13 ms·

> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interv

by NhanH 10y ago

> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one. Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?

bitL 10y ago
The guy you go to lunch with during your on-site interview @Google is most likely the one that becomes your boss if you are hired.
- akavi 10y ago
  This isn't true to my knowledge (I work at google). It's usually just another person from the interviewer pool. Decent chance you'll never see them or any of the other interviewers again after joining.
- wp1 10y ago
  FTFY: The guy you go to lunch with during your on-site interview @Google is most likely the one who hasn't completed interview training yet.
  - wattt 10y ago
    FTFY: the PERSON you go to lunch with...
    - jimmywanger 10y ago
      FTFY, guy and dude are pretty much asexual references for a person you don't know who you had a personal interaction with, at least in California. "Who did you have lunch with? Oh, some dude." Try not to language police here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.
      - iron0012 10y ago
        That's not true in my experience, and I doubt it's true in yours. While "guys" is sometimes employed to refer to a mixed gender group of people, it would be very weird for "guy" or "dude" to be used to refer to a woman. Argue in good faith, please. And try not to police PC here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.
        bobthecowboy 10y ago
        As someone who has lived in Southern California 90% of their life, and Berkeley, CA the rest, I can absolutely say that it is true in my experience that Californians (and I obviously include myself in this set) will use 'guy' and 'dude' to refer to anything. Men, women, children, dogs, cats, cars, burritos. Last week I got up from the table to throw the rest of my burrito away and offered to take my wife's as well by saying "Dude, are you going to finish that guy?" I understand it isn't "correct", and the English are within their rights weep for their language if they like, but it is not weird at all in coastal California.
        amyjess 10y ago
        I remember using "guy" to refer to a network cable at one point. "Do I plug this guy or that guy into the switch?" This was in North Texas.
        nogbit 10y ago
        I refer to many servers, consoles, screens etc as him/her/he/she/guy, and I to call out any last remaining food on the kids plate in the same way as you. West coast as well.
        jimmywanger 10y ago
        You bring up your experience, basically call me a liar about my experiences and accuse me of not adding anything to the discussion. Interesting. I grew up in California and what I said is a fact, as confirmed by other people. What are you bringing to the discussion exactly besides baseless accusations?
    - bitL 10y ago
      You guys should really fix English language. As a non-native speaker whose native language allows properly expressing gender anytime, I find this funny, being downvoted for what is a structural problem of your language :-D
      - int_19h 10y ago
        Thing is, most languages that do that don't just allow properly expressing gender, they require it. And that's not necessarily a good thing.
      - Grishnakh 10y ago
        Does your language allow referring to a person while leaving their gender unspecified? If not, your language is deficient. All the mainstream European languages I've seen (Germanic and Romance) don't seem to have this capability at all, and it's a big deficiency. Formal English doesn't have it either, but colloquially we've evolved it, using "they" (which of course is bad because it's supposed to be used for referring to people in the plural sense, not singular). So don't complain about a language having structural problems if yours isn't any better.
        bitL 10y ago
        It allows both ungendered and gendered approaches. It's really up to you to choose. So in fact my language is better in this regard, worse in others. Like any language. I would prefer mentalese over Vangelis' direct to be honest ;-)
      - hindsightbias 10y ago
        Regardless of what weird world they live in, nobody refers to a singular woman as a guy or dude in the mainstream. "guys" became gender neutral sometime in the 70's, Rita Moreno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_iGaQglnKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_iGaQglnKg
thedufer 10y ago
My experience was that they refused to even talk money before doing team matching. This was less than a year ago; maybe things have changed?
- redler 10y ago
  That's such a strange approach. The've marked you as a "hire" but not even discussed a range? Given how long this process sometimes takes, and that good people will have multiple offers (and typically an already comfortable income), how is one supposed to make a career decision?
  - oneweekwonder 10y ago
    duh it's google/facebook/etc... If you are willing to make the fanatic choice; your the employee they want. They might be missing out on a lot of talent in the industry. But they do weed the candidates down to fanatics.
  - thedufer 10y ago
    > how is one supposed to make a career decision By finishing the process? I had other offers, and they waited the <one week it took to finish team matching with Google. When would that take a long time? It was a quick chat with a few managers and then I picked.
coldpie 10y ago
My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.
- Altaer 10y ago
  I interviewed with them 2 years ago, as well as a couple of months ago. 2 years ago I would have rated the experience as "fine". My most recent experience was great, however. Very organized, lots of communication on Google's part, and I had a great interviewer. They have definitely made improvements.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).
  - coldpie 10y ago
    Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter. Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly on that, so they forwarded me to another recruiter who passed me on to a developer for a code interview. I was fairly fed up at this point and not looking for a job anyway, so I didn't do any interview prep. Interviewer sounded bored as hell, asked me to implement a graph deep copy algorithm and some other basic stuff. I haven't done algorithms implementation since college; I work in the real world where we have Google and libraries. So I bombed that, too. Got a call a few days later saying they're not interested. OK, see ya. Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit, which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies suck.
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      Sounds pretty much like my experience with Google. I'm an embedded programmer with a EE degree, not a CS degree, and they hammered me with a bunch of algorithm questions like you said. I'm not even interested in (nor qualified for) heavy-CS type work; I thought maybe they'd want me for more low-level stuff or doing some kind of work with hardware, custom OS or driver development, etc. But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush. Google's interviews are not at all like the interviews I've done with a bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small workgroup I ended up working in was a great team to work with, and again didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of years.
umanwizard 10y ago
Facebook is like this as well, but I very strongly disagree that it's a negative.
- existencebox 10y ago
  MSFT did this as well (at least for my hiring) and I found it to be negative, largely due to many reorgs shortly after hiring/being in a side of the company only peripherally related to what information I had going in. (ended up making friends on the team I'm still getting coffee with even today and the team ended up turning out fine from a career/productivity standpoint, but I likely would have taken a competing offer at the time had I known the work I'd actually been doing)

by NhanH 10y ago

bitL 10y ago

The guy you go to lunch with during your on-site interview @Google is most likely the one that becomes your boss if you are hired.

akavi 10y ago
This isn't true to my knowledge (I work at google). It's usually just another person from the interviewer pool. Decent chance you'll never see them or any of the other interviewers again after joining.
wp1 10y ago
FTFY: The guy you go to lunch with during your on-site interview @Google is most likely the one who hasn't completed interview training yet.
- wattt 10y ago
  FTFY: the PERSON you go to lunch with...
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    FTFY, guy and dude are pretty much asexual references for a person you don't know who you had a personal interaction with, at least in California. "Who did you have lunch with? Oh, some dude." Try not to language police here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.
    - iron0012 10y ago
      That's not true in my experience, and I doubt it's true in yours. While "guys" is sometimes employed to refer to a mixed gender group of people, it would be very weird for "guy" or "dude" to be used to refer to a woman. Argue in good faith, please. And try not to police PC here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.
      - bobthecowboy 10y ago
        As someone who has lived in Southern California 90% of their life, and Berkeley, CA the rest, I can absolutely say that it is true in my experience that Californians (and I obviously include myself in this set) will use 'guy' and 'dude' to refer to anything. Men, women, children, dogs, cats, cars, burritos. Last week I got up from the table to throw the rest of my burrito away and offered to take my wife's as well by saying "Dude, are you going to finish that guy?" I understand it isn't "correct", and the English are within their rights weep for their language if they like, but it is not weird at all in coastal California.
        amyjess 10y ago
        I remember using "guy" to refer to a network cable at one point. "Do I plug this guy or that guy into the switch?" This was in North Texas.
        nogbit 10y ago
        I refer to many servers, consoles, screens etc as him/her/he/she/guy, and I to call out any last remaining food on the kids plate in the same way as you. West coast as well.
      - jimmywanger 10y ago
        You bring up your experience, basically call me a liar about my experiences and accuse me of not adding anything to the discussion. Interesting. I grew up in California and what I said is a fact, as confirmed by other people. What are you bringing to the discussion exactly besides baseless accusations?
  - bitL 10y ago
    You guys should really fix English language. As a non-native speaker whose native language allows properly expressing gender anytime, I find this funny, being downvoted for what is a structural problem of your language :-D
    - int_19h 10y ago
      Thing is, most languages that do that don't just allow properly expressing gender, they require it. And that's not necessarily a good thing.
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      Does your language allow referring to a person while leaving their gender unspecified? If not, your language is deficient. All the mainstream European languages I've seen (Germanic and Romance) don't seem to have this capability at all, and it's a big deficiency. Formal English doesn't have it either, but colloquially we've evolved it, using "they" (which of course is bad because it's supposed to be used for referring to people in the plural sense, not singular). So don't complain about a language having structural problems if yours isn't any better.
      - bitL 10y ago
        It allows both ungendered and gendered approaches. It's really up to you to choose. So in fact my language is better in this regard, worse in others. Like any language. I would prefer mentalese over Vangelis' direct to be honest ;-)
    - hindsightbias 10y ago
      Regardless of what weird world they live in, nobody refers to a singular woman as a guy or dude in the mainstream. "guys" became gender neutral sometime in the 70's, Rita Moreno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_iGaQglnKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_iGaQglnKg

thedufer 10y ago

My experience was that they refused to even talk money before doing team matching. This was less than a year ago; maybe things have changed?

redler 10y ago
That's such a strange approach. The've marked you as a "hire" but not even discussed a range? Given how long this process sometimes takes, and that good people will have multiple offers (and typically an already comfortable income), how is one supposed to make a career decision?
- oneweekwonder 10y ago
  duh it's google/facebook/etc... If you are willing to make the fanatic choice; your the employee they want. They might be missing out on a lot of talent in the industry. But they do weed the candidates down to fanatics.
- thedufer 10y ago
  > how is one supposed to make a career decision By finishing the process? I had other offers, and they waited the <one week it took to finish team matching with Google. When would that take a long time? It was a quick chat with a few managers and then I picked.

coldpie 10y ago

My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.

Altaer 10y ago
I interviewed with them 2 years ago, as well as a couple of months ago. 2 years ago I would have rated the experience as "fine". My most recent experience was great, however. Very organized, lots of communication on Google's part, and I had a great interviewer. They have definitely made improvements.
kafkaesq 10y ago
Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).
- coldpie 10y ago
  Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter. Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly on that, so they forwarded me to another recruiter who passed me on to a developer for a code interview. I was fairly fed up at this point and not looking for a job anyway, so I didn't do any interview prep. Interviewer sounded bored as hell, asked me to implement a graph deep copy algorithm and some other basic stuff. I haven't done algorithms implementation since college; I work in the real world where we have Google and libraries. So I bombed that, too. Got a call a few days later saying they're not interested. OK, see ya. Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit, which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies suck.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    Sounds pretty much like my experience with Google. I'm an embedded programmer with a EE degree, not a CS degree, and they hammered me with a bunch of algorithm questions like you said. I'm not even interested in (nor qualified for) heavy-CS type work; I thought maybe they'd want me for more low-level stuff or doing some kind of work with hardware, custom OS or driver development, etc. But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush. Google's interviews are not at all like the interviews I've done with a bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small workgroup I ended up working in was a great team to work with, and again didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of years.

umanwizard 10y ago

Facebook is like this as well, but I very strongly disagree that it's a negative.

existencebox 10y ago
MSFT did this as well (at least for my hiring) and I found it to be negative, largely due to many reorgs shortly after hiring/being in a side of the company only peripherally related to what information I had going in. (ended up making friends on the team I'm still getting coffee with even today and the team ended up turning out fine from a career/productivity standpoint, but I likely would have taken a competing offer at the time had I known the work I'd actually been doing)