7 ms·

How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit if you want to be hired? Google is supposed to be a data-driven company, but it's

How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit if you want to be hired? Google is supposed to be a data-driven company, but it's impossible to extract any information out of bullshit, bullshit by definition is orthogonal to observable reality, it is neither truth, nor falsehood, it's pure empty words.

decebalus1 7y ago
These are generally interview wildcards. It can be used against you regardless of how you answer (assuming you didn't show an obvious red flag like call your former manager a fuckhead) or used for your benefit if someone needs a bit more leverage to get you on the team. My take is that you need to project the image of a professional, match your resume experience, don't be combative and basically show that you can be a valuable drone. Even the fact that you can bullshit this with a straight face and not go candid on the interviewer is a positive data point, as that's basically 80% of working in a corporation. But again, the hiring manager can cherry pick positives/negatives based on what he actually wants to do.
- deleted 7y ago
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  - deleted 7y ago
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- jkp56 7y ago
  Except that these questions are asked by SWEs who don't like these questions and don't support this idea in general. So there is a interview where one SWE asks another SWE a bunch of behavioral questions, takes notes, then goes back to his desk and writes an full interview feedback with ratings. Then a hiring manager can look at these ratings and make a decision. There is no recording of the interview. In general, SWEs just evaluate the candidate on basis "can we get along? Do I want to want with him?" and if that's the case, the interviewer gives outstanding ratings and completes the interviee's answer to match them with definitions for those ratings.
  - decebalus1 7y ago
    Even better, yes. The hiring manager often reads a bunch of notes and creates a narrative to support his already made decision. For example, a SWE will write this type of blurb: "I asked the candidate to tell me about a time when he dealt with an unresponsive or slow responsive co-worker. He told me he leveraged the project tracking tools to assign bugs/tasks with ETA deadlines after following up offline and explaining the dependency and urgency, then set up meetings and when he was ignored and everything failed, escalated to management and used plan B to work around the dependency" I want to hire the guy: "He definitely has bias for action, removing obstacles and using all tools at his disposal. He seems to have a no-nonsense approach to getting stuff done" I don't want to hire the guy: "Seems like a yellow flag, doesn't demonstrate influencing skills which are critical for a senior engineer. I don't believe he works well with others" etc.. It's the same with the Amazon leadership principles. They are often used as a tool for fucking someone over in office politics warfare.
  - Animats 7y ago
    SWE? Neither Google nor Wikipedia knows that acronym.
    - khuey 7y ago
      SoftWare Engineer
baxtr 7y ago
I’m interviewing 20+ candidates a month, and I have to say: these questions are really good to understand a person. It’s almost impossible to answer questions like 3 and 4 with fluff or BS, because they are asking for actual cases. This case-based interview technique allows you to go deep into the way people act, how they argue, how they try to influence people, how they view themself. It’s important to understand that these questions are just the starting point of a conversation to understand how a person thinks and acts. It’s impossible to make things up with a good recruiter because there’s no way you know beforehand how deep and where he will go with his follow-up questions
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  Actually, I'd argue its very easy to dream up entire situations and completely lie about the kind of experiences these questions are asking about. Not saying I've done it in an interview before, but that's my honest opinion.
  - endymi0n 7y ago
    I'd rip you to shreds on that one. It's my second favorite question and after an innocent opening of "What project was the most exciting one you recently did?", I'm usually launching a barrage of follow-up questions that zoom in and out all the time, like: - Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work? And on and on, always drilling down on their answers. It's close to impossible to come up with BS on the fly at that speed and pressure. This really splits the wheat from the chaff and pure talkers and "team players" who didn't actually contribute anything to their teams' success stand there naked.
    - Ancalagon 7y ago
      That's fair. I'd just assume that even the good, honest candidates will eventually feel like an interview like that is more of an interrogation, and decide not to come back because their manager doesn't trust them. Please note I'm not trying to make a personal attack here, my interview style has pretty much always been to keep things simple, straight, and to-the-point. Additionally, most of my interviews are technical, so sorting out behaviors is usually secondary, and the technicality is usually enough information to select candidates on.
kaibee 7y ago
> How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit if you want to be hired? Google is supposed to be a data-driven company, but it's impossible to extract any information out of bullshit, bullshit by definition is orthogonal to observable reality, it is neither truth, nor falsehood, it's pure empty words. Noise might not contain information but the presence or absence of noise does.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I always think of it as - What a sentence denotes is rarely reliable information; but the fact that the sentence was stated means something, with the right context, including a model of the speaker/writer. Someone says "X" and it doesn't tell you a thing about whether "X" is the case, but it always tells you they wanted to tell you "X" for some reason.
bduerst 7y ago
Keep in mind that this is a marketing blog post for a fairly simple hiring platform. The target audience for this is small to medium businesses, not corporations or competitive startups, who would be potential customers. It's more of a starting place for people who do not think about this much. My guess is that HN is not the target audience for this blog post, so take what the simplicity of what is said with a huge grain of salt.
- astura 7y ago
  Why do small to medium businesses have different hiring questions than corporations or competitive startups?
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Because they are of a lower intellectual class and primarily employ chimpanzees and orangutans.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    SMBs hire at lower frequencies, have less standard practices, and more often than not have people interviewing who are not trained or prepared to do so. Larger businesses or competitive startups also have on staff or outsource to professional recruiters.
throwaway_law 7y ago
>How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit... That's so funny, I read these question's and though I could consolidate them into a single question: "How well can you bullshit and talk about things entirely immaterial to work?" Seems a lot of people are chiming in to say how great question #3 is (how do/did you solve a problem at work)...I've gotten this in interviews and told them the Mad Men/Don Draper story of needing a new ad for my client "Lucky Strike" because the attorney General was going to prohibit our existing ads, complete with the pitch how I convinced the client its the greatest opportunity in marketing, asked them how they make their product....stopped them in their tracks, said that's it: "Its Toasted". Interviewers seem to love that story, and if they have seen Mad Men they seem to love it even more. Other times I told them about selling Mangos when I was a child...they love that one too, nothing more bullshitters love than other bullshitters.
steelframe 7y ago
I regularly do these so-called "culture fit" interviews. I also love playing psychological games, with the goal of breaking down their "I must project an image of a perfect human being" armor. Let's just say that most software engineers are better at reversing linked lists than they are at outmaneuvering me on this playing field. That's not to say that I've occasionally run across someone who is better than I am at this game, but in the balance, I think I come out on top and get a good deal of genuine signal. It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions. This stacks the deck massively in my favor. *Edit: Rather than downvote, instead reflect on the fact that if you interview, you'll often be on the receiving end of this. And think about how to prepare. (Hint: Be an open book. Also, don't do shitty things at work.)
- vangelis 7y ago
  What does that select for, people who can more effectively be sycophants and kiss ass?
- slyall 7y ago
  Remember when people talk about their bad experiences interviewing at companies and write things like: "The 4th Interviewer was really bad. Sat there lobbing obscure questions about XYZ to prove he was smarter than me" and subject of the post is something like "Why I'll never work for Google". They are talking about you.
  - steelframe 7y ago
    To be fair, these days I'm not interviewing for Google, but for another large tech company. I'm not asking obscure "gotcha" questions. I'm softening them up and digging under the superficial to get unguarded answers to my questions.
- pertymcpert 7y ago
  Why are you approaching this as a competition or a battle? You clearly haven't been doing management for more than a few years if this is your perspective.
rasz 7y ago
>Google .... impossible to extract any information out of bullshit You might find it telling that Google is censoring word "bullshit" on YT as of yesterday : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHvkEPL7mVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHvkEPL7mVA
friendlybus 7y ago
It's asking you to deconstruct yourself before you even begin work. You are not allowed to come into a new group of people working with your preconceived notions on how to work effectively or work well with other people, you must be asked questions that kick your brain out of work mode and start making you work on your own character instead. You are to be hazed and integrated, a threshold guardian needs to be passed. People with a reputation for getting results get to skip this step, the bottom line matters more than your character. But any company will hold up a boundary at the door to make sure you fit the mould, or at least don't sink the ship. The fundamental problem of bringing the unknown into the known has to have some boundary, what that is that makes sense usually just rides a trend wave. Character and behavioural stuff is all the rage right now. It'll pass onto other things soon enough.
helpadvisors 7y ago
I think you can assess people without a pass/fail bias and turn it into a preference type interview. 1.) In terms of a daily schedule, on a scale from 1-10 how much are you a creature of habit? 2.) If you need a quick answer from a person 20 ft. away, do you send an email or walk over? 3.) What strategies do you have for completing tasks you don't like doing? From my perspective interviews can be super biased. Skill set aside, I think we naturally want to hire someone who answers our questions in the same way we would. IMHO.

decebalus1 7y ago

These are generally interview wildcards. It can be used against you regardless of how you answer (assuming you didn't show an obvious red flag like call your former manager a fuckhead) or used for your benefit if someone needs a bit more leverage to get you on the team. My take is that you need to project the image of a professional, match your resume experience, don't be combative and basically show that you can be a valuable drone. Even the fact that you can bullshit this with a straight face and not go candid on the interviewer is a positive data point, as that's basically 80% of working in a corporation. But again, the hiring manager can cherry pick positives/negatives based on what he actually wants to do.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jkp56 7y ago
Except that these questions are asked by SWEs who don't like these questions and don't support this idea in general. So there is a interview where one SWE asks another SWE a bunch of behavioral questions, takes notes, then goes back to his desk and writes an full interview feedback with ratings. Then a hiring manager can look at these ratings and make a decision. There is no recording of the interview. In general, SWEs just evaluate the candidate on basis "can we get along? Do I want to want with him?" and if that's the case, the interviewer gives outstanding ratings and completes the interviee's answer to match them with definitions for those ratings.
- decebalus1 7y ago
  Even better, yes. The hiring manager often reads a bunch of notes and creates a narrative to support his already made decision. For example, a SWE will write this type of blurb: "I asked the candidate to tell me about a time when he dealt with an unresponsive or slow responsive co-worker. He told me he leveraged the project tracking tools to assign bugs/tasks with ETA deadlines after following up offline and explaining the dependency and urgency, then set up meetings and when he was ignored and everything failed, escalated to management and used plan B to work around the dependency" I want to hire the guy: "He definitely has bias for action, removing obstacles and using all tools at his disposal. He seems to have a no-nonsense approach to getting stuff done" I don't want to hire the guy: "Seems like a yellow flag, doesn't demonstrate influencing skills which are critical for a senior engineer. I don't believe he works well with others" etc.. It's the same with the Amazon leadership principles. They are often used as a tool for fucking someone over in office politics warfare.
- Animats 7y ago
  SWE? Neither Google nor Wikipedia knows that acronym.
  - khuey 7y ago
    SoftWare Engineer

baxtr 7y ago

I’m interviewing 20+ candidates a month, and I have to say: these questions are really good to understand a person. It’s almost impossible to answer questions like 3 and 4 with fluff or BS, because they are asking for actual cases. This case-based interview technique allows you to go deep into the way people act, how they argue, how they try to influence people, how they view themself. It’s important to understand that these questions are just the starting point of a conversation to understand how a person thinks and acts. It’s impossible to make things up with a good recruiter because there’s no way you know beforehand how deep and where he will go with his follow-up questions

Ancalagon 7y ago
Actually, I'd argue its very easy to dream up entire situations and completely lie about the kind of experiences these questions are asking about. Not saying I've done it in an interview before, but that's my honest opinion.
- endymi0n 7y ago
  I'd rip you to shreds on that one. It's my second favorite question and after an innocent opening of "What project was the most exciting one you recently did?", I'm usually launching a barrage of follow-up questions that zoom in and out all the time, like: - Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work? And on and on, always drilling down on their answers. It's close to impossible to come up with BS on the fly at that speed and pressure. This really splits the wheat from the chaff and pure talkers and "team players" who didn't actually contribute anything to their teams' success stand there naked.
  - Ancalagon 7y ago
    That's fair. I'd just assume that even the good, honest candidates will eventually feel like an interview like that is more of an interrogation, and decide not to come back because their manager doesn't trust them. Please note I'm not trying to make a personal attack here, my interview style has pretty much always been to keep things simple, straight, and to-the-point. Additionally, most of my interviews are technical, so sorting out behaviors is usually secondary, and the technicality is usually enough information to select candidates on.

kaibee 7y ago

> How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit if you want to be hired? Google is supposed to be a data-driven company, but it's impossible to extract any information out of bullshit, bullshit by definition is orthogonal to observable reality, it is neither truth, nor falsehood, it's pure empty words. Noise might not contain information but the presence or absence of noise does.

perl4ever 7y ago
I always think of it as - What a sentence denotes is rarely reliable information; but the fact that the sentence was stated means something, with the right context, including a model of the speaker/writer. Someone says "X" and it doesn't tell you a thing about whether "X" is the case, but it always tells you they wanted to tell you "X" for some reason.

bduerst 7y ago

Keep in mind that this is a marketing blog post for a fairly simple hiring platform. The target audience for this is small to medium businesses, not corporations or competitive startups, who would be potential customers. It's more of a starting place for people who do not think about this much. My guess is that HN is not the target audience for this blog post, so take what the simplicity of what is said with a huge grain of salt.

astura 7y ago
Why do small to medium businesses have different hiring questions than corporations or competitive startups?
- kortilla 7y ago
  Because they are of a lower intellectual class and primarily employ chimpanzees and orangutans.
- bduerst 7y ago
  SMBs hire at lower frequencies, have less standard practices, and more often than not have people interviewing who are not trained or prepared to do so. Larger businesses or competitive startups also have on staff or outsource to professional recruiters.

throwaway_law 7y ago

>How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit... That's so funny, I read these question's and though I could consolidate them into a single question: "How well can you bullshit and talk about things entirely immaterial to work?" Seems a lot of people are chiming in to say how great question #3 is (how do/did you solve a problem at work)...I've gotten this in interviews and told them the Mad Men/Don Draper story of needing a new ad for my client "Lucky Strike" because the attorney General was going to prohibit our existing ads, complete with the pitch how I convinced the client its the greatest opportunity in marketing, asked them how they make their product....stopped them in their tracks, said that's it: "Its Toasted". Interviewers seem to love that story, and if they have seen Mad Men they seem to love it even more. Other times I told them about selling Mangos when I was a child...they love that one too, nothing more bullshitters love than other bullshitters.

steelframe 7y ago

I regularly do these so-called "culture fit" interviews. I also love playing psychological games, with the goal of breaking down their "I must project an image of a perfect human being" armor. Let's just say that most software engineers are better at reversing linked lists than they are at outmaneuvering me on this playing field. That's not to say that I've occasionally run across someone who is better than I am at this game, but in the balance, I think I come out on top and get a good deal of genuine signal. It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions. This stacks the deck massively in my favor. *Edit: Rather than downvote, instead reflect on the fact that if you interview, you'll often be on the receiving end of this. And think about how to prepare. (Hint: Be an open book. Also, don't do shitty things at work.)

vangelis 7y ago
What does that select for, people who can more effectively be sycophants and kiss ass?
slyall 7y ago
Remember when people talk about their bad experiences interviewing at companies and write things like: "The 4th Interviewer was really bad. Sat there lobbing obscure questions about XYZ to prove he was smarter than me" and subject of the post is something like "Why I'll never work for Google". They are talking about you.
- steelframe 7y ago
  To be fair, these days I'm not interviewing for Google, but for another large tech company. I'm not asking obscure "gotcha" questions. I'm softening them up and digging under the superficial to get unguarded answers to my questions.
pertymcpert 7y ago
Why are you approaching this as a competition or a battle? You clearly haven't been doing management for more than a few years if this is your perspective.

rasz 7y ago

>Google .... impossible to extract any information out of bullshit You might find it telling that Google is censoring word "bullshit" on YT as of yesterday : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHvkEPL7mVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHvkEPL7mVA

friendlybus 7y ago

It's asking you to deconstruct yourself before you even begin work. You are not allowed to come into a new group of people working with your preconceived notions on how to work effectively or work well with other people, you must be asked questions that kick your brain out of work mode and start making you work on your own character instead. You are to be hazed and integrated, a threshold guardian needs to be passed. People with a reputation for getting results get to skip this step, the bottom line matters more than your character. But any company will hold up a boundary at the door to make sure you fit the mould, or at least don't sink the ship. The fundamental problem of bringing the unknown into the known has to have some boundary, what that is that makes sense usually just rides a trend wave. Character and behavioural stuff is all the rage right now. It'll pass onto other things soon enough.

helpadvisors 7y ago

I think you can assess people without a pass/fail bias and turn it into a preference type interview. 1.) In terms of a daily schedule, on a scale from 1-10 how much are you a creature of habit? 2.) If you need a quick answer from a person 20 ft. away, do you send an email or walk over? 3.) What strategies do you have for completing tasks you don't like doing? From my perspective interviews can be super biased. Skill set aside, I think we naturally want to hire someone who answers our questions in the same way we would. IMHO.