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"Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent." Is this really true, though? Are they losing out on more top end candidates? There are

"Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent." Is this really true, though? Are they losing out on more top end candidates? There are other places with interesting work and big paychecks. Some of them aren't building reputations for annoying interview processes.

product50 8y ago
An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.
- stephencanon 8y ago
  > You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. Except for all of the other big tech companies?
  - Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
    > Except for all of the other big tech companies? Many of which have the same type of interview processes? Hell, Facebook sometimes asks two coding questions per interview round, which is 45 minutes long as I recall. They seem to expect perfectly compiling code. If you're not doing coding competitions or practicing on Leetcode or other sites of its ilk, where you learn to regurgitate a Knapsack problem solution or Russian nesting doll problem in ~15 minutes, you're going to have a hard time getting into many of the big tech companies unless you went to a university that teaches using this style. I've seen the sort of problem that required dynamic programing combined with a binary search for the algorithmically optimal solution in a phone screen! I lucked into an easier interview loop, crushed it, and got hired and performed well at one of these types of big companies. But I dread jumping ships because of this daunting interview hoop we jump through. I've already tried to leave and got smacked around in the two interviews I went through because of nerves. I knew the problems, I knew how to solve them, but for some reason I just didn't perform well and couldn't really cross the finish line.
    - sitkack 8y ago
      I do lots of interviews of smart, well spoken people who seem to be able to decompose problems, enumerate pros and cons of various solutions and then struggle with a filter and a reduction over the lines in a file. These people are un-prepared for the interview, this question is easy and not insulting. Anyone doing tech interviews of any sort should be able to answer it, yet most don't. I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1]. Being able to ace a top-k company interview is an ego boost that reduces stress levels day to day. [0] http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/ http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/ [1] https://www.pramp.com/#/ https://www.pramp.com/#/
      - Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
        > I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1]. Leetcode, SPOJ, and others are how I landed my current job. What was most helpful for me was actually going back and reimplementing all of the fundamental datastructures and algorithms. E.g. binary search tree, skip lists, BFS, DFS, different sorting algorithms, etc. From then, it was also helpful to remember where these were being used in the real systems I interact with. Solving the interview problems is typically not my problem. In every round of my Google and Facebook interviews, I knew the optimal solution--confirmed by looking up the solutions after the interview. However, I happened to choke under the interview pressure and turned into a fool. Test anxiety--interview anxiety in this case--is a real thing. What I am going to do in the next round of interviews is apply for dozens of companies I just don't care about, fail a bunch of interviews to get used to the pressure again, and then re-apply to the companies I actually care about.
        sitkack 8y ago
        Pramp is a community driven service to simulate live interviews as closely as possible, exactly for that reason.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Liking money doesn't map to "best."
  - product50 8y ago
    It doesn't. That said, in companies like Google, an eng has a lot of flexibility to choose the team they want to work on - so eventually many people find the thing which they really like. And good money on top of it is the icing on the cake. Also, I linked money since the parent comment talked about finding interesting ans similar paying role as Google's.
    - pinewurst 8y ago
      But is that true? I thought one interviewed for a generic slot at Google, with actual team placement being done after hiring to fill the slot.
      - Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
        Once you're in, you can likely shop around after X amount of time. That's how it works at my non-Google tech company
      - geofft 8y ago
        Correct, but you can accept/decline the offer based on team placement. You don't have to accept and then see what your options are. (For complicated reasons I actually spent about May through July of last summer with an offer open, and talked to 5 or 6 different teams through that process... and at the end of the process when I called to decline, I was told that headcount had shifted for Q3, the team I'd most recently spoken to had lost their open headcount, but there were other teams that had now had open headcount and might be interested in talking.)
geofft 8y ago
An annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated, but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it against the company, but I didn't.) If Google is losing out on good candidates, it's going to be either because of false negatives in the interview process, or ongoing engineering culture concerns (which is roughly why I declined the Google offer I got last year), not because of people self-selecting against annoying interviewing processes. Even this blog post itself is written in the form of "Here's what you need to know to get past the process" - i.e., even this guy assumes people still want to work at Google and work around their process.
- vaxin 8y ago
  You forgot one more thing, google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature. I was invited to interviews on multiple occasions but they are one of the last companies I would work for. I don't care about money, wherever I was working, I had it more than enough to have a really good life and a thousand $ up or down doesnt make much of a difference. But working for a company that actually engages into global spying of people is like a mental prostitution. Not I only wouldn't work for them but also wouldn't take anyone working for them in past working for me. I value people opinion about their impact to the world and google guys went way off into wrong direction. They are simply emitting the signal "I would do anything for money" and this attitude can be understood for someone working in McDonalds, but for a hi-tech worker that can get job anywhere, this is just unacceptable. It shows moral rottening (or just beeing "simpleminded") and... well sorry, there is more than enough other people I will be far more happy to work with. I am really sorry that people like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, which I highly respect, work for them. As developers (Not Google, not Facebook, not Apple, not Microsoft! The Developers! Without them, they aren't worth a dime!) we are at the moment rulling the world, we have to accept some moral obligations instead of just beeing slaves to making money for others stock options. (How cool, I get multiple downvotes which means that the average non-important people (I could use stronger words, but you do know where you fit) don't agree, which makes me flattered. Thank you.) (The other guys upvoting me, thank you, you are somehow restoring my faith, that not everyone is a zealot)
kybernetikos 8y ago
I know multiple people who have told Google recruiters that they are not interested on the basis of their famously drawn out and disrespectful interviewing. Of course, Google is one of the top names in tech and has already employed some luminaries many developers would love to work with, so I'm sure that they get some leaway to treat their interviewees poorly, but for people with other good options, there's not a lot of appeal to being sucked into one end of a very long, very painful funnel. Having said that, Lazlo Bock has some interesting things to say about hiring in an organisation like Google.
dgreensp 8y ago
Yes, Google is missing out on some top-end candidates, who probably wouldn’t be happy there anyway. It’s not so simple as having a less annoying interview process and getting better engineers. The interview process is an extension of the corporate culture. It embodies certain attitudes and probably attracts certain personalities and repels others. Lots of people want to work at Google, and lots of people do, so only Google knows if something about the process is not working for them. I’ve worked at Google, and engaged with Google recruiters over the years (who didn’t even know I was an ex-Googler). Talking to their recruiters does feel like talking to chatbots and can feel quite dehumanizing, in big and small ways. I’ve also worked at small start-ups that did world-class recruiting, or at least several classes better than Google — perhaps there are even higher classes, who knows. Both activities are called “recruiting” but they barely seem like the same thing.

product50 8y ago

An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.

stephencanon 8y ago
> You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. Except for all of the other big tech companies?
- Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
  > Except for all of the other big tech companies? Many of which have the same type of interview processes? Hell, Facebook sometimes asks two coding questions per interview round, which is 45 minutes long as I recall. They seem to expect perfectly compiling code. If you're not doing coding competitions or practicing on Leetcode or other sites of its ilk, where you learn to regurgitate a Knapsack problem solution or Russian nesting doll problem in ~15 minutes, you're going to have a hard time getting into many of the big tech companies unless you went to a university that teaches using this style. I've seen the sort of problem that required dynamic programing combined with a binary search for the algorithmically optimal solution in a phone screen! I lucked into an easier interview loop, crushed it, and got hired and performed well at one of these types of big companies. But I dread jumping ships because of this daunting interview hoop we jump through. I've already tried to leave and got smacked around in the two interviews I went through because of nerves. I knew the problems, I knew how to solve them, but for some reason I just didn't perform well and couldn't really cross the finish line.
  - sitkack 8y ago
    I do lots of interviews of smart, well spoken people who seem to be able to decompose problems, enumerate pros and cons of various solutions and then struggle with a filter and a reduction over the lines in a file. These people are un-prepared for the interview, this question is easy and not insulting. Anyone doing tech interviews of any sort should be able to answer it, yet most don't. I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1]. Being able to ace a top-k company interview is an ego boost that reduces stress levels day to day. [0] http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/ http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/ [1] https://www.pramp.com/#/ https://www.pramp.com/#/
    - Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
      > I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1]. Leetcode, SPOJ, and others are how I landed my current job. What was most helpful for me was actually going back and reimplementing all of the fundamental datastructures and algorithms. E.g. binary search tree, skip lists, BFS, DFS, different sorting algorithms, etc. From then, it was also helpful to remember where these were being used in the real systems I interact with. Solving the interview problems is typically not my problem. In every round of my Google and Facebook interviews, I knew the optimal solution--confirmed by looking up the solutions after the interview. However, I happened to choke under the interview pressure and turned into a fool. Test anxiety--interview anxiety in this case--is a real thing. What I am going to do in the next round of interviews is apply for dozens of companies I just don't care about, fail a bunch of interviews to get used to the pressure again, and then re-apply to the companies I actually care about.
      - sitkack 8y ago
        Pramp is a community driven service to simulate live interviews as closely as possible, exactly for that reason.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Liking money doesn't map to "best."
- product50 8y ago
  It doesn't. That said, in companies like Google, an eng has a lot of flexibility to choose the team they want to work on - so eventually many people find the thing which they really like. And good money on top of it is the icing on the cake. Also, I linked money since the parent comment talked about finding interesting ans similar paying role as Google's.
  - pinewurst 8y ago
    But is that true? I thought one interviewed for a generic slot at Google, with actual team placement being done after hiring to fill the slot.
    - Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
      Once you're in, you can likely shop around after X amount of time. That's how it works at my non-Google tech company
    - geofft 8y ago
      Correct, but you can accept/decline the offer based on team placement. You don't have to accept and then see what your options are. (For complicated reasons I actually spent about May through July of last summer with an offer open, and talked to 5 or 6 different teams through that process... and at the end of the process when I called to decline, I was told that headcount had shifted for Q3, the team I'd most recently spoken to had lost their open headcount, but there were other teams that had now had open headcount and might be interested in talking.)

geofft 8y ago

An annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated, but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it against the company, but I didn't.) If Google is losing out on good candidates, it's going to be either because of false negatives in the interview process, or ongoing engineering culture concerns (which is roughly why I declined the Google offer I got last year), not because of people self-selecting against annoying interviewing processes. Even this blog post itself is written in the form of "Here's what you need to know to get past the process" - i.e., even this guy assumes people still want to work at Google and work around their process.

vaxin 8y ago
You forgot one more thing, google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature. I was invited to interviews on multiple occasions but they are one of the last companies I would work for. I don't care about money, wherever I was working, I had it more than enough to have a really good life and a thousand $ up or down doesnt make much of a difference. But working for a company that actually engages into global spying of people is like a mental prostitution. Not I only wouldn't work for them but also wouldn't take anyone working for them in past working for me. I value people opinion about their impact to the world and google guys went way off into wrong direction. They are simply emitting the signal "I would do anything for money" and this attitude can be understood for someone working in McDonalds, but for a hi-tech worker that can get job anywhere, this is just unacceptable. It shows moral rottening (or just beeing "simpleminded") and... well sorry, there is more than enough other people I will be far more happy to work with. I am really sorry that people like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, which I highly respect, work for them. As developers (Not Google, not Facebook, not Apple, not Microsoft! The Developers! Without them, they aren't worth a dime!) we are at the moment rulling the world, we have to accept some moral obligations instead of just beeing slaves to making money for others stock options. (How cool, I get multiple downvotes which means that the average non-important people (I could use stronger words, but you do know where you fit) don't agree, which makes me flattered. Thank you.) (The other guys upvoting me, thank you, you are somehow restoring my faith, that not everyone is a zealot)

kybernetikos 8y ago

I know multiple people who have told Google recruiters that they are not interested on the basis of their famously drawn out and disrespectful interviewing. Of course, Google is one of the top names in tech and has already employed some luminaries many developers would love to work with, so I'm sure that they get some leaway to treat their interviewees poorly, but for people with other good options, there's not a lot of appeal to being sucked into one end of a very long, very painful funnel. Having said that, Lazlo Bock has some interesting things to say about hiring in an organisation like Google.

dgreensp 8y ago

Yes, Google is missing out on some top-end candidates, who probably wouldn’t be happy there anyway. It’s not so simple as having a less annoying interview process and getting better engineers. The interview process is an extension of the corporate culture. It embodies certain attitudes and probably attracts certain personalities and repels others. Lots of people want to work at Google, and lots of people do, so only Google knows if something about the process is not working for them. I’ve worked at Google, and engaged with Google recruiters over the years (who didn’t even know I was an ex-Googler). Talking to their recruiters does feel like talking to chatbots and can feel quite dehumanizing, in big and small ways. I’ve also worked at small start-ups that did world-class recruiting, or at least several classes better than Google — perhaps there are even higher classes, who knows. Both activities are called “recruiting” but they barely seem like the same thing.