10 ms·

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition

• pinewurst 8y ago
  It's like military academy (or fraternity) hazing. You've been abused, therefore you want to pass the load of that abuse on. Maybe you delude yourself into calling it "tradition" or "high standards" or maybe you're just honest and enjoy the sadism of it all.
  • wolfgke 8y ago
    > It's like military academy (or fraternity) hazing. You've been abused, therefore you want to pass the load of that abuse on. I really cannot imagine why people have this behavior. I was often treated unfairly in life, so I try to architect systems that attempt to avoid my perceived unfairness so that the next generation does not have to suffer similarly (ideally in way for which correctness can be shown in a mathematically rigid way).
    • throwawaymath 8y ago
      I think the answer is that most people are not like that, and the ones that are don't think about it from that perspective or that explicitly. All disagreeable human behavior is easy to point out and criticize in its most straightforward and uncharitable representation.
      • stcredzero 8y ago
        I think the answer is that most people are not like that, and the ones that are don't think about it from that perspective or that explicitly. That, in a nutshell, is why a lot of abnormal psychology is so very sticky. It's even worse than that, however. It's more that most people are just a tiny bit "like that," and no one thinks about it from that perspective.
    • Jare 8y ago
      Note that you can easily do both, unconsciously. Architect systems that are fair, but behave poorly in person. As a poor attempt to illustrate: imagine someone who is not mean spirited but has anger management issues - they would not necessarily build systems that favor aggression, but they might behave like that's their preference.
    • ataturk 8y ago
      It's called "being an asshole" and there's lots and lots of people like that out there! I am currently running interviews at a Fortune 10 company. We get a ton of fake outs. Even using Webex, they have clever schemes for getting assistance answering our questions and some of the tricksters are so slick that it is nigh impossible to detect the fraud. Another tactic we are running into right now is when the interview is by phone, we talk to someone really great who sounds like an excellent fit and then the recruiting firm sends a different, low-skilled cutout over in their place. Now, every contractor gets re-interviewed onsite or Day 1 we assess skills and let them go if they aren't a fit. It's horrendous.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I can't speak on how solid this research was, but I remember reading a book (one of Cialdini's, I think), that explained hazing behaviour as group cohesion enhancers. Basically, what you suffer during initiation will make your bond with the group much stronger. I suppose there might be something to it, given how prevalent such practices are all around the world, in all cultures.
    • rf15 8y ago
      There's enough people out there who take this more as a hint that this is an inherently hostile environment through and through and just close themselves off forever/become closet hostile towards all members of the group
  • codr4 8y ago
    The wheel of pain and suffering must roll on, otherwise people might get a clue and unite against their oppressors. Or in the words of the freemasons, order through chaos. Once hurt, few seem to have enough integrity to break the loop; so it snow balls nicely all by itself.
  • adrianmonk 8y ago
    I have a pet theory that it's related to the difficulty of accepting a painful truth. In that moment, you face a choice. Either you do the same thing that was done to you, or you don't. If you break with tradition and avoid doing whatever it is, you will end up asking yourself why, and you'll have to answer "because it was abusive". It some cases, that thought may be too horrible to even admit into your mind, or at least it's unpleasant enough that you prefer not to deal with it. If you go the other way and stick with tradition, then you can just do whatever it is, and you can say this happened to me, it's normal, it's part of the natural cycle of things, etc. Also, sometimes you are blindsided by this and don't realize you're making the choice until the moment it happens, so you don't have time to mentally prepare to do the harder thing. Point being, it's not always sadism. Sometimes it's denial. TLDR: The corollary of "that would be abusive" is "I've been abused". It hurts to confront that possibility, so people look for ways to deny it. And the organization offers them one.
  • mmirate 8y ago
    > You've been abused, therefore you want to pass the load of that abuse on. Maybe you delude yourself into calling it "tradition" or "high standards" or maybe you're just honest and enjoy the sadism of it all. What did (or will) my successors do to deserve having an easier time than I did? (Disclaimer: have not been to a military academy or a frat; but only to an undergrad school.)
• gcatalfamo 8y ago
  I have been interviewed at Google and I was given a brainteaser. "Can you estimate Google AdWords revenue for Italy - B2B?"
  • grivescorbett 8y ago
    This isn’t a brain teaser. It’s market size estimation, I’m guessing this was not an engineering role?
    • gcatalfamo 8y ago
      How is that question different from "please estimate how many golf ball fit in a school bus" ? The only thing changing are parameters. EDIT: it was for the Search team, search spam prevention, can't remember role it's been 4-5 years, sorry.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • grivescorbett 8y ago
        If it was an engineering role I’d definitely call it a brain teaser. But for say a marketing role, an interviewers wants to see that you understand the way money flows through the business and what the parameters therein are. Maybe it’s still a brain teaser but I would say it’s relevant to the job.
      • teraflop 8y ago
        If you were interviewing for a job at a company whose main revenue stream involved transporting golf balls in school buses, that might be a perfectly reasonable interview question.
      • mgkimsal 8y ago
        If someone is sending emails about golf balls and school busses, it's probably spam. ;)
  • mike_ivanov 8y ago
• 01100011 8y ago
  > the interview process is hard Nah. I've interviewed at a lot of places where I sort of enjoy the opportunity to demonstrate my soft skills. I can't say I'm looking forward to my FB & Google interviews(quite the opposite). My Amazon interview experience absolutely sucked(not a single question relating to the job, stupid algorithm gotcha questions). Most companies, IME, are much easier. For instance, there is a large media company which pays competitively to FANG companies and the only thing I need to do to prep for the interview is memorize the algorithmic cost and backing algorithms of the common C++ STL container classes. For my current job(arguably not the greatest gig), I had to demonstrate my knowledge of Python, C++, kernel programming and networking. I know those things, and enjoyed demonstrating that. I enjoyed talking about my past work. My biggest worry was choosing the button up shirt I was going to wear. That's how interviews should work.
  • pinewurst 8y ago
    Many interviews are hard, but there's a distinct difference between good hard and bad hard. My current gig interviews were all deep storage strategy conversations and hard in the sense of needing to show a lot of knowledge articulately. I left there feeling really good if exhausted. My Google interviews were hard in the sense of embarrassing regurgitation and thinking nonsense on one's feet. Hard was being made to feel inferior.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      Hard was being made to feel inferior. I had an interview experience, where the interviewer was looking for a particular answer. I give him 3 answers to his design issue. Then the interviewer says he was looking for the 2nd answer I gave him, as if I didn't just say it. It's one thing to reach and fail. It's another thing to be in a context where the truth of what you know doesn't even matter.
      • annywhey 8y ago
        The pattern of "stay silent and look dubious to make the candidate feel dumb" is a really common interview hazing strategy in my experience. I think the next time I see it, I'm just going to question whether this is how they behave in their job too, even if it means ending the interview right there.
• sigi45 8y ago
  I failed a google interview and it is frustrating. Emotional speaking, the rejection was hard but also other rejections as well. At least at google i got feedback, audi did not. No feedback after coding project and 2 interviews sucks hard...
  • ergothus 8y ago
    This - As an interviewer I hate giving feedback on failed interviewees. It always feels like an insult as well as invitation for them to defend themselves after the decision has been made (which means I have to say no again, doubling my unhappiness and presumably theirs. As an interviewEE , though, feedback is essential to improving and definitely reduces the sting of a failed interview. (My sample size of both sucesses and failures is small but feels huge anyway).
• biztos 8y ago
  > brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google) Out of curiosity, how is this controlled?
  • jfasi 8y ago
    Interviewers write up questions asked, candidate solutions, and their commentary and hiring recommendation. Those writeups are sent to a hiring committee which reviews all the candidate's feedback and makes a hire/no hire recommendation. If the committee sees a brainteasers, disagrees with a question, spots inconsistencies in the feedback, etc., they moderate their use of the feedback or ignore it altogether. There's also a mechanism to send feedback to the interviewer, which they can use to let them know a question is appropriate, banned due to having leaked, etc.
    • biztos 8y ago
      Thanks, that's interesting. It must be a little bizarre doing interviews in a place where lots of candidates specifically prepare for your interview process, and some presumably try to game it.
• moduspol 8y ago
  > I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. I think it's possible--but there was an experiment someone ran a few years ago with a guy applying to jobs in both software development and management (while qualified for both and resumes optimized for each). One of the key differences that was found is that software developers essentially started out at zero and every wrong answer / misstep essentially reduced their score. For the management interviews, it was tougher to answer something wrong, but each good answer earned points. It naturally results in software developers feeling like they blew it, but managers just wondering if they wowed them more than the other candidates. To me that suggests it's something more inherent to software developer interviewing than a frustration bias. If I had to guess, it's just that aspects of software development are more measurable than in other roles, and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz.
  • Klonoar 8y ago
    This is one of those moments where citing a source (that experiment) would be incredibly useful...
    • moduspol 8y ago
      I wish my Googling skills were stronger, but alas, they are not. I remember one of the other key takeaways was that the manager role was treated more favorably--specifically that they apologized they could only offer some (reasonable) amount of relocation assistance while none was even offered in the developer role. It was theorized that managers were seen as an "in group" among other managers, but that was obviously just speculation. I wasn't on HN at the time, so I can't confirm it was here. It was one of those blog posts / write-ups that made the rounds.
      • rwallace 8y ago
        I think it was a blog post by Michael O Church, though I don't have the reference to hand.
• illumin8 8y ago
  I interviewed at Google (back in 2005, mind you) and I remember being asked a couple brain teaser questions like how to estimate the number of windows in NYC. I will say that out of my loop, there were only 2 interviewers that came across as intentionally mean, the rest were genuinely wanting to see how I solved problems and understand what my thought process was, which is what most interviewers should be attempting to assess. The intentionally mean ones need to be culled from your interviewer pool though. Does it really do a service to Google or to the candidate to stump them, and also humiliate them for not knowing the answer you were hoping to get from them? There are ways to make a candidate feel good about failing an interview despite not making the hiring bar. And remember, these candidates are still your customers, and human beings. They will remember how they were treated.
  • mgraczyk 8y ago
    This was 13 years ago, and Google has since had many "revelations" about its misuse of useless tools like brainteasers. The current process and interviewer training/selection process is nothing like the process in 2005.
    • jlarocco 8y ago
      Perhaps that true, but I think it's a recent change. I vaguely remember having a brain teaser question as recently as 6 years ago, but I concede it was a long time ago and I could be remembering wrong. BI had an article about it as recently as 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-brain-teaser-interview-questions-dont-work-2015-10/ https://www.businessinsider.com/google-brain-teaser-intervie...
      • groby_b 8y ago
        BI... is an interesting publication. With an interesting relationship to facts.
  • pzh 8y ago
    Aren't the examples of brainteasers actually Fermi problems? Maybe they sound like brainteasers if asked without the appropriate context, but when you're doing a system design interview and you have to estimate your throughput or storage requirements, you're effectively solving a Fermi problem just like the one that asks you to estimate the number of windows in NYC.
• delavara 8y ago
  "I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them." This also explains when people chew out service workers for petty things.
  • GW150914 8y ago
    I think that has more to do with the massive power asymmetry, because a service worker is generally expected to smile and take it. They don’t represent someone who humiliated the angry customer, they represent a punching bag.
    • Loughla 8y ago
      Completely off topic, but 100% this is why people are awful to service workers. I worked retail management while finishing post-grad work to pay bills. People who were loud and awful always had something else in their lives that was making them mad - broken down car, not much money, shit job, etc - and they used the retail employee as a punching bag. I never saw one person who was loud have a reason to be loud other than that. In 10 years.
• mabbo 8y ago
  > (which, for the record, are not used at Google) I interviewed maybe 3 or 4 years ago at Google. Definitely got some questions that were not remotely programming related, but were just hard problems that probably were awesome if you already knew the answer. I recall one was something along the lines of "You're making a bet in the final round of Jeopardy. Presume that your opponent is going to bet optimally given your bet. How much will you bet?". No matter what I bet, he bets such that if he gets it right and I get it wrong, he wins by $1, etc. There were different cases to consider, but all the hard ones boiled down to what felt like a differential equations problem. It wasn't a programming question; it was a logic brain teaser question. And the interviewer seemed to really enjoy himself. Didn't get the job. I now ignore Google recruiter emails.
  • ndvgfts34 8y ago
    That doesn't sound like differential equations, it sounds like discrete math.
  • tomrod 8y ago
    I had a similar teaser question in an interview for a senior technical role which went something like: given a function that has a uniform distribution over N, how to create a new uniform distribution over N+k. I recalled the general idea/theory of building new distributions from old and felt confident I could find the answer with general resources (textbooks I had at my desk or a quick search). The (fairly junior) interviewer didn't recognize the idea and kept trying to push me towards a specific answer. I looked it up after the interview -- the problem is apparently well known in CS circles (it was not for a CS role) and was something I could look up in 3 minutes. I did not get the role. Arrogant? Maybe I am, a little, sure. But I don't spend my days remembers every minute detail of every technical documentation I've come across -- I can't remember everything! What I _do_ instead is remember _how to recall_ technical items in specific contexts to quickly refresh and remind myself when the time comes. I don't come across _too_ many arrogant or clueless interviewers, but when I do I am genuinely surprised.
• LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  > ...even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard. People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. Which is unfortunate. To measure something, it's necessary to test to the boundaries of its ability, which basically means crossing eventually into the realm of failure. Too much of testing both in education and in job interviews is oriented to get a pass/fail result. Interviewers should understand that a good interview is not like this and should communicate this to the prospect: the goal is to measure your abilities and compare it to the needs of the position. Answering well for the most part, but not remembering some obscure academic topic or missing a particularly difficult part of a logic problem means that part of the interview helped find that boundary. Honestly, if you answer 100% of the questions in the interview it means that they don't know how good you are, what they should pay you, or what you can expect to be challenged by in the job. They will want to know how much more they should offer and ask if they can take on much more difficult projects, but they don't know how much. That's an interview failure by the interviewers.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. I've been flat-out accused of cheating and bald-faced lying, on scant evidence, when I was clearly doing neither. I very strongly suspect that the interviewers were motivated by their ageist prejudices in that case. I also have a very strong feeling that your intuition about the interview process is correct. I've done a bit of introspection and realized that there is a bit of dark side in me which can come out in situations where I wield power. Also, and this is probably more specific, there's a bit of a mythos around companies like Google and friends that have tough interviews and high standards: they hire the best people, they're doing the best work, they're the smartest, etc. I can tell you from experience, that mythos doesn't hold up once you're doing you day to day job. I've seen people with stunning credentials doing what most would consider exciting work become genuinely bored. There's a class of real world activities of substance and significant consequence where one encounters, "long stretches of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror." Lots of development also falls into this category. You spend a half year, doing basically nothing but "fixing bugs in a CRUD app." Then, there's a high priority bug where error dialogs pop up for a whole bunch of high profile enraged users who quickly and definitively figure out they're being lied to by the system. The logs and HTTPS proxy captures tell you contradictory information, and you discover that some vital logging information is getting swallowed by lazy coding. Then the logging system goes down, staying down for weeks. On top of that, someone breaks the development debug build. All the while, director level execs are breathing down your neck. I'm not making this up. This actually happened to me. Most of the time, the job can involve almost nothing, then all of a sudden, you need more than your wits about you. It's for times like that, that one seeks to hire people who can actually apply knowledge, as opposed to those who regurgitated it on an exam then promptly forgot it.
• fortythirteen 8y ago
  > I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. I think it has more to do with impostor syndrome and a fear that a new person will expose them as the frauds they perceive themselves as. In my experience, sometimes that fear is justified. The people whom I've run across who are the most condescending to engineers who "haven't proved themselves" often have the most lax coding standards on the team. They're often the ones who build Rube Goldberg programs and who never document their work - you can't be replaced if nobody knows how your core programs work.
• kthielen 8y ago
  Google has a lot of good people, but in my experience the interviews are specifically looking for a particular bias -- not just knowledgeable and personable people but specifically people who think a certain way. I had an interview there recently in NYC. I solved the guy's puzzle too quickly and I think that he thought that I'd prepped (I hadn't). Then we got started on a different problem and I tried to explain how it was a good example of "boolean blindness" and that using a specific form of dependent type was an ideal solution. He looked at me like I had two heads and smugly told me that it's impractical to solve problems this way (but it's a bog-standard type checking problem). So yes, smart people, but you should know the bias that they have before you decide that you want to work there. It could very well be bad for your career if you _do_ get in.
• munchbunny 8y ago
  At risk of proposing a generalization, I think that this comes from the same place that other gatekeeping behaviors come from: you see yourself as the in-group's bouncer. That puts you in a mindset to run the interviewee through a gauntlet, partly as a ritual to show their desire to get in, and partly through a sense of duty to hire "only the best". But hiring is not a filtering problem. It's a matching problem. And the more interviewers embrace that they're there to find the right people and to recruit them, not to filter people out, I think the more humane the interviews will be.
  • jancsika 8y ago
    Also keep in mind that inhumane interview processes necessarily filter out the candidates who refuse to put up with inhumane treatment.
  • jfasi 8y ago
    I've been mentally drafting a blog post on exactly this topic, so while that percolates in my mind I'll answer with: it totally is a filtering problem. For a small company whose culture is in flux and needs the right person, it's absolutely a matching problem. You need to find the right person for the job, period. At the scale of a company like Google, however, it's absolutely a filtering problem. First off, we're large enough that most (perhaps not all) people talented enough to clear our interviews will (given enough persistence) find a place where they can be happy and contribute. We can get away with not worrying about the subtleties of matching and instead only focus on technical skills. Second off, the number of applications rejected for every hire is staggering, simply because of how many people apply. These numbers are fantasy, but imagine if you had to choose one person out of a hundred applicants, and you actually had the means to interview every single one. You're going to pay this person a quarter of a million dollars a year and aim to keep them for half a decade or more. The economically rational thing to do is be picky as all hell, and this is exactly how Google and friends do it.
    • munchbunny 8y ago
      > Second off, the number of applications rejected for every hire is staggering, simply because of how many people apply. These numbers are fantasy, but imagine if you had to choose one person out of a hundred applicants, and you actually had the means to interview every single one. You're going to pay this person a quarter of a million dollars a year and aim to keep them for half a decade or more. The economically rational thing to do is be picky as all hell, and this is exactly how Google and friends do it. That's a good point. It's hard to ignore just how many applicants you filter out in the hiring process. However, Google and Facebook are exceptions in terms of having a non-differentiated hiring test. They are very big exceptions, but still exceptions. They have a standard interview bar and matching with teams comes later. On the other hand, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Adobe, etc. all hire for specific roles. I think the way to reconcile the nuance I was getting at with "matching problem" is this: "picky as all hell" must still be fair and backed up by a clear idea of why your requirements are as tough as they are. When you see yourself as a gatekeeper you're more likely to lose sight of that.
• bsder 8y ago
  > I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. That's a very rare individual. I've been on both sides of the desk a lot, and I don't think I've ever run into anybody like that. The much simpler explanation is that being an interviewer is hard and takes work and practice like any other skill. The problem is that nobody ever applies actual work to interviewing. Did somebody let you watch their interviews before letting you interview somebody else? Did somebody watch your interview to give you advice for what you did wrong and right? Did you ever role play being an interviewer? Do your interviewers occasionally try to calibrate themselves to other interviewers? I can count the number of people who can answer "yes" to even one of those questions on one hand without using a majority of the fingers--and that's over my entire career.
  • goostavos 8y ago
    My FANG corp matches on points 1 & 2. Occasionally you'll find people who request 3. However, in my experience, that is by far the exception. After doing my fair share of interviews and sitting through a ton of debriefs, I'm pretty convinced that getting hired boils down entirely to the loop you get. Some poor bastards get the wrong people -- people who either want to prove their smartness, or simply have out dated ideas -- and that's that. Didn't use inheritance in your system design? Well you got Bob instead of Joe. Bob loves old school OOP and thinks composition is a character flaw. If you got Joe, you'd be in, but... alas. No amount of "calibration" solves bias.
• trhway 8y ago
  >I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. It's conceivable that people with latent meanness, or as this abstract calls it tendencies for "narcissism and sadism" who aren't aware enough of their biases to try to counteract them, will use these sorts of questions to make themselves feel better. Also add another factor - Google's approach is (or at least was) in the words of Google's big HR guy: "A good rule of thumb is to hire only people who are better than you." (https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-exceptional-employees-2016-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-exceptional...) Such approach naturally brings out the worst in the people conducting the interview - their high opinion about themselves. Mix it in with the stuff you mentioned - buried frustration, latent meanness/"narcissism and sadism" - and you have the perfect "Google interview" :)