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> Out of these companies Google felt most impersonal and "test like" I had this same experience too. I went through the 4 technical interviews onsite which wer

> Out of these companies Google felt most impersonal and "test like" I had this same experience too. I went through the 4 technical interviews onsite which were all whiteboard problems. Not once did we actually talk about my past experience or rather anything software engineering related. Unfortunately(?) I didn't receive an offer despite making it to the hiring committee. Two weeks later they called me back and wanted me to fly back out for another full round of interviews for their internal applications team! I was so burned out from studying and had a wedding coming up so I passed. I felt a little insulted I was being asked to go through the gauntlet again when I _just_ interviewed.

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Cookingboy 8y ago
>Not once did we actually talk about my past experience or rather anything software engineering related. I had 5 rounds instead of 4 because I skipped phone screen, but I was pretty sure at least 3 of my interviewers didn't even look at my resume before the interviews haha. I also did a lot of interviews for Google when I was there, and I can totally see why that's the way it is, but at least I tried to see each interviewee as a person with their own unique experience and I made sure to at least read the highlights of their resume beforehand.
- pradn 8y ago
  I interview at Google and I never look at resumes - to avoid bias. I don't want to be biased by whether you went to Yale or UT Austin. My question is always a standard algo/DS question anyway.
  - Cookingboy 8y ago
    That is a good way to eliminate bias, but in the end, is that a good way to make sure each position is staffed by the best candidate possible? I always pondered about that when I was at Google. We had mostly smart people, but I argue not all of them were the perfect fit for the position/skills needed. Sure some bias are best eliminated such as what school they went to, but if work experience in general should not be discarded completely in my opinion and you can only get so much out of standard algo/DS questions, especially considering these days everyone is studying for those like standardized tests. I literally know some CS students who just did hundreds and hundreds of practice problems and they'd ace most big company algo interviews but that doesn't really tell me if they'd be good engineers in practice at all.
    - QML 8y ago
      Sadly that’s the trade off when you want a common benchmark to measure students, but then students optimize for that benchmark instead of something else — basically Goodhart’s law. As a current student studying CS, I find all of this “leetcoding” disheartening since it unnecessarily takes away time and deprives some people of passion.
    - aprdm 8y ago
      That reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who works at Amazon in Seattle. He says they have to fire guys in his team frequently because they ace the interview process by practicing it ad nauseum but are terrible software engineers.
  - existencebox 8y ago
    I say the following having worked at multiple "big-5" including G. Do you not feel any of the twist in your stomach that I feel when reading your post? That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment (that I pragmatically see as having correlated better than any other variable with effective coworkers in the past) for a readily gamable trivia question that I take some perverse pride in not having wasted time studying over the last decade? (Personally, I've spent my time doing far more actionable and applicable things such as running large distributed systems and learning how to do so more effectively while developing better patterns in that scope) To be clear, this is not some defense of bias. This is a statement that your stated approach seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If I think to myself of what this interview process incentivises, it's not behavior that would lead me to be the engineer I am today, nor the behavior that I would chose in a coworker. I'm just curious as to if there's any amount of dissonance inside G any more as to whether this is an effective way to get the people they want. Maybe it is, per their constant trumpeting of data driven hiring, and that's probably a great signal of why I didn't really feel at home there.
    - sidibe 8y ago
      I can't speak for GP but I'm guessing they don't feel that taking the big picture view is their role in the interview process. In some companies the interviewer is just there to be another data point for the people who make the decision, and if their role is to just ask whiteboarding question it seems like looking at the resume could be the wrong thing to do.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      > To be clear, this is not some defense of bias. This is a statement that your stated approach seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is impossible to give every candidate an unbiased fair chance without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
    - sanedigital 8y ago
      > That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment... It's not your job as one of the five interviewers at Google to evaluate anything except the candidate's performance in your interview. The Hiring Committee (HC) then takes the feedback received from all the interviewers and combines it with the interviewee's résumé, any recommendations they've received, etc. Source: gave over 100 interviews at Google.
  - deagle50 8y ago
    Sounds like you're dismissing a person's accomplishments in favor of pseudo-science. What's next? Unconscious bias training and quotas? Oh wait...
CydeWeys 8y ago
I've found that I get a lot more signal out of asking people to actually solve a problem by writing a program than by asking them about past experience. Hence I spend most of the interview time on the former. It's surprisingly common for people to be able to talk about something in a way that sounds impressive, but then after seeing their actual coding skills you realize they were likely not a star performer on the team and were just summarizing the work that others mostly did (which they understood well enough to talk about but likely not to have done). Like, it's easy enough to learn one really kick-ass rock song on guitar, but it's another thing entirely to have written said song.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  I have the opposite experience. I get more out of talking to them about past experience, mostly by asking them what they would do differently if they were approaching the problem today. This way, I know they are familiar with the problem space (they've worked on it), and I get to see how they thought about it and what lessons they learned from it. This also gives an opportunity to talk about how they think about software (discussions of failure or at least what could have been better are much more informative that successfully demonstrating some algorithm).
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I don’t have that impression at all. If someone is talking about something impressive, a few deeper questions generally poke holes in whatever inflation they are doing. Of course there should be some coding question, but I definitely look at their resume and it’s discussion just as much.

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Cookingboy 8y ago

>Not once did we actually talk about my past experience or rather anything software engineering related. I had 5 rounds instead of 4 because I skipped phone screen, but I was pretty sure at least 3 of my interviewers didn't even look at my resume before the interviews haha. I also did a lot of interviews for Google when I was there, and I can totally see why that's the way it is, but at least I tried to see each interviewee as a person with their own unique experience and I made sure to at least read the highlights of their resume beforehand.

pradn 8y ago
I interview at Google and I never look at resumes - to avoid bias. I don't want to be biased by whether you went to Yale or UT Austin. My question is always a standard algo/DS question anyway.
- Cookingboy 8y ago
  That is a good way to eliminate bias, but in the end, is that a good way to make sure each position is staffed by the best candidate possible? I always pondered about that when I was at Google. We had mostly smart people, but I argue not all of them were the perfect fit for the position/skills needed. Sure some bias are best eliminated such as what school they went to, but if work experience in general should not be discarded completely in my opinion and you can only get so much out of standard algo/DS questions, especially considering these days everyone is studying for those like standardized tests. I literally know some CS students who just did hundreds and hundreds of practice problems and they'd ace most big company algo interviews but that doesn't really tell me if they'd be good engineers in practice at all.
  - QML 8y ago
    Sadly that’s the trade off when you want a common benchmark to measure students, but then students optimize for that benchmark instead of something else — basically Goodhart’s law. As a current student studying CS, I find all of this “leetcoding” disheartening since it unnecessarily takes away time and deprives some people of passion.
  - aprdm 8y ago
    That reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who works at Amazon in Seattle. He says they have to fire guys in his team frequently because they ace the interview process by practicing it ad nauseum but are terrible software engineers.
- existencebox 8y ago
  I say the following having worked at multiple "big-5" including G. Do you not feel any of the twist in your stomach that I feel when reading your post? That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment (that I pragmatically see as having correlated better than any other variable with effective coworkers in the past) for a readily gamable trivia question that I take some perverse pride in not having wasted time studying over the last decade? (Personally, I've spent my time doing far more actionable and applicable things such as running large distributed systems and learning how to do so more effectively while developing better patterns in that scope) To be clear, this is not some defense of bias. This is a statement that your stated approach seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If I think to myself of what this interview process incentivises, it's not behavior that would lead me to be the engineer I am today, nor the behavior that I would chose in a coworker. I'm just curious as to if there's any amount of dissonance inside G any more as to whether this is an effective way to get the people they want. Maybe it is, per their constant trumpeting of data driven hiring, and that's probably a great signal of why I didn't really feel at home there.
  - sidibe 8y ago
    I can't speak for GP but I'm guessing they don't feel that taking the big picture view is their role in the interview process. In some companies the interviewer is just there to be another data point for the people who make the decision, and if their role is to just ask whiteboarding question it seems like looking at the resume could be the wrong thing to do.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    > To be clear, this is not some defense of bias. This is a statement that your stated approach seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is impossible to give every candidate an unbiased fair chance without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  - sanedigital 8y ago
    > That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment... It's not your job as one of the five interviewers at Google to evaluate anything except the candidate's performance in your interview. The Hiring Committee (HC) then takes the feedback received from all the interviewers and combines it with the interviewee's résumé, any recommendations they've received, etc. Source: gave over 100 interviews at Google.
- deagle50 8y ago
  Sounds like you're dismissing a person's accomplishments in favor of pseudo-science. What's next? Unconscious bias training and quotas? Oh wait...

CydeWeys 8y ago

I've found that I get a lot more signal out of asking people to actually solve a problem by writing a program than by asking them about past experience. Hence I spend most of the interview time on the former. It's surprisingly common for people to be able to talk about something in a way that sounds impressive, but then after seeing their actual coding skills you realize they were likely not a star performer on the team and were just summarizing the work that others mostly did (which they understood well enough to talk about but likely not to have done). Like, it's easy enough to learn one really kick-ass rock song on guitar, but it's another thing entirely to have written said song.

rossdavidh 8y ago
I have the opposite experience. I get more out of talking to them about past experience, mostly by asking them what they would do differently if they were approaching the problem today. This way, I know they are familiar with the problem space (they've worked on it), and I get to see how they thought about it and what lessons they learned from it. This also gives an opportunity to talk about how they think about software (discussions of failure or at least what could have been better are much more informative that successfully demonstrating some algorithm).
Aeolun 8y ago
I don’t have that impression at all. If someone is talking about something impressive, a few deeper questions generally poke holes in whatever inflation they are doing. Of course there should be some coding question, but I definitely look at their resume and it’s discussion just as much.