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Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

yegor256.com

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Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#61

Post by ryandrake »

utnick wrote: post #7

The worst part for me is how long the process takes, and how much time is invested for an interview process where the success rate is so low. My recent experience with AMZN was: - get contacted by recruiter, schedule a call with recruiter a few days later - take a take-home coding test a few days later - talk to the recruiter again a few days later to tell me I did well on the coding test - talk to another recruiter…

I remember doing a phone screen with a company who shall remain nameless, but it was a phone company that has a three letter name and two of those letters are the same :-). It went pretty well, and I predictably got not response back from them. A month or so later I accepted another job, moved my family across the country, and started on the new job. About 2 weeks into my new job, Three Letter Company's recruiter calls back and said the phone screen went great! Can I come in for a round of in-person interviews?

I LOLed over the phone, it was a riot.

EDIT: On the other extreme hand, it's a HUGE turn-off when a recruiter makes an incorrect assumption about my time availability in the initial contact. Stop me when you've seen this one: "Your background looks great! Please tell me what time slots today would work for you in order to discuss this role." Wow, really? You're assuming I have time to call you RIGHT NOW?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#62

Post by iainmerrick »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #35
iainmerrick wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in hearing from people who work at Google, and get to figure out a cool algorithm for solving an interesting puzzle-problem more an about once a year. I bet there aren't very many. In my experience, the stuff you do in this kind of interview has very little relation with the stuff you do in the actual job. (I wish it did! I love those algorithmic puzzles.)

figuring out a cool algorithm is not the same as learning 1000 algorithms by rote to prepare for an interview. Just because doesn't feel like doing test prep for an interview, it doesn't mean they don't have the brain capacity to actually solve the business problem when it comes up. If in my day-to-day I need to use an AVL tree, I will get a library for it, I won't be reimplementing it from scratch every single time.

I'm not sure I understand your point -- possibly we're agreeing?

To clarify, it seems to me the interviews tend to focus on things like "what's a good data structure for the social network in a Facebook clone?" but that's only 1% of the actual job, 5% tops.

It's true that those technical design decisions are very important, but they're not decisions that every engineer needs to make on their own on a day-to-day basis. They come up fairly rarely in a typical project and usually multiple people will be involved.

I don't have any easy answers -- I don't know a good way to interview for the other 95%+ of useful skills, like communicating well within a team, testing, debugging, benchmarking, writing documentation, good source control practice, knowledge of standard tools, meta-knowledge of how to learn about standard tools, how to evaluate new tools, system administration, dealing with production panics, etc.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#63

Post by lowbloodsugar »

See his posts How We Interview Programmers [0] and Hacker-vs-Programmer [1] for more insight. It is ironic, then, that the author is claiming that algorithms, and knowledge of them, are unimportant for a programmer. "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." He believes he is a good programmer, and that learning algorithms is not necessary to qualify as a good programmer.

I think the claim is based on the idea that we now have tons of memory and disk, so programmers don't need to worry about optimization. Which seems to have an obvious contradiction, which is that if you have huge quantities of memory and disk then ignorance of algorithms, and, e.g. O(n^2) causes shit-hitting-fan failures. Re: [2].

[0] http://www.yegor256.com/2016/03/01/how-we-interview-programm...

[1] http://www.yegor256.com/2014/10/26/hacker-vs-programmer-ment...

[2] http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/

Edit: added the quote.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#64

Post by alistproducer2 »

stuckagain wrote: post #37
iainmerrick wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in hearing from people who work at Google, and get to figure out a cool algorithm for solving an interesting puzzle-problem more an about once a year. I bet there aren't very many. In my experience, the stuff you do in this kind of interview has very little relation with the stuff you do in the actual job. (I wish it did! I love those algorithmic puzzles.)

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.

one does not need to know how to write an algorithm on a white board to understand it. Seems like it would better to ask what a red-black tree is, what's it's time complexity, and what would be a good situation to use one.

In fact, I would argue that one could know how to write one and have no idea of the practical use of it.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#65

Post by KirinDave »

I have just been through the Google process for recruiting. While I have some minor complaints about timing, I never once was not interviewing with the team and leadership that held the req. Heck, even their technical was respectful and topical every time.

So I'm a bit confused by this post.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#66

Post by beachstartup »

arielweisberg wrote: post #44
noonespecial wrote: post #4

Its the London Cabbie(1) method. They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people (for the value of smart that fits their biases). They just need as many warm bodies as possible to ram through their test so that a few trickle out the bottom of the funnel to keep the ranks from shrinking. If too many started getting hired, they'd add competitive basket weaving to the skillset if t…

And in theory it should totally be worth it as a candidate unless they are coasting on reputation. Otherwise the supply of candidates would dry up. In practice it wasn't for me, but I refused to tell them how much I made just to see what would happen. If you interview at Google and they ask how much you make you should probably tell them or you might get a weak non-negotiable offer. Unless what you make is already fa…

refusing to tell your prospective employer how much you want to get paid is a 'negotiation tactic'?

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#67

Post by Spooky23 »

noonespecial wrote: post #4

Its the London Cabbie(1) method. They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people (for the value of smart that fits their biases). They just need as many warm bodies as possible to ram through their test so that a few trickle out the bottom of the funnel to keep the ranks from shrinking. If too many started getting hired, they'd add competitive basket weaving to the skillset if t…

There are a few different processes imo.

I have been through what you describe. A recruiter reaches out and tries to get you in their funnel. For me, it's a no-go because of my college background. (Unsexy school, shitty grades.)

A family member was pursued by them very aggressively after making some presentations at significant conferences and getting praise in a book written by a high level business exec.

This family member was received borderline harassing levels of outreach from recruiters from Google. It's pretty obvious there is some sort of targeted hunting list and KPIs associated with it.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#68

Post by metaphorm »

40acres wrote: post #26

There is no standard way to interview a software engineer. Whenever one of these threads come up we see multiple posters explaining their process, and while each process has it's upsides and downsides, no two are exactly the same. For a company the size of Google, with the amount of applicants they receive, I would assume that an interview standard is absolutely necessary. It's not perfect, but for 95% of developers…

the problem with the way Google interviews is that, despite it being heavily standardized, it is not sensitive to non-algorithmic skills and talents that interviewees have. It will _only_ pass candidates who are unusually good at algorithm puzzles, on whiteboards, under time pressure.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#69

Post by adamzerner »

Asking to be interviewed by your future boss seems like a proxy for asking to be interviewed in such a way where it's directly relevant to your job. If so, why not directly ask for the latter? Your future boss isn't the only one who can perform that sort of interview.

Re: Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

#70

Post by hocuspocus »

johan_larson wrote: post #3

I wonder how high up you have to get before the top-tier companies are willing to make an exception to their standard interview process. Director? VP?

I have a friend who would be level 7~8 at Google and he still gets generic emails from recruiters.

Not sure they actually do hire anyone straight to this kind of engineer levels though, I assume they'd give you the salary and responsibilities and make you earn the title through promotions?

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