8 ms·

Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s failing

55 points by splap 5y ago

Traubenfuchs 5y ago
This website is unusable on my iPhone 13 pro with increased font size. Light grey text on white background with the menu constantly open and half transparent.
- mtmail 5y ago
  Try https://outline.com/CcLGrw https://outline.com/CcLGrw as alternative
  - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
    That worked, thanks!
- carom 5y ago
  Does reader mode work?
vichu 5y ago
Article aside, can anyone tell me what's going on here at the bottom of the article? Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/D0F4Ib9.png https://i.imgur.com/D0F4Ib9.png
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  I think the website is just broken. For me theres a menu overlapping like 80% of the screen vertically, and the light gray text is illegible on a white background (edit- screenshot here https://i.ibb.co/6YsVmQ4/Screenshot-20211008-113929.png https://i.ibb.co/6YsVmQ4/Screenshot-20211008-113929.png). I know HN discourages complaints about an article's web design, but yeesh
dolni 5y ago
I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The answer he was actually looking for depended on the knowledge that open() returns the smallest possible file descriptor number -- so close stdout, and simply call open() again. I didn't happen to know that particular detail at the time. It derailed the entire interview. He was fixated on this one very specific piece of knowledge. And the worst part is not only does his approach make your code less clear, there are also contexts under which it wouldn't work. I don't know if that particular interview was the reason for my not being offered a job. I did end up hearing later on about hiring from a couple of Google engineers at a tech conference. They said that it is quite common that Google makes you interview two or three times. I suspect the reason is to make you feel a sense of gratitude for being hired. And so you don't quit.
- ridiculous_fish 5y ago
  An example context where it wouldn't work is if stdin is closed, e.g. `./a.out <&-`. Awful question, I'm sorry you got hit by it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > He was fixated on this one very specific piece of knowledge. IMHO, that's what makes writing interview questions so hard: you really have to know the topic inside and out to know (or at least recognize) all the answers. If you only know one, your question is shit and you might as well have the applicant play guess the number.
  - krisoft 5y ago
    That is silly. Trying to know all the possible answers is a losing game. If I as an interviewer ask that same question and get the freopen answer, and let's say its not one I'm familiar with I can just simply say "I'm not familiar with freopen, could you tell me more about it?" And then I listen to what they say. A competent developer who is worth their salt will be able to summarise the gist of it quickly. Then if I want even more info I might describe the solution I know about and ask the interviewee to compare the two solutions, describe the pros and cons as they see them. What I would be looking for is the proof that the person I'm talking with is able to communicate complicated things clearly, and can think about code. These skills are exactly what one needs in their everyday work, so why not use the opportunity to evaluate them? Does anyone really think that the goal of an interview question is to query if they know that specific trivia you happen to know? And besides if I have doubts about that they are just hoodwinking me with this freopen I can just crosscheck what they told me with the reference. If it turns out to be not a thing at all, that's not a good sign and I will not recommend them to be hired, but otherwise they passed with flying colours.
tablespoon 5y ago
> It was the design of the recruiting system itself that became his problem: At some point, Google decided Watt (who was working as an associate professor at the time) was interviewing to be a site reliability engineer, despite never indicating an interest in that role himself (he was interested in a more management-focused position). > "It just never seemed to get through. They were so focused on whatever categorization they had chosen and it was fixed," he said. "I think something in their processes meant they weren't really looking for a fit between a person and a job. It felt to me that they probably had a recruiter who was looking for a certain role. Once they put you in the pipeline, that's the role you're in." Didn't Google at some point decide a guy who developed a VM or interpreter or something that they were using in-house was only good enough to be a sysadmin for them?
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Yeah, at least in the past it was pretty standard for them to assign you a seemingly random interview gauntlet focused on a role that wasn't a fit for you and wasn't even the one you were applying for. I interviewed for javascript vm/browser runtime stuff multiple times and until the last interview cycle I kept getting assigned to interview with people who worked on android apps or cloud storage infrastructure. Complete mismatch. I don't write Java, dude.
- xxpor 5y ago
  I believe the incident you're thinking of is the guy who wrote brew interviewing with them. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
- rudedogg 5y ago
  > Didn't Google at some point decide a guy who developed a VM or interpreter or something that they were using in-house was only good enough to be a sysadmin for them? You're probably thinking of Max Howell, the maker of the Homebrew package manager. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...
johnwheeler 5y ago
I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.
- bingohbangoh 5y ago
  Most interviews these days ape off Google interviews too. See most FAANG-style companies. Very few deviate from coding or systems design questions. Thus if you're studying for one, you're kind of studying for all. I never hear reasonable alternatives to this. Surely you'd rather a coding exercise than a take home coding practice you never feel will be complete enough for people. Or to do what Basecamp does and work for 2 months only to be given the boot.
- lastofthemojito 5y ago
  I would see university admissions as a closer comparison than university tests. If I'm applying to jobs (or universities) I'll want to apply to several in case some don't accept me, some feel like a bad fit once I'm in the process, etc. I won't want to cram for each. I'll want to reuse the same cover letter or admissions essay to the extent possible. Once I'm in the university and enrolled in classes, I'll know what to focus on and I'll be willing to study hard for tests. I know some people see it differently, but I've always considered multiple potential employers simultaneously and I definitely haven't been willing to play the "devote weeks of your life to try to get hired by a specific company" game. On the other hand, some people find that worthwhile, and more power to them.
- troutwine 5y ago
  At least in my experience the main difference between exams and interviews comes down to relevance. That is, an exam will be within the context of material you've been studying and an interview just... kinda whatever? I have only very, very rarely seen -- from both sides of the table -- professional interviews that are associated with the job the person might do. This problem is worse the larger the company, once there's a standardized set of questions to evaluate someone's possible fitness for a variety of roles. When I've had power over the interviewing process it's always been enlightening to ask the interviewer to take their own interview. I'd be willing to bet most professors can pass their own exams; the same hasn't been true of interviewers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
armchairhacker 5y ago
Google's recruiting system isn't "failing" unless they're hiring unqualified devs. Google gets tons of applicants. The point isn't to prevent qualified applicants from being rejected, it's to prevent unqualified applicants from being hired. They can do whatever arbitrary, unfair filters they want as long as they still have at least some applicants left, and as long as those people are adequate.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  If your teams desperately need qualified staff to get things across the finish line and you can't hire them, your recruiting system is failing. This is a real problem Google has had in the past (I don't know if they've fixed it since I left.)
  - Jensson 5y ago
    That is the main feature of the recruiting system, the whole reason they do it is so that managers can't circumvent the standard process no matter what. It might lead to some problems you don't have in the old nepotism ridden systems, but it also solves many of the problems the old systems created. So you can't say it is failing just because it doesn't do everything right.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I agree in part, but they are failing if their system is imitated by everyone else. Every time there is a thread on HN where people are debating the right way to filter applicants, the premise that goes unexamined is that there is one optimum, whether it's Google's procedures or something else. But it's not just Google that can't hire everyone qualified. It's every employer. Say, for simplicity, that any employer is only able to hire 1% of their applicants. If they all used some optimal procedure, then they will all be fighting over the same 1% and the other 99% will be unhireable and start a revolution or something. This is inescapable, I think, no matter what the so-called optimum is. It's like...a Doomsday Schelling Point. Each company can disregard the fate of those filtered out, but only if their methods are sufficiently diverse.
- cratermoon 5y ago
belval 5y ago
Three years ago I interviewed at Google for an internship here were all the steps I completed: - Google Foobar to get someone to notice my resume - First form that asked for general information - Second form that asked weird behaviour questions like "Do you think people can change" - First interview with regular leetcode questions - Second interview was waved because of foobar - Third form to write your interests/motivation for matchup with a team (No guarantee of having an internship at that point) - Dropped the whole process because I got an offer somewhere else The whole process spanned maybe 3 months. The year after that I re-did the whole process and was ghosted by the recruiter after the first interview, I assume that was because I did not rank high enough and they were waiting to see if I'd make the cut or not. This process (and the big version for FTE) works to weed-out candidates that aren't motivated to work at Google and I just don't see how else they could be doing it. People have to understand that recruitment at FANG is painful because you will get thousands of SDE applications and you can't really take the time to treat everyone "right". It does suck.
kevingadd 5y ago
Before finally getting hired there I interviewed with Google at least 3 times (hard to remember), on a referral each time (for a different team, from a different person). Incidentally, doing an interview for any role puts you on a secret 6+ month lockout, so it turns out that if you're interested in working at Google you shouldn't interview unless you're absolutely sure you want that role and can ace the interview. Anyway, Each time until my last interview cycle, they seemingly assigned me interviewers at random and they were usually a terrible fit. I'm a games/systems programmer, so think C, C++, C#, etc. Console games (PS4), PC games, etc. Never shipped a mobile app, don't have much Linux expertise, don't list them on my resume. Haven't written Java since the J2ME era. So naturally, I kept getting assigned to interview with people who worked on the Android Play Music app, or people who wrote Linux cloud storage infrastructure (think talking to storage hardware directly, etc) in Python and C. Inevitably, it was impossible for us to have an in-depth technical conversation without a lot of overhead because the disconnect was too big. Sometimes they'd ask me to whiteboard and there was no appropriate language for me to use that we both understood. At the end of each day I came away having had interesting conversations with people but it was consistently a failure of an interview process, so it wasn't a surprise that they never made me an offer. You could tell that this messed up interview process was also an issue for interviewers - I had a couple different interviewers get really combative or frustrated because of the disconnect, in one case borderline abusive. Then finally a team that really wanted me (the NaCL/WebAssembly team) looked at my interview history and just stacked the deck so that everyone interviewing me was actually qualified to interview me. It was a breeze. Sure, it was challenging like any good interview, but not a complete waste of anyone's time. While I can't speak to this personally, I also have heard from current/former Googlers that in the past it was extremely hard to hire Linux experts (kernel devs, etc) because they kept giving those people the same garbage screen (let's talk about Java!) and then rejecting them in the same way. Apparently the fix was a special interviewing process for people like that, presumably that's the treatment I got eventually.
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  This was the same for me. I'm an engine / graphics programmer with experience on console, looking for work after the studio I was at shut down. Google decided to match me up with a team working on an Android app, because it was "Graphics", and it resulted in maybe the worst phone call I've ever had in my life: any time I asked about technical questions, they just said they didn't have to worry about that part since they were using stock Google libraries. They were working on a application that displayed 3D models, so I asked about their art pipeline, which elicited the answer "what's an art pipeline, I've never heard that term before" from the project manager. It was clear that my skills weren't valued, and at times it seemed like they didn't even want any additional team members. None of the people who interviewed me are still at Google.
cosmotic 5y ago
When I last interviewed they sent out a huge pile of PDFs that said "think out loud" and "explain your thought process". During the interview, I explained every solution I'm not considering and why. The interviewers appear to have interpret this as 'candidate thought this would be a possible solution' and kept steering me back to the optimal solution, which I was on my way to explaining. This resulted in interview feedback that I needed some guidance. The kind of folks that can plow through hacker rank etc want to show everyone how good they are, even candidates. Google's process may result in selecting good SWEs, but it also selects for bad interviewers.
- xtracto 5y ago
  > When I last interviewed they sent out a huge pile of PDFs that said "think out loud" and "explain your thought process" I hated those type of interviews when I used to interview (as an interviewee) for programming positions. I am the kind of person that cannot multitask at all: I sometimes even have to close my eyes when I am thinking something before saying it. Nowadays I am on the other side being the interviewer for programming positions. I make it really clear at the beginning of the coding part: Feel free to shut up and think, focus on writing the code you'll write, and we will talk about it once you have finished.
paxys 5y ago
Google has hired ~100,000 people in the last decade. They have probably interviewed 30M+. Broad generalizations like "their interview process is failing" are pointless. You don't build a $2T company with a broken hiring process. This keeps coming up but is worth repeating – the goal of any large company's recruiting process isn't necessarily to hire the best possible candidates 100% of the time. There are always trade-offs. Every interview takes time away from employees. There is no way to predict 5+ years of performance from a 1 hour interview slot. Education, credentials, experience are all valid data points but again not a great predictor of success. Hiring is ultimately an exercise in balancing many different priorities and hoping for the best result. Some able candidates miss out, which sucks, but that's factored in. It's also much more important to keep a bad candidate out than ensure every possible good candidate is hired. Every single one of these articles/tweets/anecdotes boils down to "Google didn't hire me and I'm very smart so their system is totally broken".
- taurath 5y ago
  Chill out a little. What makes these threads explode is that many many people have spent weeks or months of their lives preparing for an interview at Google - it can create a lot of reasonable resentment especially when one feels they haven’t been given a fair shake - and by many accounts even Google recognizes that there’s an element of luck involved even when the person is good.
- mempko 5y ago
  This would be a good argument if google had diversified products. But it relies so heavily on one product it makes you wonder if engineering quality even matters to google's success. Google's Ad business can hide the worst systemic problems because it makes so much money. In other words, google's success says very little about the quality of it's hiring process.
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    Much of Google's success was cemented in place back in the day when they recruited people by putting fun little puzzle inserts into computer magazines. That's such a huge difference from their hiring practices now.
lordnacho 5y ago
I reckon that coding as part of an interview is really just to make sure the person isn't a total fraud. There's that guy who for some reason thinks he can nab a high paid job by blagging it, and then there's the guy who thought he was a coder but it turns out that writing some VBA macros isn't quite the same thing. Those kinds of people will be found out immediately if you ask for a FizzBuzz type question, and that is maybe a reason to do it. Beyond that, there's no point. You won't discover whether the guy who passes is the kind who writes undocumented spaghetti, or if he doesn't know how git works, or if he doesn't know how to assess an OSS library. What seems to always work for me, having hired dozens of people over the years, is a technical chat. Tell me what's interesting. What's the difference between this language and that one? Why did you make the choices that you did? You talk, not me. Someone who can say substantive things about different techs has spent the time. Someone who has formed opinions has spent the time. Someone who's spent the time won't run out of opinions. I will concede that while this has worked for me, a hiring manager in small financial teams, there's a fair chance it won't work for Google. For one, nothing I've just recommended can be measured. It also can't be taught to junior interviewers, and thus relies a fair bit on the reputations of the firms on the CV for filtering. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there's a big difference between the decision maker doing the interview and someone who is just an advisor (ie an agent) for them, in that the agent needs to have something concrete to say to his boss as well.
- praptak 5y ago
  Chatting carries the risk of hiring for the "talking about X" skill rather than "X" skill.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Certainly that's a priori a risk. I'm just saying it has never materialised for me and thus maybe it's not as big a risk as it sounds.
obzidi4n 5y ago
I recently went through a similar experience interviewing at the Director level with Amazon Advertising, nearly two months of time-consuming and exhausting interviews, just to get shut down on a minor (minor minor) technicality. Cool, man. Now I work for a major global agency pulling about the same compensation, and we won't recommend Amazon Ads for our clients b/c the product is well-known to be shit. Works out.

55 points by splap 5y ago

This website is unusable on my iPhone 13 pro with increased font size. Light grey text on white background with the menu constantly open and half transparent.

mtmail 5y ago
Try https://outline.com/CcLGrw https://outline.com/CcLGrw as alternative
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  That worked, thanks!
carom 5y ago
Does reader mode work?

vichu 5y ago

Article aside, can anyone tell me what's going on here at the bottom of the article? Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/D0F4Ib9.png https://i.imgur.com/D0F4Ib9.png

Rebelgecko 5y ago
I think the website is just broken. For me theres a menu overlapping like 80% of the screen vertically, and the light gray text is illegible on a white background (edit- screenshot here https://i.ibb.co/6YsVmQ4/Screenshot-20211008-113929.png https://i.ibb.co/6YsVmQ4/Screenshot-20211008-113929.png). I know HN discourages complaints about an article's web design, but yeesh

dolni 5y ago

I interviewed at Google about a decade ago. I made it far enough that they flew me out to interview on-site at their Kirkland office. I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed. Well why the hell not? The answer he was actually looking for depended on the knowledge that open() returns the smallest possible file descriptor number -- so close stdout, and simply call open() again. I didn't happen to know that particular detail at the time. It derailed the entire interview. He was fixated on this one very specific piece of knowledge. And the worst part is not only does his approach make your code less clear, there are also contexts under which it wouldn't work. I don't know if that particular interview was the reason for my not being offered a job. I did end up hearing later on about hiring from a couple of Google engineers at a tech conference. They said that it is quite common that Google makes you interview two or three times. I suspect the reason is to make you feel a sense of gratitude for being hired. And so you don't quit.

ridiculous_fish 5y ago
An example context where it wouldn't work is if stdin is closed, e.g. `./a.out <&-`. Awful question, I'm sorry you got hit by it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tablespoon 5y ago
> He was fixated on this one very specific piece of knowledge. IMHO, that's what makes writing interview questions so hard: you really have to know the topic inside and out to know (or at least recognize) all the answers. If you only know one, your question is shit and you might as well have the applicant play guess the number.
- krisoft 5y ago
  That is silly. Trying to know all the possible answers is a losing game. If I as an interviewer ask that same question and get the freopen answer, and let's say its not one I'm familiar with I can just simply say "I'm not familiar with freopen, could you tell me more about it?" And then I listen to what they say. A competent developer who is worth their salt will be able to summarise the gist of it quickly. Then if I want even more info I might describe the solution I know about and ask the interviewee to compare the two solutions, describe the pros and cons as they see them. What I would be looking for is the proof that the person I'm talking with is able to communicate complicated things clearly, and can think about code. These skills are exactly what one needs in their everyday work, so why not use the opportunity to evaluate them? Does anyone really think that the goal of an interview question is to query if they know that specific trivia you happen to know? And besides if I have doubts about that they are just hoodwinking me with this freopen I can just crosscheck what they told me with the reference. If it turns out to be not a thing at all, that's not a good sign and I will not recommend them to be hired, but otherwise they passed with flying colours.

tablespoon 5y ago

> It was the design of the recruiting system itself that became his problem: At some point, Google decided Watt (who was working as an associate professor at the time) was interviewing to be a site reliability engineer, despite never indicating an interest in that role himself (he was interested in a more management-focused position). > "It just never seemed to get through. They were so focused on whatever categorization they had chosen and it was fixed," he said. "I think something in their processes meant they weren't really looking for a fit between a person and a job. It felt to me that they probably had a recruiter who was looking for a certain role. Once they put you in the pipeline, that's the role you're in." Didn't Google at some point decide a guy who developed a VM or interpreter or something that they were using in-house was only good enough to be a sysadmin for them?

kevingadd 5y ago
Yeah, at least in the past it was pretty standard for them to assign you a seemingly random interview gauntlet focused on a role that wasn't a fit for you and wasn't even the one you were applying for. I interviewed for javascript vm/browser runtime stuff multiple times and until the last interview cycle I kept getting assigned to interview with people who worked on android apps or cloud storage infrastructure. Complete mismatch. I don't write Java, dude.
xxpor 5y ago
I believe the incident you're thinking of is the guy who wrote brew interviewing with them. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
rudedogg 5y ago
> Didn't Google at some point decide a guy who developed a VM or interpreter or something that they were using in-house was only good enough to be a sysadmin for them? You're probably thinking of Max Howell, the maker of the Homebrew package manager. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

johnwheeler 5y ago

I don't get it. University tests are brutal too and have the expectation the student will devote large amounts of time and energy. It seems like a job interview is fair game for the same, no? I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.

bingohbangoh 5y ago
Most interviews these days ape off Google interviews too. See most FAANG-style companies. Very few deviate from coding or systems design questions. Thus if you're studying for one, you're kind of studying for all. I never hear reasonable alternatives to this. Surely you'd rather a coding exercise than a take home coding practice you never feel will be complete enough for people. Or to do what Basecamp does and work for 2 months only to be given the boot.
lastofthemojito 5y ago
I would see university admissions as a closer comparison than university tests. If I'm applying to jobs (or universities) I'll want to apply to several in case some don't accept me, some feel like a bad fit once I'm in the process, etc. I won't want to cram for each. I'll want to reuse the same cover letter or admissions essay to the extent possible. Once I'm in the university and enrolled in classes, I'll know what to focus on and I'll be willing to study hard for tests. I know some people see it differently, but I've always considered multiple potential employers simultaneously and I definitely haven't been willing to play the "devote weeks of your life to try to get hired by a specific company" game. On the other hand, some people find that worthwhile, and more power to them.
troutwine 5y ago
At least in my experience the main difference between exams and interviews comes down to relevance. That is, an exam will be within the context of material you've been studying and an interview just... kinda whatever? I have only very, very rarely seen -- from both sides of the table -- professional interviews that are associated with the job the person might do. This problem is worse the larger the company, once there's a standardized set of questions to evaluate someone's possible fitness for a variety of roles. When I've had power over the interviewing process it's always been enlightening to ask the interviewer to take their own interview. I'd be willing to bet most professors can pass their own exams; the same hasn't been true of interviewers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

armchairhacker 5y ago

Google's recruiting system isn't "failing" unless they're hiring unqualified devs. Google gets tons of applicants. The point isn't to prevent qualified applicants from being rejected, it's to prevent unqualified applicants from being hired. They can do whatever arbitrary, unfair filters they want as long as they still have at least some applicants left, and as long as those people are adequate.

kevingadd 5y ago
If your teams desperately need qualified staff to get things across the finish line and you can't hire them, your recruiting system is failing. This is a real problem Google has had in the past (I don't know if they've fixed it since I left.)
- Jensson 5y ago
  That is the main feature of the recruiting system, the whole reason they do it is so that managers can't circumvent the standard process no matter what. It might lead to some problems you don't have in the old nepotism ridden systems, but it also solves many of the problems the old systems created. So you can't say it is failing just because it doesn't do everything right.
perl4ever 5y ago
I agree in part, but they are failing if their system is imitated by everyone else. Every time there is a thread on HN where people are debating the right way to filter applicants, the premise that goes unexamined is that there is one optimum, whether it's Google's procedures or something else. But it's not just Google that can't hire everyone qualified. It's every employer. Say, for simplicity, that any employer is only able to hire 1% of their applicants. If they all used some optimal procedure, then they will all be fighting over the same 1% and the other 99% will be unhireable and start a revolution or something. This is inescapable, I think, no matter what the so-called optimum is. It's like...a Doomsday Schelling Point. Each company can disregard the fate of those filtered out, but only if their methods are sufficiently diverse.
cratermoon 5y ago

belval 5y ago

Three years ago I interviewed at Google for an internship here were all the steps I completed: - Google Foobar to get someone to notice my resume - First form that asked for general information - Second form that asked weird behaviour questions like "Do you think people can change" - First interview with regular leetcode questions - Second interview was waved because of foobar - Third form to write your interests/motivation for matchup with a team (No guarantee of having an internship at that point) - Dropped the whole process because I got an offer somewhere else The whole process spanned maybe 3 months. The year after that I re-did the whole process and was ghosted by the recruiter after the first interview, I assume that was because I did not rank high enough and they were waiting to see if I'd make the cut or not. This process (and the big version for FTE) works to weed-out candidates that aren't motivated to work at Google and I just don't see how else they could be doing it. People have to understand that recruitment at FANG is painful because you will get thousands of SDE applications and you can't really take the time to treat everyone "right". It does suck.

kevingadd 5y ago

Before finally getting hired there I interviewed with Google at least 3 times (hard to remember), on a referral each time (for a different team, from a different person). Incidentally, doing an interview for any role puts you on a secret 6+ month lockout, so it turns out that if you're interested in working at Google you shouldn't interview unless you're absolutely sure you want that role and can ace the interview. Anyway, Each time until my last interview cycle, they seemingly assigned me interviewers at random and they were usually a terrible fit. I'm a games/systems programmer, so think C, C++, C#, etc. Console games (PS4), PC games, etc. Never shipped a mobile app, don't have much Linux expertise, don't list them on my resume. Haven't written Java since the J2ME era. So naturally, I kept getting assigned to interview with people who worked on the Android Play Music app, or people who wrote Linux cloud storage infrastructure (think talking to storage hardware directly, etc) in Python and C. Inevitably, it was impossible for us to have an in-depth technical conversation without a lot of overhead because the disconnect was too big. Sometimes they'd ask me to whiteboard and there was no appropriate language for me to use that we both understood. At the end of each day I came away having had interesting conversations with people but it was consistently a failure of an interview process, so it wasn't a surprise that they never made me an offer. You could tell that this messed up interview process was also an issue for interviewers - I had a couple different interviewers get really combative or frustrated because of the disconnect, in one case borderline abusive. Then finally a team that really wanted me (the NaCL/WebAssembly team) looked at my interview history and just stacked the deck so that everyone interviewing me was actually qualified to interview me. It was a breeze. Sure, it was challenging like any good interview, but not a complete waste of anyone's time. While I can't speak to this personally, I also have heard from current/former Googlers that in the past it was extremely hard to hire Linux experts (kernel devs, etc) because they kept giving those people the same garbage screen (let's talk about Java!) and then rejecting them in the same way. Apparently the fix was a special interviewing process for people like that, presumably that's the treatment I got eventually.

Jasper_ 5y ago
This was the same for me. I'm an engine / graphics programmer with experience on console, looking for work after the studio I was at shut down. Google decided to match me up with a team working on an Android app, because it was "Graphics", and it resulted in maybe the worst phone call I've ever had in my life: any time I asked about technical questions, they just said they didn't have to worry about that part since they were using stock Google libraries. They were working on a application that displayed 3D models, so I asked about their art pipeline, which elicited the answer "what's an art pipeline, I've never heard that term before" from the project manager. It was clear that my skills weren't valued, and at times it seemed like they didn't even want any additional team members. None of the people who interviewed me are still at Google.

cosmotic 5y ago

When I last interviewed they sent out a huge pile of PDFs that said "think out loud" and "explain your thought process". During the interview, I explained every solution I'm not considering and why. The interviewers appear to have interpret this as 'candidate thought this would be a possible solution' and kept steering me back to the optimal solution, which I was on my way to explaining. This resulted in interview feedback that I needed some guidance. The kind of folks that can plow through hacker rank etc want to show everyone how good they are, even candidates. Google's process may result in selecting good SWEs, but it also selects for bad interviewers.

xtracto 5y ago
> When I last interviewed they sent out a huge pile of PDFs that said "think out loud" and "explain your thought process" I hated those type of interviews when I used to interview (as an interviewee) for programming positions. I am the kind of person that cannot multitask at all: I sometimes even have to close my eyes when I am thinking something before saying it. Nowadays I am on the other side being the interviewer for programming positions. I make it really clear at the beginning of the coding part: Feel free to shut up and think, focus on writing the code you'll write, and we will talk about it once you have finished.

paxys 5y ago

Google has hired ~100,000 people in the last decade. They have probably interviewed 30M+. Broad generalizations like "their interview process is failing" are pointless. You don't build a $2T company with a broken hiring process. This keeps coming up but is worth repeating – the goal of any large company's recruiting process isn't necessarily to hire the best possible candidates 100% of the time. There are always trade-offs. Every interview takes time away from employees. There is no way to predict 5+ years of performance from a 1 hour interview slot. Education, credentials, experience are all valid data points but again not a great predictor of success. Hiring is ultimately an exercise in balancing many different priorities and hoping for the best result. Some able candidates miss out, which sucks, but that's factored in. It's also much more important to keep a bad candidate out than ensure every possible good candidate is hired. Every single one of these articles/tweets/anecdotes boils down to "Google didn't hire me and I'm very smart so their system is totally broken".

taurath 5y ago
Chill out a little. What makes these threads explode is that many many people have spent weeks or months of their lives preparing for an interview at Google - it can create a lot of reasonable resentment especially when one feels they haven’t been given a fair shake - and by many accounts even Google recognizes that there’s an element of luck involved even when the person is good.
mempko 5y ago
This would be a good argument if google had diversified products. But it relies so heavily on one product it makes you wonder if engineering quality even matters to google's success. Google's Ad business can hide the worst systemic problems because it makes so much money. In other words, google's success says very little about the quality of it's hiring process.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  Much of Google's success was cemented in place back in the day when they recruited people by putting fun little puzzle inserts into computer magazines. That's such a huge difference from their hiring practices now.

lordnacho 5y ago

I reckon that coding as part of an interview is really just to make sure the person isn't a total fraud. There's that guy who for some reason thinks he can nab a high paid job by blagging it, and then there's the guy who thought he was a coder but it turns out that writing some VBA macros isn't quite the same thing. Those kinds of people will be found out immediately if you ask for a FizzBuzz type question, and that is maybe a reason to do it. Beyond that, there's no point. You won't discover whether the guy who passes is the kind who writes undocumented spaghetti, or if he doesn't know how git works, or if he doesn't know how to assess an OSS library. What seems to always work for me, having hired dozens of people over the years, is a technical chat. Tell me what's interesting. What's the difference between this language and that one? Why did you make the choices that you did? You talk, not me. Someone who can say substantive things about different techs has spent the time. Someone who has formed opinions has spent the time. Someone who's spent the time won't run out of opinions. I will concede that while this has worked for me, a hiring manager in small financial teams, there's a fair chance it won't work for Google. For one, nothing I've just recommended can be measured. It also can't be taught to junior interviewers, and thus relies a fair bit on the reputations of the firms on the CV for filtering. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there's a big difference between the decision maker doing the interview and someone who is just an advisor (ie an agent) for them, in that the agent needs to have something concrete to say to his boss as well.

praptak 5y ago
Chatting carries the risk of hiring for the "talking about X" skill rather than "X" skill.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Certainly that's a priori a risk. I'm just saying it has never materialised for me and thus maybe it's not as big a risk as it sounds.

obzidi4n 5y ago

I recently went through a similar experience interviewing at the Director level with Amazon Advertising, nearly two months of time-consuming and exhausting interviews, just to get shut down on a minor (minor minor) technicality. Cool, man. Now I work for a major global agency pulling about the same compensation, and we won't recommend Amazon Ads for our clients b/c the product is well-known to be shit. Works out.