I interviewed for a Product Manager role at Google and my experience was awful. Put this things in perspective, I was a Director of PM managing a team at my current role and working a lot with customers, presenting in speaking engagements etc as part of my day to day.<p>I get into the interview and the person on the other side seems to know very little of my background. He says he is a PM and starts with how much is google's spend on storage for youtube on an annual basis. Knowing very well, I walk through assumptions like the average youtube video size, no of formats based on screen res and video quality etc etc and give him the logic. He pauses and says give me a dollar value. He doesnt want to understand the logic behind the calculations. Anyway, next few questions are more of the same.. code optimizations etc etc. After 3 or so questions, we were done. No, do you have any questions for me. No customer related discussions. No what I have done in the past and how I've been successful.<p>I feel like these kind of interviews are not judging what the person brings to the table, rather do you know what I'm gong to ask you and that's all that matters.<p>I always look for 2 things in any interview. Are you smart and motivated because nothing we do is rocket science. If you are smart and motivated, you will succeed. The other is, will I (and the rest of the team) get along with you. Teams need to work together and people who lack tact in personal skills end up being very difficult to work with.
All anecdotal evidence points to arriving at the correct, optimal solution as being key to passing the interview. It also seems like often times the interviewers are not even going to be working with the candidate so their opinion on a 'working relationship' is mostly irrelevant.<p>The objective of asking these leetcode style questions is to find candidates who are willing to put in the time to study. Success signals that this person is willing to commit to performing well at something that is reasonably challenging. The end result is that they are trying to hire worker bees. This makes sense as the bulk of work at any large company is largely mundane and relatively routine. I'm willing to bet that when a company wants to hire a two sigma candidate they don't go through all this nonsense, although at that point the candidate is already well known in the industry most likely.
> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis.<p>If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is?<p>I'd actually argue that for many companies this post is true (i.e. that getting it "right" is less important than the journey) but I still won't forgive companies that design the most hostile interview questions possible, and are then surprised when interviewees complain.<p>You can read the types of questions Google asks here:<p><a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer-Interview-Questions-EI_IE9079.0,6_KO7,24.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer...</a><p>I'd never interview at Google or any other company that operates this way. If the very first interaction I'm going to have is off-topic trivia, we're done, the company failed MY interview. The questions Google asks are disrespectful and unprofessional.<p>But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field.
Anyone who interviews at a "prestigious" company and then complains about how difficult the interview is kind of hypocritical. Google, and other FAANGs/unicorns, make you solve hard algorithms questions because they believe - correctly or wrongly - that in order to succeed as a company they have to filter out the vast majority of candidates who have poor algorithmic skills. They also pay a lot of money because that's the only way to attract enough candidates who can pass their hiring bar. If they stopped asking hard interview questions and increased their candidate acceptance rate they wouldn't need to pay people 300k/year to fill their open positions.<p>But the only reason people apply to Google and Facebook and Netflix in the first place is because they pay a lot of money. There are plenty of crappy CRUD shops that won't ask you to enumerate palindromic primes. As long as you can do Fizzbuzz they'll hire you and pay you 80k/year to glue libraries together. But people still try to interview at Google instead because they want to make 300k/year and not 80k/year. You can't have your cake and eat it.
I have recently interviewed at most of these companies, eventually managed to get some good offers at some of them, but let's be honest, I had to invest <i>months</i> in getting prep for the tech screening, whiteboard coding exercise and the whole non-sense jazz. I am sick of reading this blog posts because everyone knows, that is not how the <i>majority</i> of these interviews are conducted.
I have more than 10 years of experience on the field, I earned my degree in computer science years ago, but I had to go back and brush up on trie, tree, etc to convince the interviewers that I was worth working at company XYZ. The interview process is pretty much broken and very much biased towards fresh out of college eng. Unfortunately, if you really want to work at any of these companies you need to play their game and make them happy. Once you get the job, you will discover that most of your teammates are not as smart as they want you to believe they are and often you will be wondering how the hell did they manage to get a job at company XYZ. Well, they simply invested months prepping for the interview, plus they come from some well known university. Unfortunately when it comes to real work, they have no idea on how to get things done. What make things even worse is that often the tech screening is done by junior eng that have no idea and experience on how to conduct an interview and they expect the answers by the book.
A positive note: I also noticed that some companies are now giving take home exercise that are much closer to the day-to-day job. So maybe there is still hope.
Google believes, as so many before them have, that the ideal candidate can be found through numbers: pure, unbiased, beautiful numbers. Because once you reach a certain size, your biggest threat is no longer your competitors, but rather your regulators, and that means that you must not expose yourself to regulatory (at the core, social) risk.<p>Bias is bad. Discrimination is bad. And if you're big AND bad, you get fined, and have obstacles put in your path.<p>So what does a rational BigCorp do? They make everything "fair". So everyone has the same opportunities, everyone is colorblind about cultural fairness-obsessions x, y, and z, and the hiring process becomes as effective as cardboard cake. Tick the boxes and you're in. Otherwise, there's the door.<p>Of course, the irony of all of this is that they end up discriminating against the very people they need: The different, the strange, the quirky, the innovative - everyone who doesn't perfectly fit the criteria of a safe hire where nobody can criticize the hiring decision (and impact your promotion prospects).<p>This is the social process by which BigCorp stagnation works, and it's always how it worked.
Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar:<p>- Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative.<p>- Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you.<p>The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is cooperative. On Blind, you know the real way to getting through the Google interview is LeetCoding like hell and not admitting you've seen the questions before.
I conducted many interviews while I worked at google and I wouldn't trust anyone who tells you the interview situation as one particular, well-defined, thing. Individual interviewers have their own style, approach, goals. Even if people start from the same place because they go through the same interview training they inevitably drift in goals and interpretation of what the guidelines mean over the years. What your interview experience is going to be like depends on the particular people interviewing you.<p>By all means write a blog post telling what you yourself is like as an interviewer at google. But if you want to say something broader really ask yourself, what's your evidence that you understand how other people at google, on other teams and in other offices, do it.
I've interviewed three times in the last five or so years there, and I don't get the feeling the depth is as claimed in the article.
Perhaps, it's also the interviewers not implementing it as intended.<p>If these points were indeed important, I'd expect feedback addressing them. All feedback I received was about doing well or not well on certain questions. No meta whatsoever.<p>I didn't make it for good reasons, but I feel there is a big chance part.
I had one onsite interviewer in the first round who was difficult to deal with.
He presented a problem I've never seen in my life, nothing close. He interrupted and gave hints in directions that didn't make sense to me, and didn't give me 5 minutes to think without him talking.
The second attempt was fair.
In the third, the first phone screen's interviewer was constantly typing on his keyboard while I talked, and it was so loud. No real conversation happening. He was just staring in his screen clacking away. I addressed it, but he kept typing loudly while I was talking.
So annoying.<p>On the other hand, the recruiters were always very good.<p>At another company recruiting was a mess, and only knowing someone inside helped dealing with that, but the interviews were all great.
I've had Google recruiters reach out to me multiple times over the years and I've never taken them up on an interview. This last time, I told the recruiter I just wasn't interested in going through the process, and his response was a shocked "but why??" Is it so shocking that I don't want to subject myself to grueling demoralizing interviews to likely be rejected? I can get good work, with people I know, making good money, without going through any of that. I'm not interested in the Google Hazing.
I just interviewed for an embedded position a few weeks ago. Got a rejection - need to work on my coding and design skills apparently - so take this with a grain of salt.<p>I felt like there was tremendous variability in the interviewers. Some were disinterested, some were engaging. Some asked relevant questions, some clearly had no idea what my background was or what position I was interviewing for. Some asked canned questions and wanted canned responses. Some explored my experience and knowledge with open-ended questions.<p>It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated answers. Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled).<p>I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing) so maybe they just want effective robots?<p>I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience and accomplishments of the team.
Yeah right - unless it's changed it was _only_ about solving the problem. Had an interview with them ~7 years ago, unfriendly, hard to understand interviewer asking about weighing boxes of pennies in minimum number of steps. I got it to 2, interviewer said "no, you can do it in 1" then refused to move forward. I had 10 years experience at that time and that was never discussed and also would not answer my questions about working at Google. Recruiter afterward ignored my follow up email.<p>So yeah, buzz off..
In theory yes, probably that's the intention. Several other companies claim the same. Interviewers are nice and everything, however this whole process is flawed, and the post nowhere depicts the reality.<p>Practically, interviewers more often don't care anything other than solving the problem. Some are checking their emails while the candidates solve the problem, some are just trying to give the most obscure problems using exotic data structures, and some are simply too lazy to pay attention. So, I would say whatever the procedure is, there is an enforcement problem.<p>It is what it is with most companies. So we leetcode like hell, and hope for the best.<p>EDIT: I've had much better interview experience when the interviewers belong to the team I will work for. I think there is more clear incentive for interviewers to be more interested.
"its not about the problem" but if you cant correctly code one of these 200 algorithms on a whiteboard in sub 15 minutes while under extreme stress youre not getting an offer either.
I've heard a lot of really positive accounts on their interviews but mine was nothing like those. My interviewer showed up late and basically spaced out for the entire 40 minutes. He clearly wasn't listening to a thing I was saying - I was verbalizing everything and I had to keep prompting him when I wanted to clarify something. Certainly not a conversation despite everything I had seen and read about their interviews. The cherry on top was when I asked the interviewer at the end what he liked most about working at Google. All he had was that he liked the commuter allowance. Incredible.<p>Maybe the guy was just having an off day but having spent a month preparing I felt cheated.
When searching for jobs, I actually find the interview process of a company to be an extremely useful filter/signal.<p>I tend to outright reject companies who have interview processes like Google's.<p>At its best, it filters for a set of qualities that have little correlation with qualities of people whom I tend to enjoy working with professionally, and at its worst, can be easily gamed by anyone who's willing to play the interview prep game, which further reduces the quality of candidates that the process lets through.<p>This means even if I end up getting the job at a company with an interview process like Google's, I'm unlikely to be surrounded by people who I enjoy working with.<p>Even if I somehow get lucky and everybody at the company turns out to be amazing at the moment I join, the fact that their interview process is essentially a crapshoot means that wont stay true for very long as the company scales up and the law of large numbers kicks in.
This seems like a highly optimistic, happy path description of a nigh-impossible process. Testing for leadership in an hour long interview one-on-one? Yeah right. Sounds like a way of hitting your talking point of "we hire for great leadership!" Don't get me wrong, what they say they are trying to hire sounds great, and I think they think they are trying to find those things, but I'm highly skeptical of both the process and effectiveness. Any large corporation has a problem with diffused goals. If you are a small business owner, you interview and have direct skin in the game. You might do a bad job, but you are close to the metal in terms of what you think you are hiring for, and you get the results of your choices. If you personally believe you can spot a leader, then maybe you can, great. But a large company that puts out talking points about hiring great leaders and team players probably can't even elucidate what that would mean (especially when the team member isn't interviewing, so you go for the generic common denominator and average blandness, with no real idea of what it means in particular), and if they can then I'm skeptical they are finding it-- there's a limited number of great leaders around and they typically aren't interested in doing the grunt work of maintaining an obscure cog in an obscure system in perpetuity, reporting to a faceless committee so they can make more ad revenue. You usually find great leaders somewhere more exciting and independent, it's the nature of the beast.
I think these are great advices that would help to move a candidate from borderline hire/no hire to a hire, but let's be honest, you WON'T be hired if you don't solve the problems with a proper answer!<p>Months of preparation + LeetCode + Multiple interviews are critical to increase your chances to get an offer.
I wonder if they have done the experiment where after some basic screening, a relevant work history and decent personality that if you just randomly admit them if they do just as well as anyone else. You could still do the algorithm problem solving style interviews but just don't make a rejection decision based on them. The idea here would be to randomly approve people who would normally be rejected and see if they do just as well.
I keep reading about how bad Google's interview process is. But has anyone done any proper large scale research on what is the best way to hire software engineers? All the comments here seems like opinions of people based on themselves and no one provides a proper alternative. Just curious!
I have conducted many interviews at Google and this article is not true, at the very least not generally so.<p>> If you are not highly senior, you won't get asked system design<p>This, for example, is not true.
In my experiences as a candidate it is about solving the problem, actually, despite the fact that we constantly hear interviewers claim the contrary. I'd be curious to know how long it's been since this individual has went through a FANG interview process as a candidate themselves. *<p>To me this feels like a case of unconscious bias: I think many people who interview genuinely believe they are looking for some set of criteria {A,B,C} but they're evaluations/recommendations actually reveal a bias towards {X,Y,Z}. So as a candidate, after you've been interviewed enough times you realize that X,Y,Z is really the name of the game and posts like these just seem totally out of touch.<p>* I wonder if anyone has tried introducing some kind of control group or blind study mechanism where some small % of candidates are actually secretly employees of the company. Probably would be hard for in-person interviews because people might be recognized, but maybe more practical for phone screens. The trained decoy candidate could basically attempt a problem in exactly the same way for many interviewers and then data could be analyzed on the outcomes to detect what biases are present.
It's very clear that the interviewer bias is very important on the process. It shouldn't be. On my case, I got a relapsed interviewer that was working on his laptop while I was designing the service he wanted and another that wanted a very specific and canned solution for the very specific and canned problem he threw at me, instead of trying to understand my different approach for the problem.<p>2 of 5 bad interviewers. I left with a bad taste on my mouth, with the feeling that I didn't failed because I was not skilled / prepared enough for the company, but just unlucky for getting a bad set of interviewers. If was just me with that feeling, I would agree that I was biased for not receiving an offer, but I see this happening a lot with good engineers and throwing all the responsibility on the interviewees shoulders with "You are bitter for not receiving an offer" or "gitgud" arguments is just avoiding the discussion.<p>Anyway, it's their process and if it's working for them, they have no reason to change. Just stop advocating as it is a nearly perfect hiring process: it's very clear that is far from it.
I like how the article tried to portrait these interviews as super professional and as if they have like a plan or something. My experience is that most interviewers dont prepare, they probably have been asking the same question for years. And no, they are not simultaneously interviewing for multiple skills, the just try to sound professional. If you are a dev, better leetcode. That's all that matters at Google.
Alright, so here you finally hear it said out loud - it's all about whether interviewers like you, not whether you are a top performer. Increase your likability by any means necessary, don't spend too much time on building your technical excellence, it's pointless and not rewarded if you want to be at FAANG.<p>Or start a new company, get backing outside their VC arms and challenge them if you want to have fun.
I've interviewed at a couple of FAANG companies, some multiple times. I've yet to get an offer, despite feeling like a (considerably?) better-than-average candidate. I get the distinct impression that their hiring methods get them tolerable sensitivity and excellent specificity [1]. But I have a hard time believing this author's claim that "it's not about solving the problem."<p>If they reject candidates who don't/can't consider algorithmic complexity of a particular solution, then they'll likely reject some candidates who would have performed well at a job there. But they won't extend an offer to a candidate who wouldn't perform well. Hiring an underperforming employee has several costs. Obvious costs: time consuming gathering evidence to let them go, management doesn't like delivering bad news. More subtle reason: opportunity cost of team morale for a high-performing team. IMO it is exhausting being on a team where everyone frequently chooses the least challenging design options, frequently ignores process/follow-through, frequently ignores opportunities to innovate and improve.<p>Does the interview process in place actually help achieve this goal? I'm not sure, but I'd wager that it might actually come closer than any other interview process.<p>All that said, being on the receiving end of these rejections is a real disappointment. But from everything I've read, you may have to buckle down and commit lots of preparation time in order to get an offer. I haven't done that, and I suppose I should expect to get rejections until I do.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity</a>
This is ridiculous, you will be given a no hire recommendation by the interviewer at a FAANG company if you do not provide an optimal solution. This is very well documented on sites/apps like Blind and accurate from my personal experience. It's corporate double speak to state otherwise.<p>Can't give an O(N) solution but come up with a correct O(N^2) solution? Too bad - go do more Leetcode.
For all the complaining here, Google's system actually works for Google, so i'm unsure why people expect something to change.<p>The average interview score from a panel of interviews correlates very highly with performance at Google, interviewees report high satisfaction, etc.<p>If those things changed, i'm sure Google would change it.
But why would they change it otherwise?
When I get interview feedback about literally not having a coded complete solution despite strong communication skills, understanding of the solution and underlying cs concepts, i really cant help but conclude this as nothing but PR...<p>And then I read this >personal opinion<p>I'd rather take advice from /adv/
I am not sure if this is in the interest of any company but why not provide feedback, as it can only help the interviewees in the future and the companies attract better talent.<p>Even if it's not standardized, a rubrik across X attributes with a scale and a number. (Which is what I am assuming they are doing anyway -- as it sounds likes the interviewers are rating them across different dimensions)<p>Not sure if this is some sort of a thing to do with liability but the interviewee can get generalized feedback.<p>Ex: Technical skills (2/5),Communication skills (4/5) etc. and they can improve on the relevant dimensions or compare notes with other companies / candidates as well.
> Most candidates don't know what the goal of our interviews are. First rule, it is not about finding an optimal solution or any solution at all.<p>Believe this nonsense at your own peril.
I keep hearing this but it is simply not compatible with my experience.<p>Often the problems are given without any interviewer at all, for one (the initial screens).<p>Even for ones where the interviewer is present, if I solve the problem, all is well. If I do not, all is not well. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground where I fail to solve the problem and it's fine.
The key bit of context is at the top of the page:<p>Engineer. Diagnostics at Google Cloud. Keeping things boring. <i>Personal opinions.</i><p>Emphasis mine.
This article/blog entry says really nothing for the most part. I know two people personally who interviewed for Google. Neither hired, one got to a sixth interview, the other only fourth. Both told me two exact things:<p>How do you solve a problem?
How do you solve someone else's problem?<p>I counter with "who cares?". CAN YOU SOLVE the problem is the winning answer. I think Google is really guilty of wasting their time and the time of the candidates with that many number of interviews without any payoff. I know within 15 minutes if a person is going to a) fit in the culture and b) able do the job. If Google needs more than one interview to figure that out, then they are doing it wrong.<p>What Google is really doing is providing someone with the privilege of having google on their resume. I doubt it's worth all that.
I suspect all large company interview systems are about ensuring you have a large sunk cost of effort in the ‘debit’ column so that you’ll be pleased to accept substandard terms if you get to the end point.<p>Much the same as the student degree systems with its non-defaultable loans designed to keep you firmly in the rat race with no time to question whether three hour commutes and twelve hour days are a sensible way to organise a society.<p>The singular most useful skill anybody can master in IT or any other profession is the ability to write off a loss and not let it worry you.
I interviewed for a Technical Solutions Engineer over there, and contrasting to some of the other comments in this thread the interview was surprisingly reasonable. Nothing too tricky just standard basic log parsing stuff with Python. Didn’t get it but at least the questions were clear, interviewer spoke English clearly, and was friendly overall. Compare this to Facebook where English was clearly not my interviewer’s first language and didn’t explain the questions clearly. I’d gladly interview with Google again.
> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis.<p>I conducted dozens of interviews at my last place. If the goal is to identify jerks then in my experience it is best to create a friendly and comfortable atmosphere during the interview. Simply because people of such personality will confuse friendliness for weakness and start to complain and argue about questions or even mild non-positive feedback. Cool people on the other hand will be able to open up and show their skills more easily.
I'm reminded of an amusing rant by Adam Carolla: "I had no idea how… f*ckin horrible most people are at their jobs."
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6GVt35Eoz4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6GVt35Eoz4</a><p>Definitely includes tech-interviewers. As I get older I've started pushing back on these bad interview decisions, but can't help feel it's a losing proposition without support from fellow developers.
I have never interviewed for Google so wouldn’t know if that’s actually how it goes. But that sounds like how I run interviews myself. I think of myself as a fairly good interviewer, and I’ve accepted people who totally bombed the actual question, but in the way they behaved and talked and thought seemed to be a good fit.<p>Hiring is hard, and I do think asking hard questions (on any subject really) does show a lot of the candidate...
Sounds like horseshit. How many of those who didn't solve (or didn't even get on the track of solving) their problems actually ever got hired?
I perform interviews from time to time for the company I work for and my conclusion is as follows: interviews are hit-or-miss for the most part and the only way to improve on that is to spend a prohibitive amount of time on them.<p>Also the Dunning-Kruger effect is strong among interviewers. Especially given that as a person in this role you're given this tiny bit of power that is necessary to enable it.
The Silicon Valley interview system is a major blind point for these companies: a structural weakness which internal dogma paints as an unquestionable strength.<p>It's like the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. You could criticize it, but it's so internalized in how the place works that there's no way to get rid of it without blowing up everything.
I've been interviewed by Google dozens of times over the past 7-8 or so years, have received two written offers and one verbal one.<p>First, I always refused the offer.<p>Second, the process has always been full of very disappointing flaws.<p>I know that interviews at big companies can be screwed, but among the top ones, I doubt any company is as terrible as Google is.
A lot of google employees might not pass the interview if he/she is going through the interview for the 2nd time.<p>because it all depends on the questions he/she comes across. the interview process is testing do you know what i am going to ask and that's all that matters.
Hiring continues to be a favourite whipping boy on HN and honestly I kind of wish it would die because it's the same arguments every time:<p>- Inconsistent interviews<p>- Luck of the draw questions<p>- "I don't do well coding on a whiteboard" (often framed as "coding on a whiteboard proves nothing")<p>- Bad experience with the process<p>- Etc<p>Personally I don't mind coding on a whiteboard but only if you understand why you're asking a candidate to do it and what you hope to gain. Unfortunately many (IMHO) get this part wrong.<p>Obviously FizzBuzz was influential here. And I honestly think FizzBuzz is the right way to think about live coding tests because it's simple. It's deceptively simple such that anyone competent easily falls into the trap of thinking the question needs to be harder and this is a problem with many FAAMG interviewers.<p>On the other side I think there are people who don't realize how many people are masquerading as programmers who can't program a for loop in their language of choice. It's actually hard to believe for anyone semi-competent unless you've witnessed it but it's true.<p>FizzBuzz is a simple problem aimed at providing an early negative signal on a candidate. Every word of that was deliberate and important. It's simple so anyone remotely competent will pass it within minutes and you can move on.<p>This doesn't mean that if you ace it you're a good engineer ie there is ZERO positive signal here. The negative signal is if you can't solve this simple problem in your language of choice because then you almost certainly aren't a good engineer and you (the interviewer/employer) can stop wasting your time.<p>This is why it's so important it's a simple problem because a hard problem adds very little positive signal and greatly reduces the negative signal. Some people are bad under pressure with hard problems. Some questions are a matter of knowing the trick. Finding cycles in a graph is trivial if you are familiar with the tortoise and hare algorithm. If not you may figure it out from first principles but if you don't it doesn't mean you're a bad programmer or you shouldn't be hired. That's the problem.<p>On the other side some like to lambast interview processes if they have a nonzero false negative rate. These stories usually go "I referred excellent engineer X and they bombed out on a random coding question" or similar. This happens but getting a false negative doesn't invalidate the system.<p>It's important to remember to that the goals of the employer and the candidate are different. The candidate's goals are to try to get a positive signal to the employer. The employer's goals are to minimize time spent per candidate (since this is expensive) while hiring a sufficient number of qualified candidates with a minimum of false positives.<p>Again, every word of that is important. False positives are expensive. If you have a pool of 100 people to fill 10 roles and 20 are will work out then, as the employer, you don't often care which of those 20 you get, as long as you get 10 of them. There's an effort-reward curve between getting 10/20 qualified candidates vs the best 10.<p>Lastly, this is also why there is an interview slate of 4+ interviews. A single bad interview does not kill your chances.<p>I'd say Google's biggest problem is interviewer dead wood. These are people who have their pet questions, which were banned years ago (as either being too well known and/or just being a bad question) but they keep asking it anyway. Or they know <pick your language> and then force the candidate to use it and then mark them down for not knowing it (when the candidate never claimed to know it). Part of the delays in Google hiring too are some people will do an interview and won't submit feedback for 1 or even 2 weeks, a process I personally found inexcusable and infuriating.<p>But interviewing is one of those things that everyone is expected to do, which needs to change as many people are either bad at it or just don't really care.<p>I would also say, if anything, Google (and this probably applies to most if not all big tech companies) doesn't filter often and early enough. I saw candidates who never should've made it passed a phone screen. In some cases I saw the phone screen feedback (as part of the whole packet) and I honestly don't know why it didn't end there. My own theory was that recruiters largely controlled this and they had quotas to meet of phone screens, onsite interviews and hires and this just ended up wasting a lot of interviewers' time. But that was just a theory.<p>Disclaimer: Xoogler
I enjoyed my interview at Google. They asked some generic questions, but also some stuff specific to my niche.<p>No one is expecting perfect code. I ended up saying something along the lines of “let’s just pretend the method is called isPresent() because I forget” to every interviewer.
I wish someone at Google had the courage to admit how inconsistent and arbitrary the hiring/interviewing process is at Google.<p>"Googliness" is just a qualitative lever in hiring that allows Google interviewers to enforce whatever biases they have.
If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid
- that quote that is contentiously attributed to that person
(If u ask me, prolly the fish will become an amphibian lol)
I really dont hope that writing blog posts on twitter with one tweet per sentence and then threading them together becomes the norm rather than the exception, but my expectations are low.
This information is for outside and inside the company. When you interview someone you cannot go with a predefined answer that you want the candidate to achieve.
companies do not care about the quality of their hiring process. which is sad because they do care about the quality of their employees.<p>they say they care, but it’s lip service. if companies cared, they would put in place a candidate feedback mechanism, ie post-interview quality survey. you could start with only surveying those you extend an offer to.
the original post is totally BS.
These days, Google's interview system is more like getting better/cheaper replaceable labor/commodity. particularly with huge supply of new fresh graduates.
Why does everyone on HN seem to care so much about what Google does in interviews? We get it, no one likes weird off-topic brainteasers. Be a better engineer so you don't have to worry about having them on your resume and you'll be good.
To any hiring managers that might be reading this, please watch this alternative method of interviewing:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI</a>
Do people realize that there is no <i>effective</i> solution to this problem of hazing like interviews?<p>There are probably millions of High IQ people applying and vying to work at Google. Tomorrow Google could decide to add juggling competitions in interviews in addition to algorithm jargon and while it would lead to a lot more bitching from interviewers, it wouldn't matter to Google as they would still get their fill of qualified high IQ applicants.
The problem is that there is almost no correlation between how candidates do in whiteboard interviews, and the ability to perform the job on a day to day basis.<p>Also, and the article says it: you are being tested mostly for personality compatibility with the interviewer, which again has nothing to do with the ability to perform the job.<p>This plus the fact that the interviewers are volunteers, creates overtime an effect where lots of people in the workforce have similar personality traits, which is not a great thing because it creates an imbalance in the normal personality balance that a group needs to work properly.<p>Personality imbalances in groups usually lead to dysfunctional situations over time: too many sloppy people who just cowboy code until dawn, too many excessively cautious people that won't touch a line of code any more with fear of breaking something, etc.