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Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem
- rajasimon 8y agoI gone through first round and then I haven't heard any updates from google. I'm still waiting...
- komali2 8y agoDid you try emailing the recruiter? It can take up to 3 weeks to get a decision from the hiring panel, or more.
- paulsutter 8y agoPerfect and thank you. Everyone who gets offended by the interview process needs to read this
- resouer 8y agoReally? So leetcode is actually helping you work better with your future colleague in Google？
- komali2 8y agoTo be fair, the bit of juiced up kick to the brain doing a leet code problem on the train commuting to work has made me feel much more engaged once I show up.
- Someone1234 8y ago> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is? I'd actually argue that for many companies this post is true (i.e. that getting it "right" is less important than the journey) but I still won't forgive companies that design the most hostile interview questions possible, and are then surprised when interviewees complain. You can read the types of questions Google asks here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer-Interview-Questions-EI_IE9079.0,6_KO7,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer... I'd never interview at Google or any other company that operates this way. If the very first interaction I'm going to have is off-topic trivia, we're done, the company failed MY interview. The questions Google asks are disrespectful and unprofessional. But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field.
- ben_jones 8y agoTo me OP seems to assume a competent, unbiased, and well meaning interviewer: always giving hints, knows exactly what they want, will field and answer questions comprehensively. At Google's scale with hundreds of thousands of interviews on the books, thousands of interviewers who like all human beings have good days, sick days, angry days, and depressed days, this will not always happen. What happens when its the interviewer trying to have a "smartness" contest? There are too many testimonials of this happening at Google to just ignore it.
- fenwick67 8y agoI agree 100%, there are too many testimonials about people asking about things like linux syscalls and the different bits in TCP headers for me to believe that all Google interviews are conducted without any tech pissing-contest shenanigans.
- tytso 8y agoWhat happens is the hiring committee will disregard the interview report, and send feedback to the interviewer, saying "don't do that". (There are generally 4-6 interviewers on an interview panel, so if one interviewer does a bad job, there are other interviewers who will be providing signal to the hiring committee. A single bad interview report won't sink a candidate.) Google's interview training is pretty specific about what is expected of an interviewer, and the interviewer has to write up fairly comprehensive reports about the questions that were asked, and how the candidate answers them, what hints were given, etc. Most interviewers ask questions that they have asked multiple times before, so they will include things like, "The candidate (TC) took twice as long to code this a very basic warmup question that was designed to motivate a more in-depth distributed computing question; unfortuantely, what a strong candidate could do in ten minutes, TC couldn't get working C code in 45 minutes". (Current best practice is to try to avoid revealing the gender of the candidate in the interview notes, hence the use of TC instead of he or she. The goal is to try to avoid triggering any unconscious bias on the part of the members of the hiring committee.) Now, there are some screening questions that are asked by recruiters as part of an initial phone screen when they are hiring for SRE candidates. Those questions are multiple choice and are really basic questions designed to screen out old-school operators who are quite good at mounting tapes (for example) but don't have any understanding of what TCP might be, and who think an SRE job is no different from a traditional system administrator position. Those are not asked by an engineer, but by a recruiter; the goal is to avoid wasting everybody's time.
- KKKKkkkk1 8y agoThe key bit of context is at the top of the page: Engineer. Diagnostics at Google Cloud. Keeping things boring. Personal opinions. Emphasis mine.
- ssambros 8y agoThat is definitely her personal opinion, as she is not a spokesperson for Google as far as hiring is concerned. Neither am I. However, I think if you ask people who conduct software engineer interviews at Google, a lot of them will agree with her opinion, including myself. One thing I would add, is that there is unfortunately no strong consensus on what to expect from the candidate, so variance seems to be high. That is why candidates are encouraged to try again, if unsuccessful.
- daenz 8y agoI've had Google recruiters reach out to me multiple times over the years and I've never taken them up on an interview. This last time, I told the recruiter I just wasn't interested in going through the process, and his response was a shocked "but why??" Is it so shocking that I don't want to subject myself to grueling demoralizing interviews to likely be rejected? I can get good work, with people I know, making good money, without going through any of that. I'm not interested in the Google Hazing.
- lowercased 8y agoI had a google recruiter reach out a couple years back, and I asked for just some ballpark idea of salary range. No dice - they wouldn't discuss even a ballpark range until I'd flown and and given up a couple of days or my time for travel and interviews. I didn't followup.
- oculusthrift 8y agoyou can google the salary range, its not too hard. protip: its pretty low unless you have competing offers then it can be a little larger than your largest competing.
- dyu 8y agoIf you are in California, the employer is now required by law to disclose salary range.
- tarr11 8y agoWhat law is this? I’ve only heard about the law that says employers are no longer allowed to ask candidates about salary history in California.
- vincentmarle 8y agoSame law.
- bgirard 8y ago
- adamnemecek 8y agoI can't handle yet another article about the Google interview. It's not 2005, people don't care about working there anymore.
- an4rchy 8y agoI am not sure if this is in the interest of any company but why not provide feedback, as it can only help the interviewees in the future and the companies attract better talent. Even if it's not standardized, a rubrik across X attributes with a scale and a number. (Which is what I am assuming they are doing anyway -- as it sounds likes the interviewers are rating them across different dimensions) Not sure if this is some sort of a thing to do with liability but the interviewee can get generalized feedback. Ex: Technical skills (2/5),Communication skills (4/5) etc. and they can improve on the relevant dimensions or compare notes with other companies / candidates as well.
- joshuamorton 8y agoExperience says that in addition to liability, failed candidates just try to argue and get upset. People claim they want feedback but then claim that the interviewer must have misjudged them. More work for the company, and leads to even more negativity in the process.
- SilasX 8y agoInterviewers can also be stubbornly wrong about their reason for rejecting your answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070001
- an4rchy 8y agoI agree with the possible liability aspect but if they are doing it already, i.e. taking notes or rubric scoring, then it's just a matter of sending a summarized version of that and hopefully it's feedback from multiple people and not just one person's opinion. The negativity may likely exist from no response/lack of feedback -- which can be frustrating for ppl that spent time/effort), but at least as the previous poster mentioned some people do appreciate feedback. Also, recently noticed that companies have automated questionnaires asking how the recruiting process was or can be improved -- wondering if there's any improvements based on feedback. As a side, it's been kinda interesting to read glassdoor responses for how people were treated/felt during the whole process (timing, professionalism etc...)
- elcinr 8y agoWhy does everyone on HN seem to care so much about what Google does in interviews? We get it, no one likes weird off-topic brainteasers. Be a better engineer so you don't have to worry about having them on your resume and you'll be good.
- dominotw 8y ago> Why does everyone on HN seem to care so much about what Google does in interviews? Because all other companies just cargo cult what google does in interviews. If you want to switch jobs then this is interesting.
- elcinr 8y agoFair enough
- WalterSear 8y agoBecause, among other things, having it on your resume gets you an interview almost anywhere else.
- jakelarkin 8y ago"its not about the problem" but if you cant correctly code one of these 200 algorithms on a whiteboard in sub 15 minutes while under extreme stress youre not getting an offer either.
- esoterica 8y agoClearly some people can do that, since Google hires thousands of people every year. Why shouldn't they be hired over you?
- adamnemecek 8y agoBecause it's not a good measure of your programming skill. To be honest, I legit don't care whomst Google hires, what I hate is that there are all these other people who start adopting these attitudes and it can have a really shitty influence on the whole industry.
- tananaev 8y agoI don't think you need to worry about it. Google does interviews like this because they can afford to reject many good developers because they have much more candidates than they actually need to hire. I guess only most popular tech companies can do that. I bet it will never become a standard for the whole industry.
- adamnemecek 8y ago> I bet it will never become a standard for the whole industry. It's going away now but it kinda was not too long ago.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- WalterSear 8y agoBecause the people they hire can't do all the algorithms at interview speed either - they were just lucky to have reviewed the right material recently.
- drharby 8y agoWhen I get interview feedback about literally not having a coded complete solution despite strong communication skills, understanding of the solution and underlying cs concepts, i really cant help but conclude this as nothing but PR... And then I read this >personal opinion I'd rather take advice from /adv/
- pmiller2 8y agoExactly. What interviewers are really looking for is speed and fluency in working through the solution. The easiest way to get there is by already having seen the problem. This leads directly to the “grind hundreds of leetcode” meme seen on Blind. (“LC and TC or GTFO,” in other words.)
- starpilot 8y agoYet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar: - Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative. - Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you. The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is cooperative. On Blind, you know the real way to getting through the Google interview is LeetCoding like hell and not admitting you've seen the questions before.
- rrix2 8y agoI read it as "I'm trying to make sure I don't hire someone who isn't willing to work with me, and the system allows me to do that." I can't speak for anyone but myself obviously, but I think I interview at Uber a similar rate to your average Google engineer (2-3 times a week), and our interviewing process is pretty similar to what's laid out here. In cases where the interviewer is hiring for their own team, I feel like it's reasonable to assume that the interviewer is trying to hire people they want to work with. Acting in their own self interests, as it were. In some cases that may mean "I want to make sure you are someone I'm able to collaborate with." In some cases that may be "LeetCoding like hell". Regardless, if that's what the interviewer is looking for, the candidate gets a really important insight in to the team they'd be working for and not necessarily indicative of some larger corporate conspiracy.
- halflings 8y agoGoogle engineers don't interview people they work with (except rare cases). Interview notes go through a committee, so your job as an interviewer is only to describe how things went with the candidate (as explained in this twitter thread).
- SquishyPanda23 8y agoFWIW, I went through the interview process and I actually really enjoyed it. My attitude going in was that I was evaluating what it would be like to work there, and I treated the interviewer as a coworker solving a technical problem, where I was taking the lead. The questions I got were pretty much exactly the sort of hing you see on LeetCode, but I hadn't seen any of the questions before. I know from studying for other technical exams that once you reach a certain number of practice problems, pattern recognition takes you a long way. I had a similar experience at Facebook. Everybody was super nice, they all wanted you to do well, and they all responded well to being enthusiastic and genuinely interested in the problems you're solving.
- kerng 8y agoI like how the article tried to portrait these interviews as super professional and as if they have like a plan or something. My experience is that most interviewers dont prepare, they probably have been asking the same question for years. And no, they are not simultaneously interviewing for multiple skills, the just try to sound professional. If you are a dev, better leetcode. That's all that matters at Google.
- rhizome 8y ago10 years ago I was at EA and they would throw me into interviews with a couple hours notice and no resume, so.
- toast0 8y agoI don't work at Google, but I've been doing technical interviews for years and I almost always ask the same question. The reason is I've given hundreds of interviews with that question, so I'm prepared for almost all the ways people can solve it, and especially all of the ways people get stuck or approach it in ways that would probably be useful if you had more than 45 minutes but aren't going to work in an interview setting. When I've worked with interview plans it was around having the right mix of different technical interview styles and not really technical interviews (like often someone should run through the resume and validate things claimed)
- DannyBee 8y agoFor all the complaining here, Google's system actually works for Google, so i'm unsure why people expect something to change. The average interview score from a panel of interviews correlates very highly with performance at Google, interviewees report high satisfaction, etc. If those things changed, i'm sure Google would change it. But why would they change it otherwise?
- ZNB 8y ago>Google's system actually works for Google Does it? looking at the pigsty that is the gmail redesign, it sure doesn't feel like they're hiring the brightest they could.
- oculusthrift 8y agoi thought they said average score doesn’t correlate at all with how you do once you’re in? a lot of high performers only get in 2nd or 3rd time and barely.
- DannyBee 8y agoI can't speak for whether that was true in the past. (If you really care i can bug people for historical data) However, as of 2014 average interview score was very well correlated with job performance (I can't give you further exact details because they are still marked confidential and i can't find a paper or anything that has disclosed it). Note very clearly the word average above ;) Individual interview scores are definitely not predictive of job performance.
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- sdenton4 8y agoThose interested in learning more would do well to read Kahneman's "thinking, fast and slow." Averaging across multiple axes and multiple interviewers gives good signal.
- 8y ago
- kamalkishor1991 8y agoI keep reading about how bad Google's interview process is. But has anyone done any proper large scale research on what is the best way to hire software engineers? All the comments here seems like opinions of people based on themselves and no one provides a proper alternative. Just curious!
- cheez 8y agoI've been hiring people for 10 years and far and away the best results (in order): 1. I've worked with them before or they were referred by someone I trust 2. Test project Never had a good result from a question-based interview. I just don't have the numbers for it to work. Think about it, if the probability of a random dev knowing your stupid questions is 1%, then you would need to interview 100 people to find that 1. The only companies that can do that at scale are FAANG.
- ajcodez 8y agoI like to give short term contracts to promising applicants. It filters both good and bad for different reasons but it works.
- chaosite 8y agoGoogle has. Ostensibly this bad interview process is based on data.
- Eire_Banshee 8y ago
- gedy 8y agoYeah right - unless it's changed it was _only_ about solving the problem. Had an interview with them ~7 years ago, unfriendly, hard to understand interviewer asking about weighing boxes of pennies in minimum number of steps. I got it to 2, interviewer said "no, you can do it in 1" then refused to move forward. I had 10 years experience at that time and that was never discussed and also would not answer my questions about working at Google. Recruiter afterward ignored my follow up email. So yeah, buzz off..
- hydroreadsstuff 8y agoI've interviewed three times in the last five or so years there, and I don't get the feeling the depth is as claimed in the article. Perhaps, it's also the interviewers not implementing it as intended. If these points were indeed important, I'd expect feedback addressing them. All feedback I received was about doing well or not well on certain questions. No meta whatsoever. I didn't make it for good reasons, but I feel there is a big chance part. I had one onsite interviewer in the first round who was difficult to deal with. He presented a problem I've never seen in my life, nothing close. He interrupted and gave hints in directions that didn't make sense to me, and didn't give me 5 minutes to think without him talking. The second attempt was fair. In the third, the first phone screen's interviewer was constantly typing on his keyboard while I talked, and it was so loud. No real conversation happening. He was just staring in his screen clacking away. I addressed it, but he kept typing loudly while I was talking. So annoying. On the other hand, the recruiters were always very good. At another company recruiting was a mess, and only knowing someone inside helped dealing with that, but the interviews were all great.
- halflings 8y agoFYI, the reason one of your interviewers was typing is that they need to submit notes about the interview, and it's recommended to take notes ASAP (to avoid any bias post-interview). No excuse for typing loudly + not stopping after you addressed it however. Sorry you've had a bad interview experience! For what it's worth, I interviewed with Google twice, and got rejected the first time. One of my on-site interviewers asked me a simple question that has a large number of complex answers. I gave at least 4 different methods (all valid, with different pros/cons) to solve the problem, and they were not impressed at all...
- liveoneggs 8y agothe typing thing is a killer- they practically have to transcribe the entire thing so there is 0% chance of making any kind of human connection with your potential coworker.
- PretzelFisch 8y agothe typing kind of defeats the whole "understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis" goal.
- farcat991 8y agoDo people realize that there is no effective solution to this problem of hazing like interviews? There are probably millions of High IQ people applying and vying to work at Google. Tomorrow Google could decide to add juggling competitions in interviews in addition to algorithm jargon and while it would lead to a lot more bitching from interviewers, it wouldn't matter to Google as they would still get their fill of qualified high IQ applicants.
- jdck1326 8y agoThere aren't millions of high IQ people applying and vying to work at Google.
- fhdhehfhzhe 8y agoYeh maybe 15 years ago. Not anymore.
- rl1987 8y agoHigh IQ or not, Google does have millions of people applying every year. https://qz.com/285001/heres-why-you-only-have-a-0-2-chance-of-getting-hired-at-google/ https://qz.com/285001/heres-why-you-only-have-a-0-2-chance-o...
- farcat991 8y agoYou decided to latch on to one possible inaccuracy in what I said and disregard the overall point. Even if we agree that millions is not correct, 100s of thousands or thousands of people? Point is for every 1 qualified person hired at Google there are probably 100s of (at the very least) qualified people rejected. So Google can be unbelievably picky before any they see any bad effect from their hazing interviews on themselves.
- jdck1326 8y agoI didn't disregard your overall point, I just made a comment that didn't happen to relate to it.
- Jpoechill 8y agoCurrently interviewing. Super excited at first, but now excitement is mostly dying down. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for the heads up. ^^
- residentfoam 8y agoI have recently interviewed at most of these companies, eventually managed to get some good offers at some of them, but let's be honest, I had to invest months in getting prep for the tech screening, whiteboard coding exercise and the whole non-sense jazz. I am sick of reading this blog posts because everyone knows, that is not how the majority of these interviews are conducted. I have more than 10 years of experience on the field, I earned my degree in computer science years ago, but I had to go back and brush up on trie, tree, etc to convince the interviewers that I was worth working at company XYZ. The interview process is pretty much broken and very much biased towards fresh out of college eng. Unfortunately, if you really want to work at any of these companies you need to play their game and make them happy. Once you get the job, you will discover that most of your teammates are not as smart as they want you to believe they are and often you will be wondering how the hell did they manage to get a job at company XYZ. Well, they simply invested months prepping for the interview, plus they come from some well known university. Unfortunately when it comes to real work, they have no idea on how to get things done. What make things even worse is that often the tech screening is done by junior eng that have no idea and experience on how to conduct an interview and they expect the answers by the book. A positive note: I also noticed that some companies are now giving take home exercise that are much closer to the day-to-day job. So maybe there is still hope.
- Kurtz79 8y agoAs much as I agree that the process is bullshit, it is no different than studying for an exam, something we took for granted during school, just as a mean to an end (a degree), except that in this case there is arguably a much higher ratio of payoff/effort. There is no mystery involved, one of the more known books on the subject is "Cracking the Coding Interview", but really there is no mystery to crack. There is a ton of literature, tools, examples freely available on the Internet, all that is missing is time and effort to go through them and learn them as if it were for an exam. One of the main objection is "Why I should spend more time in doing something I already do full-time at my job, where I'm perfectly qualified?", but to me it's pointless: if you think getting hired by another company will improve your life significantly (or even marginally), it is something you should definitely put effort into. At the very least, this process (aside from those lucking out) proves that the candidate is able to understand a non-trivial problem (getting hired) and have the ability and put the effort necessary to solve it (going through the bullshit excercise and questions), as it was in your case.
- esoterica 8y agoAnyone who interviews at a "prestigious" company and then complains about how difficult the interview is kind of hypocritical. Google, and other FAANGs/unicorns, make you solve hard algorithms questions because they believe - correctly or wrongly - that in order to succeed as a company they have to filter out the vast majority of candidates who have poor algorithmic skills. They also pay a lot of money because that's the only way to attract enough candidates who can pass their hiring bar. If they stopped asking hard interview questions and increased their candidate acceptance rate they wouldn't need to pay people 300k/year to fill their open positions. But the only reason people apply to Google and Facebook and Netflix in the first place is because they pay a lot of money. There are plenty of crappy CRUD shops that won't ask you to enumerate palindromic primes. As long as you can do Fizzbuzz they'll hire you and pay you 80k/year to glue libraries together. But people still try to interview at Google instead because they want to make 300k/year and not 80k/year. You can't have your cake and eat it.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoTo be fair the people who complain about this stuff probably don't think they pay this much either - I've seen a strong co-occurrence of salary denial in the same population!
- PunchTornado 8y agoI don't really agree with this position. I have friends at Big4, a lot in Facebook. I wouldn't say they are the type to know what palindromic primes are. When I interviewed there I didn't get any questions that required decent algorithmic skills.
- nness 8y agoI'm going to provide no justification; but just say that that sounds very "drink the cool-aid." If you have such a high hiring bar — and you still get a sexist memo, or vocalised hate-crimes on your platform, or salary suppression, or workers being disallowed from using the bathrooms, or 20,000 employees staging a walk-out because of bonuses awarded to perpetrators of sexual assault... Maybe your a hiring bar is lower than it should be.
- Hysterisis 8y agoI enjoyed my interview at Google. They asked some generic questions, but also some stuff specific to my niche. No one is expecting perfect code. I ended up saying something along the lines of “let’s just pretend the method is called isPresent() because I forget” to every interviewer.
- cletus 8y agoHiring continues to be a favourite whipping boy on HN and honestly I kind of wish it would die because it's the same arguments every time: - Inconsistent interviews - Luck of the draw questions - "I don't do well coding on a whiteboard" (often framed as "coding on a whiteboard proves nothing") - Bad experience with the process - Etc Personally I don't mind coding on a whiteboard but only if you understand why you're asking a candidate to do it and what you hope to gain. Unfortunately many (IMHO) get this part wrong. Obviously FizzBuzz was influential here. And I honestly think FizzBuzz is the right way to think about live coding tests because it's simple. It's deceptively simple such that anyone competent easily falls into the trap of thinking the question needs to be harder and this is a problem with many FAAMG interviewers. On the other side I think there are people who don't realize how many people are masquerading as programmers who can't program a for loop in their language of choice. It's actually hard to believe for anyone semi-competent unless you've witnessed it but it's true. FizzBuzz is a simple problem aimed at providing an early negative signal on a candidate. Every word of that was deliberate and important. It's simple so anyone remotely competent will pass it within minutes and you can move on. This doesn't mean that if you ace it you're a good engineer ie there is ZERO positive signal here. The negative signal is if you can't solve this simple problem in your language of choice because then you almost certainly aren't a good engineer and you (the interviewer/employer) can stop wasting your time. This is why it's so important it's a simple problem because a hard problem adds very little positive signal and greatly reduces the negative signal. Some people are bad under pressure with hard problems. Some questions are a matter of knowing the trick. Finding cycles in a graph is trivial if you are familiar with the tortoise and hare algorithm. If not you may figure it out from first principles but if you don't it doesn't mean you're a bad programmer or you shouldn't be hired. That's the problem. On the other side some like to lambast interview processes if they have a nonzero false negative rate. These stories usually go "I referred excellent engineer X and they bombed out on a random coding question" or similar. This happens but getting a false negative doesn't invalidate the system. It's important to remember to that the goals of the employer and the candidate are different. The candidate's goals are to try to get a positive signal to the employer. The employer's goals are to minimize time spent per candidate (since this is expensive) while hiring a sufficient number of qualified candidates with a minimum of false positives. Again, every word of that is important. False positives are expensive. If you have a pool of 100 people to fill 10 roles and 20 are will work out then, as the employer, you don't often care which of those 20 you get, as long as you get 10 of them. There's an effort-reward curve between getting 10/20 qualified candidates vs the best 10. Lastly, this is also why there is an interview slate of 4+ interviews. A single bad interview does not kill your chances. I'd say Google's biggest problem is interviewer dead wood. These are people who have their pet questions, which were banned years ago (as either being too well known and/or just being a bad question) but they keep asking it anyway. Or they know <pick your language> and then force the candidate to use it and then mark them down for not knowing it (when the candidate never claimed to know it). Part of the delays in Google hiring too are some people will do an interview and won't submit feedback for 1 or even 2 weeks, a process I personally found inexcusable and infuriating. But interviewing is one of those things that everyone is expected to do, which needs to change as many people are either bad at it or just don't really care. I would also say, if anything, Google (and this probably applies to most if not all big tech companies) doesn't filter often and early enough. I saw candidates who never should've made it passed a phone screen. In some cases I saw the phone screen feedback (as part of the whole packet) and I honestly don't know why it didn't end there. My own theory was that recruiters largely controlled this and they had quotas to meet of phone screens, onsite interviews and hires and this just ended up wasting a lot of interviewers' time. But that was just a theory. Disclaimer: Xoogler
- gcampos 8y agoI think these are great advices that would help to move a candidate from borderline hire/no hire to a hire, but let's be honest, you WON'T be hired if you don't solve the problems with a proper answer! Months of preparation + LeetCode + Multiple interviews are critical to increase your chances to get an offer.
- jaypaulynice 8y agoThat was probably how her interviews went as a pretty lady. It’s quite possible. On the other hand, the normal guy probably had an adversarial interview process. So obvious! This is also true if the interviewee is buddy with a lot of the interviewers’ friends.
- yaacov 8y agoI’m an average looking dude and my interview experience at Google and comparable companies has been pretty similar to the one described in the article
- periferral 8y agoI interviewed for a Product Manager role at Google and my experience was awful. Put this things in perspective, I was a Director of PM managing a team at my current role and working a lot with customers, presenting in speaking engagements etc as part of my day to day. I get into the interview and the person on the other side seems to know very little of my background. He says he is a PM and starts with how much is google's spend on storage for youtube on an annual basis. Knowing very well, I walk through assumptions like the average youtube video size, no of formats based on screen res and video quality etc etc and give him the logic. He pauses and says give me a dollar value. He doesnt want to understand the logic behind the calculations. Anyway, next few questions are more of the same.. code optimizations etc etc. After 3 or so questions, we were done. No, do you have any questions for me. No customer related discussions. No what I have done in the past and how I've been successful. I feel like these kind of interviews are not judging what the person brings to the table, rather do you know what I'm gong to ask you and that's all that matters. I always look for 2 things in any interview. Are you smart and motivated because nothing we do is rocket science. If you are smart and motivated, you will succeed. The other is, will I (and the rest of the team) get along with you. Teams need to work together and people who lack tact in personal skills end up being very difficult to work with.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoI feel like this hits the nail on the head. They aren't looking for smart, motivated people who will work well on the team. They think they are, and that's what they say they are doing, but large companies have a hard time really doing that. There are so many other motivating factors and interests in the interviewers, the committees, the corporate structure, etc. If you are running your own company and building the product and you know you are going to work with a person you are interviewing, you can select, consciously and unconsciously, for all kinds of things that are important to you as an individual and you are free to pick the person you think has the "smarts you want", which might be technical, personal, emotional, etc. And which might compliment your own skills. But there are all sorts of strengths, and you can be biased enough to select for the ones that work with/for you. in a massive company, you get a watered down set of some sort of skills selected for by a competing line of somewhat disinterested (which can be a bad thing) people trying to meet some "objective" one-size-fits-all criteria.
- truncate 8y agoIn theory yes, probably that's the intention. Several other companies claim the same. Interviewers are nice and everything, however this whole process is flawed, and the post nowhere depicts the reality. Practically, interviewers more often don't care anything other than solving the problem. Some are checking their emails while the candidates solve the problem, some are just trying to give the most obscure problems using exotic data structures, and some are simply too lazy to pay attention. So, I would say whatever the procedure is, there is an enforcement problem. It is what it is with most companies. So we leetcode like hell, and hope for the best. EDIT: I've had much better interview experience when the interviewers belong to the team I will work for. I think there is more clear incentive for interviewers to be more interested.
- fro0116 8y agoWhen searching for jobs, I actually find the interview process of a company to be an extremely useful filter/signal. I tend to outright reject companies who have interview processes like Google's. At its best, it filters for a set of qualities that have little correlation with qualities of people whom I tend to enjoy working with professionally, and at its worst, can be easily gamed by anyone who's willing to play the interview prep game, which further reduces the quality of candidates that the process lets through. This means even if I end up getting the job at a company with an interview process like Google's, I'm unlikely to be surrounded by people who I enjoy working with. Even if I somehow get lucky and everybody at the company turns out to be amazing at the moment I join, the fact that their interview process is essentially a crapshoot means that wont stay true for very long as the company scales up and the law of large numbers kicks in.
- plesner 8y agoI conducted many interviews while I worked at google and I wouldn't trust anyone who tells you the interview situation as one particular, well-defined, thing. Individual interviewers have their own style, approach, goals. Even if people start from the same place because they go through the same interview training they inevitably drift in goals and interpretation of what the guidelines mean over the years. What your interview experience is going to be like depends on the particular people interviewing you. By all means write a blog post telling what you yourself is like as an interviewer at google. But if you want to say something broader really ask yourself, what's your evidence that you understand how other people at google, on other teams and in other offices, do it.
- auiya 8y agoThis is exactly correct. I conducted dozens of interviews for Google myself, and while most went okay, some did not. Those were failings on my part, and I did my best to learn from those mistakes. That the interview process isn't more streamlined is a failing on the company's part however. Good interviewing techniques aren't formally taught there, and only learned via shadowing and sitting in on other interviews. This isn't just the case at Google either, but most large companies are generally bad at training employees how to conduct interviews intended to draw out sufficient hiring information on candidates. And yeah, interview quality there varied wildly from office to office, and especially across the remote sites.
- tjpnz 8y agoI've heard a lot of really positive accounts on their interviews but mine was nothing like those. My interviewer showed up late and basically spaced out for the entire 40 minutes. He clearly wasn't listening to a thing I was saying - I was verbalizing everything and I had to keep prompting him when I wanted to clarify something. Certainly not a conversation despite everything I had seen and read about their interviews. The cherry on top was when I asked the interviewer at the end what he liked most about working at Google. All he had was that he liked the commuter allowance. Incredible. Maybe the guy was just having an off day but having spent a month preparing I felt cheated.
- sigstoat 8y ago> I asked the interviewer at the end about what he liked about working at Google and all he had was that he liked the commuter allowance. Incredible. the interviewer i had couldn't even manage to come up with anything he liked about google, when i asked. then he went on to complain about being forced to do interviews.
- glenneroo 8y agoThere are probably laws against it (at least in California) but the variation in interview experiences in this thread indicates that Google could possibly benefit from recording (video or at least audio) of interviews for quality control.
- 01100011 8y agoI just interviewed for an embedded position a few weeks ago. Got a rejection - need to work on my coding and design skills apparently - so take this with a grain of salt. I felt like there was tremendous variability in the interviewers. Some were disinterested, some were engaging. Some asked relevant questions, some clearly had no idea what my background was or what position I was interviewing for. Some asked canned questions and wanted canned responses. Some explored my experience and knowledge with open-ended questions. It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated answers. Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled). I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing) so maybe they just want effective robots? I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience and accomplishments of the team.
- lemoncucumber 8y agoSorry for the pedantry, but I think maybe you mean "uninterested" rather than "disinterested"
- eecsninja 8y agoI'm a Googler who conducts interviews. > It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated answers. Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled). > I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing) so maybe they just want effective robots? I can't speak for other interviewers directly, but the company really doesn't provide any incentives to do a good job or put in a lot of thought to doing interviews. For example, the coding questions that I ask are not that complex. They mostly involve translating a process that a non-engineer might have to deal with in everyday life into code. This minimizes any kind of selection bias -- if you're giving a general coding interview but the problem involves implementing something domain-specific, e.g. regex, then your results are biased in favor of people who have worked with regex. I don't know if other interviewers at Google have put in that kind of thought to improving the interview experience. > I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience and accomplishments of the team. Don't feel so bad. The quality of engineers and managers varies a lot. I've seen some of the best and some of the worst -- there's a huge range.
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- fhdhehfhzhe 8y agoThis person really enjoys working and google and must love the kool aid. The description is 100% opposite of my experience interviewing there.
- moretosee 8y agothe original post is totally BS. These days, Google's interview system is more like getting better/cheaper replaceable labor/commodity. particularly with huge supply of new fresh graduates.
- petters 8y agoI have conducted many interviews at Google and this article is not true, at the very least not generally so. > If you are not highly senior, you won't get asked system design This, for example, is not true.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoIt's not all about solving the problem, but to be clear if you don't solve the problem optimally you're not going to get an offer.
- mychael 8y agoI wish someone at Google had the courage to admit how inconsistent and arbitrary the hiring/interviewing process is at Google. "Googliness" is just a qualitative lever in hiring that allows Google interviewers to enforce whatever biases they have.
- DannyBee 8y ago[citation needed for any of your view] The problem is that it isn't inconsistent and arbitrary, so that would simply be wrong to admit. There is a tremendous amount of data/studies/etc to back this up, done repeatedly over time. Both independent of Google and not. Certainly much more than any other interview system i've seen suggested or used here. As for the second, general "Googliness" is not used to turn people down - horrible communication skills/being an asshole/etc are. Despite your claim, one interviewer noting an issue there will not get you not hired. Two or three noting it would. One noting it and then followup fit calls/interviews confirming it would. So it's not an effective mechanism for single interviewer to enforce biases anyway.
- mychael 8y agoWhether you work there or not, I'm afraid you are misinformed. Three of my friends (all similar backgrounds) interviewing at Google this year have had completely different interviewing experiences. One even bypassed the phone screen and was flown to Mountain View for an IRL technical screening/interview. These are all for the same role. How does your data reconcile that?
- DannyBee 8y agoErrr, i'm really unsure of the point you are trying to make and thus can't actually formulate a response. Is it: You think they should have had exactly the same experience/path? Regardless, any of the points i can think of don't really seem that relevant to your original point and my response. Did you respond to the wrong subthread?
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- projektir 8y agoI keep hearing this but it is simply not compatible with my experience. Often the problems are given without any interviewer at all, for one (the initial screens). Even for ones where the interviewer is present, if I solve the problem, all is well. If I do not, all is not well. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground where I fail to solve the problem and it's fine.
- vfc1 8y agoThe problem is that there is almost no correlation between how candidates do in whiteboard interviews, and the ability to perform the job on a day to day basis. Also, and the article says it: you are being tested mostly for personality compatibility with the interviewer, which again has nothing to do with the ability to perform the job. This plus the fact that the interviewers are volunteers, creates overtime an effect where lots of people in the workforce have similar personality traits, which is not a great thing because it creates an imbalance in the normal personality balance that a group needs to work properly. Personality imbalances in groups usually lead to dysfunctional situations over time: too many sloppy people who just cowboy code until dawn, too many excessively cautious people that won't touch a line of code any more with fear of breaking something, etc.
- blauditore 8y ago> The problem is that there is almost no correlation between how candidates do in whiteboard interviews, and the ability to perform the job on a day to day basis. What else would you use as metric? Talking about technical topics? In my experience, there are people good at talking about those things, but miserably failing at the actual job. Introducing simple whiteboard programming tasks in addition has helped weeding those out and dramatically improved hiring success.
- vfc1 8y agoThere are some very solid alternatives to this current system, which lets face it some of things that they make you do in an interview are borderline ridiculous and its a matter of lucj more than anything else. For the technical part, I would as screening value forms of unforgeable proof of technical competence, such as Github profiles, meaningful open source contributions, stackoverflow contributions. Next for the technical part, a homework assignment. Homework is much more close to the real world experience: get a task and would you have to figure it out. Then the technical interview would be to explain the homework. There the only goal is really to confirm that the person did the homework themselves rather than anything else. For the behavioral part, a full battery of psychological tests, to weed out psychopathic traits mostly. There are alternatives, the current interviewing system is not a good solution.
- neilwilson 8y agoI suspect all large company interview systems are about ensuring you have a large sunk cost of effort in the ‘debit’ column so that you’ll be pleased to accept substandard terms if you get to the end point. Much the same as the student degree systems with its non-defaultable loans designed to keep you firmly in the rat race with no time to question whether three hour commutes and twelve hour days are a sensible way to organise a society. The singular most useful skill anybody can master in IT or any other profession is the ability to write off a loss and not let it worry you.
- cableshaft 8y ago> I suspect all large company interview systems are about ensuring you have a large sunk cost of effort in the ‘debit’ column so that you’ll be pleased to accept substandard terms if you get to the end point. I believe this is part of why the technical interview gauntlet has slowly become the norm and persists, is it's usefulness for that, although I don't think it's consciously happening, just a side benefit that those that hire are picking up on subconsciously. I know that if I'm unable to answer one of their question in an interview I have a hard to escape feeling of "They don't think I'm their ideal candidate" and then even if it does get to the point where they want to extend an offer my brain doesn't want to fight too hard to negotiate a better offer, because "what if they think I was just barely adequate and I ask for way too much?" It's the wrong feeling to have, but I think it's inherent in human psychology. I think this type of interview process is (intentionally or not) manipulative and reminds me of pickup artist "culture", where they will 'neg' women to cause them to feel bad about themselves, weaken their confidence, and lower their standards. If you struggled with answering things that you should encounter on a regular basis at your current job, then it's mostly on you (and I have not prepared well and done that before as well for some interviews, like not really be able to talk about projects I worked on when I first started the job because we've done so much other totally different crap since then and I haven't thought about it at all for a year or two). But if you're expected to refresh a 4-year degree + rebecome an expert of every single technology stack you've ever worked on professionally every time you want to find a new job in the hopes that whatever random questions they ask you will be the right things you studied and have fresh in your head, then I think there's mostly bad reasons why this has become the norm. I also think that since this process helps select for fresh graduates who don't have any idea of their worth, have few responsibilities, no extracurricular hobbies, and are willing to put in an insane amount of time and effort in order to prove themselves is another big reason why this has become the norm.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoThis seems like a highly optimistic, happy path description of a nigh-impossible process. Testing for leadership in an hour long interview one-on-one? Yeah right. Sounds like a way of hitting your talking point of "we hire for great leadership!" Don't get me wrong, what they say they are trying to hire sounds great, and I think they think they are trying to find those things, but I'm highly skeptical of both the process and effectiveness. Any large corporation has a problem with diffused goals. If you are a small business owner, you interview and have direct skin in the game. You might do a bad job, but you are close to the metal in terms of what you think you are hiring for, and you get the results of your choices. If you personally believe you can spot a leader, then maybe you can, great. But a large company that puts out talking points about hiring great leaders and team players probably can't even elucidate what that would mean (especially when the team member isn't interviewing, so you go for the generic common denominator and average blandness, with no real idea of what it means in particular), and if they can then I'm skeptical they are finding it-- there's a limited number of great leaders around and they typically aren't interested in doing the grunt work of maintaining an obscure cog in an obscure system in perpetuity, reporting to a faceless committee so they can make more ad revenue. You usually find great leaders somewhere more exciting and independent, it's the nature of the beast.
- LaserToy 8y agoI’m sorry, but this one is BS. Google interview is dehumanizing and arrogant. It sucks.
- Rainymood 8y agoI really dont hope that writing blog posts on twitter with one tweet per sentence and then threading them together becomes the norm rather than the exception, but my expectations are low.
- ensiferum 8y agoSounds like horseshit. How many of those who didn't solve (or didn't even get on the track of solving) their problems actually ever got hired?
- zozbot123 8y agoTo any hiring managers that might be reading this, please watch this alternative method of interviewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI
- scaryclam 8y agoThanks for posting this! I tend towards the much more conversational interview to get the candidates talking, though this has some handy examples of going beyond the candidates CV and drilling down into the technical details that I'd like to appropriate. I also have the tendency to take a bunch of whiteboard pens etc into interviews I'm running in case the candidate explains things better using visual aids.
- cortexio 8y ago- Reads stupid title - Checks out author before reading the article - Author tweets retarded shit such as "black women matter" like that isn't already obvious to anyone. - Questioning if i should still read the article because there's no sign that it will make me smarter what so ever. - Reads article anyway.. Well that was kinda pointless. I don't even want to work at google... >_<
- rv-de 8y ago> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. I conducted dozens of interviews at my last place. If the goal is to identify jerks then in my experience it is best to create a friendly and comfortable atmosphere during the interview. Simply because people of such personality will confuse friendliness for weakness and start to complain and argue about questions or even mild non-positive feedback. Cool people on the other hand will be able to open up and show their skills more easily.
- autotune 8y agoI interviewed for a Technical Solutions Engineer over there, and contrasting to some of the other comments in this thread the interview was surprisingly reasonable. Nothing too tricky just standard basic log parsing stuff with Python. Didn’t get it but at least the questions were clear, interviewer spoke English clearly, and was friendly overall. Compare this to Facebook where English was clearly not my interviewer’s first language and didn’t explain the questions clearly. I’d gladly interview with Google again.
- d--b 8y agoI have never interviewed for Google so wouldn’t know if that’s actually how it goes. But that sounds like how I run interviews myself. I think of myself as a fairly good interviewer, and I’ve accepted people who totally bombed the actual question, but in the way they behaved and talked and thought seemed to be a good fit. Hiring is hard, and I do think asking hard questions (on any subject really) does show a lot of the candidate...
- rademacher 8y agoAll anecdotal evidence points to arriving at the correct, optimal solution as being key to passing the interview. It also seems like often times the interviewers are not even going to be working with the candidate so their opinion on a 'working relationship' is mostly irrelevant. The objective of asking these leetcode style questions is to find candidates who are willing to put in the time to study. Success signals that this person is willing to commit to performing well at something that is reasonably challenging. The end result is that they are trying to hire worker bees. This makes sense as the bulk of work at any large company is largely mundane and relatively routine. I'm willing to bet that when a company wants to hire a two sigma candidate they don't go through all this nonsense, although at that point the candidate is already well known in the industry most likely.
- rvn1045 8y agoDidnt the creator of home-brew not end up getting a job at google?
- minimaxir 8y agoThat 2015 tweet (https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=21 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=21) helped popularize the Google Interview memes, but things like Cracking the Code Interview still existed long before then.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoOne of the reply tweets linked an allegorical article about the pitfalls of whiteboard interviewing that I enjoyed quite a bit: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/12/can-you-solve-this-problem-for-me-on.html http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/12/can-you-solve-this-p...
- bradleyjg 8y agoIt’s totally fair to slag on whiteboard interviews, I hate them too. But it’s worth pointing out that there aren’t any great options out there. The traditional sit and have a chat interview is insanely biased towards people like the interviewer and doesn’t at all guarantee technical competence. The take home project feels like a big imposition to a lot of people, especially those that are currently employed, and raises concerns about cheating. The whiteboard interview except on a laptop has some advantages but has problems of comfort with the environment. I think a whiteboard or laptop interview with a cleaned up realistic problem, not a thinly disguised implement Dijkstra’s, is the least bad option around.
- bitL 8y agoAlright, so here you finally hear it said out loud - it's all about whether interviewers like you, not whether you are a top performer. Increase your likability by any means necessary, don't spend too much time on building your technical excellence, it's pointless and not rewarded if you want to be at FAANG. Or start a new company, get backing outside their VC arms and challenge them if you want to have fun.
- pavlov 8y agoThe Silicon Valley interview system is a major blind point for these companies: a structural weakness which internal dogma paints as an unquestionable strength. It's like the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. You could criticize it, but it's so internalized in how the place works that there's no way to get rid of it without blowing up everything.
- sjg007 8y agoI wonder if they have done the experiment where after some basic screening, a relevant work history and decent personality that if you just randomly admit them if they do just as well as anyone else. You could still do the algorithm problem solving style interviews but just don't make a rejection decision based on them. The idea here would be to randomly approve people who would normally be rejected and see if they do just as well.
- pmiller2 8y agoThat’s sounds like a very interesting, expensive, and borderline unethical experiment. I don’t think it’s fair to play with people’s lives like that, and firing those who don’t work out sounds like a nightmare, but I’d love to see the data that would come out of such a study.
- sjg007 8y agoMaybe.. the hypothesis is whether these algorithm problem solving whiteboard interviews test and predict job performance. Plenty of people have argued that they don't. The anecdotal evidence is that they don't.. because the people who fail these interviews are still gainfully employed elsewhere in tech jobs. Google should have some evidence that they do, or else it's a waste of time (although not necessarily for all jobs). I don't disagree with these whiteboard problem solving interviews because they test basically whether you can think like a computer scientist which may be the primary skill they want. There must be a correlation between thinks like a computer scientist and can program. But I think there are plenty of folks who can program even though they don't think like a computer scientist.
- pmiller2 8y agoI don't think whiteboard interviews do show one can "think like a computer scientist." What they might show is that one can recognize that a toy problem can be solved by some algorithm that was research paper-worthy some years ago. Do you think the authors of those papers wrote them, or came up with the fundamental algorithms in 45 minutes? Regardless, what companies should be looking for is "can this person do the job." "Can this person think like a computer scientist" is a poor proxy for most jobs. It would be more appropriate to want to find out "can this person think like a software engineer," but, instead, we get "can this person regurgitate problem 257 from LeetCode." I would argue that the negative signal is probably pretty high from this style of interview. That is, you're unlikely to have someone who's capable of writing down a nontrivial piece of code who can't actually write any code. But, the positive signal, the "can this person do the job" signal, is very very low. I'll give you an example of a question I've been asked multiple times in a 45-60 minute interview: implement a text-based connect 4 game. This is a totally valid programming task. That's why it's an assignment in some beginning CS classes. Without such tight time pressure and scrutiny as an interview implies, I would expect any working software engineer to be able to come up with working code in a fairly short period of time. Under interview conditions, where one has to not only come up with working code, but chatter constantly while doing so, it becomes a lot harder, simply because one has to multitask a little. Writing code and talking about it simultaneously is hard, and it's not a skill that's necessary to the vast majority of software engineer positions. Writing down tricky algorithms on a whiteboard without notes is not a skill that's necessary to any occupation as far as I can tell.
- Tade0 8y agoI perform interviews from time to time for the company I work for and my conclusion is as follows: interviews are hit-or-miss for the most part and the only way to improve on that is to spend a prohibitive amount of time on them. Also the Dunning-Kruger effect is strong among interviewers. Especially given that as a person in this role you're given this tiny bit of power that is necessary to enable it.
- jorgemf 8y agoThis information is for outside and inside the company. When you interview someone you cannot go with a predefined answer that you want the candidate to achieve.
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- taf2 8y agoI have fond memories of my google interview. It was a really fun process.
- wyldfire 8y agoI've interviewed at a couple of FAANG companies, some multiple times. I've yet to get an offer, despite feeling like a (considerably?) better-than-average candidate. I get the distinct impression that their hiring methods get them tolerable sensitivity and excellent specificity [1]. But I have a hard time believing this author's claim that "it's not about solving the problem." If they reject candidates who don't/can't consider algorithmic complexity of a particular solution, then they'll likely reject some candidates who would have performed well at a job there. But they won't extend an offer to a candidate who wouldn't perform well. Hiring an underperforming employee has several costs. Obvious costs: time consuming gathering evidence to let them go, management doesn't like delivering bad news. More subtle reason: opportunity cost of team morale for a high-performing team. IMO it is exhausting being on a team where everyone frequently chooses the least challenging design options, frequently ignores process/follow-through, frequently ignores opportunities to innovate and improve. Does the interview process in place actually help achieve this goal? I'm not sure, but I'd wager that it might actually come closer than any other interview process. All that said, being on the receiving end of these rejections is a real disappointment. But from everything I've read, you may have to buckle down and commit lots of preparation time in order to get an offer. I haven't done that, and I suppose I should expect to get rejections until I do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity
- endtime 8y agoDisclaimer: I work for Google and am an interviewer. I'm speaking for myself and not my employer, and not citing any internal data, just my own experience. I don't know what our offer rate is, but I think it is probably well below 50% even once you make it onsite, so being above average wouldn't be enough. Our hiring process is also tuned for low false positive rate, at the cost of high false negative rate. Maybe it's optimal, I don't know, but two of my referrals ended up going to Facebook after not getting offers at Google, and doing very well there (one exceptionally so). We definitely should have hired them and we didn't.
- bootsz 8y agoIn my experiences as a candidate it is about solving the problem, actually, despite the fact that we constantly hear interviewers claim the contrary. I'd be curious to know how long it's been since this individual has went through a FANG interview process as a candidate themselves. * To me this feels like a case of unconscious bias: I think many people who interview genuinely believe they are looking for some set of criteria {A,B,C} but they're evaluations/recommendations actually reveal a bias towards {X,Y,Z}. So as a candidate, after you've been interviewed enough times you realize that X,Y,Z is really the name of the game and posts like these just seem totally out of touch. * I wonder if anyone has tried introducing some kind of control group or blind study mechanism where some small % of candidates are actually secretly employees of the company. Probably would be hard for in-person interviews because people might be recognized, but maybe more practical for phone screens. The trained decoy candidate could basically attempt a problem in exactly the same way for many interviewers and then data could be analyzed on the outcomes to detect what biases are present.
- kstenerud 8y agoGoogle believes, as so many before them have, that the ideal candidate can be found through numbers: pure, unbiased, beautiful numbers. Because once you reach a certain size, your biggest threat is no longer your competitors, but rather your regulators, and that means that you must not expose yourself to regulatory (at the core, social) risk. Bias is bad. Discrimination is bad. And if you're big AND bad, you get fined, and have obstacles put in your path. So what does a rational BigCorp do? They make everything "fair". So everyone has the same opportunities, everyone is colorblind about cultural fairness-obsessions x, y, and z, and the hiring process becomes as effective as cardboard cake. Tick the boxes and you're in. Otherwise, there's the door. Of course, the irony of all of this is that they end up discriminating against the very people they need: The different, the strange, the quirky, the innovative - everyone who doesn't perfectly fit the criteria of a safe hire where nobody can criticize the hiring decision (and impact your promotion prospects). This is the social process by which BigCorp stagnation works, and it's always how it worked.
- guelo 8y agoWeird to me how a certain type of mind sees "Political Correctness" in everything they don't like. It's a very conspiratorial mindset.
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- mrfredward 8y agoAttack the idea, not the "type of mind" that posted it. My point of disagreement would be that BigCos making "safe" hiring choices and having overbearing, one-size fits all HR policies is a phenomenon that predates modern political correctness. Having a policy of making interviews into arbitrary objective tests isn't just to prevent twitter mobs and hold off political rhetoric, it's a way of making hiring more predictable, combat nepotism, and select for people who aren't too individualistic to succeed in the corporate environment. The downside, of course, is you throw away and turn off a lot of good candidates who don't fit the mold.
- 8y ago
- asaph 8y ago> Most candidates don't know what the goal of our interviews are. First rule, it is not about finding an optimal solution or any solution at all. Believe this nonsense at your own peril.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoI've been interviewed by Google dozens of times over the past 7-8 or so years, have received two written offers and one verbal one. First, I always refused the offer. Second, the process has always been full of very disappointing flaws. I know that interviews at big companies can be screwed, but among the top ones, I doubt any company is as terrible as Google is.
- nappy-doo 8y agowhy do you keep interviewing then?
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoMostly because I trusted ex-colleagues that "this time will be different". I stopped interviewing with them, forever.
- Kephael 8y agoThis is ridiculous, you will be given a no hire recommendation by the interviewer at a FAANG company if you do not provide an optimal solution. This is very well documented on sites/apps like Blind and accurate from my personal experience. It's corporate double speak to state otherwise. Can't give an O(N) solution but come up with a correct O(N^2) solution? Too bad - go do more Leetcode.
- pmiller2 8y agoFor most companies, it’s not doublespeak, it’s outright lying. My successful interviews have been 100% correlated with times I’ve gotten to the optimal solution.
- jiveturkey 8y agocompanies do not care about the quality of their hiring process. which is sad because they do care about the quality of their employees. they say they care, but it’s lip service. if companies cared, they would put in place a candidate feedback mechanism, ie post-interview quality survey. you could start with only surveying those you extend an offer to.
- robertsd247 8y agoThis article/blog entry says really nothing for the most part. I know two people personally who interviewed for Google. Neither hired, one got to a sixth interview, the other only fourth. Both told me two exact things: How do you solve a problem? How do you solve someone else's problem? I counter with "who cares?". CAN YOU SOLVE the problem is the winning answer. I think Google is really guilty of wasting their time and the time of the candidates with that many number of interviews without any payoff. I know within 15 minutes if a person is going to a) fit in the culture and b) able do the job. If Google needs more than one interview to figure that out, then they are doing it wrong. What Google is really doing is providing someone with the privilege of having google on their resume. I doubt it's worth all that.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoI'm reminded of an amusing rant by Adam Carolla: "I had no idea how… f*ckin horrible most people are at their jobs." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6GVt35Eoz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6GVt35Eoz4 Definitely includes tech-interviewers. As I get older I've started pushing back on these bad interview decisions, but can't help feel it's a losing proposition without support from fellow developers.
- pmiller2 8y agoCan you give a couple examples of questions you’ve pushed back on? How and why did you do so?
- mixmastamyk 8y agoAs a category I now decline any questions at a site like coderpad.io where you have to code with a gun to your head. They're simply a waste of time for everyone involved. On the other hand, I haven't declined any that are given as homework, except one where the guy said it would take 8-10 hours. <= 4 is a firm rule with me, unless they want to provide a stipend. Two years ago was the most recent time someone asked about my "greatest weakness" and I simply lol'd. So, while I realize the content of the questions themselves could be problematic, that's not generally what I push back on. Perhaps if the question was totally off the wall rather than merely a gotcha.
- gawkface 8y agoIf You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid - that quote that is contentiously attributed to that person (If u ask me, prolly the fish will become an amphibian lol)
- mrzacarias 8y agoIt's very clear that the interviewer bias is very important on the process. It shouldn't be. On my case, I got a relapsed interviewer that was working on his laptop while I was designing the service he wanted and another that wanted a very specific and canned solution for the very specific and canned problem he threw at me, instead of trying to understand my different approach for the problem. 2 of 5 bad interviewers. I left with a bad taste on my mouth, with the feeling that I didn't failed because I was not skilled / prepared enough for the company, but just unlucky for getting a bad set of interviewers. If was just me with that feeling, I would agree that I was biased for not receiving an offer, but I see this happening a lot with good engineers and throwing all the responsibility on the interviewees shoulders with "You are bitter for not receiving an offer" or "gitgud" arguments is just avoiding the discussion. Anyway, it's their process and if it's working for them, they have no reason to change. Just stop advocating as it is a nearly perfect hiring process: it's very clear that is far from it.
- egberts1 8y agoVery hostile to deaf and handicapped folks
- egberts1 8y agoVery hostile to deaf and handicapped folks once they’ve passed all four segments: The interview process
- moretosee 8y agoA lot of google employees might not pass the interview if he/she is going through the interview for the 2nd time. because it all depends on the questions he/she comes across. the interview process is testing do you know what i am going to ask and that's all that matters.