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Unique questions? What's there to be so proud of in selecting questions? Are you playing jeopardy with the candidates careers? Enticing the candidates to moving

Unique questions? What's there to be so proud of in selecting questions? Are you playing jeopardy with the candidates careers? Enticing the candidates to moving on and not answering questions in what is probably the biggest interview in their life? "Quickly!"? > Some candidates make it hard because they want to keep persevering, keep thinking Yeah, amazing that some candidates want to demonstrate their perseverance even in face of problems that they find challenging. Crazy right?

ljm 5y ago
I'm wary of pushing people to move on to something else because I know that if I was on the receiving end, I would think that I fucked up and the interviewer is trying to get the interview done early. A candidate who spends far too long on a part of the problem without getting anywhere will get some guidance and nudging. If they take that on board and get back on track then that's great - they're responding to feedback and correcting course. If they remain too committed to their chosen approach and continue to struggle, then we've seen it with our own eyes. At the end of the day, we're giving candidates the benefit of the doubt and recognising that, a lot of the time, it's their nerves that are doing the talking and you need to work with that.
mrb 5y ago
Well, as evidenced by this thread, candidates are frustrated by the interviewing process at Google, in particular by poor/generic/boring questions that test a narrow/irrelevant topic. So, yes, I took pride in selecting questions that aren't like this in order to find what the candidate is good at, not what they don't know. And rest assured that I always made it very clear to the candidate that abandoning a question they are stuck on is best to maximize their chance of doing well in the interview. If I have a 45-min time slot to spend on a candidate, I don't want to waste 30 min on a single coding challenge that they do poorly on and have barely 15 min to cover other topics. If I get a sense they won't do well after 10 min, I stop it, move on, and that leaves us 35 min to do other coding challenges. I have more chances of finding what the candidate is good at in 35 min than in 15 min.

ljm 5y ago

I'm wary of pushing people to move on to something else because I know that if I was on the receiving end, I would think that I fucked up and the interviewer is trying to get the interview done early. A candidate who spends far too long on a part of the problem without getting anywhere will get some guidance and nudging. If they take that on board and get back on track then that's great - they're responding to feedback and correcting course. If they remain too committed to their chosen approach and continue to struggle, then we've seen it with our own eyes. At the end of the day, we're giving candidates the benefit of the doubt and recognising that, a lot of the time, it's their nerves that are doing the talking and you need to work with that.

mrb 5y ago

Well, as evidenced by this thread, candidates are frustrated by the interviewing process at Google, in particular by poor/generic/boring questions that test a narrow/irrelevant topic. So, yes, I took pride in selecting questions that aren't like this in order to find what the candidate is good at, not what they don't know. And rest assured that I always made it very clear to the candidate that abandoning a question they are stuck on is best to maximize their chance of doing well in the interview. If I have a 45-min time slot to spend on a candidate, I don't want to waste 30 min on a single coding challenge that they do poorly on and have barely 15 min to cover other topics. If I get a sense they won't do well after 10 min, I stop it, move on, and that leaves us 35 min to do other coding challenges. I have more chances of finding what the candidate is good at in 35 min than in 15 min.