10 ms·

Don’t you think it’s silly that Google’s interviews are so ineffective that candidates need to learn how to “game” them? Asking as someone who’s been on both si

Don’t you think it’s silly that Google’s interviews are so ineffective that candidates need to learn how to “game” them? Asking as someone who’s been on both sides of Google’s interview process.

noname120 7y ago
That's an interesting viewpoint, so I'd be interested if you could do a critique of the following claim[1]: > Hackerrank-style interviews suck and they aren't representative (not even remotely) of real working conditions. But they are good at something: evaluating the tenacity and the drive of a candidate. You need to work hard to ace these interviews, and companies are looking for candidates who are persistent and able to work hard—even on things they don't choose to work on. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21123588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21123588
- dilyevsky 7y ago
  That may be true but will also effectively exclude strong experienced candidates with options. It worked well for Google in post-dotcom crash frenzy of early 2000s but may not work very well today ;)
  - NeverFade 7y ago
    > That may be true but will also effectively exclude strong experienced candidates with options. What options will you have as an experienced candidate which are competitive with FAANG? I'm an experienced engineer, and my leading FAANG offers were over 50% higher than my top non-FAANG offer. In fact, my non-FAANG offers as an experienced engineer weren't much better than the offers junior candidates get. So unfortunately, it seems if you're an experienced candidate who wants to be appreciated and rewarded for your experience, FAANGs are basically your only option. Non-FAANGs will pay you maybe 30% more than a junior, and for that they'd expect you to lead a team and work twice as hard.
    - honkycat 7y ago
      Yep. You just nailed my latest hiring experience. I moved on triumphantly from my previous programming job where I built a company's product from Greenfield to million a month with awesome performance and features. Other start-ups in my area are offering me 5-10k more than I was making at my last job to do the same thing again. My counter offer from a large company was 50k higher for a laid back environment. Guess which opportunity I took. Hilarious to me. One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. I see startups doing the same thing over and over again. Hiring Junior developers fresh out of boot camp who are completely worthless, and refusing to spend money on high quality candidates who are interested.
      - NeverFade 7y ago
        > One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. Far more, I'd say. Fresh graduates and juniors are often held to almost no production bars at all. In many startups, you could be a junior for a year, accomplish very little, yet be in no danger of failing any performance metrics. Before I left the startup world behind, I observed that seniors were often held responsible to 95% of the production that was happening at their startup. You'd expect them to be paid x10-20 times as much as juniors, but instead it's typically no more than x1.3-1.4. So as a senior engineer with a track record of shipped projects, I get to work harder than all juniors, be held to x20 their performance metrics, and for that I get 30% better pay? No wonder every single senior engineer I know has a "FAANG or bust" attitude nowadays.
    - dilyevsky 7y ago
      There’s a number of companies (mostly public, ofc) in the bay that pay competitively. In fact google is known for lowballing unless you collect offers from fb etc
      - scarmig 7y ago
        My experience is that FB will offer a marginally better offer (30k or so more than G) for comparable levels, and those other public companies give a vaguely competitive offer that still falls short of G by about the same amount. Though I'd love to see actual data.
- michaelt 7y ago
  > evaluating the tenacity [...] able to work hard—even on things they don't choose to work on. By that logic, surely every interview practice is justified? And the less related to the job, the better? I could ask a programmer to build a wooden boat, become a proficient opera singer, or complete four marathons in a year.
  - blazespin 7y ago
    To be completely honest, it's actually an intriguing idea. I wonder, assuming some basic level of competency, if you gave a candidate some completely orthogonal task unrelated to the career and they excelled at it (assuming no cheating), would they be a better hire than another candidate? Maybe! Quite often success at work is determined by getting crap done that doesn't require the skills you trained for initially.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      Let’s take it to another level: the candidate realises that if they kill a current employee with the skills exactly matching theirs, would you hire them (assuming you can’t prove they killed the employee but it’s blatantly obvious) or would you think that’s unacceptable?
      - petjuh 7y ago
        In Terry Pratchett's Assassins Guild they would hire them.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        I remember a book by Jim Cramer in which he told a story about how he was offered a job "if you go in that office and fire that guy, right now". He did, and was.
    - wwweston 7y ago
      This would also imply that there's probably fruitful hiring ground in picking from anyone inside your organization (where you have the most direct knowledge) who does their job well, no matter what it is. I'm given to understand companies used to do this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
blazespin 7y ago
Is it necessarily gaming? It seems to me that this a focused opportunity for self-aware and ambitious folks to carefully study what's actually really important to organizations. Honestly, I think 80% of what keeps candidates from succeeding is an unwillingness to conform their character and personality to the needs of the institution that is recruiting them. That said, I don't want to be a corporate drone either. There are more important things in my life. Like family, health, my hobbies, etc. Yes, I know that if I lived the organizational values of my company I'd get ahead. But honest, I'd rather go play catch with my kids than obsess about customers[1] [1] https://sellernexus.com/amazon-mission-statement https://sellernexus.com/amazon-mission-statement
- coachdarek 7y ago
  I think people consider it gaming because hackerrank is not accurately representative of day to day as a FAANG engineer. That being said I don’t think there’s a really great way to assess that in a 5 hour onsite interview. So hackerrank ends up being the best they’ve got.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    If you can’t assess a candidate in 5 hours, you’re doing something wrong or don’t know what you want.
    - coachdarek 7y ago
      Predicting the success of an employee and how well they will perform on a brand new team/stack over the course of potentially several years is very challenging and likely impossible especially when the people interviewing you aren’t even on the team you’ll work on. Hence this is why leetcode interviews are the best they’ve got.
      - BubRoss 7y ago
        Saying that tiny puzzles are the best you can do is a very large leap from saying that you can't predict an employee's performance. Someone's job performance over time depends on lots of different factors, many out of the control of the company. Understanding someone's potential and risk can be the result of conversations about what they have already done and possibly looking at what they've done. No irrelevant puzzles needed.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Don’t you think it’s silly that Google’s interviews are so ineffective that candidates need to learn how to “game” them? Don't you mean "effective"? I assume that given the ratio of applicants to positions, the primary purpose of the interview process is to eliminate as many unacceptable candidates as possible, not to identify as many acceptable candidates as possible.
- coachdarek 7y ago
  The FAANG interview is meant to reduce the number of false positives, however, the cost is having a lot of false negatives. This isn't really a problem for them since they have so many applicants.
- dilyevsky 7y ago
  If by “effective” we mean “deny most everyone” then yeah it’s very much so. If we mean “hire people right for the job” then no one actually knows this because a test would require control group. I would argue that if some leetcoding and other rote can make a significant difference it’s probably not effective.
joelgrus 7y ago
I used to work as a SWE at Google, and we sometimes "joked" that the process ("here's a list of computer science topics, we expect you to know all of them, take as long as you want to prepare") was designed to identify insecure overachievers.
new_realist 7y ago
Actually, people try to game the Google interview precisely because it is effective.
wdr1 7y ago
Are SAT Prep classes learning to game the SAT?

noname120 7y ago

That's an interesting viewpoint, so I'd be interested if you could do a critique of the following claim[1]: > Hackerrank-style interviews suck and they aren't representative (not even remotely) of real working conditions. But they are good at something: evaluating the tenacity and the drive of a candidate. You need to work hard to ace these interviews, and companies are looking for candidates who are persistent and able to work hard—even on things they don't choose to work on. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21123588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21123588

dilyevsky 7y ago
That may be true but will also effectively exclude strong experienced candidates with options. It worked well for Google in post-dotcom crash frenzy of early 2000s but may not work very well today ;)
- NeverFade 7y ago
  > That may be true but will also effectively exclude strong experienced candidates with options. What options will you have as an experienced candidate which are competitive with FAANG? I'm an experienced engineer, and my leading FAANG offers were over 50% higher than my top non-FAANG offer. In fact, my non-FAANG offers as an experienced engineer weren't much better than the offers junior candidates get. So unfortunately, it seems if you're an experienced candidate who wants to be appreciated and rewarded for your experience, FAANGs are basically your only option. Non-FAANGs will pay you maybe 30% more than a junior, and for that they'd expect you to lead a team and work twice as hard.
  - honkycat 7y ago
    Yep. You just nailed my latest hiring experience. I moved on triumphantly from my previous programming job where I built a company's product from Greenfield to million a month with awesome performance and features. Other start-ups in my area are offering me 5-10k more than I was making at my last job to do the same thing again. My counter offer from a large company was 50k higher for a laid back environment. Guess which opportunity I took. Hilarious to me. One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. I see startups doing the same thing over and over again. Hiring Junior developers fresh out of boot camp who are completely worthless, and refusing to spend money on high quality candidates who are interested.
    - NeverFade 7y ago
      > One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. Far more, I'd say. Fresh graduates and juniors are often held to almost no production bars at all. In many startups, you could be a junior for a year, accomplish very little, yet be in no danger of failing any performance metrics. Before I left the startup world behind, I observed that seniors were often held responsible to 95% of the production that was happening at their startup. You'd expect them to be paid x10-20 times as much as juniors, but instead it's typically no more than x1.3-1.4. So as a senior engineer with a track record of shipped projects, I get to work harder than all juniors, be held to x20 their performance metrics, and for that I get 30% better pay? No wonder every single senior engineer I know has a "FAANG or bust" attitude nowadays.
  - dilyevsky 7y ago
    There’s a number of companies (mostly public, ofc) in the bay that pay competitively. In fact google is known for lowballing unless you collect offers from fb etc
    - scarmig 7y ago
      My experience is that FB will offer a marginally better offer (30k or so more than G) for comparable levels, and those other public companies give a vaguely competitive offer that still falls short of G by about the same amount. Though I'd love to see actual data.
michaelt 7y ago
> evaluating the tenacity [...] able to work hard—even on things they don't choose to work on. By that logic, surely every interview practice is justified? And the less related to the job, the better? I could ask a programmer to build a wooden boat, become a proficient opera singer, or complete four marathons in a year.
- blazespin 7y ago
  To be completely honest, it's actually an intriguing idea. I wonder, assuming some basic level of competency, if you gave a candidate some completely orthogonal task unrelated to the career and they excelled at it (assuming no cheating), would they be a better hire than another candidate? Maybe! Quite often success at work is determined by getting crap done that doesn't require the skills you trained for initially.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Let’s take it to another level: the candidate realises that if they kill a current employee with the skills exactly matching theirs, would you hire them (assuming you can’t prove they killed the employee but it’s blatantly obvious) or would you think that’s unacceptable?
    - petjuh 7y ago
      In Terry Pratchett's Assassins Guild they would hire them.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        I remember a book by Jim Cramer in which he told a story about how he was offered a job "if you go in that office and fire that guy, right now". He did, and was.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    This would also imply that there's probably fruitful hiring ground in picking from anyone inside your organization (where you have the most direct knowledge) who does their job well, no matter what it is. I'm given to understand companies used to do this.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

blazespin 7y ago

Is it necessarily gaming? It seems to me that this a focused opportunity for self-aware and ambitious folks to carefully study what's actually really important to organizations. Honestly, I think 80% of what keeps candidates from succeeding is an unwillingness to conform their character and personality to the needs of the institution that is recruiting them. That said, I don't want to be a corporate drone either. There are more important things in my life. Like family, health, my hobbies, etc. Yes, I know that if I lived the organizational values of my company I'd get ahead. But honest, I'd rather go play catch with my kids than obsess about customers[1] [1] https://sellernexus.com/amazon-mission-statement https://sellernexus.com/amazon-mission-statement

coachdarek 7y ago
I think people consider it gaming because hackerrank is not accurately representative of day to day as a FAANG engineer. That being said I don’t think there’s a really great way to assess that in a 5 hour onsite interview. So hackerrank ends up being the best they’ve got.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  If you can’t assess a candidate in 5 hours, you’re doing something wrong or don’t know what you want.
  - coachdarek 7y ago
    Predicting the success of an employee and how well they will perform on a brand new team/stack over the course of potentially several years is very challenging and likely impossible especially when the people interviewing you aren’t even on the team you’ll work on. Hence this is why leetcode interviews are the best they’ve got.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      Saying that tiny puzzles are the best you can do is a very large leap from saying that you can't predict an employee's performance. Someone's job performance over time depends on lots of different factors, many out of the control of the company. Understanding someone's potential and risk can be the result of conversations about what they have already done and possibly looking at what they've done. No irrelevant puzzles needed.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Don’t you think it’s silly that Google’s interviews are so ineffective that candidates need to learn how to “game” them? Don't you mean "effective"? I assume that given the ratio of applicants to positions, the primary purpose of the interview process is to eliminate as many unacceptable candidates as possible, not to identify as many acceptable candidates as possible.

coachdarek 7y ago
The FAANG interview is meant to reduce the number of false positives, however, the cost is having a lot of false negatives. This isn't really a problem for them since they have so many applicants.
dilyevsky 7y ago
If by “effective” we mean “deny most everyone” then yeah it’s very much so. If we mean “hire people right for the job” then no one actually knows this because a test would require control group. I would argue that if some leetcoding and other rote can make a significant difference it’s probably not effective.

joelgrus 7y ago

I used to work as a SWE at Google, and we sometimes "joked" that the process ("here's a list of computer science topics, we expect you to know all of them, take as long as you want to prepare") was designed to identify insecure overachievers.

new_realist 7y ago

Actually, people try to game the Google interview precisely because it is effective.

wdr1 7y ago

Are SAT Prep classes learning to game the SAT?