Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing • Hacker News Board

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#81

Post by kongin » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

adwn wrote: post #76

kongin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still not as efficient since you're breaking on base 10 digit boundaries, not base 2, the most efficient encoding will be base 3, but alas we don't have ternary computers.

But it's a much more compact than that glibc monstrosity is. Sure, the glibc version will win in a micro-benchmark, but micro-benchmarks don't capture the effect on the instruction cache.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy

Using a decimal expansion adds 25% overhead from pure maths. Your cache will be larger if you're working in base ten regardless of what optimizations your compiler does.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#82

Post by feoren » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:09 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #33

AJ007 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how dependent Google’s hiring pipeline has been on just having a huge % of every qualified candidate attempting to get a job at Google? If that is the case, then the interviewing process just needs to be good enough to have a low false positive rate. The false negatives don’t hurt them.

I'd be willing to bet that has a lot to do with it. In my younger years I remember being in awe of the simple fact that a recruiter from Google actually reached out to _me_. A decade changes a lot, though. I don't think I would ever want to work at Google now. I'd be curious to know if my shift in perspective on Google is common, and if they're even aware of it.

I absolutely do not want to work for Google. There's an office near me, and the few times I've been considering another job, I explicitly decided not to even send an application there. It sounds kinda like a dead-end hellhole to be honest. So it's not just you.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#83

Post by johnwheeler » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:27 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #35

johnwheeler wrote: post #8

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

> I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? No. That logic is just superficial pattern matching. The point of university is to spend the time and energy to master the subject, test or no , and the knowledge gained is usually valuable in and of itself. The kind of interv…

> The point of university is to spend the time and energy to master the subject

Really? I think most people go to college to get a good job before all else. With that line of thinking, an interview is just another of these “tests”.

But you make a good point about these arrogant companies administering tests. College faculty are never arrogant, but always humble like this guy in the article who just can’t chalk his failure up to being a human being.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#84

Post by dolni » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:28 PM UTC

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #79

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

This sub-thread is missing the forest for the trees. This interview was not the highlight of the interviewer's day. They most likely didn't overthink every angle and every word. They probably were on autopilot looking for some pre-defined criteria - and could care less if the candidate was qualified, accepted, or rejected.

That's plausible, but it doesn't change the fact that the interview was bad.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#85

Post by tmp_anon_22 » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #84

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sub-thread is missing the forest for the trees. This interview was not the highlight of the interviewer's day. They most likely didn't overthink every angle and every word. They probably were on autopilot looking for some pre-defined criteria - and could care less if the candidate was qualified, accepted, or rejected.

That's plausible, but it doesn't change the fact that the interview was bad.

Right but Google really needs to be called out on the amateurism in interviewer training, selection, and quality control, as displayed throughout these comments. They clearly use volume and redundancy to make up for the number of failures.

I'm sure they'll come out with the argument "we give xx million interviews, we are within an acceptable failure rate with these outliers". No you're not Google. No you're not.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#86

Post by fanf2 » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:39 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #59

Brian_K_White wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost wonder if he was really looking for an objection to that proposal, and specifically the reason for the objection. It's the kind of thing I might do but I'd freaking TELL you, and in time so that you know how to handle the rest of the interview. I don't think it's wrong to have a test that exceeds the range of the tested. Really no one should ever ace any test, else the test is insufficient. Thermometers don'…

> I almost wonder if he was really looking for an objection to that proposal Nah, he wasn't. Near the end of our time slot, he shared the behavior of open() with me (that's how I learned about it). I told him that doing it that way was silly, because it made the code's intent less clear. He didn't seem impressed.

Another point on your side is that close(); open(); is racy in threaded programs: to avoid the races you need to use dup2(), but that still has caveats related to losing errors from close().

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#87

Post by pengaru » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:48 PM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #71

pengaru wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually such a question is used not to fail you for not having the specific answer, but to observe your ability to reason about it and collaborate with the interviewer on pursuing the desired answer. What questions you ask, what resources you consult, experiments you perform, creativity you demonstrate, openness to alternatives, etc. If you just fixate on your specific first solution and choose to dig in and argue ov…

"not a good sign you're someone pleasant or frictionless to collaborate with" That sreet must run both ways or it's an invalid charge. If you're reasoning is valid and the interviewer doesn't provide better arguments, then it's the interviewer who is not pleasant or frictionless to work with.

the interviewer already has the job

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#88

Post by tablespoon » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #83

tablespoon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? No. That logic is just superficial pattern matching. The point of university is to spend the time and energy to master the subject, test or no , and the knowledge gained is usually valuable in and of itself. The kind of interv…

> The point of university is to spend the time and energy to master the subject Really? I think most people go to college to get a good job before all else. With that line of thinking, an interview is just another of these “tests”. But you make a good point about these arrogant companies administering tests. College faculty are never arrogant, but always humble like this guy in the article who just can’t chalk his fa…

> Really? I think most people go to college to get a good job before all else. With that line of thinking, an interview is just another of these “tests”.

That's called credentialism, and it's a perversion of what universities are supposed to be.

> But you make a good point about these arrogant companies administering tests. College faculty are never arrogant, but always humble

What a red herring.

> College faculty are never arrogant, but always humble like this guy in the article who just can’t chalk his failure up to being a human being.

Let's review that professor's story:

> Jacobson has no trouble admitting he totally blew a basic test at the beginning of an interview for a fairly elite job at Google. He has no expectation that had he passed the test, he would have earned a place at the company down the line. He has a problem with the fact that a company with the power, prestige and wealth of Google has developed a recruiting process that is so large and systematic that it can both ask for large amounts of time and energy from prospective candidates and then easily or accidentally hurt or dismiss those same qualified candidates because of a difference, like Jacobson's cognitive disorder.

Does that sound like arrogance to you? Ignoring the sarcasm for a moment, there's a difference between being humble and being a pushover, and it's more of a pushover thing to overlook glaring problems in a process in order to blame oneself.

His story also brings to mind another salient difference that undermines your attempt to compare a Google's interview process to the ACT/SAT: if you flub a standardized test, you can easily retake it. That's not so much the case with an interview.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#89

Post by cratermoon » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #25

Before finally getting hired there I interviewed with Google at least 3 times (hard to remember), on a referral each time (for a different team, from a different person). Incidentally, doing an interview for any role puts you on a secret 6+ month lockout, so it turns out that if you're interested in working at Google you shouldn't interview unless you're absolutely sure you want that role and can ace the interview. A…

I interviewed with HashiCorp for an IAM position and got a question about implementing a transactional key-value store.

The whole exercise was pointless for assessing whether or not I'd be a good hire for the role.

Re: Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

#90

Post by rurban » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #34

dolni wrote: post #5

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The ans…

> The answer he was actually looking for depended on the knowledge that open() returns the smallest possible file descriptor number -- so close stdout, and simply call open() again. That should never pass any code review.

Neither is it portable. Wonder how the interviewer got hired