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If you don't like Google's hiring process, apply somewhere else. There's plenty of viarety among a whole host of different companies large and small. The realit
by notliketherest 10y ago
If you don't like Google's hiring process, apply somewhere else. There's plenty of viarety among a whole host of different companies large and small. The reality is Google gets hundreds of thousands of candidates a year and has these processes in place for a reason. The interview machine at Google spans the entire company and everyone is expected to participate and give detailed feedback at each stage and "rank" a candidate on a 1-4 scale. You have to have some sort of normalization in place when you're interviewing at that scale, it's not enough to say "oh, this guy invented homebrew or this guy has some cool open source project, let's fast track him." It's unrealistic to think that. A lot of people complain that Google spends too much time on "things that don't matter like nuances of algorithms" but I'd disagree with that point. Google's not in the business of hiring "frontend devs" or "node js devs" theyre looking to hiring well rounded software engineers that would be expected to fit in any role given to them org wide. And honestly, it's not hard to pick up a data structure book and a "software engineer interview questions" book and study for a few weeks prior. You'd probably do pretty well.
- metaphorm 10y agoI'm not sure why you feel the need to apologize for and defend google's interviewing practices. they are entitled to interview in whatever way they choose, but you should recognize that it is a highly idiosyncratic process that has been widely criticized by many many many people.
- notliketherest 10y agoIt's also helped them become the world's most valuable company and home to some of the world's most brilliant engineers. I'm skeptical of people who critize this process - it's not perfect, what is? But it's worked out well for them I'd say.
- metaphorm 10y agoand you're still doing it. do you work at google or something?
- notliketherest 10y agoI can't reply to your other comment but I worked there several years ago. Am I brilliant? No. Did I study my ass off and understand the company's hiring practice in and out BECAUSE I WANTED A JOB THERE? absolutely. I didn't go in with some attitude like this guy in the article and resign myself to failure because of preconceived notions.
- tehwebguy 10y agoYou are explaining the problem exactly! Author spends their time building software; Hired Google employee spent their time studying to win the interview game.
- notliketherest 10y agoYou realize that "winning the interview game" consists of what's called "practicing"? Do you expect to succeed in life by winging it? I'm really taken aback by how many people think they're entitled to passing job interviews without preparing for them.
- GFischer 10y agoThe problem is when the interview has absolutely nothing to do with the day to day work the hired employee is expected to do. So someone who wants to be hired has to spend a lot of time and effort learning stuff that are only marginally useful - knowledge isn't bad per se, but it might be a bad allocation of resources. I'm not saying that it is so in Google's case, only that I've seen and participated in interviews where questions had no relevance to the job description.
- scalajunkie 10y agoThe interview process is not the only thing broken at Google. I turned them down about a year ago (for a better offer elsewhere) and was essentially told I would be blacklisted from applying there again. I do not know if this was official policy or just someone talking out of their ass. Either way, talk about sore losers.