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Aren't Google acquihire offers conditional on passing the usual Google employee screening process? I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
by pinewurst 10y ago
Aren't Google acquihire offers conditional on passing the usual Google employee screening process?
I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
Say your employer is bought by Google - are you axed because you slept poorly and couldn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem on the whiteboard in 15 minutes?
- ModernMech 10y agoI don't know about Google, but I've heard of this happening during other acquisitions. A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in CS worked at a startup that was just acquired. He was responsible for the a lot of the tech in the platform they were acquiring, yet since he didn't pass their algorithms heavy interview they didn't want to hire him. He ended up working for one of the other companies interested in buying the startup.
- ryanSrich 10y agoLol wut? This can't be serious. Can you please name this company so everyone can avoid them?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- anon_123 10y agoSnapchat does this when they try to acquire companies.
- aswanson 10y agoHilarious. We've reached a place where a doctorate in CS is an insufficient qualification to delete a fucking file.
- ben_jones 10y agoIMO the pendulum swings both ways. I'd bet money many a PHD could not delete a file properly.
- jshevek 10y agoFrom what I've seen, people with PhDs in CS are less competent as devs than devs without PhDs.
- asabjorn 10y agoThat doesn't make sense at all. I do not see why a PhD would disproportionally filter out people with talent for coding, so that the graduates even after years of industry experience afterwards would still be unable to be great at coding.
- jshevek 10y agoI'm speaking anecdotally, and there are many ways my sample may be biased. (Also, maybe bad PhD devs make sure everyone knows they have PhDs, while competent devs never mention it?). OTOH, there could be something in culture and personality that pushes lesser devs into getting PhDs.
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoNo, but not having a PhD filters out people without a talent for coding. Same with not having a college degree at all - it's not that going to college makes you worse at coding, but that getting a coding job without a college degree requires you to be better at coding.
- plinkplonk 10y agoWhat a PhD in CS teaches you is how to do research in CS. This skill may or may not be valuable for a specific company and may or may not intersect with raw dev chops. Production Dev is a distinct skill from CS research.
- spotman 10y agoGoogle does this too. There is exceptions but they are rare.
- ModernMech 10y agoI'll just say it starts with a "P" and ends in "interest"
- eliben 10y ago> I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity. And yet you referred to it as "BS" and provided a sarcastic example in the same post. I'd say your attempt not to be negative and to sound serious failed.
- pjlegato 10y agoThe term "BS" should appear far more often in "serious" discourse. Far too much of what is currently being passed around as "serious" is, in fact, BS. And that wasn't sarcasm!
- jkaptur 10y agoGoogle's "Bachelor of Science" interview screening process? I'd assume that they would have an interview that would be appropriate to the degree they obtained. I'd also be surprised if Fermat's last theorem would be involved in any way - that's more of a math problem, and isn't relevant to the work of most software engineers.
- anaskar 10y agofrom what I've seen at Google specifically, when hiring for team talent, acquihires are typically performed in a binary fashion -- they take everybody who wants to go, without going through the regular screening process. n = 1
- fizixer 10y agoAfter reading your comment multiple times, I have no idea what you said.
- NegativeK 10y agoI believe anaskar is saying that, for the one instance they've seen, Google either takes on the entire team or no one, and they don't do the normal Google interview.
- eitally 10y agoAnd he may be right for n=1, but I know of n>1 instances where he's incorrect and whole teams were not taken. I even know of one instance where the CEO/founder was non-technical and they refused to allow him to remain in charge of the product post-acquisition. The direct of product, who was a Google SWE before the acquisition, took over.
- jhalstead 10y agoI read it as they take the employees, if they want to join, without any additional screenings/interviews. I assume n=1 means that's OP's sample size.
- 6nf 10y agoHis answer is 'no they do not have to pass the normal Google screening'
- jlaz 10y agoSpeaking from personal experience, that's not always true. When the company I worked for was acquired for team talent, they interviewed all but a handful of the engineers. Around half were given full time offers. Another group were given fixed-term offers and the remaining engineers didn't make it in. I was given a fixed-term offer. Several months and many interviews later, I made it in as a full time employee. I was never outright rejected, but due to circumstances involving my contract and project work, I probably took around 9-12 Google interviews over that time. They aren't fun. But in the end, I'd say it was worth it.
- linkregister 10y agoOne of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google. He had designed and contributed a decent portion of the core of the product. One of his projects for the company had about 50 stars on github. n=1
- MichaelMoser123 10y ago> One of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google amazing: they spend n million dollars just to get that talented individual, and then just throw it all away. My question is how is this expense reported/justified and who gets the difference? What about shareholder value?
- corobo 10y agoThey have many talented individuals who could probably figure out what does what with the code they just bought
- thewhitetulip 10y agonot to troll or anything but I find it utterly stupid that this is done. Also is it a big deal to have 1000 stars on a github project you run? I am curious because I do not know what the general perception is of github projects, I mean how much do they matter? I do not have a formal training on algorithms and I am studying machine learning now. Also I have a project having 200 something stars and one having 1000+ stars
- linkregister 10y ago1000+ stars is a pretty big deal! I imagine you could leverage this to gain software development job interviews if you were looking. Do they matter? It is just one of many metrics of how useful a repository is. I think it's one of the most public metrics that can be distilled to a single factoid on HN. There are absolutely better metrics to judge the quality of software.
- eitally 10y agoYes, you are correct (generally speaking).