5 ms·

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 ar

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
In my opinion, the biggest problem with the google-style interview (other companies do the same thing) is that you can practice and get better at it. In fact, you can probably improve how well you do so much that even a mediocre developer can come out looking very good. So why is that bad? Well, for one thing, the questions asked usually aren't directly to being good at your job. Consider the classic "How can you detect loops in a singly-linked list without modifying nodes / keeping accounting information around?" Very, very few people are going to come up with the correct answer to that question without having seen it before especially in a high pressure interview environment. Yet people ask it all the time in interviews. Why? You're just selecting for people who have had to interview a lot (got rejected a lot). A newer style of interview that I quite like is to ask someone to write a moderate chunk of code with a laptop, access to the internet, and a few hours. At least you're measuring something that's directly related to software development.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  A newer style of interview that I quite like is to ask someone to write a moderate chunk of code with a laptop, access to the internet, and a few hours. An amusing variation on this might be to pick the next n interviewees and tell them to spend the day working on something as a team. Observe via camera or one-way glass.
  - eru 16y ago
    Make sure to pay them.
    - Psyonic 16y ago
      My buddy actually had an interview just like that at a California company (much smaller than Google) and he did get paid.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- _Lemon_ 16y ago
vecter 16y ago
Can you explain how the pathogen analogy applies to a corporation of people?

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

In my opinion, the biggest problem with the google-style interview (other companies do the same thing) is that you can practice and get better at it. In fact, you can probably improve how well you do so much that even a mediocre developer can come out looking very good. So why is that bad? Well, for one thing, the questions asked usually aren't directly to being good at your job. Consider the classic "How can you detect loops in a singly-linked list without modifying nodes / keeping accounting information around?" Very, very few people are going to come up with the correct answer to that question without having seen it before especially in a high pressure interview environment. Yet people ask it all the time in interviews. Why? You're just selecting for people who have had to interview a lot (got rejected a lot). A newer style of interview that I quite like is to ask someone to write a moderate chunk of code with a laptop, access to the internet, and a few hours. At least you're measuring something that's directly related to software development.

CamperBob 16y ago
A newer style of interview that I quite like is to ask someone to write a moderate chunk of code with a laptop, access to the internet, and a few hours. An amusing variation on this might be to pick the next n interviewees and tell them to spend the day working on something as a team. Observe via camera or one-way glass.
- eru 16y ago
  Make sure to pay them.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    My buddy actually had an interview just like that at a California company (much smaller than Google) and he did get paid.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
_Lemon_ 16y ago

vecter 16y ago

Can you explain how the pathogen analogy applies to a corporation of people?