10 ms·

Why Google's hiring process is broken

293 points by michokest 15y ago

locopati 15y ago
They are self-selecting for a certain type of person and that will likely hurt them in the long-run (may even be hurting them in the short-run).
- rhizome 15y ago
  Microsoft had the same problem in the late 90s, though I wouldn't want to attribute causation to that for how MS has wound up. However, I do think it provides an object lesson that the use of abstract interviewing might indicate a company that is very popular to work for but has possibly jumped the shark (or hit a plateau) businesswise.
rbanffy 15y ago
I need no evidence beyond the fact they didn't hire me when they had the opportunity ;-)
- michokest 15y ago
  Please share more about your story!
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    I was half joking. I was interviewed once, a couple years ago, and I wasn't really a good match to what they were looking for (they wanted a C programmer, my C is very rusty, I am much more an evangelist than anything else). There are very few technical positions where I live and I was not willing to move to Belo Horizonte (which is where most of Google's tech staff are in Brazil) for personal reasons. Not a lot of drama in this story.
currywurst 15y ago
This "Google can't do design" meme is really getting old, imho. At best, this is a story about one recruiter in a giant company not doing his job well in matching the requirements with the skill set of the candidate. It is easy to conclude preconceived notions.
- wiredfool 15y ago
  It's not that, it's that Google's candidate referral or search is really poorly targeted when they contact a candidate. They've talked me twice, about the same job that's really not a good fit for me. They talked to him, and totally missed the designer thing and went straight into CS101.
- gwy 15y ago
  I'll be happy when someone else writes an 'I'm leaving Google design because' rant other than Bowman's from 2009. That single post is probably pretty tired from all the constant traffic to it every time this meme comes up.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- weixiyen 15y ago
  FWIW I've had the exact same experience as the author for (I kid you not) a Visual Design opening. Now unless we somehow had the same recruiter, I doubt this is a "one-time" incident.
yesimahuman 15y ago
It doesn't take a designer or user experience expert to note that google products lack consistency and don't interopt with each other very well. I think this stems from larger issues that are much harder to fix, or through 20% projects and acquisitions that were developed independently of a common set of standards. I doubt they are ignoring it. Perhaps the lack of a "Google standard" enables eager developers to create amazing new products, like Gmail.
- enriclluelles 15y ago
  I don't think that having a hiring system that's not fucked up and actually researches the guy would set a "Google standard". You can also keep launching amazing products with a recruiting process that makes sense, and doesn't analyze the guy with semi-random stupid questions.
  - yesimahuman 15y ago
    The lack of google standard was my alternative reason for some google products hurting in experience and consistency.
  - mrgordon 15y ago
    To be fair, Google doesn't just interview guys.. People constantly using "guy" and "programmer"/"computer scientist" interchangeably might be part of the reason why so many women avoid computer science.
javert 15y ago
I've also had a bad recruiting experience with Google, but for very different reasons. Personally, from what I can see (i.e. outside looking in), I think they have major systemic problems in how they do recruiting.
- rhizome 15y ago
  Care to provide some insight into those different reasons?
  - javert 15y ago
    I just posted a comment about it elsewhere in this thread, but let me list my gripes here, in order of decreasing annoyance. This was actually for an internship, but for a PhD-seeking grad student who can code (me). (1) I had a deadline to accept/deny with another company, and I told Google the deadline. Google asked me to get an extension, so they'd have more time to interview me. I got the extension (the other company wasn't delighted to give it to me, and I was embarassed to ask, but I did it anyway). I told Google. Then, Google never scheduled the interview for me, and I ended up just having to accept with the other company. I wrote Google to tell them I had accepted with the other company on that company's deadline, and they acknowledged my email, but did not offer an apology or explanation for making me get an extension and then not actually scheduling an interview. (2) The process they used for me and my colleagues (grad students) was to have PhD engineers interview us as an initial filter, then to have HR people actually place us in groups. This placement process seemed pretty abysmal, for me and for everyone else. Which isn't surprising. The HR people aren't qualified to understand a student's area of research, expertise, and interest, and match them to groups. I would imagine their level of insight, as non-hackers, is basically "This student like Python, this group needs Python." In order to do this right, they need people who can actually understand the students' research and skills and the groups' needs at a much more fine-grained level. (3) The sort-of-rudeness I experienced with HR described in #1 happened to more of my colleagues than not (in various forms). Honestly, I wonder if the HR people are just super over-worked. Anyway, not long after this Google very publicly announced that Sergey was taking over as CEO and shaking things up to try to return the company to its roots. I was surprised by how "un-Googly" the whole recruiting process was, and I guess the company has really been struggling to maintain its culture across the board. I consider the experiences I described above to be one likely symptom/manifestation of this. Overall I'd say I saw a combination of big company bureaucracy problems, with a "holier-than-thou" pretentious attitude that seems to allow rudeness to creep in. Their attitude is, "We know you'd die to work for us," which is just so untrue, and it'll be very hard for them to ever recruit me in the future after this experience. Maybe Google has gone from "Don't be evil" to "Evil, but unlike other companies, we still act like can can do no wrong."
rkischuk 15y ago
I recently talked to a colleague who was hired as a developer by Google. He went through 3 rounds of "hiring committees". 3 different committees to make a developer hire is obviously broken. The ability to evaluate culture and skill fit should be possible with a hiring manager and a few prospective peers.
- esrauch 15y ago
  While there are 3 levels of approval, it's not exactly as crazy as it sounds at first glance. After your phone interview with an engineer, you go in for your on site interview and talk to at least 4 people, both managers and engineers. They each write up their impressions of you without discussion between them. They pass their impressions on to a hiring board that reviews those, your resume, and what positions are open. That board passes the recommendation onto a final board who I suspect is largely a financial gatekeeper, just to approve stock grants and controls company-wide hiring rates and company wide strategy.
- stewiecat 15y ago
  It's 3 committees + Larry. This was the case in December 2009 when I interviewed there. Local hiring committee, regional hiring committee, HQ hiring committee then final sign-off by Larry himself.
kenjackson 15y ago
Asked me to rate my skills in a list of 14 programming languages. Really? I'd love to know what they did with that data. It seems almost completely useless except to say "Tim does not know any Javascript, indicated by his zero score on that."
- rbright 15y ago
  Well, one thing it means is don't bother asking Tim any Javascript questions during his interviews.
- kapitalx 15y ago
  I often ask a similar question such as "Your top 5 languages". It does not negatively affect the interviewee, it just helps me target my questions better. Though if you say that you are a 10 but perform at a 5, then who knows, it could affect you negatively as my expectations are set high at that point! :)
- drtse4 15y ago
  From what i remember you could rate from 0 to 5(or 4) but each level represented something, e.g. 0=no experience, 1=limited exp on personal projects, 2=good knowledge and used for "production" projects, etc... It was (few years ago) not just a simple (useless and subjective) rating about your knowledge of the subject.
- esrauch 15y ago
  I think the point is to get an idea for what your skills are to determine if any open positions would be a reasonable fit for you. Theres also the whole theory about what languages you know indicates what kind of person you are. Even if you are looking for a Java programmer, the guy who took the time to learn languages that weren't required in their class indicates they have drive to learn on their own. Obviously it's not a perfect metric, but it's not unreasonable to use it as an indicator. I'm sure they didn't come up with that question just for him, and I don't think its too unreasonable of a question as long as they don't weigh it too heavily.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
ruethewhirled 15y ago
It does seem like Google is more focused on the programing side of things and design is an afterthought for them. Which is a pity because I feel overall look and design dramatically changes my perceptions of how good something is. Another beef I have with Google is the sorta half-assedness of some of their products. They seem to release things early to get them out there, which isn't necessary a bad thing but now I've started to realize this it's soured me to using some of their api's and products
k_shehadeh 15y ago
I couldn't agree more with this one. I have trouble talking to people about this because I failed their interview so I come across as bitter (which I am). But this problem is not just Google's problem. It's systemic. Someone a long time ago decided to turn interviewing into a formula - a bad one - and it stuck. Drives me crazy.
ziadbc 15y ago
Google manages not to hire someone who didn't want to work there in the first place. Sounds like the process is working just fine to me. In all seriousness, there may be some issues with their hiring process, but I think the Google hiring practices would best be analyzed by using the aggregated data, rather than the trickle of anecdotes we tend to hear about in public. Even if Google got their hiring right 99.9 percent of the time, there would be hundreds of people, if not thousands, who were perfect for the job, and still didn't get hired.
- javert 15y ago
  Except that the anecdotes that are being heard suggest that their HR practices are broken, through and through, rather than fitting the pattern you described. For example, people just being dropped from contact with Google for no given reason (not as in, "We don't want you," but as in... they just never heard from them again).
  - shin_lao 15y ago
    If she doesn't call back, it means she's not interested...
- lupino3 15y ago
  It depends on how you define "hire right". They can make two types of errors (as any binary classifier ;) ), false positives - wrong hires - and false negatives - wrong rejections. They tend to err on the false negative side.
  - bugmenot 15y ago
    Yeah. In my experience they have an exceptionally low false positive rate. That's what makes it so much easier for me to think that they could apply their (exceptional) brains to lowering the (seemingly) high false negative rate.
yid 15y ago
My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral, and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reason for terminating contact, just plain dead silence. I tried emailing her a few times and left her a voicemail, noting very politely that they had contacted me and not vice versa, and asking if they were still interested in setting up an interview, but all I got was stony silence. If that's not broken, I don't know what is. For a company that hires the best engineering talent, they either hire substandard HR people, or perhaps most HR people just operate at a different level of efficacy.
- javert 15y ago
  I had a deadline to give a yes/no to another company, and my recruiter at Google asked me to get my deadline extended so that Google would have time to interview me. I asked the other company for an extension, which I got, and told my Google recruiter the new deadline. Then Google never responded and I never did an interview with them. I felt really put-off by that.
  - xster 15y ago
    Went through a dozen super generic interviews for a generic engineer role. Got a good feedback but ended up finding out that the role was filled before my case was presented to the hiring committee and that even though the interviews were generic, they try to use the results to fill one chosen position only. I needed to restart the entire process and do more generic interviews to try for another generic role in one particular opening.
  - adnam 15y ago
    Why didn't you just say "yes". You can always change your mind.
    - yid 15y ago
jrockway 15y ago
I had a similar experience. Same letter from the recruiter, back-and-forth with rate-your-skills, but then nothing. It's strange because the position they had in mind seemed directly aligned with my proven interests and abilities. Hell, my cover letter was pretty much describing the job they wanted before they even told me about it. I really see it as strange that I never got a call back. (Maybe it's not over yet, it's only been a few weeks.)
- danssig 15y ago
  You applied at google? I remember a few months ago you asking why anyone would want a lower paying job at google when they could work in finance. Have the rates changed that much?
  - jrockway 15y ago
    I doubt those were my exact words. I said if you can get more in finance, then do it.
VBprogrammer 15y ago
Call me old fashioned but I think Google keeps having slightly embarrassing failures because it tries to copy ideas, without significantly improving on them, where the dominant player has already gained a critical mass of users.
- suking 15y ago
  Problem is they can't even copy well. Wave, Buzz - they were terrible.
- itswindy 15y ago
  Instant search - copied Background image - copied Search display - copied Panda? Still a freaking mess Oh, 7 years after FB Google wants to get in the action.
alienfluid 15y ago
I haven't had an interview in over 6 years, but I have been approached by multiple recruiters in the same time span. I actually dread the day I choose to switch jobs and have to face another technical interview - considering that my knowledge of college-level CS has declined over time. It's not because I am less skilled now than I was before, it's because you don't have to constantly create fantastically fast algorithms on a daily basis (at least in my job!). The skills that I have developed over the past 6 years - designing complex components that interact with other complex components in a hugely complex product, making improvements in the design of a 20 year old codebase, deciding between fixing a bug and compatibility etc., intuition about design choices and how they fit in the product, and yes, debugging (!) - none of these are covered in technical interviews these days. Sure, I could explain how a b-tree works - but that's not going to help me resolve my next bug.
- yid 15y ago
  I'm sure you would do fine based on your experience and boyishly good looks.
  - alienfluid 15y ago
    Um ... thanks!?
    - yid 15y ago
      FYI, my comment has 4 upvotes. EDIT: now 8 upvotes...??
      - MrMan 15y ago
        this is how HN should work - reddit your post to keep people updated on your upvote count.
- dangero 15y ago
  Same here. I would have to study up for the interview and that seems pretty silly considering I spend every day writing code and have for years. There's a lot of irony in that too considering that when I need a b-tree, I Google it. It would be funny to bring an Android phone to a Google interview and then proceed to Google answers for questions they ask like this to point out how outdated the question is. If it's anything like interviews at my company, we just aren't really trained on how to interview, so these questions come up because the interviewer may not know what to ask aside from things like this, and their last interview experience may have been when looking for a job straight out of college when this was all they really knew about, so this is what interviewers asked them about. In a way those questions may just be "what you're supposed to ask someone in a CS related interview".
bugmenot 15y ago
I deal frequently with a good number of Googlers (many pretty high up in the company), and it's a common complaint from the inside that their hiring process is deeply flawed. Managers can't hire someone they already know to be a perfect fit for a particular job -- if HR decides (after a lengthy interview process) that the candidate didn't attend the right school, that's it. A lot of emotional and social capital gets spent as they approach people to ostensibly hire them, and along the way someone (who'll never actually work with the person post-hire) pulls the plug. A good number of manager-level people are pretty frustrated by it. And they appear to have taken a chapter from Disney-CBS's book: if you ever turn down a job offer from them, your chances of getting another one--even if it's years down the road, and for a different job--are practically nonexistent. To some degree, I get that, but institutionally, they certainly seem to believe their own hype a bit too much. Google's still reaping the rewards of having a ridiculously high-profit product (AdWords). Despite being publicly traded, nobody's ever expected them to behave like a 'regular company', and as long as Yahoo and Microsoft continue to play the Copy Google game, it'll stay that way. They're the corporate equivalent of the trust fund baby who's definitely smart, definitely accomplished some things on merit, but still has their world view rooted in unsustainable assumptions.
veyron 15y ago
I actually ended up turning down a google offer for this precise reason -- the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person. Having been through a real interview (where the interviewer went through my resume before the interview and prepared real thoughtful questions that would only be known if you actually worked on the language), I took that offer and now interview others more intelligently.
- paganel 15y ago
  > the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person. Reminds me of a phone-interview I had with Adobe for a Python job. The guy at the other end of the line asks me to sort of implement an algorithm, on the phone, I ended up solving his problem using a dictionary, getting its keys and then sorting it. That of course wasn't what the guy wanted, but it solved the problem.
crux_ 15y ago
I think an underlying reason for so many anecdotes of the sort in the comment threads here is the sheer number of hires the Goog is trying to make right now -- according to http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html, they've grown headcount by close to 10% in Q1 alone so far. Life for their recruitment folks is probably fairly interesting these days.
sabat 15y ago
In a nutshell: Google has developed a reputation for interviewing skill sets, as opposed to interviewing people. Sadly, that's common practice industry-wide.
brown9-2 15y ago
What position was the author interviewing for? Google (and most big companies) seem to pigeonhole candidates into a certain slot, even when it is obvious they'd be better off in a different title. The real way in which their process seems broken is the wildly different experiences people have seemingly at random, depending on who their arbitrarily assigned recruiter is. When I interviewed I had none of this weird "rate yourself" questions, and a mostly positive experience. But it seems like if I had randomly been assigned a different recruiter, or someone tried to fit me into a different bucket, I would have had a wildly different experience. How can you compare candidates evenly when their experiences seem so randomly different?
danielha 15y ago
Every few weeks or so I'm contacted by the same Google recruiter asking if I'm interested in an engineering opportunity. After a while, I responded by asking who had referred me. He answered: "Referrals are confidential, but this person knows you from your days at <proceeds to list out my LinkedIn>." Awful. Plus I'm a shitty programmer.
- acgourley 15y ago
  Pretty ridiculous to try and hire a founder fresh off a VC round for an engineering position. That's enough of a tip off right there.
fogus 15y ago
Sometimes I feel like the only person who was not hired by Google that didn't become bitter. I was treated with respect, was put up in a nice hotel, met very smart people, answered (and didn't ;) very tough questions. In the end it didn't work out. I had a blast nonetheless.
- briancurtin 15y ago
  Same here. I had two solid phone interviews, then they flew me out, put me up in a cool hotel, rented me a car, and put me through a good day on campus. Of the five interviews, I think I nailed four and blew one of them. Oh well, heard back around a week later that I didn't make the cut.
  - nl 15y ago
    I've done 2 set of interviews, and I'm not bitter. I wasn't impressed with their process the first time, but the second time (2 years later) was a lot better.
pgroves 15y ago
I disagree with article's conclusion that they are selecting for "backend" engineers. They are selecting for people that think over-engineering every little data structure is the way to build good programs. The skill software companies need is the ability to get a hundred subsystems tested and working together, which is totally different. I know someone who recently interviewed with Google and he told me about the algorithms question he "got wrong." After he came up with a simple solution to a simple problem, the interviewer told him the better, googley-er algorithm, which was: a) far more complex and difficult to implement, b) had far more corner cases that would need unit tests, c) had more overhead in the expected case, but d) technically had a better big-O in the (extreme) worst case. In other words, the interview was screening for people who have been to school but haven't ever built anything.
- bnoordhuis 15y ago
  That was the impression I walked away with too: much CS ivory tower thinking, little real-world relevance. But they're only interviews, everyday life at Google is probably (hopefully!) different. As a counterpoint to the HR horror stories: my recruiter was a friendly woman who always responded quickly and politely. No complaints here.
jnhnum1 15y ago
I've interviewed for a summer internship at Google twice: this summer and last. The first time I interviewed with them, they emailed me the same day to tell me that my interview went really well and they'd like to proceed to host matching. Unsure of the way the process worked, I emailed the recruiter a week later to ask what the next steps were. She called me back half an hour later to ask if I had any deadlines, which I didn't. The reason for the delay, she said, was that Google tried to first match returning interns with hosts before new interns. A couple weeks later, I had a phone interview with a host, it went well, and I was assigned to work with him over the summer. That was that. This summer, I decided I wanted to return to work at Google again, but I had a specific project in mind I wanted to work on. I filled out a form stating my project interests (which were very specific this time around), but no recruiter reached out to me. I talked to one of my colleagues at Google from the previous summer, he talked to HR or something, and I got a new recruiter. Then I went through five host interviews in three days, picked my favorite, and that was that. So in my experience, the hiring process at Google isn't that bad. It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up.
- yid 15y ago
  > It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up. Please read some of the comments and anecdotes here a little more closely. A lot of people (including myself) followed up on the silence, often in multiple ways, and still got absolutely no response.
  - jnhnum1 15y ago
    Yes, and I was just sharing my own personal experience to try to counter some selection bias.
spraveen80 15y ago
Google probably expects that all designers/product management folks that they are interviewing to be good at programming too. There are good programmers, good designers and some people who are really good at both. Since a lot of people want to work at Google, they are using that to their advantage and hiring good designers who are also good programmers.
gabeiscoding 15y ago
My Google offer experience: I turned down a offer from Google last spring. Long story, but my reasons can be summed up as having a more challenging opportunity in a leadership position at a small company versus having to enter the "engineer" lotto where you don't know what team and project you get placed on. Funny thing is, I had a call from one of their recruiters today. A couple times previously somebody contacted me by email and I said "sure, call me", and didn't hear from them. But this guy was out of the blue and from a different office and had a different approach to it. The message was that things are different at Google and they at least from his office's perspective, they treat each recruitment uniquely. My take away is that Google is a big company and you'll get different experiences depending on how you enter the HR process (college grad applicant, versus sought after name). The OP in this case is doing a lot of generalization.
jquery 15y ago
My own personal "horror" story. Google reached out to me, unsolicited, for a web developer position. I wasn't looking, but I thought cool, I'll at least talk to them. The recruiter kept asking me about how good my Java was. I repeated what it said on my resume, that I only used it in college, but that my OO skills were strong and transferable. Afterwards the recruiter emailed me, and said I wasn't a good fit because I didn't have enough Java experience. I didn't even get a technical phone screen. Java experience is serious business.
- noarchy 15y ago
  I don't know anything about their recruiters, but in my own experience with other companies, the recruiters know eff-all about what is really required for the job.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Lots of interesting stories. Disclaimer, I worked at Google for 4 years ('06 - '10) and interviewed a lot of folks (it was always a part of the job) and did a number of phone interviews too. The process then (as perhaps now) was broken and some folks within Google understood that. The process and goals were pretty simple, hire smart people that get things done. The process was aimed at finding smart people who get things done. That, like the phrase "largest integer" is easy to say and rolls off the lips but when you need to actually write out what it means gets a bit squirrely. The first challenge is what does "get things done" mean? Well for college students it means you got your diploma and at the same time you contributed to some FOSS project. For people with 0 - 5 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 5 - 15 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 15 to 25 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. Did you see what I did there? Google wanted smart people but the definition of smart was "you write a lot of code" and "get things done" was "that code shipped in the product/project." Fundamentally they didn't have any way to judge or evaluate the 'goodness' of what someone did if it wasn't writing code. Designers don't write a lot of code and they don't generally have a good metric for what constitutes good which can be empirically tested. The process has a hard time accomodating that. And if you're "good" at spotting problems in a process or getting folks organized around some better way of doing things? That's not measurable either. There was a company, BASF, a chemical company which had an advertising campaign around the fact that they were part of the process and materials that made quality products, their tag line was "We don't make the products you buy, we make them better." [1] And I noted that Google was exceptionally bad at hiring "BASF" people, which is to say people who bring the quality of other work up, or products up, or processes up. The people who did those roles in Google all started out as coders and that is how they got hired. It was only after they were working there that they (and Google) discovered they had this leveraging effect. In order to keep bias out of the process, Google isolates the steps where bias can creep in; separated the folks who decided hire / no-hire from the folks who decided on compensation; the folks who decide to hire and the folks who decide which project they work for. For all my time there, you could not interview for a specific job, you interviewed to get 'in' and then your name showed up on a list and the allocation process would determine which project got you. Often a candidate would ask during the interview "What would I be working on?" the only truthful answer was "That is impossible to say." Before you even get to that point though you get into "the system." Since Google keeps a record of everyone they have interviewed or has shown up as a lead and not interviewed. There is a long, long list of people (I once joked that it was everyone in the market). If you are an employee and you might know that person, common employer, common university, etc. The system could automatically send you an email asking for your opinion on the candidate. This isn't really any different than any other company, person X shows up in the candidate list, people who work at the company who worked at person X's company are asked if they knew this person when they were there. But it can have unintended consequences. Lets say there is a person X, who gets hired, from company Y, and person X really didn't fit in at Y and felt really abused by the company. Now new candidates from Y generate an email to X with the standard "You worked at Y when candidate Z did etc etc." Now person X is still pissed off about how Y treated them and so they respond to all of those emails with "Yeah, candidate Z was a crappy engineer, everyone had to carry for them they never did anything useful." Maybe someone else from Y says "candidate Z was great, everyone turned to them for advice." The process of separating the interviewers from the decisions means that this feedback bubbles up all equally weighted. Hard to know that employee X has said the same thing about every candidate that has come from Y, and if the committee sees two comments one positive and one negative and there isn't anyone on the committee who knows any different then how do you evaluate? The simplest solution if either has an equal probability of being the 'correct' assesment is that you pass on them because you can't know if you have bad data. And that was a part of the process that was fundamentally broken. Because Google gets a metric crap load of resumes and candidates all the time, passing on someone who is +1/-1 like that makes sense because you can't know which of the two feedback comments more accurately reflects the real candidate behavior. The result is that hiring someone with a grudge can poision the feedback pool for a bunch of possible hires. If you weren't Google and didn't have this huge backlog of candidates, you might dig deeper to find out which one was the more accurate representation, but if you are Google you just move on. Externally that sometimes appears that you just stop answering the phone. It also means that you miss out on quality people who would be good for the company and ultimately Google will have to find a way to address that issue (if they haven't already) because they are running out of people to interview. As with most things Google, you combine a data-driven, automata friendly process with fuzzy data and alternate agenda actors, at the scale Google runs at, and you get lots of weird artifacts. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE
j_baker 15y ago
Design decisions powered by A/B testing are a great way of incrementally improving your product, but trying to use them to drive the overall product direction can lead you to decisions that fly in the face of common sense. Good lord do I agree. At a certain level, you just have to trust your gut.
googInterviewee 15y ago
(Posting anonymously because I'm in the middle of interviewing with Google) My experience so far has been very different. I was contacted by a recruiter a few weeks ago. I had a phone interview within a week of the initial contact. Within three days, they got back to me to schedule an onsite interview. The one negative I've encountered so far: Google has an office near where I live, but will not interview me there. This will require significant travel on my part.
- briancurtin 15y ago
  I'm going to guess you probably work near a Google office which does different things than your target role. I live in Chicago, where Google has an office, but they flew me out to Mountain View to interview for a software engineering spot.
anacrolix 15y ago
I got contacted out of the blue. Phone interview lined up at a very inconvenient time and everything. An hour AFTER the appointed time for the phone interview, I received an email saying they had not noticed that I hadn't graduated yet (I've had 4 years full time experience in industry and open source). I referred them to more senior colleagues who I considered to be similarly talented and had graduated, none of whom were ever contacted.
larsberg 15y ago
Google is considered (or at least was, by other tech companies) to have a very poor sourcing and general recruiting experience. It was assumed to be because they contract out the work. As a contrast to that, at MSFT, we had full-time recruiting staff generally split into college and experienced recruiting (there are some extra bits not important to this). The experienced recruiting staff was assigned to divisions and worked for usually a couple of years at a time sourcing candidates specially suited to their area. The college recruiters carefully handle and ensure that only one person is in charge of each candidate, they're marshalled through all the steps, know when they'll hear what piece of info back, and are absolutely brutal with us hiring managers about making timely decisions (not that we ever drag our feet <grin>). While working at MSFT, I was contacted several times by different Google recruiters. Each time, I was left sort of half-indifferent e-mails or voicemails, which I was informed was the desired style of contact. I'd fire them off to my sourcing manager to forward around the recruiting org for a good laugh and jokes about where these people had been before (it's a small industry, and they often would point out ex-Cisco recruiting washouts, etc.). That said, you can certainly go far on name alone for your recruiting, especially when your options are expected to pay out well. But it's unfortunate to have to try to build teams despite your recruiting efforts. I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.
- cletus 15y ago
  Your information is incorrect. Google does all its own recruiting. It is not outsourced.
  - larsberg 15y ago
    Thank you for this clarification! That was not the case in 2002-2004 (when I was a hiring manager at MSFT).
nostrademons 15y ago
It sounds like you were going through the software engineer interview process, when what you wanted to do is product management. This is a recruiter-fail: when someone expresses an interest in product decisions, it makes sense to send them through the PM interview process. But it's not really representative of what it's like to interview for all the different job families that one might apply to.
citizenkeys 15y ago
Google's process is broken because it generally presumes job candidates know what specific job they want, and they don't. To put it in contrast, I also applied to Microsoft and they immediately assigned me a specific recruiter that I could email directly. Google needs to give job candidates a person to contact rather than expecting talent to go online and do that weird "job shopping cart" thing they have on their website. The other reason the hiring process is broken is because it's totally backwards. The hiring process doesn't indicate any appreciation of talent. Talent in this industry consists of wanna-be rockstars. Talent wants the company to say "Hey, you're great. We want you. What's it going to take to get you here?" Google's approach, like many other companies, is "Go online, email us a resume, and we'll get back to you whenever we feel like it." Most people with talent are going to say "Forget that. You got it backwards. You need me more than I need you." To put it in perspective, think of how professional sports teams recruit college athletes. The professional teams do every damn thing they can to get college athletes to agree to join the team. They send out recruiters that pay for meals, make the candidates feel special, and everything else to make the talent feel appreciated. That's how you recruit talent. Taking the approach of "Go online, do our rinky-dink job shopping cart thing, email us a resume, and we'll get back to you when we feel like it" doesn't attract talent and never will.
- bane 15y ago
  Google's counter to that is that since they tend to target only people from top companies and top schools (by their particular perception of what is "top"), so they'll tend to sweep up talented people anyway.
  - citizenkeys 15y ago
    I re-read my comment. The flaw in my reasoning seems to be that Google still needs a way to know the talent exists. So you still gotta get Google's attention somehow before they can recruit you. Still, though, that "job shopping cart" thing is lame. As somebody that's actually tried it, having to look all around the site and find a specific job just doesn't work. In simple terms, it would be better for Google to have a form that says "Tell us everything you know", let people just write everything they know and submit it, and then let Google match the skills up with a set of jobs that might be a good fit for the candidate.
T_S_ 15y ago
Easier to get bought than hired?
iam 15y ago
I submitted my resume to Google and filled out their top X language survey, but never even so much got back an email from them after waiting for over a month. Oh well, there's plenty of other companies who were happy to talk to me.
tomkarlo 15y ago
The OP is doing a lot of generalization and extrapolation to make the judgement contained in the title, considering he doesn't even seem to have made it through stage one of the process he's attempting to judge. I'm pretty sure there's some folks who get rejected at the preliminary screening stage of my company's hiring process (some, I'm sure, for the wrong reasons) but I hardly think that would justify condemning our entire recruiting strategy and process. This seems mostly like a standard recipe for baiting traffic from HN to a blog: make up a sweeping generalization about a company people are deeply interested in (e.g. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter) based on a very limited data set, put that in your headline, then have your article talk about how much better your company is at XYZ by comparison. It's the HN version of the humblebrag tweet.
latch 15y ago
I'd like to work at Google, but I have no interest in going through the embarrassment of their [seeminly] stuck up interview process. No doubt this is my loss, and not Google's.
bane 15y ago
Related question, how easy/hard is it to move around internally once you are "in"?
16s 15y ago
They asked me how to rm a file named -f. Seriously. I thought to myself what a silly question. That's like 20 year old Unix trivia. I was dumb-founded. This was the second phone interview. I knew then I did not want to work for them and I told the recruiter I was not interested. They called me and they initiated the contact.
ved 15y ago
Another interesting view on why Google's hiring process will bring it down sooner or later - http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-everyone-else-will-eventually-fail http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-eve...
ved 15y ago
Another interesting view on why Google's hiring process will bring it down sooner or later - http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-everyone-else-will-eventually-fail http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-eve...
peter_severin 15y ago
I had a relatively good interview experience with Google. I wasn't hired but I felt that the process was fair. True, it was long and I had to invest some significant time to freshen up my algorithm skills. But overall I was left with a good impression. I do think that Google puts too much accent on algorithms and college-level CS. I consider myself a good programmer. I created two moderately successful Micro ISVs in my free time. I contributed a huge chunk to the product at my corporate job. I get things done. However I felt that this is not what Google looks for even if the say they do.
namank 15y ago
Hahaha, today morning I was thinking about why startups manage to leech millions of $$s selling services that Google actually offers for free. And I reached the same conclusion - Google doesn't focus on users and thus completely misses the mark. They focus on engineers but not designers or market researchers. This is why, I think, App Engine will be a huge success and why Wave failed. It was an excellent product, IMO, but it wasn't built with a particular user in mind.
suprgeek 15y ago
This reminds me of the saying: To a man with a Hammer, everything looks like a nail. Google's Hammer is its (admittedly great) expertise at Algorithmically solving Hard Webscale Data Problems. Unfortunately some problems cannot be solved by the Hammer of Algorithms - Social Products is one of them and Great UI is another. Think about any Google Product (Search, Maps, Youtube, Groups,..) that is the very best in either of these two areas.
jinushaun 15y ago
"User are not As and Bs." Reminds me of working at MS as a designer. It's challenging for an engineering-focused company to suddenly try to integrate design into their products--especially one so focused on metrics. This often leads to "duct-tape design" instead of a clear unified design. User testing no longer validates design, but completely drives it. E.g., because our study found that users clicked more buttons when they are bright red and blinking in their faces, let's make all buttons blink red! Brilliant? No.
geebee 15y ago
I haven't interviewed at Google, but I've interviewed at a few other companies that seem to follow a similar style. I'd agree that the hiring process may be broken, but that these companies don't completely realize it. I have no problem with the intensely rigorous emphasis on CS (and math, sometimes), but I've been on these interviews and realized that (after seven hours of interviewing) we still haven't discussed what the company actually does. Here's the thing - when you're interviewing a very experienced candidate, the candidate may know more than you do about how to write the software. They may know things you haven't even thought to ask about. This isn't a reason to skip the technical grilling, that's a critical background. My problem is that these companies heap it on and on and on, and then they make an offer based on compensation for someone who can survive a technical grilling. What if this candidate has experience writing software in your domain? What if the candidate has a deep understanding of the business space and knows a lot about what those customers are looking for? What it there's a completely different approach that you haven't even considered? A candidate like that is, quite frankly, probably worth much more than someone with a strong theory background but no real domain knowledge (though I would still hire that guy). So I suspect that these interviews are good at establishing a high bar, but aren't so good at identifying certain types of developers who could be absolute game changers for the company. Ironically, the only time a company did do this for me, I didn't get the offer ;) It was at netflix, and (after the obligatory data structures grilling), they talked to me about all their data mining needs. I told them I didn't have much of a data mining background, but discussed how they might approach these problems a completely different way. A few days later: thanks but no thanks, they wanted a data miner. Oh well ;) Still, it was one of the best interviews I've been on, actually fun and energetic. And I felt that if they'd made me an offer, they'd know why. This is what may be missing from a lot of these interview processes, which is why they may be "broken" in the sense that they don't really get at why you'd want to hire a specific person, beyond the fact that he cleared a high technical bar.
DJFK 15y ago
I was contacted by a recruiter for a security test engineer after some crazy stuff I did which got out into the international press. I meet up all their requirments besides strong coding in c++, java, python. My main is PHP, JS and python at the level of exploit development. I have a lot and strong experiences described in the CV. No response from the recruiter yet ...
pabilla 15y ago
If you google "google job interview", my nightmare story is #2 or #3 - read shmula. I eventually received a job offer, but by that point, I wasn't interested. Anyways, the details of my story are in that blog post.

293 points by michokest 15y ago

They are self-selecting for a certain type of person and that will likely hurt them in the long-run (may even be hurting them in the short-run).

rhizome 15y ago
Microsoft had the same problem in the late 90s, though I wouldn't want to attribute causation to that for how MS has wound up. However, I do think it provides an object lesson that the use of abstract interviewing might indicate a company that is very popular to work for but has possibly jumped the shark (or hit a plateau) businesswise.

rbanffy 15y ago

I need no evidence beyond the fact they didn't hire me when they had the opportunity ;-)

michokest 15y ago
Please share more about your story!
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I was half joking. I was interviewed once, a couple years ago, and I wasn't really a good match to what they were looking for (they wanted a C programmer, my C is very rusty, I am much more an evangelist than anything else). There are very few technical positions where I live and I was not willing to move to Belo Horizonte (which is where most of Google's tech staff are in Brazil) for personal reasons. Not a lot of drama in this story.

currywurst 15y ago

This "Google can't do design" meme is really getting old, imho. At best, this is a story about one recruiter in a giant company not doing his job well in matching the requirements with the skill set of the candidate. It is easy to conclude preconceived notions.

wiredfool 15y ago
It's not that, it's that Google's candidate referral or search is really poorly targeted when they contact a candidate. They've talked me twice, about the same job that's really not a good fit for me. They talked to him, and totally missed the designer thing and went straight into CS101.
gwy 15y ago
I'll be happy when someone else writes an 'I'm leaving Google design because' rant other than Bowman's from 2009. That single post is probably pretty tired from all the constant traffic to it every time this meme comes up.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
weixiyen 15y ago
FWIW I've had the exact same experience as the author for (I kid you not) a Visual Design opening. Now unless we somehow had the same recruiter, I doubt this is a "one-time" incident.

yesimahuman 15y ago

It doesn't take a designer or user experience expert to note that google products lack consistency and don't interopt with each other very well. I think this stems from larger issues that are much harder to fix, or through 20% projects and acquisitions that were developed independently of a common set of standards. I doubt they are ignoring it. Perhaps the lack of a "Google standard" enables eager developers to create amazing new products, like Gmail.

enriclluelles 15y ago
I don't think that having a hiring system that's not fucked up and actually researches the guy would set a "Google standard". You can also keep launching amazing products with a recruiting process that makes sense, and doesn't analyze the guy with semi-random stupid questions.
- yesimahuman 15y ago
  The lack of google standard was my alternative reason for some google products hurting in experience and consistency.
- mrgordon 15y ago
  To be fair, Google doesn't just interview guys.. People constantly using "guy" and "programmer"/"computer scientist" interchangeably might be part of the reason why so many women avoid computer science.

javert 15y ago

I've also had a bad recruiting experience with Google, but for very different reasons. Personally, from what I can see (i.e. outside looking in), I think they have major systemic problems in how they do recruiting.

rhizome 15y ago
Care to provide some insight into those different reasons?
- javert 15y ago
  I just posted a comment about it elsewhere in this thread, but let me list my gripes here, in order of decreasing annoyance. This was actually for an internship, but for a PhD-seeking grad student who can code (me). (1) I had a deadline to accept/deny with another company, and I told Google the deadline. Google asked me to get an extension, so they'd have more time to interview me. I got the extension (the other company wasn't delighted to give it to me, and I was embarassed to ask, but I did it anyway). I told Google. Then, Google never scheduled the interview for me, and I ended up just having to accept with the other company. I wrote Google to tell them I had accepted with the other company on that company's deadline, and they acknowledged my email, but did not offer an apology or explanation for making me get an extension and then not actually scheduling an interview. (2) The process they used for me and my colleagues (grad students) was to have PhD engineers interview us as an initial filter, then to have HR people actually place us in groups. This placement process seemed pretty abysmal, for me and for everyone else. Which isn't surprising. The HR people aren't qualified to understand a student's area of research, expertise, and interest, and match them to groups. I would imagine their level of insight, as non-hackers, is basically "This student like Python, this group needs Python." In order to do this right, they need people who can actually understand the students' research and skills and the groups' needs at a much more fine-grained level. (3) The sort-of-rudeness I experienced with HR described in #1 happened to more of my colleagues than not (in various forms). Honestly, I wonder if the HR people are just super over-worked. Anyway, not long after this Google very publicly announced that Sergey was taking over as CEO and shaking things up to try to return the company to its roots. I was surprised by how "un-Googly" the whole recruiting process was, and I guess the company has really been struggling to maintain its culture across the board. I consider the experiences I described above to be one likely symptom/manifestation of this. Overall I'd say I saw a combination of big company bureaucracy problems, with a "holier-than-thou" pretentious attitude that seems to allow rudeness to creep in. Their attitude is, "We know you'd die to work for us," which is just so untrue, and it'll be very hard for them to ever recruit me in the future after this experience. Maybe Google has gone from "Don't be evil" to "Evil, but unlike other companies, we still act like can can do no wrong."

rkischuk 15y ago

I recently talked to a colleague who was hired as a developer by Google. He went through 3 rounds of "hiring committees". 3 different committees to make a developer hire is obviously broken. The ability to evaluate culture and skill fit should be possible with a hiring manager and a few prospective peers.

esrauch 15y ago
While there are 3 levels of approval, it's not exactly as crazy as it sounds at first glance. After your phone interview with an engineer, you go in for your on site interview and talk to at least 4 people, both managers and engineers. They each write up their impressions of you without discussion between them. They pass their impressions on to a hiring board that reviews those, your resume, and what positions are open. That board passes the recommendation onto a final board who I suspect is largely a financial gatekeeper, just to approve stock grants and controls company-wide hiring rates and company wide strategy.
stewiecat 15y ago
It's 3 committees + Larry. This was the case in December 2009 when I interviewed there. Local hiring committee, regional hiring committee, HQ hiring committee then final sign-off by Larry himself.

kenjackson 15y ago

Asked me to rate my skills in a list of 14 programming languages. Really? I'd love to know what they did with that data. It seems almost completely useless except to say "Tim does not know any Javascript, indicated by his zero score on that."

rbright 15y ago
Well, one thing it means is don't bother asking Tim any Javascript questions during his interviews.
kapitalx 15y ago
I often ask a similar question such as "Your top 5 languages". It does not negatively affect the interviewee, it just helps me target my questions better. Though if you say that you are a 10 but perform at a 5, then who knows, it could affect you negatively as my expectations are set high at that point! :)
drtse4 15y ago
From what i remember you could rate from 0 to 5(or 4) but each level represented something, e.g. 0=no experience, 1=limited exp on personal projects, 2=good knowledge and used for "production" projects, etc... It was (few years ago) not just a simple (useless and subjective) rating about your knowledge of the subject.
esrauch 15y ago
I think the point is to get an idea for what your skills are to determine if any open positions would be a reasonable fit for you. Theres also the whole theory about what languages you know indicates what kind of person you are. Even if you are looking for a Java programmer, the guy who took the time to learn languages that weren't required in their class indicates they have drive to learn on their own. Obviously it's not a perfect metric, but it's not unreasonable to use it as an indicator. I'm sure they didn't come up with that question just for him, and I don't think its too unreasonable of a question as long as they don't weigh it too heavily.
- kenjackson 15y ago

ruethewhirled 15y ago

It does seem like Google is more focused on the programing side of things and design is an afterthought for them. Which is a pity because I feel overall look and design dramatically changes my perceptions of how good something is. Another beef I have with Google is the sorta half-assedness of some of their products. They seem to release things early to get them out there, which isn't necessary a bad thing but now I've started to realize this it's soured me to using some of their api's and products

k_shehadeh 15y ago

I couldn't agree more with this one. I have trouble talking to people about this because I failed their interview so I come across as bitter (which I am). But this problem is not just Google's problem. It's systemic. Someone a long time ago decided to turn interviewing into a formula - a bad one - and it stuck. Drives me crazy.

ziadbc 15y ago

Google manages not to hire someone who didn't want to work there in the first place. Sounds like the process is working just fine to me. In all seriousness, there may be some issues with their hiring process, but I think the Google hiring practices would best be analyzed by using the aggregated data, rather than the trickle of anecdotes we tend to hear about in public. Even if Google got their hiring right 99.9 percent of the time, there would be hundreds of people, if not thousands, who were perfect for the job, and still didn't get hired.

javert 15y ago
Except that the anecdotes that are being heard suggest that their HR practices are broken, through and through, rather than fitting the pattern you described. For example, people just being dropped from contact with Google for no given reason (not as in, "We don't want you," but as in... they just never heard from them again).
- shin_lao 15y ago
  If she doesn't call back, it means she's not interested...
lupino3 15y ago
It depends on how you define "hire right". They can make two types of errors (as any binary classifier ;) ), false positives - wrong hires - and false negatives - wrong rejections. They tend to err on the false negative side.
- bugmenot 15y ago
  Yeah. In my experience they have an exceptionally low false positive rate. That's what makes it so much easier for me to think that they could apply their (exceptional) brains to lowering the (seemingly) high false negative rate.

yid 15y ago

My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral, and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reason for terminating contact, just plain dead silence. I tried emailing her a few times and left her a voicemail, noting very politely that they had contacted me and not vice versa, and asking if they were still interested in setting up an interview, but all I got was stony silence. If that's not broken, I don't know what is. For a company that hires the best engineering talent, they either hire substandard HR people, or perhaps most HR people just operate at a different level of efficacy.

javert 15y ago
I had a deadline to give a yes/no to another company, and my recruiter at Google asked me to get my deadline extended so that Google would have time to interview me. I asked the other company for an extension, which I got, and told my Google recruiter the new deadline. Then Google never responded and I never did an interview with them. I felt really put-off by that.
- xster 15y ago
  Went through a dozen super generic interviews for a generic engineer role. Got a good feedback but ended up finding out that the role was filled before my case was presented to the hiring committee and that even though the interviews were generic, they try to use the results to fill one chosen position only. I needed to restart the entire process and do more generic interviews to try for another generic role in one particular opening.
- adnam 15y ago
  Why didn't you just say "yes". You can always change your mind.
  - yid 15y ago

jrockway 15y ago

I had a similar experience. Same letter from the recruiter, back-and-forth with rate-your-skills, but then nothing. It's strange because the position they had in mind seemed directly aligned with my proven interests and abilities. Hell, my cover letter was pretty much describing the job they wanted before they even told me about it. I really see it as strange that I never got a call back. (Maybe it's not over yet, it's only been a few weeks.)

danssig 15y ago
You applied at google? I remember a few months ago you asking why anyone would want a lower paying job at google when they could work in finance. Have the rates changed that much?
- jrockway 15y ago
  I doubt those were my exact words. I said if you can get more in finance, then do it.

VBprogrammer 15y ago

Call me old fashioned but I think Google keeps having slightly embarrassing failures because it tries to copy ideas, without significantly improving on them, where the dominant player has already gained a critical mass of users.

suking 15y ago
Problem is they can't even copy well. Wave, Buzz - they were terrible.
itswindy 15y ago
Instant search - copied Background image - copied Search display - copied Panda? Still a freaking mess Oh, 7 years after FB Google wants to get in the action.

alienfluid 15y ago

I haven't had an interview in over 6 years, but I have been approached by multiple recruiters in the same time span. I actually dread the day I choose to switch jobs and have to face another technical interview - considering that my knowledge of college-level CS has declined over time. It's not because I am less skilled now than I was before, it's because you don't have to constantly create fantastically fast algorithms on a daily basis (at least in my job!). The skills that I have developed over the past 6 years - designing complex components that interact with other complex components in a hugely complex product, making improvements in the design of a 20 year old codebase, deciding between fixing a bug and compatibility etc., intuition about design choices and how they fit in the product, and yes, debugging (!) - none of these are covered in technical interviews these days. Sure, I could explain how a b-tree works - but that's not going to help me resolve my next bug.

yid 15y ago
I'm sure you would do fine based on your experience and boyishly good looks.
- alienfluid 15y ago
  Um ... thanks!?
  - yid 15y ago
    FYI, my comment has 4 upvotes. EDIT: now 8 upvotes...??
    - MrMan 15y ago
      this is how HN should work - reddit your post to keep people updated on your upvote count.
dangero 15y ago
Same here. I would have to study up for the interview and that seems pretty silly considering I spend every day writing code and have for years. There's a lot of irony in that too considering that when I need a b-tree, I Google it. It would be funny to bring an Android phone to a Google interview and then proceed to Google answers for questions they ask like this to point out how outdated the question is. If it's anything like interviews at my company, we just aren't really trained on how to interview, so these questions come up because the interviewer may not know what to ask aside from things like this, and their last interview experience may have been when looking for a job straight out of college when this was all they really knew about, so this is what interviewers asked them about. In a way those questions may just be "what you're supposed to ask someone in a CS related interview".

bugmenot 15y ago

I deal frequently with a good number of Googlers (many pretty high up in the company), and it's a common complaint from the inside that their hiring process is deeply flawed. Managers can't hire someone they already know to be a perfect fit for a particular job -- if HR decides (after a lengthy interview process) that the candidate didn't attend the right school, that's it. A lot of emotional and social capital gets spent as they approach people to ostensibly hire them, and along the way someone (who'll never actually work with the person post-hire) pulls the plug. A good number of manager-level people are pretty frustrated by it. And they appear to have taken a chapter from Disney-CBS's book: if you ever turn down a job offer from them, your chances of getting another one--even if it's years down the road, and for a different job--are practically nonexistent. To some degree, I get that, but institutionally, they certainly seem to believe their own hype a bit too much. Google's still reaping the rewards of having a ridiculously high-profit product (AdWords). Despite being publicly traded, nobody's ever expected them to behave like a 'regular company', and as long as Yahoo and Microsoft continue to play the Copy Google game, it'll stay that way. They're the corporate equivalent of the trust fund baby who's definitely smart, definitely accomplished some things on merit, but still has their world view rooted in unsustainable assumptions.

veyron 15y ago

I actually ended up turning down a google offer for this precise reason -- the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person. Having been through a real interview (where the interviewer went through my resume before the interview and prepared real thoughtful questions that would only be known if you actually worked on the language), I took that offer and now interview others more intelligently.

paganel 15y ago
> the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person. Reminds me of a phone-interview I had with Adobe for a Python job. The guy at the other end of the line asks me to sort of implement an algorithm, on the phone, I ended up solving his problem using a dictionary, getting its keys and then sorting it. That of course wasn't what the guy wanted, but it solved the problem.

crux_ 15y ago

I think an underlying reason for so many anecdotes of the sort in the comment threads here is the sheer number of hires the Goog is trying to make right now -- according to http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html, they've grown headcount by close to 10% in Q1 alone so far. Life for their recruitment folks is probably fairly interesting these days.

sabat 15y ago

In a nutshell: Google has developed a reputation for interviewing skill sets, as opposed to interviewing people. Sadly, that's common practice industry-wide.

brown9-2 15y ago

What position was the author interviewing for? Google (and most big companies) seem to pigeonhole candidates into a certain slot, even when it is obvious they'd be better off in a different title. The real way in which their process seems broken is the wildly different experiences people have seemingly at random, depending on who their arbitrarily assigned recruiter is. When I interviewed I had none of this weird "rate yourself" questions, and a mostly positive experience. But it seems like if I had randomly been assigned a different recruiter, or someone tried to fit me into a different bucket, I would have had a wildly different experience. How can you compare candidates evenly when their experiences seem so randomly different?

danielha 15y ago

Every few weeks or so I'm contacted by the same Google recruiter asking if I'm interested in an engineering opportunity. After a while, I responded by asking who had referred me. He answered: "Referrals are confidential, but this person knows you from your days at <proceeds to list out my LinkedIn>." Awful. Plus I'm a shitty programmer.

acgourley 15y ago
Pretty ridiculous to try and hire a founder fresh off a VC round for an engineering position. That's enough of a tip off right there.

fogus 15y ago

Sometimes I feel like the only person who was not hired by Google that didn't become bitter. I was treated with respect, was put up in a nice hotel, met very smart people, answered (and didn't ;) very tough questions. In the end it didn't work out. I had a blast nonetheless.

briancurtin 15y ago
Same here. I had two solid phone interviews, then they flew me out, put me up in a cool hotel, rented me a car, and put me through a good day on campus. Of the five interviews, I think I nailed four and blew one of them. Oh well, heard back around a week later that I didn't make the cut.
- nl 15y ago
  I've done 2 set of interviews, and I'm not bitter. I wasn't impressed with their process the first time, but the second time (2 years later) was a lot better.

pgroves 15y ago

I disagree with article's conclusion that they are selecting for "backend" engineers. They are selecting for people that think over-engineering every little data structure is the way to build good programs. The skill software companies need is the ability to get a hundred subsystems tested and working together, which is totally different. I know someone who recently interviewed with Google and he told me about the algorithms question he "got wrong." After he came up with a simple solution to a simple problem, the interviewer told him the better, googley-er algorithm, which was: a) far more complex and difficult to implement, b) had far more corner cases that would need unit tests, c) had more overhead in the expected case, but d) technically had a better big-O in the (extreme) worst case. In other words, the interview was screening for people who have been to school but haven't ever built anything.

bnoordhuis 15y ago
That was the impression I walked away with too: much CS ivory tower thinking, little real-world relevance. But they're only interviews, everyday life at Google is probably (hopefully!) different. As a counterpoint to the HR horror stories: my recruiter was a friendly woman who always responded quickly and politely. No complaints here.

jnhnum1 15y ago

I've interviewed for a summer internship at Google twice: this summer and last. The first time I interviewed with them, they emailed me the same day to tell me that my interview went really well and they'd like to proceed to host matching. Unsure of the way the process worked, I emailed the recruiter a week later to ask what the next steps were. She called me back half an hour later to ask if I had any deadlines, which I didn't. The reason for the delay, she said, was that Google tried to first match returning interns with hosts before new interns. A couple weeks later, I had a phone interview with a host, it went well, and I was assigned to work with him over the summer. That was that. This summer, I decided I wanted to return to work at Google again, but I had a specific project in mind I wanted to work on. I filled out a form stating my project interests (which were very specific this time around), but no recruiter reached out to me. I talked to one of my colleagues at Google from the previous summer, he talked to HR or something, and I got a new recruiter. Then I went through five host interviews in three days, picked my favorite, and that was that. So in my experience, the hiring process at Google isn't that bad. It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up.

yid 15y ago
> It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up. Please read some of the comments and anecdotes here a little more closely. A lot of people (including myself) followed up on the silence, often in multiple ways, and still got absolutely no response.
- jnhnum1 15y ago
  Yes, and I was just sharing my own personal experience to try to counter some selection bias.

spraveen80 15y ago

Google probably expects that all designers/product management folks that they are interviewing to be good at programming too. There are good programmers, good designers and some people who are really good at both. Since a lot of people want to work at Google, they are using that to their advantage and hiring good designers who are also good programmers.

gabeiscoding 15y ago

My Google offer experience: I turned down a offer from Google last spring. Long story, but my reasons can be summed up as having a more challenging opportunity in a leadership position at a small company versus having to enter the "engineer" lotto where you don't know what team and project you get placed on. Funny thing is, I had a call from one of their recruiters today. A couple times previously somebody contacted me by email and I said "sure, call me", and didn't hear from them. But this guy was out of the blue and from a different office and had a different approach to it. The message was that things are different at Google and they at least from his office's perspective, they treat each recruitment uniquely. My take away is that Google is a big company and you'll get different experiences depending on how you enter the HR process (college grad applicant, versus sought after name). The OP in this case is doing a lot of generalization.

jquery 15y ago

My own personal "horror" story. Google reached out to me, unsolicited, for a web developer position. I wasn't looking, but I thought cool, I'll at least talk to them. The recruiter kept asking me about how good my Java was. I repeated what it said on my resume, that I only used it in college, but that my OO skills were strong and transferable. Afterwards the recruiter emailed me, and said I wasn't a good fit because I didn't have enough Java experience. I didn't even get a technical phone screen. Java experience is serious business.

noarchy 15y ago
I don't know anything about their recruiters, but in my own experience with other companies, the recruiters know eff-all about what is really required for the job.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Lots of interesting stories. Disclaimer, I worked at Google for 4 years ('06 - '10) and interviewed a lot of folks (it was always a part of the job) and did a number of phone interviews too. The process then (as perhaps now) was broken and some folks within Google understood that. The process and goals were pretty simple, hire smart people that get things done. The process was aimed at finding smart people who get things done. That, like the phrase "largest integer" is easy to say and rolls off the lips but when you need to actually write out what it means gets a bit squirrely. The first challenge is what does "get things done" mean? Well for college students it means you got your diploma and at the same time you contributed to some FOSS project. For people with 0 - 5 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 5 - 15 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 15 to 25 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. Did you see what I did there? Google wanted smart people but the definition of smart was "you write a lot of code" and "get things done" was "that code shipped in the product/project." Fundamentally they didn't have any way to judge or evaluate the 'goodness' of what someone did if it wasn't writing code. Designers don't write a lot of code and they don't generally have a good metric for what constitutes good which can be empirically tested. The process has a hard time accomodating that. And if you're "good" at spotting problems in a process or getting folks organized around some better way of doing things? That's not measurable either. There was a company, BASF, a chemical company which had an advertising campaign around the fact that they were part of the process and materials that made quality products, their tag line was "We don't make the products you buy, we make them better." [1] And I noted that Google was exceptionally bad at hiring "BASF" people, which is to say people who bring the quality of other work up, or products up, or processes up. The people who did those roles in Google all started out as coders and that is how they got hired. It was only after they were working there that they (and Google) discovered they had this leveraging effect. In order to keep bias out of the process, Google isolates the steps where bias can creep in; separated the folks who decided hire / no-hire from the folks who decided on compensation; the folks who decide to hire and the folks who decide which project they work for. For all my time there, you could not interview for a specific job, you interviewed to get 'in' and then your name showed up on a list and the allocation process would determine which project got you. Often a candidate would ask during the interview "What would I be working on?" the only truthful answer was "That is impossible to say." Before you even get to that point though you get into "the system." Since Google keeps a record of everyone they have interviewed or has shown up as a lead and not interviewed. There is a long, long list of people (I once joked that it was everyone in the market). If you are an employee and you might know that person, common employer, common university, etc. The system could automatically send you an email asking for your opinion on the candidate. This isn't really any different than any other company, person X shows up in the candidate list, people who work at the company who worked at person X's company are asked if they knew this person when they were there. But it can have unintended consequences. Lets say there is a person X, who gets hired, from company Y, and person X really didn't fit in at Y and felt really abused by the company. Now new candidates from Y generate an email to X with the standard "You worked at Y when candidate Z did etc etc." Now person X is still pissed off about how Y treated them and so they respond to all of those emails with "Yeah, candidate Z was a crappy engineer, everyone had to carry for them they never did anything useful." Maybe someone else from Y says "candidate Z was great, everyone turned to them for advice." The process of separating the interviewers from the decisions means that this feedback bubbles up all equally weighted. Hard to know that employee X has said the same thing about every candidate that has come from Y, and if the committee sees two comments one positive and one negative and there isn't anyone on the committee who knows any different then how do you evaluate? The simplest solution if either has an equal probability of being the 'correct' assesment is that you pass on them because you can't know if you have bad data. And that was a part of the process that was fundamentally broken. Because Google gets a metric crap load of resumes and candidates all the time, passing on someone who is +1/-1 like that makes sense because you can't know which of the two feedback comments more accurately reflects the real candidate behavior. The result is that hiring someone with a grudge can poision the feedback pool for a bunch of possible hires. If you weren't Google and didn't have this huge backlog of candidates, you might dig deeper to find out which one was the more accurate representation, but if you are Google you just move on. Externally that sometimes appears that you just stop answering the phone. It also means that you miss out on quality people who would be good for the company and ultimately Google will have to find a way to address that issue (if they haven't already) because they are running out of people to interview. As with most things Google, you combine a data-driven, automata friendly process with fuzzy data and alternate agenda actors, at the scale Google runs at, and you get lots of weird artifacts. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE

j_baker 15y ago

Design decisions powered by A/B testing are a great way of incrementally improving your product, but trying to use them to drive the overall product direction can lead you to decisions that fly in the face of common sense. Good lord do I agree. At a certain level, you just have to trust your gut.

googInterviewee 15y ago

(Posting anonymously because I'm in the middle of interviewing with Google) My experience so far has been very different. I was contacted by a recruiter a few weeks ago. I had a phone interview within a week of the initial contact. Within three days, they got back to me to schedule an onsite interview. The one negative I've encountered so far: Google has an office near where I live, but will not interview me there. This will require significant travel on my part.

briancurtin 15y ago
I'm going to guess you probably work near a Google office which does different things than your target role. I live in Chicago, where Google has an office, but they flew me out to Mountain View to interview for a software engineering spot.

anacrolix 15y ago

I got contacted out of the blue. Phone interview lined up at a very inconvenient time and everything. An hour AFTER the appointed time for the phone interview, I received an email saying they had not noticed that I hadn't graduated yet (I've had 4 years full time experience in industry and open source). I referred them to more senior colleagues who I considered to be similarly talented and had graduated, none of whom were ever contacted.

larsberg 15y ago

Google is considered (or at least was, by other tech companies) to have a very poor sourcing and general recruiting experience. It was assumed to be because they contract out the work. As a contrast to that, at MSFT, we had full-time recruiting staff generally split into college and experienced recruiting (there are some extra bits not important to this). The experienced recruiting staff was assigned to divisions and worked for usually a couple of years at a time sourcing candidates specially suited to their area. The college recruiters carefully handle and ensure that only one person is in charge of each candidate, they're marshalled through all the steps, know when they'll hear what piece of info back, and are absolutely brutal with us hiring managers about making timely decisions (not that we ever drag our feet <grin>). While working at MSFT, I was contacted several times by different Google recruiters. Each time, I was left sort of half-indifferent e-mails or voicemails, which I was informed was the desired style of contact. I'd fire them off to my sourcing manager to forward around the recruiting org for a good laugh and jokes about where these people had been before (it's a small industry, and they often would point out ex-Cisco recruiting washouts, etc.). That said, you can certainly go far on name alone for your recruiting, especially when your options are expected to pay out well. But it's unfortunate to have to try to build teams despite your recruiting efforts. I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.

cletus 15y ago
Your information is incorrect. Google does all its own recruiting. It is not outsourced.
- larsberg 15y ago
  Thank you for this clarification! That was not the case in 2002-2004 (when I was a hiring manager at MSFT).

nostrademons 15y ago

It sounds like you were going through the software engineer interview process, when what you wanted to do is product management. This is a recruiter-fail: when someone expresses an interest in product decisions, it makes sense to send them through the PM interview process. But it's not really representative of what it's like to interview for all the different job families that one might apply to.

citizenkeys 15y ago

Google's process is broken because it generally presumes job candidates know what specific job they want, and they don't. To put it in contrast, I also applied to Microsoft and they immediately assigned me a specific recruiter that I could email directly. Google needs to give job candidates a person to contact rather than expecting talent to go online and do that weird "job shopping cart" thing they have on their website. The other reason the hiring process is broken is because it's totally backwards. The hiring process doesn't indicate any appreciation of talent. Talent in this industry consists of wanna-be rockstars. Talent wants the company to say "Hey, you're great. We want you. What's it going to take to get you here?" Google's approach, like many other companies, is "Go online, email us a resume, and we'll get back to you whenever we feel like it." Most people with talent are going to say "Forget that. You got it backwards. You need me more than I need you." To put it in perspective, think of how professional sports teams recruit college athletes. The professional teams do every damn thing they can to get college athletes to agree to join the team. They send out recruiters that pay for meals, make the candidates feel special, and everything else to make the talent feel appreciated. That's how you recruit talent. Taking the approach of "Go online, do our rinky-dink job shopping cart thing, email us a resume, and we'll get back to you when we feel like it" doesn't attract talent and never will.

bane 15y ago
Google's counter to that is that since they tend to target only people from top companies and top schools (by their particular perception of what is "top"), so they'll tend to sweep up talented people anyway.
- citizenkeys 15y ago
  I re-read my comment. The flaw in my reasoning seems to be that Google still needs a way to know the talent exists. So you still gotta get Google's attention somehow before they can recruit you. Still, though, that "job shopping cart" thing is lame. As somebody that's actually tried it, having to look all around the site and find a specific job just doesn't work. In simple terms, it would be better for Google to have a form that says "Tell us everything you know", let people just write everything they know and submit it, and then let Google match the skills up with a set of jobs that might be a good fit for the candidate.

T_S_ 15y ago

Easier to get bought than hired?

iam 15y ago

I submitted my resume to Google and filled out their top X language survey, but never even so much got back an email from them after waiting for over a month. Oh well, there's plenty of other companies who were happy to talk to me.

tomkarlo 15y ago

The OP is doing a lot of generalization and extrapolation to make the judgement contained in the title, considering he doesn't even seem to have made it through stage one of the process he's attempting to judge. I'm pretty sure there's some folks who get rejected at the preliminary screening stage of my company's hiring process (some, I'm sure, for the wrong reasons) but I hardly think that would justify condemning our entire recruiting strategy and process. This seems mostly like a standard recipe for baiting traffic from HN to a blog: make up a sweeping generalization about a company people are deeply interested in (e.g. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter) based on a very limited data set, put that in your headline, then have your article talk about how much better your company is at XYZ by comparison. It's the HN version of the humblebrag tweet.

latch 15y ago

I'd like to work at Google, but I have no interest in going through the embarrassment of their [seeminly] stuck up interview process. No doubt this is my loss, and not Google's.

bane 15y ago

Related question, how easy/hard is it to move around internally once you are "in"?

16s 15y ago

They asked me how to rm a file named -f. Seriously. I thought to myself what a silly question. That's like 20 year old Unix trivia. I was dumb-founded. This was the second phone interview. I knew then I did not want to work for them and I told the recruiter I was not interested. They called me and they initiated the contact.

ved 15y ago

Another interesting view on why Google's hiring process will bring it down sooner or later - http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-everyone-else-will-eventually-fail http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-eve...

ved 15y ago

peter_severin 15y ago

I had a relatively good interview experience with Google. I wasn't hired but I felt that the process was fair. True, it was long and I had to invest some significant time to freshen up my algorithm skills. But overall I was left with a good impression. I do think that Google puts too much accent on algorithms and college-level CS. I consider myself a good programmer. I created two moderately successful Micro ISVs in my free time. I contributed a huge chunk to the product at my corporate job. I get things done. However I felt that this is not what Google looks for even if the say they do.

namank 15y ago

Hahaha, today morning I was thinking about why startups manage to leech millions of $$s selling services that Google actually offers for free. And I reached the same conclusion - Google doesn't focus on users and thus completely misses the mark. They focus on engineers but not designers or market researchers. This is why, I think, App Engine will be a huge success and why Wave failed. It was an excellent product, IMO, but it wasn't built with a particular user in mind.

suprgeek 15y ago

This reminds me of the saying: To a man with a Hammer, everything looks like a nail. Google's Hammer is its (admittedly great) expertise at Algorithmically solving Hard Webscale Data Problems. Unfortunately some problems cannot be solved by the Hammer of Algorithms - Social Products is one of them and Great UI is another. Think about any Google Product (Search, Maps, Youtube, Groups,..) that is the very best in either of these two areas.

jinushaun 15y ago

"User are not As and Bs." Reminds me of working at MS as a designer. It's challenging for an engineering-focused company to suddenly try to integrate design into their products--especially one so focused on metrics. This often leads to "duct-tape design" instead of a clear unified design. User testing no longer validates design, but completely drives it. E.g., because our study found that users clicked more buttons when they are bright red and blinking in their faces, let's make all buttons blink red! Brilliant? No.

geebee 15y ago

I haven't interviewed at Google, but I've interviewed at a few other companies that seem to follow a similar style. I'd agree that the hiring process may be broken, but that these companies don't completely realize it. I have no problem with the intensely rigorous emphasis on CS (and math, sometimes), but I've been on these interviews and realized that (after seven hours of interviewing) we still haven't discussed what the company actually does. Here's the thing - when you're interviewing a very experienced candidate, the candidate may know more than you do about how to write the software. They may know things you haven't even thought to ask about. This isn't a reason to skip the technical grilling, that's a critical background. My problem is that these companies heap it on and on and on, and then they make an offer based on compensation for someone who can survive a technical grilling. What if this candidate has experience writing software in your domain? What if the candidate has a deep understanding of the business space and knows a lot about what those customers are looking for? What it there's a completely different approach that you haven't even considered? A candidate like that is, quite frankly, probably worth much more than someone with a strong theory background but no real domain knowledge (though I would still hire that guy). So I suspect that these interviews are good at establishing a high bar, but aren't so good at identifying certain types of developers who could be absolute game changers for the company. Ironically, the only time a company did do this for me, I didn't get the offer ;) It was at netflix, and (after the obligatory data structures grilling), they talked to me about all their data mining needs. I told them I didn't have much of a data mining background, but discussed how they might approach these problems a completely different way. A few days later: thanks but no thanks, they wanted a data miner. Oh well ;) Still, it was one of the best interviews I've been on, actually fun and energetic. And I felt that if they'd made me an offer, they'd know why. This is what may be missing from a lot of these interview processes, which is why they may be "broken" in the sense that they don't really get at why you'd want to hire a specific person, beyond the fact that he cleared a high technical bar.

DJFK 15y ago

I was contacted by a recruiter for a security test engineer after some crazy stuff I did which got out into the international press. I meet up all their requirments besides strong coding in c++, java, python. My main is PHP, JS and python at the level of exploit development. I have a lot and strong experiences described in the CV. No response from the recruiter yet ...

pabilla 15y ago

If you google "google job interview", my nightmare story is #2 or #3 - read shmula. I eventually received a job offer, but by that point, I wasn't interested. Anyways, the details of my story are in that blog post.