 page RFC!

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#478

Post by twic » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:41 PM UTC

beachstartup wrote: post #299

gcp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was pretty well understood that you should never name a number, and if you're forced to, you should say 5 times the number you had in mind.

that's absurd. you should name the price you expect, and not go below your minimum. would you hire a plumber that refuses to name his rate, and then when pushed, tells you a number 5 times higher than normal? why do you think any other employment negotiation is any different? if you "never name a number", the person on the other end is going to know you're inexperienced and operating on cargo cult mythology, and will…

If you have a good idea of the price you expect, based on a clear understanding of what you can command, then this is an excellent idea.

The standard "don't name a number" advice is based on the assumption that most candidates don't have that. They know what they earn right now, but they don't know what they could be earning. In that situation, you want to sweat some information out of the recruiter by getting them to name the number.

There are other ways you can get a bit of edge.

In a previous round of job hunting, i let a recruiter persuade me to apply at Amazon, even though i was 85% sure i didn't want to work there. They made me an offer substantially higher than my salary at the time, because they're desperate to hire, because nobody wants to work there, because they're a shitshow. I could then take that offer to the other companies i applied to, where i actually did want to work, as a starting point in salary discussions.

In my most recent round, one recruiter said to me "Company X want to know how much you currently earn, because they can't offer above 130k for this position and they don't want to waste their time if you're on more than that". 130k may not sound like a lot to you over in the Valley, but it was getting on for twice what i was making at the time here in London. "Well,", i said in the most noncommital voice i could manage, "130k would probably be okay".

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#479

Post by acdha » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:41 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #354

sidlls wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The attitude that really basic Computer Science concepts like algorithms and algorithmic complexity are irrelevant is exactly why software projects are so frequently FUBAR. You must mean "some software projects" and not "frequently." And who's proud of ignorance? Ignorance of what? And, what's more, why should it be considered a negative if someone isn't concerned, or even is proud, about ignorance of certain thing…

You must mean "some software projects" and not "frequently." In the 2000's and prior, it was common knowledge that the majority of software projects failed. Even if they succeeded on paper and shipped, they weren't actually used. By some estimates, it was something like 75% of software projects. If you look at the contents of "ecosystems" like Steam and the the various app stores, you'll see much the same. Most of th…

Do you have a citation supporting the claim that those failures were due to poor performance and not far more significant problems like failing to correctly model the actual business problem or handle changes? That era was dominated by waterfall development which is notoriously prone to failure due to the slow feedback loop.

This is highly relevant because one not uncommon problem with highly-tuned algorithms is the greater cost of writing that faster code and then having to change it when you realize the design needs to be different, especially if pride + sink cost leads to trying to duct tape the desired feature on top of the wrong foundation for awhile until it's obvious that the entire design is flawed. That failure mode is especially common in large waterfall projects where nobody wants to deal with the overhead of another round.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#480

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Feb 21, 2017, 9:42 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #420

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. W…

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

Hint: Don't ever work for or hire anyone who would exploit the ambiguity of the English language in a hastily written comment to gain the false appearance of geeky superiority. (Exercise: how would you interpret the situation referred to in the comment to wind up with O(n^2) and how you interpret it to wind up with O(n^3)?)