4 ms·

Re:hiring I've been through various pieces of Google's hiring apparatus a few times and have come away pretty unimpressed that they have it any more figured ou

by bane 11y ago

Re:hiring I've been through various pieces of Google's hiring apparatus a few times and have come away pretty unimpressed that they have it any more figured out than anybody else. In fact I'd wager that tossing all the resumes they receive down the stairs and picking whoever ends up at the top of the stairs for any given position would probably work as well as the broken process they have in place. Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint that I've had to short circuit and kill the whole process, twice, from my end it had gone so off the rails on Google's side. This isn't a particular criticism of Google's process in particular, hiring in general is pretty broken for every company, but it comes across as a bit of hubris that Google is going to bring something new to the table other than dysfunctions that are unique to Google. Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways. I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways, but given the number and length of phone and in person interviews Google demands of candidates, it's a big time waste for everybody. These days I just tell the recruiters what I'm looking for and if they aren't hiring for that job in that location I'll pass.

gdulli 11y ago
> Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint That's an artifact of a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege, and qualitatively better than working for any other company, so you should be willing to eat shit for the chance to do it. Well, they probably still believe it.
- mhurron 11y ago
  > a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege I don't see that that has really changed. It doesn't help the number of people that also still believe it though.
vonmoltke 11y ago
> Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways. Been there, done that, got the logo water bottle. I told the recruiters multiple times that I was fundamentally a systems/embedded developer and that I wanted a systems/embedded job (despite currently working in NLP). I was told they would make sure my rotation included people from those groups. I show up, and it's all guys from Search and Maps who want to ask me NLP and ML questions. :| The interview group was so far off my background and interests that one guy literally had to scrap all the questions he planned to ask. Overall it was a huge waste of time for everyone involved and money for Google, and has permanently turned me off the company.
arikrak 11y ago
I thought Google's hiring process was very fair and considerate, even though I initially felt I had done poorly on their interview.
- bane 11y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I think the process, once you're in the chute, is fair and relatively impartial (and about on par with any large company I've ever worked for). It's the matchmaking process beforehand that's a mess.
  - jowiar 11y ago
    My experience with their process is it is impartial to the point of being inhuman -- Like, Google is so thoroughly obsessed with "making the perfect decision" that they ignore the fact that candidates are actual human beings, not "machines with a programming attribute that can be rated with a scale of 1 to 10, and we'll take the 8s while passing on the 7s", and if after a day of interviews we're not sure whether we've got an 8 or 7, we'll throw it through the evaluations again.
asuffield 11y ago
(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways This is definitely not the case, because we don't have hiring managers (at least in engineering; there are parts of the company that this post doesn't apply to). The system has been designed to definitively prevent that sort of thing from happening. Nobody can say "I want that person" and hire them. You feed people into the hiring pipeline, they get interviewed by a series of calibrated peers, and then a separate committee of people who have never met the candidate reviews the interview feedback. There is no way for any single individual to get somebody hired. This largely removes personal biases from the outcome. As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  > As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do. Which is precisely why all small companies should do something completely different from Google. Google is virtually guaranteed to get applications from the majority of people in the field, so gets very low cost for a high false-negative rate.
  - philwelch 11y ago
    Arguably, it should actually be the other way around. If you make a bad hire, you increase the proportion of bad hires in your company by 1/NUM_EMPLOYEES. For Google, NUM_EMPLOYEES is very large, so making a bad hire is not disastrous for Google and they can probably get along for awhile. For smaller companies with <100 employees, you're increasing the proportion of bad hires in your company by entire percentage points every time you make a single bad hire.

by bane 11y ago

gdulli 11y ago

> Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint That's an artifact of a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege, and qualitatively better than working for any other company, so you should be willing to eat shit for the chance to do it. Well, they probably still believe it.

mhurron 11y ago
> a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege I don't see that that has really changed. It doesn't help the number of people that also still believe it though.

vonmoltke 11y ago

> Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways. Been there, done that, got the logo water bottle. I told the recruiters multiple times that I was fundamentally a systems/embedded developer and that I wanted a systems/embedded job (despite currently working in NLP). I was told they would make sure my rotation included people from those groups. I show up, and it's all guys from Search and Maps who want to ask me NLP and ML questions. :| The interview group was so far off my background and interests that one guy literally had to scrap all the questions he planned to ask. Overall it was a huge waste of time for everyone involved and money for Google, and has permanently turned me off the company.

arikrak 11y ago

I thought Google's hiring process was very fair and considerate, even though I initially felt I had done poorly on their interview.

bane 11y ago
Don't get me wrong, I think the process, once you're in the chute, is fair and relatively impartial (and about on par with any large company I've ever worked for). It's the matchmaking process beforehand that's a mess.
- jowiar 11y ago
  My experience with their process is it is impartial to the point of being inhuman -- Like, Google is so thoroughly obsessed with "making the perfect decision" that they ignore the fact that candidates are actual human beings, not "machines with a programming attribute that can be rated with a scale of 1 to 10, and we'll take the 8s while passing on the 7s", and if after a day of interviews we're not sure whether we've got an 8 or 7, we'll throw it through the evaluations again.

asuffield 11y ago

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways This is definitely not the case, because we don't have hiring managers (at least in engineering; there are parts of the company that this post doesn't apply to). The system has been designed to definitively prevent that sort of thing from happening. Nobody can say "I want that person" and hire them. You feed people into the hiring pipeline, they get interviewed by a series of calibrated peers, and then a separate committee of people who have never met the candidate reviews the interview feedback. There is no way for any single individual to get somebody hired. This largely removes personal biases from the outcome. As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do.

aidenn0 11y ago
> As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do. Which is precisely why all small companies should do something completely different from Google. Google is virtually guaranteed to get applications from the majority of people in the field, so gets very low cost for a high false-negative rate.
- philwelch 11y ago
  Arguably, it should actually be the other way around. If you make a bad hire, you increase the proportion of bad hires in your company by 1/NUM_EMPLOYEES. For Google, NUM_EMPLOYEES is very large, so making a bad hire is not disastrous for Google and they can probably get along for awhile. For smaller companies with <100 employees, you're increasing the proportion of bad hires in your company by entire percentage points every time you make a single bad hire.