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Google hiring has been fubar for years now. I think many of us here have been contacted ( unsolicited ) by Google for job interviews in the past. My Google in
by _Marak_ 8y ago
Google hiring has been fubar for years now.
I think many of us here have been contacted ( unsolicited ) by Google for job interviews in the past.
My Google interview story ends with me stopping the 8th interview ( 4th technical interview ) half-way in due to the frustration of listening to my interviewer loudly reply to text messages on his phone while I'm trying to write very complex source code into a shared Google Text Document using no other development tools.
At one point the 8th interviewer asked me if I had ever used Github before. Considering Google cold-contacted me on my public Github email address and half my resume was Github projects it was obvious this guy didn't even look at my resume...
- s17n 8y agoI make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.
- crispyporkbites 8y agoIs this sarcasm? You just make your entire hiring call on talking to the person without looking at their career, academics and skills?
- sjsjxhhc 8y agoIf you’re one person out of many in the hiring process, and your role is to evaluate some specific skills, then yes, it may well be the case that knowing more about the candidate’s background will hurt more than it helps.
- s17n 8y agoExactly
- psyc 8y agoI doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my next opportunity.
- golergka 8y ago> I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. I have had a pleasure of interviewing a 'veteran' who listed both Emacs and vim on his resume, among dozens of other keywords and many, many years of professional experience. I asked him, how do you exit these text editors? "As any other program", he answered, perplexed - "you click on the cross in the upper-right corner". This was not an unique and ever especially outstanding event in my interviewing experience.
- rayiner 8y agoIs that answer wrong? Does using GVIM or Aquamacs mean you don’t know vim and emacs?
- golergka 8y agoWhen I asked if he was using a console version or some wrapper that supported window manager, he didn't understand the question. When I asked if there's some another way to close it, he, just as surprised, told about the main program menu, just below the window title. Any person who actually used either of these editors even once would have a pretty solid idea of what I was going for. It was a very simple, quick test to determine that he just assembled his CV from semi-relevant keywords at random.
- itronitron 8y agothe right answer would be to google stackoverflow for how to kill vim after saving your work (pressing ctrl+s) :)
- rayiner 8y agoI don't know if I believe that. Lots of people (in particular folks using Windows or Mac) use the GUI version of those editors because they're preinstalled on machines at school and work. They may not even know there is a console version of those programs. (Also "window manager" is pretty *nix-specific jargon.)
- johannes1234321 8y agoFor an engineer who is doing an interview it is hard to judge those things written there. There are other stages (i.e. before an techbical interview is setup) where those are checked in depth. For the technical interviewer knowing a bit about the candidate can help to start in an area where the candidate should have experience and then move into the direction you are interviewing for, of you have a clear set of requirements for the job however can also directly start there.
- s17n 8y agoI'm not making a hiring decision, I'm just an interviewer.
- dvt 8y agoUh, what? Every time I've done an interview, the first thing I looked at was the candidate's resume. Even ignoring the fact that everyone is different, has different experiences, and is strong/weak in different areas (which is very important to know as an interviewer), I'm not sure what kind of bias you're trying to avoid.
- philwelch 8y agoFWIW, I’ve seen the same practice advised in “unconscious bias training”. The idea being that if you notice that someone went to the same university you did, or a prestigious university, or worked for a prestigious company or a company you worked for, you’ll be unconsciously biased in their favor. The antidote to unconscious bias is to have a standardized interview and a standardized rubric for evaluating the candidate’s answers and to disregard any other information. I’m very deliberately not sharing my personal opinions on this.
- s17n 8y agoI am skeptical that standardized rubrics can help but my approach is more effective and easier anyway, at least for things you can avoid knowing. Doesn't help with race or gender bias though unfortunately.
- s17n 8y agoThe recruiters tell you if they want you to ask questions about specific topics and realistically I'm only going to get to ask one question anyway. The main bias that I'm trying to avoid is knowing what school the candidate went to.
- cm2187 8y agoAnd most resumes are full of lies anyway.
- dvt 8y agoYou really think the best way to start a new business relationship is with the assumption that the guy across the table is a lying scumbag?
- cm2187 8y agoI am not sure I understand your position. So you would not get a lawyer to review a business contract because doing so would imply that your business partner is a lying scumbag, a morally unacceptable position when starting a new business relationship? No, and that's called due diligence. Same with hiring. I have come across enough candidates where there was a huge gap between claims written on the CV and what the candidate actually did or knew to blindly trust any CV. And the best candidates are often not the best CV writers.
- icebraining 8y agoYou start by assuming they may be a lying scumbag. Hopefully by the time you make an offer, you're reasonably certain they aren't.
- hennsen 8y agoAnd somebody putting only lies in a resume will turn super honest on the phone?
- cm2187 8y agoNo but he wouldn't be able to answer questions that go a bit deeper into what they claim they did or know but didn't/don't.
- hennsen 8y agoYes. And that this kind of discovery - especially detecting if they lied at you in written text, which for me is an exclusion criterion - requires having read the text...
- RightMillennial 8y agoTo avoid bias? As in to be completely unprepared? Wouldn't reading the résumé give you a better idea of the interviewee's background, and allow you to better assess him?
- UncleMeat 8y agoAt Google there are two layers of the hiring process. Interviewers provide information for the hiring committee. The hiring committee has the resume. They don't need people to read it to them.
- RightMillennial 8y ago> They don't need people to read it to them. I'm not following. Why would someone read the resume to someone else?
- joshuamorton 8y agoSo, when I interview someone, I ask them some technical questions and maybe some questions about their work, and provide structured feedback to a seperate group of people who make final hiring decisions. There's actually not a whole lot of reason for me to look at their resume. The group who makes hiring decisions has it, so my interpretation of it won't be that valuable. Potentially I could ask them to elaborate on some of their prior work or projects, but that's usually less meaningful than just asking technical questions.
- s17n 8y agoI'm not there to figure out how good the candidate is at the things they claim to be good at. I'm there to figure out how good they are at the things the company wants them to be good at. (Not trying to claim that I'm actually able to figure out much of anything in a technical interview, but that's the goal.)
- danpalmer 8y agoOr her/them.
- liquidise 8y agoI'm happy to see i'm no the only one who has adopted this practice[1]. Sure enough, reading resumes filled me with bias about a person's assumed design skills, communication skills, organizational skills and attention to detail, none of which a resume is adequately capable of determining. When i interview candidates today, i check a resume for 3 things: years they have been coding professionally, has their average tenure with companies been > 6-9 months, what languages do they list? It has yet to be a practice that has bitten me in any way i can identify. In fact, i feel i give candidates a better chance when im not criticizing their resume before meeting them. 1. https://blog.benroux.me/resumes-make-hiring-harder-ignore-them/ https://blog.benroux.me/resumes-make-hiring-harder-ignore-th...
- dasil003 8y agoSo in the realm of infinite knowledge and experience candidates may have, the signal you want is based purely on the specific contrived questions of your choice. You should be aware this is not unbiased, it's just biased towards those who happen to have worked on similar problems to what you think is important. Google can probably get away with this due to the size of applicant pool, but when I see other companies cargo-culting this approach I can't help but see a huge talent arbitrage opportunity.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoIt's biased toward people who have taken a few weeks to prep on the standard Google interview curriculum that has been widely advertised for a decade.
- s17n 8y agoIt's hiring committee's job to read the resume, not the interviewer's.
- drdeadringer 8y agoWhat is the interviewer's job?
- s17n 8y agoAsk a technical question or two and assess the candidate based on their reply.
- drdeadringer 8y agoHow can you assess this when divorced from the resume, or is this technical Q&A purely "people skills" and how is that possible?
- itronitron 8y agoThe interviewer's job should be to determine whether, and how, the candidate would succeed in the organization.
- sowbug 8y agoYou seem to be getting beaten up over this point, so I'd like to un-lurk and support it. A screener's job is to read the resume and match static facts to company needs. A recruiter's job is to gauge subjective fit and mutual interest. An interviewer's job is to assess analytical ability, communication skills, personality, and culture fit, as well as to be an advertisement for the company/team/project/position if both sides want to close the deal. None of that depends on a re-evaluation of the static facts on the resume. If I interviewed with a CEO or VP of Engineering, and that person asked me questions about my resume, I'd run away as quickly as possible from that company. I'd do the same depending on the circumstances if an engineer referenced my resume during an interview.
- s17n 8y agoI think that reading the resume is probably appropriate for the person making the hiring decision but for the interviewer, it's clearly a bad idea.
- sowbug 8y agoI'm less concerned about bias than you are. For me it's more that your resume is what you used to do, and I'm interested in what you will do. I also found history the most boring subject in high school. Probably not a coincidence.
- itronitron 8y ago>> If I interviewed with a CEO or VP of Engineering, and that person asked me questions about my resume, I'd run away What else are they going to ask you about? If my resume highlights my notable accomplishments in XYZ and the VP of E asks me if I have any interest in doing XYZ then I am going to consider the VP of E to be a total idiot or incredibly distracted.
- sowbug 8y agoI don't care about XYZ. The company you came from already did that. The world doesn't need another XYZ. But we do care about XYZ', and we think someone with experience in X, Y, XY, YZ, XZ, XYZ, WXY, etc. will help us build the first XYZ' in the industry. That's why the screener picked your resume among the 500 we received. So I'll ask about XYZ', because that's what we're going to build. (We're actually building ZYX''', but that's a secret we'll reveal once you join the team.)
- zmarty 8y agoI think that approach is misguided. The resume has background information and my opinion is that interviews do not correctly capture the capabilities of a person.
- s17n 8y agoYeah but I'm not the person making the hiring decision, I'm just the interviewer. The way this works at companies like Google is that the interviewers submit feedback to the hiring committee and the hiring committee decides.
- noarchy 8y agoSo who at Google is using Google Docs to write their code, day-to-day? No one, right? And 8 interviews? Was it even the last potential interview? That is indeed fubar. They do this because they can. Hiring is an expensive process, and not everyone can afford to dump this much effort into a single hire.
- kamaal 8y ago>>And 8 interviews? Pretty standard across these AmaGoogFaceSoft like companies. They basically have too much money and time to spend on these things, and they inevitable hire people like them who have lot of free time on their hands to prepare for their textbook puzzle questions. In other words they wish to hire candidates who do bare minimum work but spend hours preparing for interviews to move to next jobs.