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Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters

• ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
  It's like this person was inside my head. I agree basically word for word and do the same thing, cannot be bothered anymore, like he suggests, if they are telling him his profile is so great and 'impressive' why must they schedule a regular interview and on a whim reject him. Waste of time.
• johan_larson 10y ago
  I wonder how high up you have to get before the top-tier companies are willing to make an exception to their standard interview process. Director? VP?
  • whenwillitstop 10y ago
    I was exempted and moved all the way to the last round of interviews. The compensation was even negotiated before hand. I am a regular engineer with three years experience.
  • EdiX 10y ago
    whenwillitstop: you are hellbanned.
  • hocuspocus 10y ago
    I have a friend who would be level 7~8 at Google and he still gets generic emails from recruiters. Not sure they actually do hire anyone straight to this kind of engineer levels though, I assume they'd give you the salary and responsibilities and make you earn the title through promotions?
• noonespecial 10y ago
  Its the London Cabbie(1) method. They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people (for the value of smart that fits their biases). They just need as many warm bodies as possible to ram through their test so that a few trickle out the bottom of the funnel to keep the ranks from shrinking. If too many started getting hired, they'd add competitive basket weaving to the skillset if that's what it took to balance it. (1)http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/special-features/2014/08/140808-london-cabbies-knowledge-cabs-hansom-uber-hippocampus-livery/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/special-features/201...
  • ryandrake 10y ago
    > They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people I've found this to be decidedly not true, from many recruiter contacts. They have a role in mind they're trying to fill and if you point out that it's far more junior than what you're looking for, the conversation's over. Think about how must companies hire. The hiring manager fights internally and finally gets a req for a very specific role. They have to fill that role. Having a generally smart person would be great but they have this immediate need and they can only hire one person. And once that req is filled, no more hiring until you get another req. I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this!
    • Le_SDT 10y ago
      I think Valve works a bit like that from what I've read.
    • rarec 10y ago
      Nobody does that because being smart is of no guarantee that this person can be of any use to a business.
      • the_watcher 10y ago
        Are you entirely excluding university recruiting from this? Because consulting firms and investment banks routinely recruit smart people without any demonstrable experience doing what those companies plan to train them to do.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
        • VLM 10y ago
          That's almost exclusively ivy. We need a Yale guy, any Yale guy, doesn't matter who, just need it for the list of accomplishments. Then we can use our new "ivy atmosphere" to get that specific guy from Stanford or whatever. The only place hiring generic warm bodies at random state-U is Starbucks.
• ng12 10y ago
  Yeah it kind of sucks, but from Google's perspective it's absolutely necessary. So many people talk the talk, run a blog, have a neat looking resume/website/GitHub and just cannot perform. Unless you're an undisputed rockstar in a specific area and they're hiring exactly for your expertise you can't expect anything else. It's a huge waste of time to custom tailor to each candidate when 90% won't receive an offer. > There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. Take an afternoon and skim Cracking the Coding Interview before applying. There's no reason a competent engineer shouldn't be able to solve questions like that. You know exactly what's expected of you, show some initiative.
  • untog 10y ago
    > Take an afternoon and skim Cracking the Coding Interview before applying. There's no reason a competent engineer shouldn't be able to solve questions like that. You know exactly what's expected of you, show some initiative. I think the core issue here is whether the prospective employee should have to show some initiative. My initial reaction is that of course they should, but when you're fielding job offers from numerous companies, some of which don't require you to go out of your way to pick up new knowledge specifically and only so that you can pass an interview, why not just dump Google and go somewhere else? A few years ago Google was probably the most desirable place anyone could work, I really don't think that's true any more. Overall, it sounds like the system is working. Developers that don't much care for Google's methods won't go and work at Google. Those that are very passionate about working at Google for the sake of working at Google will jump through those hoops.
  • shmerl 10y ago
    You can't figure out if anyone can perform, by asking algorithms questions. That's rather a waste of time. Instead, they can be given a task to write some real code to solve a certain task, and of course not in 2 hours, but within a day let's say. And then evaluate the result. That can show how people perform. And not puzzle questions about problems that people were breaking their heads for years to crack.
    • 10y ago
• utnick 10y ago
  The worst part for me is how long the process takes, and how much time is invested for an interview process where the success rate is so low. My recent experience with AMZN was: - get contacted by recruiter, schedule a call with recruiter a few days later - take a take-home coding test a few days later - talk to the recruiter again a few days later to tell me I did well on the coding test - talk to another recruiter a few days after that, get scheduled for an all-day in person interview 4 weeks in the future - cram cracking the coding interview for 4 weeks - go to the interview all day, hear at the interview that I was close but didn't pass, they recommend I should try again in 6 months. All in all thats a pretty big time & mindshare investment
  • newobj 10y ago
    If Amazon (or probably anyone for that matter) has some reason to believe you have a short timeline, you can expedite all this. Both times I interviewed with Amazon (I boomeranged and worked there in two separate stints), I had other loops/offers from other co's, and went from initial contact w/ Amazon to an offer in ~4 days.
  • geodel 10y ago
    May be not for many people here on HN but for very large number of engineers job opportunity Google/Amzn/MS/FB etc are once in a lifetime type. I have not met people in my circles who would balk at interview process there.
    • mindcrime 10y ago
      for very large number of engineers job opportunity Google/Amzn/MS/FB etc are once in a lifetime type Meh. Being a developer is being a developer. Not to say that certain specific companies don't sometimes have specific challenges or perks that would be of unique interest to somebody, but by and large, there's no real reason to think if Google/Facebook/Amazon/$anybody_else as a "dream job." I used to think that way, and after working at two of my "dream job" companies, I've realized that it's pretty never what it's cracked up to be. Really, the world is SO much bigger than just GoogBookHooSoftCart... I'd encourage people to NOT put those companies on any kind of pedestal.
• stuckagain 10y ago
  > There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. Interview process: complete success.
  • untog 10y ago
    Depends what the job description is, surely. And if the developer isn't interested in working on these things, surely it's failure on Google's part to effectively target who they are approaching?
    • johannes1234321 10y ago
      The job description is "Software Engineer at Google" They hire some special roles from time to time, but then they approach people differently (i.e. on a personal level) otherwise they hire people they ideally can move easily from project to project.
  • johannes1234321 10y ago
    For a complete success they would have a way to filter out people without algorithm knowledge early on. A day of interviews already costs them some money, especially on the scale they are doing this.
    • stuckagain 10y ago
      Yeah maybe you are right on that point. At Google at least the filtering by stage seems to be: Recruiter phone interview: do you speak English? Technical phone interview: have you ever programmed a computer before? Technical on-site interview: do you know a few things about data structures and algorithms?
      • iainmerrick 10y ago
        What's funny is that Google seems to think they're really good at interviewing -- for example, see this Washington Post puff piece: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/an-inside-look-at-googles-data-driven-job-interview-process/2013/09/03/648ea8b2-14bd-11e3-880b-7503237cc69d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/an-i... Possibly they are, but it's hard to see solid evidence one way or the other. I guess they can't be really bad in the sense of hiring mostly bad candidates, as that would surely cause big problems before long. But they could be about the same as other big bay area companies.
• 010a 10y ago
  I've turned down actual offers because even some medium-sized companies won't tell you which team you'll be working on when the offer is extended. I get that things can be fluid, but its such a meat machine.
  • edgan 10y ago
    That is when you know they just see you as another cog.
    • quantumf 10y ago
      These perspectives are very negative. An alternative view is that there are tons of interesting problems and projects and applications to be worked on, and to some degree at least you get a say in which ones you work on.
• xt00 10y ago
  Places like google give you a guide on how to prepare. So it consists of stuff like algorithms and data structures. I do wonder sometimes how much it is tailored to getting people who are fresh out of college rather than more experienced. My take is that you basically have to spend time preparing and studying so as to get past those types of questions then finally you talk one on one with the people you likely would work with and then it's smooth sailing for experienced people. But the entry bar can be pretty tough to get past with zero prep.
  • forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    Why should skilled developers with extensive track-records in their field be forced to use their free time to cram for college-style exams? Other professions dealing with exact-sciences / engineering don't seem to have this problem..
    • filoleg 10y ago
      While I agree with the sentiment, I wouldn't call it "college-style exams", to be honest. Colleges would be quite different if exams were conducted one-on-one, and instructor would have been willing to talk with you through the problem and cared more about your thought train and approach rather than the exact solution. In fact, I am pretty sure that if you just knew the correct solution and the answer to the coding interview and simply wrote it down silently on the whiteboard (which would be the best outcome on a college exam), you would be rejected instantaneously.
      • paulgb 10y ago
        I used to interview for Google, if a candidate knew an answer immediately I'd be impressed but I'd always have a harder variation in my back pocket. And if you write out the answer in silence, be prepared for a "tell me how it works" follow-up.
      • FLUX-YOU 10y ago
        >simply wrote it down silently on the whiteboard (which would be the best outcome on a college exam), you would be rejected instantaneously. No, jesus. Some people need to switch to a presentation mindset and out of a problem-solving mindset. This is completely normal in life. I'm starting to think most interviewers are terrible only for not having a decent amount of social interaction with strangers. Let's just admit it's 90% hazing ritual at this point so we can get on with putting up guides to get through it.
• falsedan 10y ago
  Part of the problem is that these companies don't know who your direct manager will be, since they don't know where you'd best fit! Or worse, by the time you finish your notice period, they've re-orged and another team needs engineers more than the originally-intended team. One of the skills they're looking for is adaptability/flexibility, to offset the terrible resource planning. The message I really get from this post is that they'd be happier in a more structured, predictable environment, and there are plenty of places like that, old+new, small+large.
• zschuessler 10y ago
  Similar story: a few years back I was interested in applying to TopTal for side work. As a senior engineer working with well known companies, I thought the acceptance process wouldn't be as bad as claimed on their homepage. Passed the first personality interview. The second was a coding challenge. I said to the interviewer several times I have not studied algorithms, and that if the coding challenge involves them, I would prefer to drop out and not waste time for anyone involved. I was very happy to say that multiple times - I know what I don't know. The interviewer goaded me into taking the challenge anyway, saying I'll "definitely be fine and pass." The next day I attend the timed coding challenge. Three algorithm puzzles that are in no way insignificant. I had Google at my disposal and still could not solve a single problem - although I came close on one involving permutations of chess pieces. Unreal. At least Yegor had the good fortune of not being directly lied to by the recruiters!
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• preinheimer 10y ago
  This also solves another problem. Many orgs have their recruiters slot a candidate into a particular role really early on in the process (possibly even before the first phone screen). So you're not applying for a job at FooCorp, you're applying to be a Level 2 Engineer on the WidgetSearch team. By the time the third interview finishes, it turns out you're a bad fit, and the process stops. This doesn't mean there's not a great role for you inside the company, just that the you were tagged for in their recruiting software wasn't it. By having the future direct manager involved early, they can hopefully say "I need a algorithm person, not an OOP person. Go talk to Carla, she's been looking for someone like this" sooner.
  • jorgemf 10y ago
    They should ask you whether you want just to join the company in any role or you want to be working in a specific role.
• lazyant 10y ago
  Well, in their defense (Google/Amazon/Facebook etc), a team leader or any other particular person cannot interview 500 applicants, so either more people are interviewers or they are way more specific with initial resume (which can be fake to a big extend). I don't like algorithm questions either but at least they optimize by time, the alternative is to have people in for a few days, or spend a day doing chat interviews and risk getting a bullshitter.
  • taway_1212 10y ago
    They don't need to interview 500 people for their generic jobs. Filter people early based on CV and some phone screens and then talk to a couple people and select someone reasonable.
  • deathanatos 10y ago
    > a team leader or any other particular person cannot interview 500 applicants While, yes, it often takes interview more than one, and often several people, to find a desirable candidate — it's not that high. Given that any candidate will see probably around 4 interviewers, I don't think asking that the manager interview is that big a deal. I have to agree with that part of the article (though I disagree with it on the whole): meeting your manager-to-be is important. (And I don't think one understands this until one has a bad manager.) In a prior job, we would also omit the manager interview if it was certain the candidate wasn't going to be a pass.
• jorgemf 10y ago
  I did an interview with Google few years ago, I still don't know the position they wanted me for. I make pretty clear my preferences but I was interviewed by random engineers not related with what I wanted to do in Google. I guess they just want software engineers as workforce. They don't really care about what you want and your skills, if you are very good at something you will probably be good at something else.
• 40acres 10y ago
  There is no standard way to interview a software engineer. Whenever one of these threads come up we see multiple posters explaining their process, and while each process has it's upsides and downsides, no two are exactly the same. For a company the size of Google, with the amount of applicants they receive, I would assume that an interview standard is absolutely necessary. It's not perfect, but for 95% of developers out there you know EXACTLY what you're going to get when you interview Google. I think there is something to be said about that. Google recruiters tell you what the interview will be like, they give you study materials, and are pretty gracious with scheduling. If you don't like the process, that's fine, but I think Google in particular has done a good job of standardizing their process. It may not work for individual cases, but I would assume it works well for the company.
  • overcast 10y ago
    The problem here is that he wasn't pursuing it, they were pursuing him. Maybe the issue lies in the actual recruitment process, and not the stupid interview questions.
  • metaphorm 10y ago
    the problem with the way Google interviews is that, despite it being heavily standardized, it is not sensitive to non-algorithmic skills and talents that interviewees have. It will _only_ pass candidates who are unusually good at algorithm puzzles, on whiteboards, under time pressure.
    • codazoda 10y ago
      This seems to be the type of employee Google is looking for, in which case, it works great.
      • pmontra 10y ago
        Maybe it's not what they are looking for. Maybe it's only the easiest test, like looking for the keys under the lamp post. It could also be that this way of hiring people turned the company into a specific direction, more attention to the sw and less to the customers.
• zrail 10y ago
  At this point in my career I typically respond by stating that I'm only interested in remote work and asking what their budget is. I have yet to hear back either.
• tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
  I think when a company reaches a certain size it is hard to expect that there is such a thing as "a manager looked at my github/qualifications and decided they need me so they will tailor the interview to my skillset". At this point it feels the interview process is becoming more of a combo between a hazing ritual and a lottery than something actually useful to ascertain if the person interviewed would be a good match for the position or not. The longer the interview is, also, the more likely one will be discarded because one of the many interviewers is having a bad day, or because after several hours of whiteboarding one can understandably draw a blank on a simple question they would've waltzed through 4 hours prior and be failed because of that. How long before interviews also contain an anti-doping panel to weed out candidates trying to improve their odds? It is strange though that in a country where there is at-will employment one is basically told that hiring the "wrong person" could destroy the company or something and so the interviewer has to make really really really really sure that the candidate is absolutely ok. I personally think the risk of hiring somebody and they can't cut it after three months and you have to let them go, is worth not passing the candidate that doesn't do well at whiteboarding but will instead prove to be great when tasked with real business problems that take more than a few minutes to solve.
  • stcredzero 10y ago
    I think when a company reaches a certain size it is hard to expect that there is such a thing as "a manager looked at my github/qualifications and decided they need me so they will tailor the interview to my skillset". Why? As a matter of fact, I have a friend who met a manager at Burning Man, then was hired into Google in just such a manner. He described the Google interviewing process as "a breeze!" My reaction: What!?
  • mdekkers 10y ago
    It is strange though that in a country where there is at-will employment one is basically told that hiring the "wrong person" could destroy the company or something and so the interviewer has to make really really really really sure that the candidate is absolutely ok. What it does is destroy the recruiters reputation and KPI charts.
• ryandrake 10y ago
  Unlike most of HN (it seems), I like hearing from recruiters, because despite the very low signal-to-noise ratio, there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job". It's zero cost to me to politely reply to a recruiter and ask for more info, and I try to at least respond to everyone. What I've found is that they must have a lot of candidates they're juggling because falling out of the funnel is surprisingly easy! It's amazing how often "Hey, thanks for reaching out, I'm interested. Can you tell me more about the role?" results in the conversation ending right away. Probably over 50% recruiters that contact me do not reply back after that very polite and neutral response. Many who do keep the conversation going have not read my profile or resume carefully, so I'll give them a summary of the types of work I'm actually interested in, which is never what they contact me for, and politely decline to move forward with the (usually way too junior) role they are looking to fill. That will almost always end the engagement. Sure, it's a lot of noise, but filtering is very cheap: the time it takes to reply back. My actual success rate with recruiters probably pretty average. Of the eight or so jobs I've had in my ~20 year career, about three were obtained through recruiters, two times through in-house staff, once through an external recruiter.
  • rb1 10y ago
    Now consider this approach with spam. To paraphrase you, there's always that remote chance that one of the Nigerian Princes could actually need your help. I used to do a similar thing to you, but it's too much work now and the levels of job spam ("Oil pipeline engineer" roles, simply because my CV has the word engineer in it (prefixed with Software)... lazy recruiter, that's bad!). Basically, if they can't make the effort, why should I? I guess the answer is, "Because there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job""..
    • davidcbc 10y ago
      Recruiters and Nigerian scams aren't comparable. People legitimately get jobs through recruiters. I got my dream job through a recruiter who found me. Nobody gets the Nigerian Prince's money
• malisper 10y ago
  > I should have told her that I didn't want to be interviewed by some programmers, because I would most certainly fail. There was no need to try. I wanted to be interviewed by the person who really needs me: my future boss. That person will understand my profile and won't ask pointless questions about algorithms, simply because he or she will know what my duties will be and what kind of problems I will be capable of solving, if they hired me. While I agree with the author about algorithm questions being relatively pointless, my sense is they don't know about the team matching process. After I interviewed with Google, they presented me with a list of a eight teams who were interested in me and asked me to rank them in order of preference. They then had me come back a second day and meet with the managers of the top four teams I selected. At the end of the day, I ranked the teams again. The team I ranked the highest who also wanted to hire me was the team I would have joined if I had accepted my offer. I much prefer the current process where you have one day of general interviews, and then go back a second day and just talk with the managers of the teams you would be interested in. It would only make the process much more of a hassle for everyone involved if you had to be interviewed by the managers of every team for which there was mutual interest.
• mabbo 10y ago
  Amazon won't hire you just for one role. The company allows free movement between teams by SDEs. If you're an SDE, you're an SDE, and you're welcome to change teams so long as the new manager will take you. If you don't know algorithms, maybe that's okay for the team you're joining. But hiring you means screwing over the team you're going to be on in 3 years. That's why they interview that way.
  • hbosch 10y ago
    Nit: I believe you can't move more freely than once every 30 days or so. ;)
    • mabbo 10y ago
      When I joined, it was once every 12 months. All I know is that they removed that rule recently.
• cortesoft 10y ago
  You aren't going to interview with your future manager because they don't know who your future manager is. They need to hire hundreds of people, they aren't going to try to get separate candidates for each role, and they aren't going to have you interview with a hundred different managers. My company is experiencing this as we grow; we have too many openings to have each team try to recruit for their open spots. We need a more general queue of talent to hire, so that we can interview for 10 open spots for every interview we do.
  • hehheh 10y ago
    > You aren't going to interview with your future manager because they don't know who your future manager is. I generally agree when it comes to cold resumes. However, in this case, OP is talking about being actively recruited. In that case there ought to be a specific manager that was looking for a specific type of person. Otherwise the recruiter is just wasting everyone's time.
  • disordr 10y ago
    I recently interviewed and accepted a position at Amazon. Prior to the interview the recruiters did a great job of preparing me for what to expect. My direct manager was also part of the interview team, so I got to meet them. Overall it was a very pleasant experience, which is part of the reason I decided to join.
• 65827 10y ago
  I really like this strategy, fighting back against these monolithic HR departments and bored engineers asking terrible questions is something we need to do more and more.
• rdtsc 10y ago
  > I learned my lesson two years ago, when Amazon tried to recruit me. I got an email from the company that said they were so impressed by my profile and couldn't wait to start working with me. They needed me, nobody else. I was naive, and the message did flatter me. I learned mine with AWS as well: Scheduled call. They forgot to call. Waited like an idiot for an hour. Ok fine big company yadda, yadda. Had the phone interview. Liked me, called me onsite. Before coming onsite was sent the Leaderhips Princples and told to learn and will be quizzed on them basically. Had 2 offers in hand already and was told they'd get back to me at most 2 days after the interviews. Got to the site. Future manager who was supposed to interview me not there. Whiteboard questions, solve some algorithm puzzles. "Tell me about your worst failure". Most people I talked to would not have even worked with. People did not seem happy, kept warning me about how hard it is to work there and so on. (Subconsciously perhaps telling me to stay away?) Lunch time comes, at least think I'll eat lunch with future team. So I wait, and wait, and nobody shows up. Ended up wondering the hallways exploring. Hoping someone would ask me if I am supposed to be there. Then I got a bit snarky after that and kind of gave up on the chance of wanting to work there. Went home. It took them 3 weeks to call me. But I wasn't surprised by that point.
  • valuearb 10y ago
    LOL, your experience was much like mine. They sent me a ton of stuff to study pre-interview, which I thought was odd way to bias my answers (I attribute that to the recruiters trying to game system to get more of their finds hired and look good). When I got there the door was locked and I was trapped in an ante-room with another candidate waiting for 45 minutes. Interviews with a bunch of randoms, half from other teams. Only one whiteboard test which I apparently didn't do well on.
  • stcredzero 10y ago
    Scheduled call. They forgot to call. Back in the 90's and early 2000's in non Silicon Valley tech companies, this was Simply Not Done. I find Silicon Valley tech culture a little loose when it comes to interpersonal morals.
  • euyyn 10y ago
    Shitty experience of not showing up apart, I know that, at Google, the fact that the hiring manager isn't involved in the selection process is done on purpose, to reduce bias.
• alistproducer2 10y ago
  I agree with this post. I've turned down Google interviews twice precisely because I was immersed in personal projects and didn't want to spend the time needed to practice algorithm writing just for a test. I could understand if they ask you practical questions like "when and why would you use a trie?" that seems more appropriate than "write a trie on my whiteboard or you're not smart enough to work here." None of their engineers are writing trees by hand and in fact are actively encouraged not to "reinvent the wheel."
• jdhopeunique 10y ago
  I did a second phone interview at Amazon once. I have several years experience and understood the algorithm for the problem fine but got tripped up on the syntax a little. I was interviewing for a specific team and I could tell the interviewer was just looking for an excuse not to hire me. Perhaps I dodged a bullet in not getting on that team, but now I have to wait before I can apply anywhere else at Amazon.
• nsxwolf 10y ago
  The amount Amazon spends on airfare for these wasted trips must be staggering. I'm in Chicago and I don't know very many people who haven't gone on this strange pilgrimage to Seattle.
  • rabidrat 10y ago
    Amazon has free shipping with Prime.
• lowbloodsugar 10y ago
  See his posts How We Interview Programmers [0] and Hacker-vs-Programmer [1] for more insight. It is ironic, then, that the author is claiming that algorithms, and knowledge of them, are unimportant for a programmer. "There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them." He believes he is a good programmer, and that learning algorithms is not necessary to qualify as a good programmer. I think the claim is based on the idea that we now have tons of memory and disk, so programmers don't need to worry about optimization. Which seems to have an obvious contradiction, which is that if you have huge quantities of memory and disk then ignorance of algorithms, and, e.g. O(n^2) causes shit-hitting-fan failures. Re: [2]. [0] http://www.yegor256.com/2016/03/01/how-we-interview-programmers.html http://www.yegor256.com/2016/03/01/how-we-interview-programm... [1] http://www.yegor256.com/2014/10/26/hacker-vs-programmer-mentality.html http://www.yegor256.com/2014/10/26/hacker-vs-programmer-ment... [2] http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/ http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/ Edit: added the quote.
  • onion2k 10y ago
    It is ironic, then, that the author is claiming that algorithms, and knowledge of them, are unimportant for a programmer He didn't say that.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • valuearb 10y ago
    There is a ton of development that doesn't require knowing advanced algorithms. When I develop for iOS, most of my data structures are provided by the OS, including generic data storage. There are compelling reasons to use them, most importantly speed of development, and the fact that my apps simply won't have performance issues noticeable by my customers. Once in a blue moon I will have a hot spot that is noticeable. So I'll break out a hash table, not a book on algorithms, and solve it in a few minutes.
  • logfromblammo 10y ago
• KirinDave 10y ago
  I have just been through the Google process for recruiting. While I have some minor complaints about timing, I never once was not interviewing with the team and leadership that held the req. Heck, even their technical was respectful and topical every time. So I'm a bit confused by this post.
• adamzerner 10y ago
  Asking to be interviewed by your future boss seems like a proxy for asking to be interviewed in such a way where it's directly relevant to your job. If so, why not directly ask for the latter? Your future boss isn't the only one who can perform that sort of interview.
• soheil 10y ago
  > There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. They are just looking for smart people. If you ever looked it up it's 5 lines of code. That's the whole point they're not forcing you to learn something: A) so esoteric you will never encounter in your programming career B) so complicated that you'd have to spend days practicing it, etc In my opinion a lot of these questions are disguised IQ tests wrapped in algorithms since they can't blatantly ask "brain teaser" questions anymore.
  • pjmlp 10y ago
    You mean like the famous inverting tree whiteboard exercise that the Homebrew author failed? Which lead them to refuse to give a job to the guy that actually developed a software used by those with higher IQ to come up with tree inversion algorithms?
    • soheil 10y ago
      Yes, I completely agree with you that their recruiting system has a lot of false positives, but I was just clarify that algorithm questions are really IQ questions, which is as you rightly point out is a flawed proxy for predicting how well someone will perform in their role.
  • hocuspocus 10y ago
    They can definitely ask brain teasers, they decided to stop because it proved useless. Some questions are fair, but there's a reason most candidates spend weeks/months practicing. Good luck pulling off something like a topological sort if you haven't studied the algorithm recently.
  • unprepare 10y ago
    >If you ever looked it up it's 5 lines of code. multiply that 5 lines of code by all the possible algorithms they couldve asked about instead of this one. Thats what you need to know walking into the interview, seems kinda stupid
• volkk 10y ago
  Personally, my biggest issue with interviewing at large companies like these by people whom you aren't necessarily going to be working with, is that not everyone is in a position to interview people. I personally hate interviewing other people and having to be responsible for their futures. I was never trained for it, and I don't want to ever deal with it. I just want to code and make sure the product I'm working on is coming along smoothly. I've had countless interviews where I could immediately tell upon entering the room that the interviewer does not want to be there at all. It's a lose lose situation. For me, because I get demoralized instantly, and he's already got a chip on his shoulder for having had to do this in the first place. Everything I say going forward from that point on is an uphill battle. I think only managers/very few people who are truly trained should interview people as that is kind of the essence of a manager's job--making sure they have happy, solid team. I don't even mind the technical questions. I just want to be in a room with someone who is actually potentially excited having me there. Not grilling me in a depressed fashion
  • welder 10y ago
    Facebook has a "shadower" who is in your room just to learn to be a better interviewer. A shadower pairs up with the interviewer for each round. You can't just say inexperienced interviewers can't interview, then how would anyone ever get experience?
• base698 10y ago
  I like how every week one of these posts comes up. So many posts telling the world that they don't want to be the algorithm guy--the world doesn't care. Forgetting the Maxim: "Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up." https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/potentialdemotivator.jpeg?v=1414017238 https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/potenti...
  • nsxwolf 10y ago
    But an "algorithm guy" kind of IS the astronaut, no? Most work is line of business, CRUD, wiring up web forms, etc.
• zo7 10y ago
  I've stopped talking to recruiters in general. I've never had someone reach out because I'm a good fit for the role/company, but I've had a lot where it's obvious that I just ticked enough boxes on their hiring checklist to push me through the pipe. Once I got messaged by a recruiter who was very enthusiastic about meeting "expert Rails devs" and wanted to hop on a call to see if I had any interest in their company. I've never touched Ruby in my life though. I also just started my first machine learning job recently. Before I was even a month into it I started getting messages from recruiters from companies like Microsoft who were looking for "top ML talent" like me. Unless there's an actual genuine interest from the recruiter, I don't think you gain any advantage by responding to them.
• kleiba 10y ago
  Why I don't talk to Google recruiters: they never call.
• sandworm101 10y ago
  Better than my emails from new clients: "Head office called last week. We need X but have no idea what X means. We asked Bill to look into it but after a day his eyes started bleeding. Help!" ( Im an attorney doing privacy and compliance work. I've never been given a night in a 5-star by any current or potential client. )
  • pinewurst 10y ago
    As a preface for working at Amazon, that 5 star hotel is like a condemned prisoner's choice of meal.
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      The military has put me up in some rather nice on-base hotels a few times. And they send a driver to pick me up in the morning. Id take a free meal at the chow hall over the breakfast buffet at most 5-stars.
• wnevets 10y ago
  People questioning his ability as a programmer are missing the point. He was approached by the recruiter/amazon, not the other way around.
• thurn 10y ago
  Interviewing only with your eventual manager is massively inefficient. Imagine I'm a hiring manager with one headcount available. Let's say Google gets about 5000 applications per day and hires 50 people per day, so I need to interview around 100 people to fill that spot. If two of those people meet my criteria, the extra ones get rejected anyway. Even more time is wasted than with the algorithm question approach (and honestly, stuff like tree traversal comes up all the time, even in client application code, so you might still get asked about it).
  • laurencerowe 10y ago
    Engineers/managers from somewhere in the organization are still needed to phone screen and interview people that make it through the initial recruiter bar. If people in your team were to interview applicants for jobs on your team wouldn't it take the same amount of time on average?
• seangrogg 10y ago
  Maybe he should talk to Google's contract recruiters. I got interviewed by my manager, my interview was extremely relevant to the tasks that have since been expected of me... it was good times. Between the perks, the pay, and getting to work on various projects that always have me learning new and exciting things about front-end development I think the fifteen minute investment I made in exchanging pleasantries with a recruiter has paid off. Though that could just be my morning coffee talking.
• TallGuyShort 10y ago
  That reply has a lot of worth to it. I very nearly worked for Yahoo many years ago and was very excited about it, but it fell apart at the last minute. In the end, what should have been my big red flag is how evasive they were every time I asked to talk to someone specifically from my team. I was given offers from multiple specific teams and had to choose one before I was given the details of the offer (i.e. salary and other benefits), so I had assumed there was a specific team. In the end their turned out to be a massive disconnect between my qualifications and what they were going to have me do. I really didn't appreciate it, especially after I had tried so hard to do more specific preparation from my end. Now I look at this standard reply and I think its genius. I'll go the extra mile for my employer but if they're that impersonal right off the bat it's probably not a good match. Sure, they're running at scale and maybe anything more isn't practical, but clearly it's not for me.
• benevol 10y ago
  Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters? Because they know already everything about me. And you. And all of us.
• SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  I'm up in the northeast and at a level where I'm not going to get emails from Google/Amazon/etc for an engineering position. But I do get a ton of what I consider recruiter spam - usually something tangentially related to my background, and often fairly junior (I'm on the very low end of the executive ranks nowadays). I used to ignore it, but I've decided since that while I'm not going to be remotely interested in the role they've proposed, I can at least clarify my background and career level should they have something more appropriate. And for the total form email recruiter spam, I'll sometimes reply asking their rate range for W2 and 1099. I never get a response to those. Well, I'm lying, I did once and it was to say "let's discuss it on a call." No thanks, that means it's low. And being a small world up here, I knew who the client was anyway, and what they were trying to do. I had no business getting that email.
  • digler999 10y ago
    > I never get a response to those. Exactly. Thats what makes this such a difficult game. If you pay enough, filling positions won't be a problem. The problem comes when you try to fill positions while simultaneously suppressing wages to the lowest tolerable level. Even the dumbest monkey will learn to do tricks if you offer enough bananas.
    • SmellTheGlove 10y ago
      But nobody wants to pay enough. I hate to be a presumptive asshole, but if I get 5 different emails from 5 different recruiters for what appears to be the same position with the same client - all either form emails or in barely readable messages (or incomprehensible voicemails), I'm going to presume they're not offering anything reasonable relative to the work asked.
      • digler999 10y ago
        I had to fight for it, dealing with some really skeezy recruiters for a contract position that advertised/expressed a rate of $x5/hr, once I passed one of the 3 phone/skype interviews, and they realized I was a viable candidate, they immediately tried to insinuate that they couldn't afford anything more than $X0/hr or a fulltime salaried position at $(X-10)/hr. I said shove it, and lo and behold, they called back and the $X5 rate was yet again available. I complete 2 more interviews, and they get ready to draft an offer and they tried again to get me to accept $X2/hr, then $X3, for no explicable reason. I said no, and in my offer letter they wrote $X5/hr *{rate may change at time (sic)}. I made them re-draft it, flew to the client site, and after a tense 2 weeks (worrying if I got paid the full amount), I finally got paid what they advertised.
• rb2k_ 10y ago
  At Facebook you can usually chose which team you will join after bootcamp, so asking to be interviewed by your future manager is a bit of a problem.
  • perlgeek 10y ago
    The recruiter could just reply with such an explanation, and then explore of if something could be done to satisfy the candidate's desired to be interviewed by a specific person.
• misingnoglic 10y ago
  The idea of speaking to your future manager is a bit absurd for this type of job, where they're not hiring you for a specific role with a specific manager. If they did that, the project you're hired into may not exist in a few months. They want people who would be good at any project, under any manager.
• jff 10y ago
  > some programmers who didn't know a thing about my profile asked me to invent some algorithms on a white board for almost four hours. Yep. Did the phone interview after weeks of back-and-forth, told them what I was interested in, told them I was only interested in working on such-and-such, then they drop me in the standard "write memcpy for us" interview. The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months." If someone like David Presotto or Rob Pike want to recruit me directly, fine, but after similar experiences with Amazon I've decided the typical mega-startup interview process is for the birds.
  • yeukhon 10y ago
    Assembly, did you apply for some low-level embedded system job? For most software engineering jobs, I would drop my jaws and freak out if someone asks me to look at an assembly bug. I probably will look at it and try to figure the shit out, but oh lord.
  • thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months." Not great, but there is a world of difference between, on the one hand: (1) there is a bug; (2) it's in these 30 lines of code, and on the other hand: something's wrong, and the problem might be somewhere in your two million lines of code.
  • astrange 10y ago
    > The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months." Sounds like he's narrowed it down for you! But if it's in asm, the bug is usually just a typo.
• stcredzero 10y ago
  There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. Let's presume this is out of preference and not ability. It's a pretty basic concept. If your preference stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn't seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts. Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that. I'd rather hire someone who knows exactly why it's O(n^2) and why adding to the end of an array that doubles when it expands is O(n) amortized. Why? Because a different but analogous situation might well come up in a programming job, and the person who likes to think about such things is more likely to spot the potential problem and avoid it altogether! The fact that the op would actually feature the above sentences as a large text excerpt sets off the "Dunning-Kruger" alarm for me. That said, the op still has a good point. There is considerable organizational disconnect being displayed here. Those big companies would do well to have developers or a puzzle website do the initial filtering, rather than waste people's time by alternatively telling them they're supposedly wonderful, then supposedly horrible.
  • pm90 10y ago
    I think you got it right. The fundamental issue seems to be that the recruiter flattered the candidate and made him/her think that they had genuinely looked through their profile and determined that they would be a good candidate. Most recruiters will not do this, simply because their priorities are not aligned that way. I think the OP revealed a very important mechanism: recruiters' job is just to get bodies in the system, which needs more people continuously for replacement and expansion.
  • CJKinni 10y ago
    > Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that. You and I live in different worlds, or have vastly different definitions of 'programmer.'
    • trollsonson 10y ago
• fecak 10y ago
  Being an agency recruiter in 2017 is becoming impossible in that fewer and fewer people are even willing to talk to you, which is one reason I've diversified into resumes and coaching. I have almost 20 years in the industry, led a large successful users group for 15 years, have published tons of content for tech pros (often critical of recruiters), and have a pretty solid reputation in the industry, I write targeted and friendly approaches (no surprise calls at your desk), and I still have difficulty getting responses from people. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for people who don't have my 'cred' with developers, but the signal to noise makes most people filter out all messages. So for the most part, I've stopped reaching out to new candidates. Outreach is mostly futile, so my time is better spent doing other things to try and get potential candidates to come to me instead. It goes completely against what recruiting is built upon (always be recruiting, recruit everybody, source, smile and dial, etc.), but when people approach me the outcomes are much more positive. When I got into recruiting (circa 1998), the primary skill of a recruiter was just identifying potential candidates. There was no LinkedIn, nobody had websites, no social media. The skill was calling into a company and finding out who the Java developers were by navigating different people, and in my case I did this without lying to anyone (there was rusing, but no outright lies). Now identifying people is ridiculously easy (identifying actual talent is a little different), and so easy in fact that we've turned into an industry of spammers. This model doesn't seem sustainable, and I expect agency recruiters will continue to be replaced by better systems. Nobody seems to have gotten it just right to this point, but some are getting close.
  • jcadam 10y ago
    I used to respond to just about every recruiter email/call. Problem is, as you noted, that so much of what I receive these days is spam that I've stopped bothering to reply to most of them. Now, occasionally I'll receive a well crafted email that was obviously specifically targeted to me and I'm so impressed that I have to reply :)
    • fecak 10y ago
      Most of my responses do mention that they did so because of the attention to detail in the message. Even the ones that are well-crafted still don't get much response. I envision that they're deleted by most people unless they are actively looking or pretty set on doing so rather soon.
• legohead 10y ago
  I find it hard to believe they simply disappeared. Recruiters will pester you until you give up or say you aren't interested. They even make promises they can't keep, in order to get you to the interview. The last time I was looking for a job, I talked to recruiters from Facebook and Amazon, and the first thing I told them were my salary requirements. They told me it "wouldn't be a problem." Then later on, I found out I was going to be offered a lot less.
• nolemurs 10y ago
  There's tons of information online about what the big companies' interview processes are like. If you show up to an interview without bothering to do any research or preparation (like the author clearly did), then it's not going to be surprising when it doesn't go well. Maybe I'm setting too high a bar, but I feel like it's not unreasonable to expect someone to spend an hour or two doing research on the interview process before flying out to Seattle. If he had, he'd have realized it was going to be heavy on the white boarding and algorithms, and then could have chosen either not to waste anyone's time, or to really prepare. The recruiter totally should have let him know what to expect of course, but it's a strange sort of entitlement that leads someone to be upset when they don't get a job just for showing up.
  • hibikir 10y ago
    I look at it backwards: Rejecting a candidate to day doesn't mean that they won't be exactly the kind of person I'll need to hire 3 years later, as both my needs ad theirs have changed, and therefore, I think that a good candidate experience is crucial. I want people that are rejected, or that leave the process early, to remember the experience positively. Thus, I do not expect anyone to do research on the interview process: Before anything other than the basic recruiter chat, every candidate should receive a pretty good picture of how the recruiting process goes: Number of interviews, style of content, time to wait between an interview and its next steps... If a candidate is ever surprised, It's the company that fails. If a shop that has a couple of hundred developers can do that in a cost effective way, so can the bigger tech companies. If they fail, it's because their standards for how to run a company are way too low.
    • nolemurs 10y ago
      Yeah, I totally agree with this actually. Amazon totally should have done everything you say. As it happens, I know that Google is really good at doing the things you list. The fact that Amazon screwed up doesn't mean that the author of the blog post didn't also screw up though. He really should have figured out what he was getting into before getting on a plane. My take on the blog post is that everyone involved was incompetent.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• fizixer 10y ago
  The lesson based on your experience could be the advice you gave. But it could also be: Don't get your expectations too high. If you have achieved something in your programming career already, you've done it. Something to be proud of. "Bad" interviewing practices of top companies, and the outcomes that follow, don't and shouldn't undermine your self-worth. Just take the whole interviewing experience as a chance to meet new people, have a mentally stimulating exchange, and that's it. If they hire you, great; you were able to capitalize (in one very specific, and by far not the only, way) on your achievements. If they don't, you go back to doing the great stuff you're already doing.
  • justin66 10y ago
    > Just take the whole interviewing experience as a chance to meet new people, have a mentally stimulating exchange, and that's it. You're not wrong, but if one needs to put a premium on their time it's a little more complicated than that. Particularly if you need to take time off and travel for an interview, it'd be nice if the whole thing was more than a minor social experience.
    • fizixer 10y ago
      Yeah I should've mentioned that. Well I guess I did in a way when I started by saying either the lesson from the blog post or the lesson that I talked about. To summarize, if you put a premium on your time then we reach the conclusion in the blog post. If you are willing to reduce the premium, then we have the alternative conclusion that I suggested.
• kabes 10y ago
  I've been working as a software engineer for quite a few years now and I'm sure I'm a much better software engineer now then when I graduated. I now have years of solving varying real life problems with real-life constraints (budgets, deadlines, ...) using a big amount of different technologies, working with a lot of different people, ... However, I'm also pretty sure I'd have a better chance on the Google interview right after graduation then now, when all the theoretical stuff was fresh in my brain. So I'd have more chance while being a (in my opinion) less useful engineer.
  • nolemurs 10y ago
    > However, I'm also pretty sure I'd have more chance on the Google interview right after graduation then now, when all the theoretical stuff was fresh in my brain. So I'd have more chance while being a (in my opinion) less useful engineer. The thing to understand is that Google is more interested in not hiring potential bad hires than in hiring every good hire. Part of the reason the interview process works the way it does is to filter for people willing to put in some effort. If you want a job at Google, it's not a big deal to spend 3-5 hours a week for a few months getting sharp on the basics. If you're not willing to do that, then that's a good sign that you're not really invested, and may not be the best hire. Google will totally lose some good hires this way of course. But their philosophy is explicitly that it's better to lose a good hire than make a bad hire. I think they're probably right.
    • hueving 10y ago
      >Part of the reason the interview process works the way it does is to filter for people willing to put in some effort That's the sales pitch, but it's actually just because there is no other interview approach that works at scale for the volume of candidates they get. If they didn't have a stack of 100,000 resumes, they would throw this ridiculous process out the window in a heartbeat and actually interview people for the position.
      • nolemurs 10y ago
        > If they didn't have a stack of 100,000 resumes, they would throw this ridiculous process out the window in a heartbeat and actually interview people for the position. Absolutely. If they had far fewer resumes then they'd be much less willing to pass on potentially good hires, and more willing to risk bad hires. You make it sound like we're disagreeing, but this is 100% consistent with what I said.
• uranian 10y ago
  A few years ago I decided to never do these algorithm, fizz buzz and whatever tests again in order to get a job. These tests have almost nothing to do with my daily work as a software developer. With very much ease I can ask the interviewer/dev to solve a seemingly simple algorithm, where I'm almost 100% sure he will fail, even if I'd gave him 6 hours to solve it. I've seen so much horrible code in my life, there is no fizz buzz test that can prevent you from that. I am wary of companies doing these tests as it tells me they have no clue what my work is about. If a company wants to hire me they can look at some of my production code and the live results of it. If that is not good enough for them I'm not interested.
• codeonfire 10y ago
  In my opinion Google hiring is corrupt. They are under federal investigation and a civil lawsuit. The reason recruiters contact a large number of people that won't be hired is they need a lot of no-hires to make their stats balance out and keep up appearances. Other big companies do this as well, Google just purports to be better.
• johnsmith21006 10y ago
  Anyone find it interesting the author had a bad experience with Amazon but titles the article with Google and he has a problem with company integrity?
• jfasi 10y ago
  Regarding his canned response: > Thanks for your email. I'm very interested indeed. I have nothing against an interview. However, there is one condition: I have to be interviewed by the person I will be working for. By my future direct manager. This kinda misses the point. I can't speak for any companies besides Google, and this is all my personal sense and not the company line, but anyway: speaking with a hiring manager who wants you is actually less useful than speaking to a disinterested stranger. Hiring at Google is done by committee and actually regards feedback from a hiring manager with some suspicion. Here's why: Google allows for a lot of mobility. Internal transfers are common, projects are scaling up all the time, sometimes new engineers don't gel with their teams and want out, and we strongly prefer to keep people within the company when projects scale down. Given this, hiring an employee solely on the basis of an enthusiastic manager's word is a recipe for lowering the overall level of engineering. Even if Yegor had the strong support of a manager who wanted him, he'd still have to go through the same raft of interviews and be judged by the same hiring committee. Alright, fine, I hear you say, but if a manager likes you, surely that's still a positive signal? Well, in the best case scenario, sure: you're talented, the manager is wise enough to spot a good engineer when they see one, and they express their assessment honestly. But the best case scenario involves the manager acting as though they were a disinterested outside, so why not get the opinion of an actual disinterested outsider? However, what if the manager is short-staffed and just needs whatever help he can get to meet their goals? What if the endorsement is made on some biased basis, such as going to the same school or assessment of talent in an area unrelated to engineering? For all their warts, whiteboard-based interviews are the state of the art in assessing the capabilities of a large number of candidates within reasonable time and cost. They're not foolproof, and smaller companies can afford to (and should) use more bespoke methods. However, at the scale of Google and friends, they're unfortunately the best thing available. But I won't lecture hacker news on scale. We all know expectations have to be adjusted as systems grow.
  • linkregister 10y ago
    You miss the point of the article. Yegor doesn't want to be put on a team using technology completely orthogonal to his expertise. He isn't interested in spending 3-5 hours per week for a few months to cram on algorithms study so he can use it once on his interview day. Many other companies hire by role. There is no ambiguity in where a software developer will end up working on. Facebook and Google use centralized hiring. Yegor's point is that this uncertainty regarding team placement is a strategic disadvantage. Despite what you might think, Object Oriented Design isn't going away anytime soon. There is no need for Facebook or Google to prematurely optimize away the risk of an obsolete engineer at the expense of rejecting domain experts for an important project.
• felixgallo 10y ago
  As a hiring manager at Amazon, I'm super excited to talk to candidates. A new job is, after all, an incredibly important life decision on the same level as getting married or buying a house. And as a manager, making sure I hire the right people to build the kind of diverse, respectful, collaborative, representative, professional, mentoring, balanced and focused team that I can is the most important thing I can do on a daily basis. In fact, I spend a non-trivial amount of my day personally looking for, and reaching out to, prospective candidates, with no recruiter involved. With that in mind, Amazon recruits so widely that I couldn't possibly talk to every prospect; there just aren't enough hours in the day. So I think it's important to have recruiters doing the basic screens, and am delighted to take over from there. Anyone who wants a job at one of the big companies should understand that there's going to be some bureaucracy on the intake side just because the volume is unbelievable. If you feel like you've had a bad experience with Amazon in particular, please reach out and let me know and I'll see if there's anything I can do about it.
  • gravyboat 10y ago
    The recruiters at Amazon are pretty bad in general. They don't give enough details about positions, salary, or anything else to make it worth discussing. I get contacted a few times a year and I always ask to just be added to the 'do not contact' list, but then the next year I'm always contacted again. At this point the teams at Amazon are such a crap shoot that it's not even worth talking to them (plus the pay is trash most of the time if you don't want golden handcuff equity). I always turn them down, but even that first contact is a pretty bad experience.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • wott 10y ago
    Nice! You've managed to stick almost all the corporate recruiting empty buzzwords in a single message.
    • felixgallo 10y ago
      That's not very charitable. I get where you're coming from, but in this case, I assure you I mean every word, and I'm happy to put candidates in touch with my direct reports so they can verify that for themselves.
• maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Ah, another one of those butthurt posts from people who failed a technical interview. I guess I see them at a rate of at least 1/month in HN.
  • sctb 10y ago
    Name-calling dismissals are at least in equal oversupply. Please don't do this here.
• Philipp__ 10y ago
  Am I the only one that kinda forgets these kinds of stuff, like binary-tree-traversing? What I mean by that is that I forget the implementation (let's say in C) very often, and have to go back and look at text book/google/and spend time implementing it. While conceptually I can explain and present everything, at any time, and show you that I understand specific data structure and algorithm, it's use cases, strengths and weaknesses, when I fire up terminal and try to write it straight from the head it takes time. And I always feel like I have to "relearn" the implementation and think about it in specific way. These questions sound pretty daunting and stressful to do, @Google, on whiteboard, in front of strangers who's temper and mood can vary a lot. I am student still, while working for company like Google sounds awesome, and there is a lot of smart people and cool stuff to do, it's "scary" recruiting techniques and that "cog in the machinery" feel is what turns my excitement down. Especially cause I am not so good in academic sense of learning. I tend to be one of those who work on their own, and hack with things in their free time, where my results in curriculum aren't as great as people expect them to be, but once it comes down to conversation/discussion/implementation people often surprise themselves and are kinda confused.
  • nkassis 10y ago
    No you are not alone. The expectation is you've reviewed and practiced these subjects before going in. Hopefully with a few weeks of practice you should be able to remember them enough to write them out on a board. But yeah it can be thought, the interviews are stressful and not good for introvert candidates or those who struggle under pressure. (I'm in the latter group. practice helps). It's not a great system but it's the best they have come up with so far. It's frustrating because it's got a high false negative rate. Failing it isn't a indication of you on the job skill.
• roguecoder 10y ago
  The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in interesting and novel ways. I have seen the worst apps written by "Very Smart People" who obviously had never built an Android application before. It doesn't matter how smart you are, the first time you do something it will suck. I have had catastrophic failures caused by premature optimization, because locking a tool into a fancy algorithm before you know where the actual bottleneck is is a recipe for disaster. I have seen so many problems caused because people couldn't take feedback or didn't ask for help, because they were so wrapped up in being The Kind Of Person Who Knows The Answers. Frankly, passing algorithm questions is a great way to signal that I probably don't want to have to deal with your code. Personally, I love working with people coming out of the good agencies because building 15 or 30 applications from scratch in an environment with strong mentorship and rapid feedback is, in my experience, more likely to produce a good programmer than all the smarts in the world.
  • perfmode 10y ago
    But Google's code quality is quite high...
    • ingsoc79 10y ago
      Have you ever worked with the Android SDK?
      • perfmode 10y ago
        In my opinion, Android's code organization is a result of questionable architectural constraints applied early in the development of the platform.
        • JangoSteve 10y ago
• itaysk 10y ago
  I liked this post do much! I totally relate to what you are saying. A friend of mine recently interviewed to Google (true story), and told me about the process. Hearing about the questions he was asked completely blew away my esteem of Google, and my desire to work there. Exactly the kind of algorithm efficiency questions you describe, which is something completely unrelated to the job he was interviewing for. Also, some questions like "estimate the size of area covered by all roof tops in the city" which is nonsense to me. I wrote this article a while ago about how I hate that kind of interviews, and actually how I personally interview. Swear to god this was before that friend told me about his process, but they miraculously managed to exactly ask all the questions I considered wrong in that article! http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/07/07/how-i-interview http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/07/07/how-i-interview
• orange_county 10y ago
  "I'm sorry, recruiters, no more standard interviews for me." This whole blog post reeks of arrogance. You write a few books, done some presentations at a conference and suddenly you are above the standardize hiring process? Next time, just tell the recruiters you don't do interviews and only do consultations at X rate.
  • logfromblammo 10y ago
    Yes, someone like that is above a standardized interview process. But that is only because we are all above such a process. There is no single standard for software professionals' jobs, and that is why it is stupid and foolish to have a single standard for hiring into those thousands of unique jobs. For most companies, the only skill you need to have and develop is how to shovel that company's unique and specific type of manure, or if you prefer, how to prepare their unique and specific flavor of sweetened "ade" beverage.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I don't know how it has changed since I left but when I was at Google and interviewing folks the idea was to find smart people who could get things done and then figure out what to do with them if they decided to join. As a result it was literally impossible to have your "future manager" interview you, because that person was only identified after you accepted[1]. But "recruiting" in the sense the author discusses is really more like a lottery for people calling themselves recruiters than it is actually finding of talent. There are a number of these people that email hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, while simultaneously creating a "resume" out of information they found out about them online and submitting that to companies. Then when the company says "we'd like to see Bob" then they go back and figure out who Bob was and they contact Bob and try really really hard to get Bob to take an interview with the company, and if this match works they pocket anywhere from 15 to 25% of Bob's annual salary as a finder's fee. So low overhead work that can be pretty easily automated with the occasional out sized payout? That is the recipe for a fishing business and that is what we get. I got an email from a friend who had my "resume" cross their inbox. They emailed me to tell me my resume skills had really plummeted, what with a bit of my LinkedIn page, some Github repos, and snippets of broken english mashed together. I tied the source back to one of the "recruiters" who had sent an email saying they had companies asking for me to apply (no I didn't respond). We speculated whether the resume mashup had been done in house or if there was some Turker somewhere who was doing 'resume assembly from accessible data'. Bottom line is that there is money to be made so people will come out and try to get that money. [1] There were some exceptions of course and certain skills or disciplines but it was the general rule.
• gravyboat 10y ago
  I actually wrote a short field manual on this (partially as a joke) to try and sell to recruiters that gives them tips about actually, you know understanding the candidate they are contacting.
• lngnmn 10y ago
  This is a classic example of what we call a blogrammer and self-serving bias. Classic CS (Algorithms and Data Structures and basics of FP) is the must. The questions about subtleties of C++ syntax is, perhaps, less reasonable (but they are aimed to catch an experienced dev instead of a self-proclaimed wizard) but ignorance of the basic CS is a major red flag.
• eatbitseveryday 10y ago
  http://www.yegor256.com/testimonials.html http://www.yegor256.com/testimonials.html ?
• Grue3 10y ago
  I couldn't even get the part where they fly you to the HQ and pay for the hotel. I'd make sure to ace the whiteboard interview if I got that far! But nope, the farthest I got was talking about irrelevant non-technical stuff over Skype and then nothing.
• dlwdlw 10y ago
  A thought occurred tine that maybe these types of interviews aim to filter for specific people. An H1B from Asia will have the motivation to memorize "Cracking the Coding Interview" as well as the pressure to stay and say yes to everything. This creates a distortion at the IC level. At the management level, the filters create another distortion for cultures that heavily bias statis and grouo standing (rather than get a paycheck and do the minimum to stay). At the final leadership level there isnt even another filter from the managers. The candidates come through entirely other channels, usually network related.
• perfmode 10y ago
  How is the author going to create his programming language without tree traversal algorithms?
  • krzyk 10y ago
    He can learn them on the go, he doesn't need to prepare beforehand. That's what most people do when they face a problem, they try to learn how to fix it.
    • perfmode 10y ago
      He just said he has no interest in learning them ever.
• mpoloton 10y ago
  I think the recruiting process is designed to minimize type II errors (false negatives), namely someone who passes the process but would later turn out to be a bad recruit. Inevitably, the type I error (false positives) grows, those who are good but rejected in the process. I don't understand this risk averseness in the recruiting process by the employers. Especially, in countries with favorable dismissal laws for employers. Glad to see that someone puts condition on the interview process and doesn't submit to their rules.
  • geocar 10y ago
    Having someone around who the team likes, but can't code their way out of a paper bag (type I) is still a problem. If you have a culture that you're there to work, and to make the company money then it's not as big of a problem as it can be if you've got a ball pit.
• sandGorgon 10y ago
  Today, I read something very interesting on the Slack engineering blog on an older post - https://slack.engineering/a-walkthrough-guide-to-finding-an-engineering-job-at-slack-dc07dd7b0144#.yptbjwpi1 https://slack.engineering/a-walkthrough-guide-to-finding-an-... Many candidates think they need to find someone currently at Slack to “get their foot in the door.” Rest assured this is not the case; in fact most of our hires have come from people who have applied via our careers page. We take all applications seriously. We care deeply about diversity at Slack and when you only hire from your current employees’ networks, you tend to get a homogenous set of candidates. Kind of, the opposite of how Google hires. I wonder which one is the right approach.
• caseysoftware 10y ago
  > There was a clear mismatch between my profile and the expectations of the interviewers. I don't blame them, and I don't blame her. I think this is the underlying key point. If you walk into an interview and there's a mismatch, you will fail. But since "applicant tracking systems" have you now, when someone wants to bring you in next time, the answer will be "yes, we interviewed them before.. meh" and you're passed over. I appreciate the author's approach. It kills the time wasting but is still respectful.
• brendangregg 10y ago
  At Netflix I was interviewed by the manager I'd work for (in fact, I was interviewed by two managers, as I had the option to join one of two teams). As part of recruiting I had many conversations with my potential manager about what exactly I'd do, and how my skills can be best put to use. I ended up picking Netflix, and it's been great working here. I wish more companies interviewed in this way. I've had the other type of experience at a major tech company, similar to what was described in this post. Interviews that were generic and not focused on what I'd been told by the recruiter the job was. I spent all day exercising brain cells from University classes a decade ago, rather than my industry experience. I remember feeling odd about it afterwards: that's the first time I've had to recall those skills since University, yet I've been working in this role for a decade and haven't needed to remember that doing the actual job...
• utopcell 10y ago
  what are you guys talking about ? Some of the best minds that I know work at Google. How is asking algorithmic questions inappropriate for a CS candidate ?
• paulus_magnus2 10y ago
  If working for Google is such a Valhalla, why do people leave after 1.1y https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Google-employees-have-such-a-low-average-tenure https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Google-employees-have-such-a-lo...
  • nkassis 10y ago
    Read some of the response and it's what I expected, fast hiring rate make tenure number artificially low. That's true at most large tech companies right now, they've grown massively in the past 5 years.
    • paulus_magnus2 10y ago
      Can't be this. Fast hiring rate, say 15-20% y/y growth, would only push average tenure down by 15-20%. https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/476634581293.png https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/4766345812... http://www.koozai.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Google-Employees-Chart.png http://www.koozai.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Google-Empl... https://cdn.geekwire.com//wp-content/uploads/2015/10/amazonww-e1445553945718-620x394.png https://cdn.geekwire.com//wp-content/uploads/2015/10/amazonw...
• syntaxing 10y ago
  I've been thinking about it for a while to try to transition from a mechanical engineer to a software engineer but are all the interviews as miserable as HN makes it seem? I feel like these interview structure is a form of deterrent. I had a quick call with one of the recruiters from Apple for a hardware engineer position. He said the interview will take about a week and needs about a month to prepare... I didn't call back because it doesn't even seem reasonable to me. I've interviewed many times (mechanical engineering positions) for big companies (10K employees+) to small (<50 employees) and they're usually a one day remote and one day on-site interview. There would be a couple of technical questions and some technical discussions but nothing like, solve this Navier-Stokes equation for creep flow from your memory. I don't think any competent manager would even ask that to me.
  • funkymike 10y ago
    There is a big difference between computer science as taught and software development in practice. These hiring practices are there to weed out people just can't design applications or write code with any proficiency.
    • syntaxing 10y ago
      But can't that be said about every discipline of engineering? I could be wrong but these hiring practices are particularly prevalent in the software roles compared to the other major discipline of engineering. I'm more curious to what is different about software engineering/development roles that require these methods. The amount of applications or size of the company doesn't seem like a logical reason since I've seen equally sized (employee-wise) companies weed out and select specific roles pretty well (relatively).
• ammon 10y ago
  I don't think the problem the author is highlighting here actually has very much to do with recruiters. The recruiting industry _is_ full of scamminess (spam to both engineers and companies, false-flag recruiters who claim to represent famous companies). However, as broken as the industry is, I don't think it's behind the author's problem here. He's talking about interview randomness. He was heavily recruited by Amazon, then failed the interview. This is not a rare event. We have data on this from running Triplebyte. Almost no engineers passes all their interviews. The top cohort on Triplebyte goes on to pass about 80% of their interviews. These are strong, strong engineers (successful startup founders, ICPC national winners, Google staff engineers), and they still fail. Almost no one can consistently pass more than 80% of interviews. One reason for this is just incentives for companies. False positives (bad hires) are far more expensive to a company than false negatives (rejecting a good person). So companies rationally bias toward rejection. To a certain extend we just have to accept this as rational. (Although I do think that companies tend to assume that everyone they reject is bad, and discount the cost of false negatives). But I DO think the situation can be significantly improved. Interviewers vary significantly between companies. Some companies want everyone they hire to understand low-level systems and concurrency and thread scheduling. Others think this is irrelevant and want everyone they hire to be very fast and productive in modern web frameworks. Some think that CS is important, others think that it's bookish and irrelevant. All of this makes sense (different companies do different things). The problem is that you can't tell from the outside what a company wants to see (oddly what the company wants often has little to do with the type of engineering they're doing. It seems to just be an engineering culture that develops over time). And companies themselves often are not aware of how what they want is different from what other companies want. Each company just says that they want to hire "excellent engineers", and think that that means the same thing to them as to everyone else. It's the cognitive bias where everyone thinks that the things they are good at are the core of the discipline. This adds noise to interviews. At Triplebtye, one of the big things we do is measure this (by evaluating engineers already working at companies, and updating our model with the feedback on each candidate we send). I'd love to see this sort of approach take hold across the industry (and companies get better at advertising honestly what skills they care about).
• iamleppert 10y ago
  I'd also like to add my own experience dealing with recruiters from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix. They are liars. They most definitely will e-mail you whatever it takes to get you into the first part of the funnel. They'll tell you its a "special project" or try and make it seem like somehow you're exactly what they are looking for. It's not true; I've been down the route a few times and have easily been able to spot the deception at second phone call. I do wonder how many brilliant people are abjectly turned off by these tactics and don't make it into these companies. But I rather think that's a good thing, call it bio-diversity. No one company should get too many very smart people. And, unlike the OP, I can actually solve the bizarre algorithm questions they ask. Although I 100% believe they tell you absolutely nothing about the person but their ability (read: desire/motivation) to read and comprehend a basic text on the subject. No, you don't need this knowledge (unless specifically required) to be effective at your job despite what others here are posting on about. Tech companies, once they reach a certain size, become little more than meat shops; corporate behemoths, not unlike other large companies that run the same dog and pony shows but for different kinds of human talent and capital. This is not to say they can't be good places to work, or have cool and creative teams within them, but the chances of you getting hired into one have nothing to do with the recruiting process, unless the hiring manager or manager of a specific team reaches directly out to you. If it's a recruiter doing the reaching, you'll be forced through the opaque funnel and likely lied to or manipulated in some way. Its just the nature of their job. By far the best way to find a great job is to: If you don't already have contacts in the industry or niche you want to work in: Go to work for a startup in the space to build your network and domain expertise. If you do have a contact, have this person refer you from the inside. In many cases your interview process will be completely different. Following this I've actually not had to deal with recruiters much at all; maybe only as a formality.
  • stcredzero 10y ago
    No, you don't need this knowledge (unless specifically required) to be effective at your job despite what others here are posting on about. Pretty much like how the Asiana Airlines pilots didn't really need to know how to manually land a plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
• YZF 10y ago
  To contrast and say something surprisingly positive about Amazon. A local Amazon engineering manager looking to hire people sent me a note and suggested we discuss over a coffee. While I didn't want to pursue the opportunity I definitely left with a much better opinion of Amazon. Also contrast with Microsoft when I had a series of technical interviews with members of the team I would be working with. I ended up going with a different opportunity but again I left with a good impression. The Google hiring process sucks IMO. I've been approached a few times. I recall one phone coding interview where the Google engineer was condescending and trying to prove he's smarter than me. It seemed like he was in a bad mood or something, that can happen I guess. In a later recruiting attempt a Google recruiter called me, said he'd follow up, and then left Google to go work for Apple without having anyone follow up with me. Yet another recruiter, when he heard what area I'm interested in, said I've no chance because everyone in Google wants to work there. One thing that should automatically give you pause is a recruiter in Texas while the jobs are in California. Clearly that recruiter doesn't interact closely with the teams he's hiring for. Google has gotten away with this for so long because they can be picky. Every open position has 100's of candidates. But times will change. They certainly have a lot of good people but they also have a lot of less good people. I've worked with some ex-Google people and they're really just like everyone else. Conversely there are lots of very good/smart people who don't work for Google...
• grigjd3 10y ago
  I've had pretty good experiences with recruiters who talk to me about the job or department they are hiring for. I've enjoyed the process but maybe I've been lucky.
• ninjakeyboard 10y ago
  I think you're missing the point - those things that you don't like about the Google interview process are meant to eliminate bias. Your hiring manager doesn't interview you because they might make compromises. People interviewing you don't review your profile because they might have a bias if they know about you. All of the things that make those interviews effective are the things that you are complaining about.
• ghbakir 10y ago
  It's an unreasonable ask. Not a single engineer stays his whole career with the same manager. Furthermore, needs change since demands and projects change. Therefore at a big company the best strategy is to check fundamentals. I agree that it's a BS strategy. I would love that the hiring process is a internship or some other real work simulation. Unfortunately they do not scale. Maybe the author should consider a smaller company where one can predict the future role.
• uladzislau 10y ago
  I never had any luck with incoming recruiters and often it turns out into huge waste of time. Scheduling/re-scheduling, they don't call on time, there's a delay, there's something else. In the end it looks like they are not really hiring otherwise they'd treat you with more respect.
• nodivbyzero 10y ago
  I'm wondering what was Google interview for Guido van Rossum?
  • 0x445442 10y ago
    Exactly! I'm sure Rob Pike and Guido didn't go through the typical BS. What's curious too is that I've never heard either of them comment on their individual interviews at Google. Maybe Google made them sign a gag order. My hunch is Pike & Guido were approached directly by management at Google.
• akeck 10y ago
  I talked to (very nice) Google recruiters off and on for a few years, until I mapped out enough of the SRE knowledge set to know I wouldn't make it through the interview process. Maybe someday... ;-)
• skolos 10y ago
  I sometimes agree to these kind of interviews, since I can visit my friends and have a dinner on a company dime. Never expect anything else out of these though.
• DataJunkie 10y ago
  Google left a sour taste in my mouth after my first interview there. Recruiter was a mess. I had one phone interview with no coding questions. My resume could not be more clear that my best language was Python. Yet, every single question they said "use C, C++ or Java." It was very awkward and intimidating because although I knew those languages, I wasn't confident with them and the recruiter already knew this.
  • BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
    That's strange, none of my interviewers there had any objection to my using Python. This was a few years back; perhaps things have changed.
    • tir 10y ago
      After I did my phone interview and study problems in Python, I was told when I got onsite for whiteboard problems that they really preferred C++ or Java. It was a little late for me to switch mindsets day-of, didn't get enough recommendations to hire.
      • orangecat 10y ago
        Weird. That is definitely not standard practice, at least as of a few months ago. Candidates provide their preferred languages and are supposed to be matched with interviewers who are familiar with them.
• kmonsen 10y ago
  You can actually keep the requirement and work for a big company, I believe this is how Apple recruits. It is my understanding you will talk to and be interviewed by your future manager.
• sebringj 10y ago
  I don't talk to them because I probably am not smart enough, am too old, went to a crap school, only want to do remote consulting anyway and most of all, I don't care one bit how Google does, besides my browser search working. In the end I still make more than 1% of developers so I'm not too choked up about it. You could say I'm stupid-happy.
• jonthepirate 10y ago
  I get so many obnoxious unsolicited recruiter emails that I have set an email autoresponder that triggers when the word "opportunity" comes in from someone I don't know. Here's the template: ----- Hi, I get a lot of messages like these. Since time is valuable, I promise to fully read your original email plus any job web pages that describe the opportunities you are hiring for for $100. You can paypal me at <your email here>. For $500, I'll even do a coding exercise or come in for an onsite interview. Cheers, <Yournamehere> -----
• OpenDrapery 10y ago
  I think most young engineers are surprised to find that after they've navigated the hiring guantlet at BigCorp, they were never interviewing for a specific position to begin with. They were interviewing to be thrown into a pool of new hires. When they show up for their first day of work, then they basically role the dice to determine whether you go to team A (interesting work) or team B (shit work).
• noipv4 10y ago
  Usually the first question during the phone screen is "Do you know Quick Sort; What is its time complexity?". At that point it's a quick thank you and phone drop. I am in no mood to solve the formal equations of the time-complexity of quicksort on my cell-phone.
• mydpy 10y ago
  The other way to respond: thanks, I'm interested. Alternatively: no thanks, I'm not interested. Recruiters aren't monkeys or slaves. This post is arrogant and rude.
  • Gigablah 10y ago
    THANK YOU. I'm concerned I had to scroll down this far to find a comment that calls out the author on this point.
• siliconc0w 10y ago
  Companies who need to hire a lot of general purpose high quality engineers who are highly desirable can design interview processes with high false negative rates. Where his argument gets off the rails is that it's hard to really argue a good facility with data structures and algorithms isn't at least one strong heuristic for a software engineer.
• inkblot11 10y ago
  I've interviewed at the major software companies, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. In all interviews I was interviewed by the people and managers I would be working with. In many cases, I would also interview with members of other teams I would be expected to interact with. I now realize I must have taken that for granted and did not realize it was a privilege.
• tomcam 10y ago
  tl;dr: He sends an email to the recruiter requiring that he interview with the manager he will eventually work for. Brilliant!
• mathattack 10y ago
  I take the recruiter's call just to get market information. Who is hiring? What are they paying? What's the market for someone like me? Or someone I may want to hire? Who is doing interesting work? For better or worse, the "Mass hire smart people" is the most efficient way for these large companies to recruit. It's very good for ensuring universal standards of quality. But it suboptimal for specialists like the OP.
• harry8 10y ago
  When there is a popular article here criticising a big employer, in this case google. People commenting should be declaring their affiliation with that employer. We want to hear what you think, really! Criticising the article when you have a dog in the fight you're not revealing is just plain dishonest. A lot of comments here, not many saying "Disclosure: I (used to) work there"
• tjbiddle 10y ago
  Fun trick: Change your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles to have a specific spelling or something of your name - you'll start to notice that a vast majority are scraped and automated.
• acconrad 10y ago
  Every email from a recruiter is a chance to secure part time consulting work even if you're fully employed and happy at your job. Great way to build your freelance résumé and secure more money quite easily.
• mbrodersen 10y ago
  "I do realize that these are multi-billion-dollar companies, the best in the industry, and I'm nothing compared to them." Making a lot of $ as a company does not automatically mean that every individual working for the company is "the best in the industry". And the more they hire, the more this will be true. I have worked with people who ended up working for Google and they were certainly not the best developers I have worked with. They were good but not great. Also, to make a lot of $ as a company you need to have a good business. You don't need top developers. Just good enough developers. With a few really good ones mixed in to take care of the core components. A great business idea with OK developers beats a bad business idea with top developers every time.
• gabrielblack 10y ago
  I'm sick and tired, too. Yesterday same 'retarded-monkey' style interview for a company here in Ireland. They require 5+ years of C ++ on Linux, knowledge of the standard library, design and implementation of high performance, scalable, distributed and resilient systems. Questions: implement a stack, traverse a b-tree, Caesar cipher, an example of polymorphism, etc. Honestly I felt they stolen 2 days of my life! I'm not a noob! In the last 20 years I had not the necessity to encrypt a socket with the Caesar cipher, nor to write a stack from scratch! How do you suppose I could show you that I can write in "high performance, scalable, distributed and resilient systems" ? Seriously they think this is a interviews for seniors? One of them asked me the date of birth "It's illegal but we need for it Security Reasons", yes, sure, take my vocabulary and look up "junior"!
• jondubois 10y ago
  The interview processes at a lot of those big companies favor fresh university graduates - Other than that, they are completely random. I bet that if they forced existing employees to take a slightly different variation of the test again, most of them would fail - Someone could be an expert with graph algorithms, but if a question popped up about decision trees and minimax adversarial search, would that graph expert still be able to solve the problem in time? My personal experience with the interview process at a couple of these companies is that even if you CAN solve the problems, you will usually run out of time - Unless you practised that specific problem recently. Also, they tend to favor engineers who can come up with solutions quickly as opposed to engineers who can come up with optimal solutions. They could look at stuff like open source projects you created/worked on, past successful companies you've worked at, etc... But no, they don't care about that; instead they prefer to have this random selection process which favors experts in specific algorithms or thinking styles which often have nothing to do with the company's core business.
• sreque 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, all other things being equal, if I were building a software team I'd hire a candidate who could pass a basic algorithms interview over a "OOP design" specialist who couldn't.
• jondubois 10y ago
  I agree that these kinds of tests are terrible but I don't want to work for companies that have a bad recruitment process anyway - If their talent acquisition strategy has started to degrade then the level of talent in the company will start to taper off as well - To me, that's a signal that the company will stop growing soon. Companies play the numbers game, so you have to play the numbers game too. When looking for a job, I usually apply for like 100 positions and maybe get like 50 calls/pitches from recruiters, then from there I pick maybe 5 to do the technical challenge - Out of those maybe 4 or 5 have a reasonable code challenge and I only attempt those. Sometimes the tasks have a deadline; in these cases I will intentionally submit my code slightly late (but I make sure it's good quality); if the company is too upset about me missing the deadline (and ignoring the code quality) then I will cross them off (or they cross me off; it doesn't matter); I don't want to work for such companies. Then I end up with maybe 2 or 3 really good offers with companies that match all my requirements. My point here is that the recruitment process is a two-way street; you can test them as much as they test you. The recruitment process says a lot about the company if you know what to look for.
• MarkMc 10y ago
  > Clearly, I'm not an expert in algorithms. There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; ...I'm trying to be an expert in something else, like object-oriented design, for example. I've always been surprised by the focus on algorithms in interviews. Maybe I'm an outlier but in my entire career I very rarely have to implement any complex, low-level algorithm - usually I can just use a standard library. But almost every day I'm using object oriented design to refactor code or meet new business requirements.
• LyalinDotCom 10y ago
  Reminds me of my own story on a much smaller scale and at a much smaller company, but very similar experience so let me share it. I recall my interview many years ago (10+ yrs) at a small Microsoft partner, this was when I was still working in banking but wanted to do more interesting work and grow my career. I was younger, ambitious and also as this post talked about, fairly new to the interview process. I found them through a recruiter, they setup an interview and I was very anxious but excited, showed up ready to show them why I thought I could do the job they needed, why I could be a great senior .NET developer. I met that day with one person, who asked me a bunch of very very narrow questions around some ASP.NET thing I never needed to do but could have Googled and figured out. But on the spot, if that was the scope of the interview, well then I was certainly not "qualified". I then left, very confused and very demoralized. Is this what it meant to have interviews at jobs more interesting then some random NYC bank? A short time later Microsoft recruiters called me back in regards to a resume I submitted 6+ months before all this started and totally thought that Microsoft didn't want me, I mean look at the crazy experience with the partner. But my buddy, a more senior developer told me "dude trust me, that was a BS interview, you HAVE to go to this interview and you'll see, you have a good chance". The Microsoft interview was the standard Microsoft Consulting one, multiple people plus the hiring manager. I felt welcomed, they all focused on different technology and at a high level which made a lot of sense. I met my future manager, she seemed to like me. I got the job and I have not looked back, working now at Microsoft for 9 years. I was honestly very impressed with the Microsoft interview process and have helped hire others to the team over the years. It really works if you do it this way and the manager is included, but yeah many companies and even many teams within Microsoft don't do it that way and I don't get why.
• amzn_throwaway2 10y ago
  Ironically the example given (Amazon) does include the hiring manager and engineers from the team in every interview loop. Teams do their own hiring which has its downsides in terms of consistent quality, but does mean you will be interviewed by the direct manager.
• OJFord 10y ago
  Another data point of ridiculousness: I fairly often receive emails from recruiters who have 'read my profile' and found me to be 'a great fit' for some 'senior ...' role. Had they actually read my profile, they'd have found me to be a student, who's only relevant experience is as an intern, and has accepted an offer for a graduate position. Certainly not a fit for senior anything, but it makes me wonder how far it would go if I replied OK - do companies using these recruiters get hopelessly underqualified candidates to interview on a regular basis, and still stick with them?
• novel 10y ago
  For those who are bored with the "new opportunity" emails from Google and maybe other companies: rather than trolling recruiters with obnoxious responses, you can just ask them to add you to the non-contact/ignore list and most probably they'll not bother you ever again.
• mack73 10y ago
  I acctually love questions about how to best traverse a tree, binary or not. Maybe I'm ready for an interview at least? But why is it me who should be put through a four-hour white board coding session? I would collapse after 40 minutes. They can code. Why can't they be the ones at the white board? I can "architect" and correct their mistakes. They would still be able to evaluate my competence.
• gscott 10y ago
  A lot of things things come up over and over again that is why I have a copy and paste file of what I use often. 90% of the time what I need is in my file. Everyone should be given a standard copy and paste file with the algorithms that come up often rather then needing to be written from scratch. Also now you can save $50,000 per employee by being able to hire from lower then the top 1%
• rajadigopula 10y ago
  I stopped replying altogether. They keep saying on linkedin they liked my profile, that's the first and last mail they send me as I never respond as I clearly know my career path ,the kind of companies I want to work with and how to get them interview me. I do have a separate mobile, email accounts for job profile.
• seanhunter 10y ago
  I'm not sure the OPs approach is reasonable, and I would decline any candidate who tried to put constraints like this on the process. In particular I don't think it's reasonable to insist on being interviewed by the direct manager and I don't think it's reasonable to refuse to engage with algorithm and other whiteboard questions. As a meta-point, a company should try to standardise their interview process as much as possible in order to provide each candidate with an equal chance to succeed. This is very important in attempting to address inherent biases etc. Apart from filtering out unsuitable candidates, one of the purposes of the interview process is to determine where exactly a good candidate might best fit. Although you get a good guess at this from their CV, oftentimes I find myself suggesting a good candidate be routed to a particular team based on strengths and weaknesses they have demonstrated in the interview process that were not apparent before. There is an information asymmetry at the heart of this that is hard to solve - I know a lot about my company, its teams and their needs, and the candidate (hopefully) knows a lot about themselves, what they are actually good at and want to do. What this means is that the direct manager is not necessarily knowable ahead of the interview (and subsequent review). Secondly, just because someone is a team lead/manager does not necessarily presuppose they are a particularly good interviewer. Interviewing is a skill that not everyone has and there are good reasons to keep the interview pool to a set of people who see a wide swathe of candidates and are able to calibrate their interview based on experiences of lots of candidates. This means the hiring manager (even if you know who she is) may not be on the slate for interviewing. Finally the "I'm not prepared to answer questions like x". Although this is becoming a trendy thing to say on HN (most typically about algorithm/whiteboard type questions), refusing to engage constructively with a question is a huge red flag for me, and likely to indicate a personality type that I don't want to hire. I would readily admit that the data shows that algo questions often don't have as much signal as people used to think. However, structured work exercises have been shown time and time again to be a very good indicator of subsequent performance. I do need to know that you can actually program, and often offer a choice of an algo question or a structured code review (where the candidate and I talk through some code on their github or that they can provide me for the review). There are good and bad ways to ask algo questions as there are with many questions. It's pretty pointless to ask an experienced programmer to write the algo for heapify; they either know it or they don't. However, if you're a recent compSci graduate and you don't know these things I'll suspect that you didn't really pay attention in class and mostly coasted. One of the hardest and very best interviews I have ever had consisted of someone deliberately re-asking one of the algo questions I had performed poorly on at the beginning of the interview process (after I had a couple of weeks to think about it). This proceeded into a very very tough interview that pushed me beyond the bounds of my compsci knowledge to how I think about solving hard problems. It wasn't about what "book knowledge" I could recall but rather about how good I was at applying my knowledge in a tough situation.
• EnderMB 10y ago
  I've mentioned this a couple of times on here, but I'll say it again because it's (somewhat) relevant. What are you guys doing to get Google recruiters to notice you?! I get at least 2-3 messages from recruiters every day, and it's your usual nonsense. They have an exciting role in an unnamed company that pays a competitive salary, the usual stuff they spout when they don't actually represent the company they're hiring for. I can count on one hand the number of emails I've had from big companies. Amazon have emailed a few times about working for AWS in Ireland, and I've had an email from Microsoft that led to nothing. I'd consider myself a decent developer. I have a CS degree (albeit from a crappy uni), I've done well everywhere I've worked, I've given talks at local user groups, and I've got open-source contributions under my belt. I'm primarily a .NET developer, but I've worked with Java, Python, and PHP before, so I'm not limited to a certain stack. When I left uni I applied to Google and never heard back, and over the past few years I've sent a CV in, only to be rejected after about a week by whichever hiring manager handled my application. I've even added a few Google recruiters on LinkedIn, and they never have anything for me. For me, I'd say that the interview process is one of the reasons I'd like to interview with Google, because it's so different from everything else I've done. Sure, as I get older the idea of jumping through all these hoops to work for a huge company that seems to favour recent grads becomes less appealing, but the idea of being able to pass such a grueling interview and work on hard problems still wants me to dust off the CV and apply to Google again. I fully appreciate the OP's point of view. Experienced developers have very different standards of working to newer developers. The more you work, the longer your requirements for employment becomes. However, I think the potential positives of working for a company with the resources like Google tends to outweigh the negatives.
• oryades 10y ago
  The title should be "Why I Don't Talk to Any Recruiter"
• deleted 10y ago
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