4 ms·

To 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

To 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 ago
I 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 ago
What 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.
- ben_jones 8y ago
  So self reporting by the interviewer?
  - tytso 8y ago
    I'm not sure what you are asking. Each interviewer on the interview panel writes up a large amount of notes on their interview. The C++/Java/C/Python code written by the interviewee, what hints were given, what blind alleys the candidate might have wandered by, how the candidate tested the code, how long did it take for candidate to find a bug (with or without hints, etc.) For a design question, the interviewer will write up a sketch of the design, what tradeoffs were identified by the interviewee; what hints, if any, were needed, etc. Then the interviewer will rate candidate on various technical dimensions (coding efficiency, design, etc.) and non-technical dimensions (communication, leadership, etc.) For each of these ratings the interviewer has to justify the rating, by pointing at examples from the interview notes. Finally, the interviewer will be asked to score the candidate along a dimension of "strong hire" to "strong no-hire" and again, the score must be justified with a paragraph. For people on the hiring committee, the justification for the scores are often far more important than the actual rating given by the interviewer. The hire/no-hire decision is not up to the interviewers; the hiring committee is composed of a different panel of engineers who review the interview reports from the interview panel; and the members of the interview panel write their interview reports without getting to see or hear from the other members of the interview panel.
  - timsneath 8y ago
    Every interviewer provides a lengthy write-up of each interview: several pages of notes, including the raw notes of what the candidate said, questions asked, plus an evaluation against a rubric for a number of criteria. The system is not perfect (what system is?) but as someone who has conducted tens of interviews as a Googler and at other tech companies, I can say it's one of the most rigorous and fairest systems I've seen so far. Interviewers are trained to try and get candidates to a 'win', trained to be aware of their unconscious biases, and the hiring committee process reduces the significance of any one vote. In general, the process is designed to select the best candidates and give all candidates a positive experience. It's not perfect -- indeed, I'm sure I've given 'failing-grade' interviews as an interviewer here and there -- but it's one of the least-worst human systems that I've encountered, from both sides of the process.

fenwick67 8y ago

I 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 ago

What 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.

ben_jones 8y ago
So self reporting by the interviewer?
- tytso 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you are asking. Each interviewer on the interview panel writes up a large amount of notes on their interview. The C++/Java/C/Python code written by the interviewee, what hints were given, what blind alleys the candidate might have wandered by, how the candidate tested the code, how long did it take for candidate to find a bug (with or without hints, etc.) For a design question, the interviewer will write up a sketch of the design, what tradeoffs were identified by the interviewee; what hints, if any, were needed, etc. Then the interviewer will rate candidate on various technical dimensions (coding efficiency, design, etc.) and non-technical dimensions (communication, leadership, etc.) For each of these ratings the interviewer has to justify the rating, by pointing at examples from the interview notes. Finally, the interviewer will be asked to score the candidate along a dimension of "strong hire" to "strong no-hire" and again, the score must be justified with a paragraph. For people on the hiring committee, the justification for the scores are often far more important than the actual rating given by the interviewer. The hire/no-hire decision is not up to the interviewers; the hiring committee is composed of a different panel of engineers who review the interview reports from the interview panel; and the members of the interview panel write their interview reports without getting to see or hear from the other members of the interview panel.
- timsneath 8y ago
  Every interviewer provides a lengthy write-up of each interview: several pages of notes, including the raw notes of what the candidate said, questions asked, plus an evaluation against a rubric for a number of criteria. The system is not perfect (what system is?) but as someone who has conducted tens of interviews as a Googler and at other tech companies, I can say it's one of the most rigorous and fairest systems I've seen so far. Interviewers are trained to try and get candidates to a 'win', trained to be aware of their unconscious biases, and the hiring committee process reduces the significance of any one vote. In general, the process is designed to select the best candidates and give all candidates a positive experience. It's not perfect -- indeed, I'm sure I've given 'failing-grade' interviews as an interviewer here and there -- but it's one of the least-worst human systems that I've encountered, from both sides of the process.