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> 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 th

> 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...
- tablespoon 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. My memory is very fallible, but I don't think that's it. I'm sure there are several similar incidents, and the one I'm thinking of definitely involved a sysadmin role and maybe even an offer. The issue was that the role was an insultingly bad fit, not that a talented person got rejected.
native_samples 5y ago
Google routinely makes offers to people only for SRE roles even if they want another. It happened to me in 2006 and it sounds like not much changed. SRE is an odd department inside Google because they want people with an unusually wide mix of skills. They want a lot of people who are software developers and have those skills but who also have networking, UNIX sysadmin and maths skills. The requirements and interviews are/were more intense than for regular SWE roles. My interviewers tested all of those and more. At the end even if you just want to write software you get an offer that boils down to "it's SRE or nothing" because frankly, not that many people want to do SRE work, so they have to be a bit muscular about it. Normally they point out that after a year or two you can transfer if your job performance is good enough, which is what I did. Anyway this Watt guy sounds like he's blaming Google for not giving him a free choice of roles. That's not a demand made of any normal company. Usually it's understood that companies have particular needs and are looking to fill 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...

tablespoon 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. My memory is very fallible, but I don't think that's it. I'm sure there are several similar incidents, and the one I'm thinking of definitely involved a sysadmin role and maybe even an offer. The issue was that the role was an insultingly bad fit, not that a talented person got rejected.

native_samples 5y ago

Google routinely makes offers to people only for SRE roles even if they want another. It happened to me in 2006 and it sounds like not much changed. SRE is an odd department inside Google because they want people with an unusually wide mix of skills. They want a lot of people who are software developers and have those skills but who also have networking, UNIX sysadmin and maths skills. The requirements and interviews are/were more intense than for regular SWE roles. My interviewers tested all of those and more. At the end even if you just want to write software you get an offer that boils down to "it's SRE or nothing" because frankly, not that many people want to do SRE work, so they have to be a bit muscular about it. Normally they point out that after a year or two you can transfer if your job performance is good enough, which is what I did. Anyway this Watt guy sounds like he's blaming Google for not giving him a free choice of roles. That's not a demand made of any normal company. Usually it's understood that companies have particular needs and are looking to fill them.