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Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

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Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#621

Post by ThrustVectoring »

jimmaswell wrote: post #580
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd generalize your point a little more - for a given level of life success, intelligence will anti-correlate with other hire-ability skills like work ethic, diligence, attendance, emotional stability, professionalism, etc. Basically, imagine that there's two ways to graduate college with a CS degree - you're either the kind of person who's smart enough to get things if you work your ass off for them, or you're a gen…

You hardly need to be a genius to get through a CS degree without 'working your ass off'

When you attack the hypothetical like that, you're generally missing the point. Assume a more inconvenient hypothetical - say, a CS degree from MIT.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#622

Post by tptacek »

DannyBee wrote: post #100
plg wrote: post #27

just playing devil's advocate, but how do we know the reason for the no-hire was the reason the OP thinks it was?

Don't be silly. As hedbo says, it's obvious google just doesn't know what they are doing.

If their goal is hiring from industry, as opposed to from schools, I think I could credibly defend an argument that they don't.

(I think what they do now makes sense if they want the top of their funnel to be comprised mostly of recent CS grads, and I think that industry people with really high profiles, or that internal people really want, get to skip a lot of this evaluation.)

I have a lot of respect for Google (how could you not). That doesn't mean they can't be a bit clownshoes with recruiting.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#623

Post by pavel_lishin »

varelse wrote: post #618
mikek wrote: post #15

At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees. Succeeding at these whiteboard questions requires weeks of preparation. You need to practice, practice, practice. After enough practice, you are pretty likely to pass. So ultimately, it is more of a test of "how…

I spent Xmas break reviewing the most recent TopCoder problems, C++ and STL, and read Sedgewick's algorithms book cover to cover. I drank two quad espressos right before the interview. The interview was a straightforward process and I didn't miss a single question. The offer came that evening. I should have turned it down. I've written on this thread already what a career-churning waste of time my brief stint at Goog…

What was the worst?

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#624

Post by varelse »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #623
varelse wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent Xmas break reviewing the most recent TopCoder problems, C++ and STL, and read Sedgewick's algorithms book cover to cover. I drank two quad espressos right before the interview. The interview was a straightforward process and I didn't miss a single question. The offer came that evening. I should have turned it down. I've written on this thread already what a career-churning waste of time my brief stint at Goog…

What was the worst?

A consulting company that hired me to develop PS2 tools and then yanked the rug out from under me on day one and told me I had to write a fast MPEG-2 codec from the ground up in the next 60 days despite zero zip nada null knowledge of MPEG-2.

I quit after a month or so. Later I learned their bait and switch tactics were S.O.P. and the company mostly existed to fund the CEO's various mistresses.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#625

Post by ConfuciusSay »

zaphar wrote: post #605
dennisgorelik wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Finally after wasting other people's time for 9 months, a manager made the decision to get him out." Why did the manager wait so long?

Because it's hard to fire someone. Lets discount the emotional cost completely and simply look at this in terms of financial risk to the company. Employee X is hired. After a month it becomes clear to the whole team that X is a bad hire. But how do you turn a subjectively obvious feeling into an objectively obvious reason to fire. Because if that person decides to sue the company after getting fired that's what you w…

That's why you have a probation period where it's all worked into the equation that you might be let go after three months if it's not working out.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#626

Post by Eridrus »

72deluxe wrote: post #553
Eridrus wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I recently interviewed for a security engineering position at a startup, and while I got offered the job, the interview was quite silly. The first thing I was asked to do was to write a lisp interpreter. It was a pretty trivial task, but it left me scratching my head since not only did it not tell them about whether I would be qualified at all, but I had explicitly avoided writing parsing code since I found…

That last sentence is telling. Would you even consider working there if they had no idea what to do? I have worked at established companies where there is clearly nobody at the helm and it is frustrating.

I considered it for a bit, they were hiring their first security engineer, so it's understandable that they weren't very sure what they were hiring for.

In the end there were a lot of other issues that made me not take it, but not knowing what is necessary seems pretty typical wrt security. However, in those situations you want to have wide latitude to affect change because the thing they hire you to look at is probably not really where their problems are.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#627

Post by samkone »

thethimble wrote: post #74
kenrikm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of interviews work really well for the "I got 1600 on my SATs and went to {insert high profile school here} crowd" There are books out there just to prep you for Google interviews I see these as very similar to SAT test prep books. I'm not so sure Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer.

Think of the problem from Google's perspective though. At some point, you have tens of thousands of candidates and you need a system to quantify how good they are. Further, it's reasonable to have false negatives (people you don't hire that should have been hired) but really bad to have false positives (people that you hire that you should not have). Together, these boil down into the de facto whiteboarding interview…

This cracks me up a bit. I don't have anything against whiteboarding, even though I find it meaningless. With this you more often than not have false positives. And if Google had so many resumes they have to filter through, then why do they have all these recruiters literally spamming you to join? they have recruiting issues like many others tech companies, but the whiteboard is really a bad filter. I've seen very much capable,competent and experienced engineers being denied just because they didn't spend too much time learning cute algorithms or coding in the whiteboard, in front of interviewers sometimes more focused in showing off how smart they are.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#629

Post by jd3 »

mymacbook wrote: post #504
jd3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he's a fan of Susan Kare :-)

I don't get the message you're trying to send by this reply... and yes I know who Susan Kare is.

Susan Kare designed the icon on Apple's command key. [0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key#Origin_of_the_symbo...

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#630

Post by politician »

njloof wrote: post #111
sown wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of it is legacy. Google said early on they want to hire the best and brightest and that was the most important. We got the mantra that passing over a good person is better than hiring a bad one. And they were right. But they're a huge company now. They, and other gigantic tech companies are always complaining they can't find 'good people'. But how do you make this philosophy scale? Do you say, "This…

They'll do it when they start to care more about how much their employees cost. Screening too narrowly drives up the price.

I wonder about that. What percentage of their employees are recent college graduates? From all of these anecdotes, it seems like their process is optimized to select cheap recent CS grads.
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