13 ms·

My Google Interview

228 points by cletus 16y ago

enneff 16y ago
"But the process does seem to be a lottery to some extent." They go to great lengths to ensure this is not the case. If the feedback from five different interviewers led to a 'no hire' decision, the chances are good that it was the right decision. Of course, no system is perfect. They tend to err on the side of exclusivity; it's much cheaper to decline a suitable candidate than it is to hire someone who won't work out in the long term.
- cletus 16y ago
  > They go to great lengths to ensure this is not the case. That may well be the case and I can't dispute the conclusion because I am unaware of the position. Were they looking for a hardcore C++ programmer? That's not me. This goes to my observation that feedback is important. I've applied for positions that were slim chances before but I knew they were slim going in so I could set my expectations accordingly. As for the lottery part, 2/5 didn't know my primary language. That seems open to interpretation.
  - danbmil99 16y ago
    They won't give you feedback for the same reason they don't disclose their search algorithms: information about their process can be used to game the process. I see the same behavior with VC's -- no usable feedback. It's like in poker -- there's no game-theoretic advantage to show your cards if everyone else folds.
    - barrkel 16y ago
      It's also arrogant not to even let someone know what the specific position involves. It's a solid reason not to interview with Google if you're not going in there on the basis of contacts.
      - btilly 16y ago
        The reason for that is that at the time of the interview there are usually many different positions you could wind up being slotted into. In many cases this is still true at the time of the hire. In a few cases this is still true at the time the person starts on the job.
  - chengas123 16y ago
    I can't speak to any particulars in this situation. I thought I would add that it's not necessary to know C++ (I don't :o). It is true that there are people who work on projects that are entirely written in C++. However, there's not generally a requirement that applicants write solutions in a particular language and pseudo code is usually fine.
  - Smerity 16y ago
    I'm interested how this came about. They usually either try to match people who know common languages or they do more generic problems which don't depend on language. One important thing is if you said you knew C well (or even only "working knowledge of") then it's perfectly reasonable for them to ask you to write it in C instead of Java/Python/etc. Did the interviewers state they didn't Java beforehand? Did they say they knew another language you'd mentioned you knew on your resume? My interview experience actually involved them hammering me on the languages I said I knew but wasn't an expert in. This is likely as they were trying to find out whether I was lying (or, put kindly, overstating) on my resume. From what I've seen there are a few people who put every language down that they've ever written hello world in ;) (disclaimer: recent intern from Google Sydney office)
- timcederman 16y ago
  As a company that gets 100k resumes a day, they can afford a few false negatives, but no false positives.
- slpsys 16y ago
  Yeah, no. Of the dozens of Googlers I've met, their take is that this is just not the case. As others have pointed out, it is _not_ a lottery as to false positives, but it certainly can be for false negatives; Yegge himself points it out with "interview anti-loops." But you know what? From a certain perspective, that's fine. We're currently going through a hiring phase at the startup I work for, and I'd much rather turn away people who might be ok than lock someone in who slid by. From his StackOverflow profile, cletus is a top-notch developer (or at the very least passionate and knowledgeable), it just sounds like he encountered his anti-loop. The biggest problem I see (and encountered this myself with them) is that there's no real feedback, even if your raw score was only just below the mark, where it might behoove everyone if you came back and interviewed with a little more experience and/or preparation.
  - enneff 16y ago
    "Yeah, no. Of the dozens of Googlers I've met, their take is that this is just not the case." I am a Googler. I mentioned explicitly that false negatives happen, and stated why they are preferable. Why, then, do you preface your comment with a disagreement?
    - csallen 16y ago
      Because you also said this: >> If the feedback from five different interviewers led to a 'no hire' decision, the chances are good that it was the right decision.
- btilly 16y ago
  "Ensure" is too strong a word. Best efforts notwithstanding, there remains a lot of luck in the process.
- prospero 16y ago
  They go to great lengths to ensure this is not the case. If the feedback from five different interviewers led to a 'no hire' decision, the chances are good that it was the right decision. As a recent hire at Google, I don't really think this is the case. There's not just a bias towards false negatives, there's a strong bias. It's well understood here that lots of qualified people are turned away. And for whatever it's worth, the offer to keep your resume on file wasn't just lip service. I interviewed two years ago unsuccessfully, and was recruited a year and a half later based on the strength of that failure. It's also maybe worth mentioning that my only prior work experience was four years of desktop software development in C#, so I don't think the Microsoft thing is that much of a black mark.
  - enneff 16y ago
    "As a recent hire at Google, I don't really think this is the case. There's not just a bias towards false negatives, there's a strong bias. It's well understood here that lots of qualified people are turned away." This is pretty much exactly what I said. Do you think if I'd pointed out that I'm actually a google employee also, I might have been spared the down votes?
    - prospero 16y ago
      You said there was a good chance it was the right decision. That may be true in some amortized sense across all hires, but you implied that it was also likely the correct choice in this specific situation. I don't think putting that much faith in the results of the hiring process is justified. Jobs interviews at Google aren't near perfection with a slight bias towards false negatives, and it's unfair to the people who don't make it through to suggest that they are.
etherael 16y ago
I had an interview for a systems administrative position way back when that was my primary gig, admittedly this was in the twilight after ten years of experience and I had already mostly gotten sick of systems administration and was deeply into coding so maybe I was just too jaded, but the single question I recall that they asked me I actually found so stupid it was insulting; What's the default bytes per block in random linux distribution x version y when using filesystem z? My response; I'd google it. Perhaps this is unique to the Australian branch of Google or something but I get the impression that they're much more into the whole meaningless rote memorisation of facts than is often let on. I had a contact from another Google HR person a couple months back in Estonia, this time for a development position. I can't say I wasn't tempted but this time I turned them down flat.
- cletus 16y ago
  That does seem like a strange question but then again I'm not a sysadmin so I really don't know what's reasonable. I'll frame this in what I know, which is programming. I think it's entirely reasonable to ask someone how a hashtable or even a quick sort (or some other O(n log n) sort) works because programmers should be familiar with that even if 99.9% of the time (if not 100% of the time) you're using a HashMap or std::map or dict or whatever. But number of inodes does seem somewhat esoteric.
  - etherael 16y ago
    In my view, it's stupid because it implies that if you're the kind of person that bothers to attempt to commit irrelevant or at best situationally relevant things like this to memory as a matter of course, you probably aren't making optimal use of your mental resources. I found it pretty ironic actually as that's exactly the kind of thing we have search engines for.
    - megablast 16y ago
      On the other hand, if you are constantly working with certain systems, you will know this stuff. If they ask me something esoteric about a language or API that I know really well, I can answer all the tricky questions, or explain how I think it would work. If it is something I use rarely, then I could not. Anyway, isn't block size standard across all OS?
codexon 16y ago
Interesting how they are scouting stackoverflow profiles for potential hires. I suppose it takes more than 10k reputation (talking about my own profile of course). The part about being denied because he was Microsoft-centric and yet Jon Skeet was accepted was quite amusing.
- bnoordhuis 16y ago
  I was approached by Google recently for an SRE position. I'm not sure where they found my contact information but I don't have accounts with any of the major geek sites - or much of an internet presence at all, really. The recruiter was a tad vague about it but if I were to venture a guess, I'd say Google scans the high-profile OSS projects and associated mailing lists. That's about the only place they could have found me.
- alec 16y ago
  I think Google recruiters trawl places frequented by programmers and invite them in. A few years ago, when I was more involved in free software, I got an email out of the blue asking me to submit a resume. I was certainly not as visible in the communities I frequented as this guy appears to be in his.
gcheong 16y ago
If I have an interview scheduled to go through lunch hours and the company does not offer me lunch, that makes a very bad impression on me. To me it's part professional courtesy as well as an indication of how well things are planned. Also, if you are able to lunch with the team, it lets you get to know each other in a less stressful situation.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  That seemed very weird to me. When I interviewed, it was customary to have a Googler who was not an interviewer take you to lunch at one of the cafes. If you were a referral, it's usually your referrer; if you know someone at Google, they try to match you up with that person. It's your chance to ask questions of an employee in an informal setting, where they won't be making a report back to the hiring committee. And I know they still do it, because I was the lunch interview for a friend of mine that just applied a month or so ago. The only thing I can think of is maybe they couldn't find interviewers for the normal time slots, and so they had to schedule one at lunch as well. Qualified interviewers are often a scarce resource at Google, mostly because of people like me who never sign up for it, and they try to avoid assigning more than two interviews/week/person to avoid burnout and let them still get actual work done. It may've been a choice between "schedule one during lunch" or "wait another week until a different interviewer is free".
endlessvoid94 16y ago
The lack of feedback is crippling. I interviewed at a similar company and I thought the interview went GREAT. I'm usually a great judge of whether or not someone likes me, I pay attention that kind of thing, I got all the answers to their satisfaction while explaining, in detail and concisely, my thought process. Didn't get the job. I didn't make one mistake and I thought they liked me. I have zero clues as to why. I'm not really upset about it, it was just a very frustrating experience. All the more reason to do your own thing :-)
- gcheong 16y ago
  A good time to elicit feedback is right at the end of the interview, in a casual manner along the lines of "well, so how do you think I did?". You don't want to push it if they try to avoid the issue, but I find I generally get better feedback than when trying to get it after a rejection.
  - cletus 16y ago
    I'd read stories about people doing this and being told they're not supposed to. I'm usually a fairly good judge of this sort of this so I usually don't need to ask. Eliciting a response may not give an accurate response (eg putting someone on the spot when their view is negative could be somewhat confronting). Practically speaking however, time constraints tended to prohibit such chit-chat anyway.
  - gaius 16y ago
    Having been interviewing candidates for over a decade, I've noticed that in the vast majority of cases, this question is only asked by people who've done very badly. With a good candidate it doesn't feel like an interview at all, it feels like getting to know someone who's just joined your team.
    - arethuza 16y ago
      I've been interviewing people for 15+ years and I've only had one person ask that question and he was by far the worst candidate I've every interviewed for a developer job.
danbmil99 16y ago
TL; DR: Google's recruitment process is opaque and arguably leads to many false negatives. True 3 years ago and apparently still true. I suspect they would argue the impact of false positives (hired but don't work out) greatly outweighs the loss of false negatives (potentially great employees that can't pass through the filter). This may be true for the one company everyone and their dog wants to work for, but I wouldn't apply this kind of process to my startup. It also feels like it might result in a surfeit of homogeneity. Genetic diversity is important; if everyone is a clone, all it takes is one pathogen to wipe out the population.
- dtcavallaro 16y ago
  Some companies believe that it is better to reject an excellent applicant than to hire a mediocre applicant.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. Google has a relative luxury here. Companies that don't have a large enough pool of quality applicants to hire from need to turn that equation around: rather, they must try hard not to let the excellent applicant get away, as they may not find another.
    - dtcavallaro 16y ago
      Of course, but by "some companies", I was mainly referring to Google/Microsoft/Amazon/et al. I would agree that for the vast majority of companies, having an attitude like that is a losing proposition.
  - ojbyrne 16y ago
    And yet, if you talk to managers, they'd complain at length about the inability to find even mediocre people. Most states in the US have "at will" employment laws meaning that its easy to fire a person after a couple of weeks if its obvious they're not working out.
- btmorex 16y ago
didtrade 16y ago
<a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>www.didtrade.com http://www.didtrade.com/>www.didtrade.co... Online sell fashion goods,Accept PayPal.cheap replica fashion goods for sale from china free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-suit free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica t-shirts free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-coat free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-pants free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-tops free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children shoes free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica children-boot free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica UGG boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Edhardy boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica LV boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica DG boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Gucci boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica chanel boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica fendi boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Tou`s boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Versace boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica coach boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica juicy boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Burberry boots</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Justin boots</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Dior boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Puma boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica DB bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Burberry bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Suitcase free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica gucci bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Fendi bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Versace bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Prada bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Hermes_7*star free shipping</a>
csomar 16y ago
I don't know Cletus, I just noticed his profile somehow in StackOverFlow. However, as a brilliant StackOverFlow member with over 100K of points and 3K answers, I really wonder if he is not above the average developer. Only experienced developers can contribute and answer question in Stackoverflow. Questions are generally hard and random. So if Google hires only from the top 10% (say in Australia); isn't this a critical fail in the hiring process? (considering cletus with ranking 4 in sof, I can safely say he's among the top 1% or 0.5%)
- jackowayed 16y ago
  I don't think you can "safely say" that he's among the top 1% of developers based purely on his StackOverflow profile, regardless of how impressive it is. The only way you can really "safely say" that someone is within the top 1% (That's a pretty elite group. That's like saying "I can safely say he'll get into Harvard.") is if you've seen a significant amount of their actual code (working with them, OSS, etc) and been consistently amazed.
  - cletus 16y ago
    The "top 1%" is such a great phenomenon. I remember in the 2000 election the top 1% of earners were daemonized by then VP Gore. In a survey some 20% of people thought they were in the top 1% and another 19% aspired to be. And that's with something easily quantifiable. How exactly do you quantify the percentile of a programmer? FWIW I make no such claim about being the top 1% nor do I claim SO ranking translates to the nebulous concept of a programmer's ranking. If anything, SO reputation is a function of time more than anything else. It's also an indicator of persistence but only a positive indicator (meaning lack of a SO ranking obviously doesn't mean a lack of persistence).
    - waqf 16y ago
      > the top 1% of earners were daemonized by then VP Gore He set them to run in the background and wake up periodically?
  - barrkel 16y ago
mkramlich 16y ago
Part of the problem that bit him, I think, is that the traditional interviewing/hiring process is fundamentally flawed and handicapped. Superficial elements have way too large of an impact. it filters out things that should not be filtered out. and way too big of a judgement is made too early, and on too little information, and with too little confidence in the correctness of that judgment. resumes are demanded and then either not read or not remembered. small comments can be magnified in the mind of the listener and used to conclude things that cannot possibly be concluded. ridiculous questions are asked. and lastly, there's very often too much of an attitude that the company/interviewer is in the superior/owner position and the applicant in the subservient/inferior/slave situation (perhaps carried over from blue collar industry) when in reality it should probably be considered an exchange of equals.
- gruseom 16y ago
  the company/interviewer is in the superior/owner position and the applicant in the subservient/inferior/slave situation (perhaps carried over from blue collar industry) Agree 100%. It's a kinder-gentler master-slave dynamic. That's part of why it's so fucked. So what's the alternative? Let's figure something out.
gruseom 16y ago
Clearly, many of us agree that this process is broken; not specifically at Google, but broken more or less everywhere. So fine, what would you do differently? I hate everything about job interviews, on both sides of the transaction: I don't want to ever job-interview or be job-interviewed again. So let's hear some radical ideas about how else to approach the problem. The crazier the better.
- mstevens 16y ago
  I've long felt the key is to get the interviewee to do some real work for a day. Pair programming seems like it might work well. You'd have to come up with some suitable toy problems that you could make significant progress on in a day.
- csl 16y ago
  I think ITA's job screening process is quite nice: Post an interesting puzzle and ask anyone to submit answers. Spend as much time on it as you wish. Their puzzle archive: http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid=39 http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid...
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Google used to do that - if you remember their "Great people needed" campaign from 2002-2005, they did fun stuff like putting coding problems on billboards that solved to the phone number you had to call to submit to apply, or the "Google Labs Aptitude Test" that was basically a parody of standardized testing. I think the reason they don't anymore is that they're a household name. They get tons of applications without any clever tricks. In some ways, I think this is too bad, because it attracts applicants who (in JWZ's words) "want to work for a successful company instead of working to make a company successful." But there's really no way to turn back the clock and make Google hip & unknown anymore.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      My personal favourite questions from that quiz were: * How many ways are there of painting the sides of a cube using four different colors? * Which colors would you choose?
tmsh 16y ago
The key, I think, to hacking most interviews is to take into account the fact that most interviewers overoptimize for their own contribution to the process; i.e., you want to put yourself on a path where the interviewers have some sort of insight into why you're valuable. This can be the traditional: wow, this person has mastered all these fields very well. But it can equally be: wow, this person did extraordinary things with this thing that I've heard good things about; or, wow: I could totally use a person like that on my team -- I think culturally this type of person is valuable; etc. Basically, you want to figure out the selection of likely thoughts the interviewer will have about you -- choose the set of most optimal, most distance-traversing in their mind (some of which ideally differentiate you for your peers), and give them some excuse to figure those out. It's, sadly, not completely unrelated to PUA, as our minds are trained to seek and, with cognitive dissonance, to esteem the general direction of what we've verified before. Fwiw, same pattern as setting traps in poker. Though hopefully you're not being duplicitous, but rather smoothing out an already error-laden, discontinuous situation.
yason 16y ago
Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do. If, after four months, the people turn out to be "smart and get things done" and the company wants to keep them, they'd get the missing 50% from the first four months as a one-time bonus and 100% salary afterwards. It costs something but it also costs a lot of time and money for both parties to engage into this mutual guesswork game called job interviewing. It might even cost everyone less as I bet many candidatepeople would have to be fired after only a few weeks or days.
- aspiringsensei 16y ago
  Some places do that, and they're generally not places you'd like to work for. Places that cold-call will do bulk hirings with the expectation that most people will leave. A lot of the time these arrangements allow employers to force a lot of work out of their employees with questionable tactics.
- kaens 16y ago
  Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do. Having an incompetent (or malicious even) developer on your team for four months is likely to cost your company much more than 50% of their salary for four months.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    And working at 50%, for a competent developer, is also likely to chafe quite a bit. Though hopefully, if someone's really able to tell, you'll be able to tell in much less than 4 months.
  - yason 16y ago
    My point was that this is what happens in the practice: you just won't know until you know, so why not make it that way upfront and not spend lots of effort trying to select the best candidate when you could, based on a much more loose criteria, select the best dozen and see who's really good. I wasn't envisioning a sweatshop: if the company tried to extract everything out of cheap hires for four months, the company itself would lose. And there are these leeching companies anyway, working within conventional hiring practices as well. I had a good company in mind, one that really needs good programmers and not cheap minions. An incompetent or malicious developer wouldn't really last four months, not probably four days. The projected four months was the final threshold after which most programmers can tell whether the candidate is really worth hiring. Having new semi-hires around might certainly add up to the team overhead but on the other hand, that's what happens with conventional hires, too. Lots of teaching, tutoring, and support and things might still get crossed in the first few months. Plus the whole process of interviewing and that some hires quit or get fired within months. So, to reply to your comment: having a batch of new hires, some incompetent and some possibly stellar, and few weeks to sort out the final candidates and few months to seal the deal, might not cost as much as you're afraid. Even a single new hire (carefully selected by HR, phone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and all) can eat up surprisingly lot of the team's time. Further, like hires in general, you don't want to be doing this all the time, just once a year or when you really, really need more programmers.
brown9-2 16y ago
But everyone knew C++. I’ve read about this before. This combined with my own experience now leads me to believe that C++ isn’t optional for any Google applicant. Not because you need to use it to work there. I have no direct experience of this. But because of “interviewer lottery”. Some at Google (it seems) do nothing but C++. You might be interviewed by one of these people. Not true one bit. I don't know a lick of C++ and never encountered it in my interviews there. In fact, the questions I was asked there could have been easily answered in any language, as they were language-neutral and heavily on the side of pure algorithms. Your experience may have been thrown off by having C++ on your resume, assuming you do.
- aplusbi 16y ago
  My experience (having interviewed at Google NYC twice, turned down both times) was that if I asked what language I should, they would always reply with either C, C++ or "C-like." Only once was a particular language required (I was asked to implement memcpy, in part because the interviewer wanted to test my knowledge of low-level C and void pointers). That said, I did write one of my solutions in OCaml even though the interviewer did not know the language (I asked him if I could, and he got the gist of my solution).
- jacoblyles 16y ago
  I had an on-campus interview where they were processing a lot of people quickly. C++ was non-optional. Of course, I have little C++ experience. I would suggest anyone seeking a job at google know C++.
  - drcobg 16y ago
    Google doesn't do interviews the way you describe. Why are you making shit up?
known 16y ago
Interview != Quiz
kno 16y ago
When rejection occurs after an interview, I generally try to my best to identify what I did wrong and prepare to the next interview. My advice don’t feel disappointed if you don’t get the OK there are many reasons why someone get rejected, most of them not necessary skill based; so JUST MOVE ON.
cousin_it 16y ago
I seem to always fail spoken interviews, but easily pass ones where I get to write code. As a particularly hilarious example, this spring I completely failed a phone-screen on the subject of 3D graphics, then sometime later I released a 3D terrain engine that is apparently the best of its kind in Flash as of today (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1500338 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1500338). And I can't say I know much more about the subject now! I just tend to learn stuff "situationally" and immediately forget it when the problem is solved. That applies to concepts too, but it's like 100x worse for APIs: my work nowadays is mostly ActionScript and JavaScript, but I can't even fill a polygon in AS without having the reference open.
- cyunker 16y ago
  I'm the same way. If I'm not currently working in the specific area I'm given a question in, it can take me a few minutes to access that information in my head. And therefore, I look like I don't know the answer. I recently was in an interview for an iPhone dev job. I was prepared to talk about Objective-C/Apple SDK since I was working with that. However, they started digging into projects I had done at my last job (in Java). I struggled. I just hadn't thought about that work for a few years, and probably came off like I was embellishing my resume. After the interview, once I caught my breath and thought about it, all the details started coming back. Needless to say I was kicking myself for not being able to recall it sooner. Just the way my mind works....
bosch 16y ago
I agree with the fact that not getting any feedback (good or bad) hurts people in the long run. Having feedback and either improving in those areas or adjusting how you approach them would help people and if you don't know their an issue how can you improve them? I've sent previous interviewing managers questions asking what I can improve when I didn't get a job this year, and none of them returned my e-mail. Very frustrating, especially if you're someone who would like to improve themself!
bosch 16y ago
Playing Devil's Advocate: Has anyone ever thought they randomly fail someone who might pass just to keep all future applicants on their toes?
- rbanffy 16y ago
  That would assume communication between job applicants. In general, job searh is conducted in secret. When I wa interviewing, nobody but my family and closest friends knew I was doing. I wouldn't appreciate if a candidate kept talking about our hiring processes. Even because they change, vary according to the position and are explained early in the process to the candidate by the HR folks who conduct the first steps. I have nothing to say about Google's process, with the exception being that I was interviewed by a guy whose research paper I read, something that didn't really surprise me.
heresy 16y ago
We're currently going through a hiring cycle, and while admittedly, there's a lot of people applying, I get annoyed by some of our guys doing interviews removing people from consideration for things that simply do not matter. I would likely have failed our own interview processes, yet I was one of the guys let know I was indispensable and not to worry about my job security by upper management when we were going through layoffs in the middle of the financial crisis, going so far as to offer me a raise in the middle of it. The post-interview review of candidates needs to be: (1) Are they smart? (2) Do they practice self-improvement? A given if (1). (3) Can we work with them? But not many people have the balls to take a chance on someone from the left field, so they'll settle for the mediocre plodder who has learned how to game the interview process.

228 points by cletus 16y ago

"But the process does seem to be a lottery to some extent." They go to great lengths to ensure this is not the case. If the feedback from five different interviewers led to a 'no hire' decision, the chances are good that it was the right decision. Of course, no system is perfect. They tend to err on the side of exclusivity; it's much cheaper to decline a suitable candidate than it is to hire someone who won't work out in the long term.

cletus 16y ago
> They go to great lengths to ensure this is not the case. That may well be the case and I can't dispute the conclusion because I am unaware of the position. Were they looking for a hardcore C++ programmer? That's not me. This goes to my observation that feedback is important. I've applied for positions that were slim chances before but I knew they were slim going in so I could set my expectations accordingly. As for the lottery part, 2/5 didn't know my primary language. That seems open to interpretation.
- danbmil99 16y ago
  They won't give you feedback for the same reason they don't disclose their search algorithms: information about their process can be used to game the process. I see the same behavior with VC's -- no usable feedback. It's like in poker -- there's no game-theoretic advantage to show your cards if everyone else folds.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    It's also arrogant not to even let someone know what the specific position involves. It's a solid reason not to interview with Google if you're not going in there on the basis of contacts.
    - btilly 16y ago
      The reason for that is that at the time of the interview there are usually many different positions you could wind up being slotted into. In many cases this is still true at the time of the hire. In a few cases this is still true at the time the person starts on the job.
- chengas123 16y ago
  I can't speak to any particulars in this situation. I thought I would add that it's not necessary to know C++ (I don't :o). It is true that there are people who work on projects that are entirely written in C++. However, there's not generally a requirement that applicants write solutions in a particular language and pseudo code is usually fine.
- Smerity 16y ago
  I'm interested how this came about. They usually either try to match people who know common languages or they do more generic problems which don't depend on language. One important thing is if you said you knew C well (or even only "working knowledge of") then it's perfectly reasonable for them to ask you to write it in C instead of Java/Python/etc. Did the interviewers state they didn't Java beforehand? Did they say they knew another language you'd mentioned you knew on your resume? My interview experience actually involved them hammering me on the languages I said I knew but wasn't an expert in. This is likely as they were trying to find out whether I was lying (or, put kindly, overstating) on my resume. From what I've seen there are a few people who put every language down that they've ever written hello world in ;) (disclaimer: recent intern from Google Sydney office)
timcederman 16y ago
As a company that gets 100k resumes a day, they can afford a few false negatives, but no false positives.
slpsys 16y ago
Yeah, no. Of the dozens of Googlers I've met, their take is that this is just not the case. As others have pointed out, it is _not_ a lottery as to false positives, but it certainly can be for false negatives; Yegge himself points it out with "interview anti-loops." But you know what? From a certain perspective, that's fine. We're currently going through a hiring phase at the startup I work for, and I'd much rather turn away people who might be ok than lock someone in who slid by. From his StackOverflow profile, cletus is a top-notch developer (or at the very least passionate and knowledgeable), it just sounds like he encountered his anti-loop. The biggest problem I see (and encountered this myself with them) is that there's no real feedback, even if your raw score was only just below the mark, where it might behoove everyone if you came back and interviewed with a little more experience and/or preparation.
- enneff 16y ago
  "Yeah, no. Of the dozens of Googlers I've met, their take is that this is just not the case." I am a Googler. I mentioned explicitly that false negatives happen, and stated why they are preferable. Why, then, do you preface your comment with a disagreement?
  - csallen 16y ago
    Because you also said this: >> If the feedback from five different interviewers led to a 'no hire' decision, the chances are good that it was the right decision.
btilly 16y ago
"Ensure" is too strong a word. Best efforts notwithstanding, there remains a lot of luck in the process.
prospero 16y ago
They go to great lengths to ensure this is not the case. If the feedback from five different interviewers led to a 'no hire' decision, the chances are good that it was the right decision. As a recent hire at Google, I don't really think this is the case. There's not just a bias towards false negatives, there's a strong bias. It's well understood here that lots of qualified people are turned away. And for whatever it's worth, the offer to keep your resume on file wasn't just lip service. I interviewed two years ago unsuccessfully, and was recruited a year and a half later based on the strength of that failure. It's also maybe worth mentioning that my only prior work experience was four years of desktop software development in C#, so I don't think the Microsoft thing is that much of a black mark.
- enneff 16y ago
  "As a recent hire at Google, I don't really think this is the case. There's not just a bias towards false negatives, there's a strong bias. It's well understood here that lots of qualified people are turned away." This is pretty much exactly what I said. Do you think if I'd pointed out that I'm actually a google employee also, I might have been spared the down votes?
  - prospero 16y ago
    You said there was a good chance it was the right decision. That may be true in some amortized sense across all hires, but you implied that it was also likely the correct choice in this specific situation. I don't think putting that much faith in the results of the hiring process is justified. Jobs interviews at Google aren't near perfection with a slight bias towards false negatives, and it's unfair to the people who don't make it through to suggest that they are.

etherael 16y ago

I had an interview for a systems administrative position way back when that was my primary gig, admittedly this was in the twilight after ten years of experience and I had already mostly gotten sick of systems administration and was deeply into coding so maybe I was just too jaded, but the single question I recall that they asked me I actually found so stupid it was insulting; What's the default bytes per block in random linux distribution x version y when using filesystem z? My response; I'd google it. Perhaps this is unique to the Australian branch of Google or something but I get the impression that they're much more into the whole meaningless rote memorisation of facts than is often let on. I had a contact from another Google HR person a couple months back in Estonia, this time for a development position. I can't say I wasn't tempted but this time I turned them down flat.

cletus 16y ago
That does seem like a strange question but then again I'm not a sysadmin so I really don't know what's reasonable. I'll frame this in what I know, which is programming. I think it's entirely reasonable to ask someone how a hashtable or even a quick sort (or some other O(n log n) sort) works because programmers should be familiar with that even if 99.9% of the time (if not 100% of the time) you're using a HashMap or std::map or dict or whatever. But number of inodes does seem somewhat esoteric.
- etherael 16y ago
  In my view, it's stupid because it implies that if you're the kind of person that bothers to attempt to commit irrelevant or at best situationally relevant things like this to memory as a matter of course, you probably aren't making optimal use of your mental resources. I found it pretty ironic actually as that's exactly the kind of thing we have search engines for.
  - megablast 16y ago
    On the other hand, if you are constantly working with certain systems, you will know this stuff. If they ask me something esoteric about a language or API that I know really well, I can answer all the tricky questions, or explain how I think it would work. If it is something I use rarely, then I could not. Anyway, isn't block size standard across all OS?

codexon 16y ago

Interesting how they are scouting stackoverflow profiles for potential hires. I suppose it takes more than 10k reputation (talking about my own profile of course). The part about being denied because he was Microsoft-centric and yet Jon Skeet was accepted was quite amusing.

bnoordhuis 16y ago
I was approached by Google recently for an SRE position. I'm not sure where they found my contact information but I don't have accounts with any of the major geek sites - or much of an internet presence at all, really. The recruiter was a tad vague about it but if I were to venture a guess, I'd say Google scans the high-profile OSS projects and associated mailing lists. That's about the only place they could have found me.
alec 16y ago
I think Google recruiters trawl places frequented by programmers and invite them in. A few years ago, when I was more involved in free software, I got an email out of the blue asking me to submit a resume. I was certainly not as visible in the communities I frequented as this guy appears to be in his.

gcheong 16y ago

If I have an interview scheduled to go through lunch hours and the company does not offer me lunch, that makes a very bad impression on me. To me it's part professional courtesy as well as an indication of how well things are planned. Also, if you are able to lunch with the team, it lets you get to know each other in a less stressful situation.

nostrademons 16y ago
That seemed very weird to me. When I interviewed, it was customary to have a Googler who was not an interviewer take you to lunch at one of the cafes. If you were a referral, it's usually your referrer; if you know someone at Google, they try to match you up with that person. It's your chance to ask questions of an employee in an informal setting, where they won't be making a report back to the hiring committee. And I know they still do it, because I was the lunch interview for a friend of mine that just applied a month or so ago. The only thing I can think of is maybe they couldn't find interviewers for the normal time slots, and so they had to schedule one at lunch as well. Qualified interviewers are often a scarce resource at Google, mostly because of people like me who never sign up for it, and they try to avoid assigning more than two interviews/week/person to avoid burnout and let them still get actual work done. It may've been a choice between "schedule one during lunch" or "wait another week until a different interviewer is free".

endlessvoid94 16y ago

The lack of feedback is crippling. I interviewed at a similar company and I thought the interview went GREAT. I'm usually a great judge of whether or not someone likes me, I pay attention that kind of thing, I got all the answers to their satisfaction while explaining, in detail and concisely, my thought process. Didn't get the job. I didn't make one mistake and I thought they liked me. I have zero clues as to why. I'm not really upset about it, it was just a very frustrating experience. All the more reason to do your own thing :-)

gcheong 16y ago
A good time to elicit feedback is right at the end of the interview, in a casual manner along the lines of "well, so how do you think I did?". You don't want to push it if they try to avoid the issue, but I find I generally get better feedback than when trying to get it after a rejection.
- cletus 16y ago
  I'd read stories about people doing this and being told they're not supposed to. I'm usually a fairly good judge of this sort of this so I usually don't need to ask. Eliciting a response may not give an accurate response (eg putting someone on the spot when their view is negative could be somewhat confronting). Practically speaking however, time constraints tended to prohibit such chit-chat anyway.
- gaius 16y ago
  Having been interviewing candidates for over a decade, I've noticed that in the vast majority of cases, this question is only asked by people who've done very badly. With a good candidate it doesn't feel like an interview at all, it feels like getting to know someone who's just joined your team.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I've been interviewing people for 15+ years and I've only had one person ask that question and he was by far the worst candidate I've every interviewed for a developer job.

danbmil99 16y ago

TL; DR: Google's recruitment process is opaque and arguably leads to many false negatives. True 3 years ago and apparently still true. I suspect they would argue the impact of false positives (hired but don't work out) greatly outweighs the loss of false negatives (potentially great employees that can't pass through the filter). This may be true for the one company everyone and their dog wants to work for, but I wouldn't apply this kind of process to my startup. It also feels like it might result in a surfeit of homogeneity. Genetic diversity is important; if everyone is a clone, all it takes is one pathogen to wipe out the population.

dtcavallaro 16y ago
Some companies believe that it is better to reject an excellent applicant than to hire a mediocre applicant.
- barrkel 16y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. Google has a relative luxury here. Companies that don't have a large enough pool of quality applicants to hire from need to turn that equation around: rather, they must try hard not to let the excellent applicant get away, as they may not find another.
  - dtcavallaro 16y ago
    Of course, but by "some companies", I was mainly referring to Google/Microsoft/Amazon/et al. I would agree that for the vast majority of companies, having an attitude like that is a losing proposition.
- ojbyrne 16y ago
  And yet, if you talk to managers, they'd complain at length about the inability to find even mediocre people. Most states in the US have "at will" employment laws meaning that its easy to fire a person after a couple of weeks if its obvious they're not working out.
btmorex 16y ago

didtrade 16y ago

<a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>www.didtrade.com http://www.didtrade.com/>www.didtrade.co... Online sell fashion goods,Accept PayPal.cheap replica fashion goods for sale from china free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-suit free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica t-shirts free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-coat free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-pants free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children-tops free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Children shoes free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica children-boot free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica UGG boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Edhardy boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica LV boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica DG boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Gucci boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica chanel boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica fendi boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Tou`s boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Versace boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica coach boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica juicy boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Burberry boots</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Justin boots</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Dior boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Puma boots free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica DB bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Burberry bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Suitcase free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica gucci bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Fendi bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Versace bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Prada bag free shipping</a> <a href="http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica http://www.didtrade.com/>Replica Hermes_7*star free shipping</a>

csomar 16y ago

I don't know Cletus, I just noticed his profile somehow in StackOverFlow. However, as a brilliant StackOverFlow member with over 100K of points and 3K answers, I really wonder if he is not above the average developer. Only experienced developers can contribute and answer question in Stackoverflow. Questions are generally hard and random. So if Google hires only from the top 10% (say in Australia); isn't this a critical fail in the hiring process? (considering cletus with ranking 4 in sof, I can safely say he's among the top 1% or 0.5%)

jackowayed 16y ago
I don't think you can "safely say" that he's among the top 1% of developers based purely on his StackOverflow profile, regardless of how impressive it is. The only way you can really "safely say" that someone is within the top 1% (That's a pretty elite group. That's like saying "I can safely say he'll get into Harvard.") is if you've seen a significant amount of their actual code (working with them, OSS, etc) and been consistently amazed.
- cletus 16y ago
  The "top 1%" is such a great phenomenon. I remember in the 2000 election the top 1% of earners were daemonized by then VP Gore. In a survey some 20% of people thought they were in the top 1% and another 19% aspired to be. And that's with something easily quantifiable. How exactly do you quantify the percentile of a programmer? FWIW I make no such claim about being the top 1% nor do I claim SO ranking translates to the nebulous concept of a programmer's ranking. If anything, SO reputation is a function of time more than anything else. It's also an indicator of persistence but only a positive indicator (meaning lack of a SO ranking obviously doesn't mean a lack of persistence).
  - waqf 16y ago
    > the top 1% of earners were daemonized by then VP Gore He set them to run in the background and wake up periodically?
- barrkel 16y ago

mkramlich 16y ago

Part of the problem that bit him, I think, is that the traditional interviewing/hiring process is fundamentally flawed and handicapped. Superficial elements have way too large of an impact. it filters out things that should not be filtered out. and way too big of a judgement is made too early, and on too little information, and with too little confidence in the correctness of that judgment. resumes are demanded and then either not read or not remembered. small comments can be magnified in the mind of the listener and used to conclude things that cannot possibly be concluded. ridiculous questions are asked. and lastly, there's very often too much of an attitude that the company/interviewer is in the superior/owner position and the applicant in the subservient/inferior/slave situation (perhaps carried over from blue collar industry) when in reality it should probably be considered an exchange of equals.

gruseom 16y ago
the company/interviewer is in the superior/owner position and the applicant in the subservient/inferior/slave situation (perhaps carried over from blue collar industry) Agree 100%. It's a kinder-gentler master-slave dynamic. That's part of why it's so fucked. So what's the alternative? Let's figure something out.

gruseom 16y ago

Clearly, many of us agree that this process is broken; not specifically at Google, but broken more or less everywhere. So fine, what would you do differently? I hate everything about job interviews, on both sides of the transaction: I don't want to ever job-interview or be job-interviewed again. So let's hear some radical ideas about how else to approach the problem. The crazier the better.

mstevens 16y ago
I've long felt the key is to get the interviewee to do some real work for a day. Pair programming seems like it might work well. You'd have to come up with some suitable toy problems that you could make significant progress on in a day.
csl 16y ago
I think ITA's job screening process is quite nice: Post an interesting puzzle and ask anyone to submit answers. Spend as much time on it as you wish. Their puzzle archive: http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid=39 http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid...
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Google used to do that - if you remember their "Great people needed" campaign from 2002-2005, they did fun stuff like putting coding problems on billboards that solved to the phone number you had to call to submit to apply, or the "Google Labs Aptitude Test" that was basically a parody of standardized testing. I think the reason they don't anymore is that they're a household name. They get tons of applications without any clever tricks. In some ways, I think this is too bad, because it attracts applicants who (in JWZ's words) "want to work for a successful company instead of working to make a company successful." But there's really no way to turn back the clock and make Google hip & unknown anymore.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    My personal favourite questions from that quiz were: * How many ways are there of painting the sides of a cube using four different colors? * Which colors would you choose?

tmsh 16y ago

The key, I think, to hacking most interviews is to take into account the fact that most interviewers overoptimize for their own contribution to the process; i.e., you want to put yourself on a path where the interviewers have some sort of insight into why you're valuable. This can be the traditional: wow, this person has mastered all these fields very well. But it can equally be: wow, this person did extraordinary things with this thing that I've heard good things about; or, wow: I could totally use a person like that on my team -- I think culturally this type of person is valuable; etc. Basically, you want to figure out the selection of likely thoughts the interviewer will have about you -- choose the set of most optimal, most distance-traversing in their mind (some of which ideally differentiate you for your peers), and give them some excuse to figure those out. It's, sadly, not completely unrelated to PUA, as our minds are trained to seek and, with cognitive dissonance, to esteem the general direction of what we've verified before. Fwiw, same pattern as setting traps in poker. Though hopefully you're not being duplicitous, but rather smoothing out an already error-laden, discontinuous situation.

yason 16y ago

Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do. If, after four months, the people turn out to be "smart and get things done" and the company wants to keep them, they'd get the missing 50% from the first four months as a one-time bonus and 100% salary afterwards. It costs something but it also costs a lot of time and money for both parties to engage into this mutual guesswork game called job interviewing. It might even cost everyone less as I bet many candidatepeople would have to be fired after only a few weeks or days.

aspiringsensei 16y ago
Some places do that, and they're generally not places you'd like to work for. Places that cold-call will do bulk hirings with the expectation that most people will leave. A lot of the time these arrangements allow employers to force a lot of work out of their employees with questionable tactics.
kaens 16y ago
Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do. Having an incompetent (or malicious even) developer on your team for four months is likely to cost your company much more than 50% of their salary for four months.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  And working at 50%, for a competent developer, is also likely to chafe quite a bit. Though hopefully, if someone's really able to tell, you'll be able to tell in much less than 4 months.
- yason 16y ago
  My point was that this is what happens in the practice: you just won't know until you know, so why not make it that way upfront and not spend lots of effort trying to select the best candidate when you could, based on a much more loose criteria, select the best dozen and see who's really good. I wasn't envisioning a sweatshop: if the company tried to extract everything out of cheap hires for four months, the company itself would lose. And there are these leeching companies anyway, working within conventional hiring practices as well. I had a good company in mind, one that really needs good programmers and not cheap minions. An incompetent or malicious developer wouldn't really last four months, not probably four days. The projected four months was the final threshold after which most programmers can tell whether the candidate is really worth hiring. Having new semi-hires around might certainly add up to the team overhead but on the other hand, that's what happens with conventional hires, too. Lots of teaching, tutoring, and support and things might still get crossed in the first few months. Plus the whole process of interviewing and that some hires quit or get fired within months. So, to reply to your comment: having a batch of new hires, some incompetent and some possibly stellar, and few weeks to sort out the final candidates and few months to seal the deal, might not cost as much as you're afraid. Even a single new hire (carefully selected by HR, phone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and all) can eat up surprisingly lot of the team's time. Further, like hires in general, you don't want to be doing this all the time, just once a year or when you really, really need more programmers.

brown9-2 16y ago

But everyone knew C++. I’ve read about this before. This combined with my own experience now leads me to believe that C++ isn’t optional for any Google applicant. Not because you need to use it to work there. I have no direct experience of this. But because of “interviewer lottery”. Some at Google (it seems) do nothing but C++. You might be interviewed by one of these people. Not true one bit. I don't know a lick of C++ and never encountered it in my interviews there. In fact, the questions I was asked there could have been easily answered in any language, as they were language-neutral and heavily on the side of pure algorithms. Your experience may have been thrown off by having C++ on your resume, assuming you do.

aplusbi 16y ago
My experience (having interviewed at Google NYC twice, turned down both times) was that if I asked what language I should, they would always reply with either C, C++ or "C-like." Only once was a particular language required (I was asked to implement memcpy, in part because the interviewer wanted to test my knowledge of low-level C and void pointers). That said, I did write one of my solutions in OCaml even though the interviewer did not know the language (I asked him if I could, and he got the gist of my solution).
jacoblyles 16y ago
I had an on-campus interview where they were processing a lot of people quickly. C++ was non-optional. Of course, I have little C++ experience. I would suggest anyone seeking a job at google know C++.
- drcobg 16y ago
  Google doesn't do interviews the way you describe. Why are you making shit up?

known 16y ago

Interview != Quiz

kno 16y ago

When rejection occurs after an interview, I generally try to my best to identify what I did wrong and prepare to the next interview. My advice don’t feel disappointed if you don’t get the OK there are many reasons why someone get rejected, most of them not necessary skill based; so JUST MOVE ON.

cousin_it 16y ago

I seem to always fail spoken interviews, but easily pass ones where I get to write code. As a particularly hilarious example, this spring I completely failed a phone-screen on the subject of 3D graphics, then sometime later I released a 3D terrain engine that is apparently the best of its kind in Flash as of today (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1500338 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1500338). And I can't say I know much more about the subject now! I just tend to learn stuff "situationally" and immediately forget it when the problem is solved. That applies to concepts too, but it's like 100x worse for APIs: my work nowadays is mostly ActionScript and JavaScript, but I can't even fill a polygon in AS without having the reference open.

cyunker 16y ago
I'm the same way. If I'm not currently working in the specific area I'm given a question in, it can take me a few minutes to access that information in my head. And therefore, I look like I don't know the answer. I recently was in an interview for an iPhone dev job. I was prepared to talk about Objective-C/Apple SDK since I was working with that. However, they started digging into projects I had done at my last job (in Java). I struggled. I just hadn't thought about that work for a few years, and probably came off like I was embellishing my resume. After the interview, once I caught my breath and thought about it, all the details started coming back. Needless to say I was kicking myself for not being able to recall it sooner. Just the way my mind works....

bosch 16y ago

I agree with the fact that not getting any feedback (good or bad) hurts people in the long run. Having feedback and either improving in those areas or adjusting how you approach them would help people and if you don't know their an issue how can you improve them? I've sent previous interviewing managers questions asking what I can improve when I didn't get a job this year, and none of them returned my e-mail. Very frustrating, especially if you're someone who would like to improve themself!

bosch 16y ago

Playing Devil's Advocate: Has anyone ever thought they randomly fail someone who might pass just to keep all future applicants on their toes?

rbanffy 16y ago
That would assume communication between job applicants. In general, job searh is conducted in secret. When I wa interviewing, nobody but my family and closest friends knew I was doing. I wouldn't appreciate if a candidate kept talking about our hiring processes. Even because they change, vary according to the position and are explained early in the process to the candidate by the HR folks who conduct the first steps. I have nothing to say about Google's process, with the exception being that I was interviewed by a guy whose research paper I read, something that didn't really surprise me.

heresy 16y ago

We're currently going through a hiring cycle, and while admittedly, there's a lot of people applying, I get annoyed by some of our guys doing interviews removing people from consideration for things that simply do not matter. I would likely have failed our own interview processes, yet I was one of the guys let know I was indispensable and not to worry about my job security by upper management when we were going through layoffs in the middle of the financial crisis, going so far as to offer me a raise in the middle of it. The post-interview review of candidates needs to be: (1) Are they smart? (2) Do they practice self-improvement? A given if (1). (3) Can we work with them? But not many people have the balls to take a chance on someone from the left field, so they'll settle for the mediocre plodder who has learned how to game the interview process.