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I work at Google and no it's not easy for us either. I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably

• vonmoltke 8y ago
  > I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. I don't see how companies that claim it's hard to find talent can be OK with a system that would reject more than a small portion (<5%) of their current productive engineers. Edit: fixed word sense ambiguity
  • mrep 8y ago
    Because they think false positives are really bad and you can always reapply.
  • meestaahjoshee 8y ago
    I see it like getting into a top college. Would your average college student be able to get a 2300+ (1500+ ?) SAT score if they had to take it again? Probably not unless they re-studied and prepared for it - which I think is the same answer for FAANG engineers and whiteboarding questions. Also, good SAT scores don't always translate into good college students and the same could be said for good whiteboarding skills don't translate into good software engineers or vice versa.
    • kart23 8y ago
      That's why standardized testing is becoming more irrelevant in college admissions.
  • HillaryBriss 8y ago
    > I don't see how companies that claim it's hard to find talent can be OK ... I don't either, but it's an easy game to play: start a company with an impossibly difficult goal (e.g. build a more popular social network than Facebook in two years, colonize Neptune, cure cancer) and then complain that there isn't enough talent in the labor pool. Finally, blame the government.
• Spoom 8y ago
  I got the same response from an old friend who has worked for Google for the better part of a decade. FWIW my understanding is that the Hiring Committee tends to discard feedback from interviewers like your latter type here.
  • franzwong 8y ago
    Is there any mechanism like those olympics diving competition? i.e. the highest and lowest score are discarded.
    • Spoom 8y ago
      They don't do this as a matter of course, but they do look at the question that was asked various factors surrounding the interview. They certainly can and do throw out interviews that don't generate any signal.
  • tostitos1979 8y ago
    I had such an a-hole interviewer the last (and hence final) interview I did at Google. His attitude was ... oh .. you have a PhD, let me show you how smart I am. Just like getting into YC isn't necessary to be a successful founder, getting into Google isn't necessary to be a successful engineer. There are tons of companies out there, and many pay better than Google.
    • UncleMeat 8y ago
      Give feedback to your recruiter. Interviewers can be forced into more training or taken off rotations.
      • WorldMaker 8y ago
        The one that got to me admitted first thing that he already was told to knock it off, shrugged it off, and was still in the rotation anyway. I didn't feel like giving that feedback to the recruiter would help if it was already known well in advance. That and a lot of other signals in two interview cycles seemed to indicate that the recruiter and/or Google were perfectly happy wasting my time, and I've not really felt like bothering to interview with Google since.
• ryandrake 8y ago
  > I've heard many of my coworkers joke that if they went through the interview process again they'd probably fail. I’ve heard this joke at a lot of tech companies. Also, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done at my job was pass the interview.” Just shows how divorced from day-to-day work skills interviewing has become. I think most tech companies severely overestimate the cost of false positives, particularly in the USA where it’s trivially easy to fire someone who turns out to be a dud. Also think it represents an opportunity: if you could reliably figure out who made it to the interview stage at these top companies but did not get an offer, you could forego your recruiting expense, simply hire all those people and likely end up with a well above average team, minus the few false positives.
  • tootie 8y ago
    I'd be curious what the pipeline of candidates looks like at these top places. You're probably correct that they are being overly critical and rejecting plausible candidates. They may be overestimating their needs, but they are also probably inundated with overconfident chumps.
    • ryandrake 8y ago
      I bet if you could select only the people who made it to the in-person interviews at these companies, which usually happens after multiple weed-out filters, you’d have a way-above-average cohort.
  • zeveb 8y ago
    > I think most tech companies severely overestimate the cost of false positives, particularly in the USA where it’s trivially easy to fire someone who turns out to be a dud. I don't think that's actually true. People who are net-negative on a team may be very personable and hence emotionally difficult to fire. And of course the U.S. does have a number of protected classes, who can be very difficult & expensive to fire for cause (because the assumption is that they were not fired for cause). I'm a member of a protected class, and I often worry that it actually makes it more difficult for me to get hired: will folks be willing to take a chance on me, knowing that were I a jerk I could make life difficult for them? I'm not a jerk (I think!), but they can hardly know that!
• jfasi 8y ago
  I also work at Google and what mystifies me when I do interviews is just how consistently people manage to screw up even the medium difficulty questions. I used to love asking this question until it was banned: https://programmingpraxis.com/2012/01/20/knights-on-a-keypad/ https://programmingpraxis.com/2012/01/20/knights-on-a-keypad... This is a great question because it has several levels of solutions: 1. A recursive solution that iterates over all sequences, exponential time and logarithmic in space. Interviewing for T3 (entry level, think college grad), getting only this far in 45 minutes earns a "leaning no hire" in my book. 2. The above solution except with memoization, which reduces the runtime to linear but requires linear space. This one earns a "leaning hire" from me. 3. A dynamic programming solution that takes linear time and constant space. This one gets a "hire" to a "strong hire," depending on the elegance of the implementation and the strength of the discussion we have around it. 4. A logarithmic time solution involving adjacency matrices, matrix multiplication, and binary decomposition of numbers. I've never seen anyone get this and I only learned about it after months of asking this question. It's shocking how few candidates actually got as far as solution 1. I kinda want to open this up to the HN comments section, because this does not strike me as a brutally difficult problem, but the rate at which people fell on their faces when presented with this question suggests either something about our interview process or about the candidates we interview. EDIT: A clarification about “getting as far as” a particular solution: I’m not sitting there stone faced taking notes, I provide hints and prods and suggestions to push candidates toward more optimal solutions. I want the candidate to get as far as possible because it feels good to watch someone succeed, but oftentimes they run out of steam or take forever to implement their solution. In particular with respect to solution 1, if that’s as far as a candidate can get despite my recommendations, that’s not a good sign for their algorithmic ability.
  • aaomidi 8y ago
    I mean I'm surprised you don't see why this question is plain stupid. I've had to deal with an algorithm problem of this difficulty once in my entire work life and I was given a week time to go figure out the best way to go about this. Your problem creates an unrealistic standard of a software developer. You don't get to see something like their coding quality which is a lot more important in a candidate than their ability to solve an arbitrary algorithms question. Especially since these algorithm quesstions are now being studied for the sake of interviews. Rather than to learn something. It's shocking to me how many engineers I come across that think having an algorithms based interview actually gives them good results.
• Shish2k 8y ago
  Working at FB, +1 to all of this. Personally I find that I can get a lot more useful signal from simple practical problems (eg "take a .txt file as input, modify all the words which contain the letter 'q' to be uppercase, write the results to a new file") which have a lot of room for expansion (What if we instead want to capitalise each word where the word after it contains a 'q'? What if we only want to modify the third instance of each word? What if the .txt file is too large for RAM? What if a single 'word' is too large for ram and the letter q is right at the end of the word?) -- starting out with something that any programmer should be able to solve in one or two minutes, and then cranking up the difficulty; adding in bits where a strong algorithmic coder has an opportunity to come up with a more efficient solution, but it isn't just a binary "has the candidate memorised the appropriate algorithm yes/no?". (Example question made up off the top of my head because NDA, I haven't actually given much throught as to if it's a good question or not, just giving an example of "question which starts simple and then you can add complexity on top")
  • amnguyen11 8y ago
    What would the correct solution be for the questions involving an input too large for RAM? This is new to me.
    • Shish2k 8y ago
      "the correct solution" implies that there is one particular correct solution - there are a lot of options, and I'd accept any answer if the candidate can come up with a reasonable justification for it. One example would be to process the data in fixed-size chunks of eg 1KB instead of trying to process the entire file at once. Pros: no matter how weirdly malformed your data is, your memory use is constant. Cons: what if that 1KB boundary line cuts a word in half? - then the candidate can either handle that new edge case, or switch to a different approach that doesn't suffer from that problem. Again, either option is valid if they have a solid explanation for what they are doing and why they are doing it.