7 ms·

Of the 10 after 10 minutes I predicted... Having visited the Google SF campus once (and knowing a number of Googlers), I picked up on a certain monoculture. T

Of the 10 after 10 minutes I predicted... Having visited the Google SF campus once (and knowing a number of Googlers), I picked up on a certain monoculture. This makes me question whether you were objectively picking out good and bad candidates, versus intuitively deciding whether someone will fit in the Google clique.

xtracto 15y ago
>versus intuitively deciding whether someone will fit in the Google clique. Which I thing is also very important. Imagine making your current colleagues work with someone that just does not fit! everybody might become miserable. Also, one point I did not see mentioned, and have not seen in any interview I have taken is code reading. If I were looking for a colleague to work in my project, I would give him two or three pages of code from my system which I think are "interesting" and ask him to tell me what it does and some other stuff he observes. It is most likely that reading the current code is something he/she will be doing at least in the beginning, I would like to make shure she knows how to read code (extra points if it is a language she does not write in, but can grasp the idea of what happens).
Estragon 15y ago
> a certain monoculture I'm curious about the common characteristics you saw in people there.
larsberg 15y ago
> deciding whether someone will fit in the Google clique That can be shockingly important. You can be a great developer, but still not a good fit for a company. As an example, I saw several employees top-out at relatively low points at MSFT but then go to Google and have heard back that they have done shockingly well. I would bet that the reverse is also true. Some of the best interviewers I've had on my loops were people who had a great grasp of whether a person was not only smart, but whether they would be successful long-term (e.g. if this entire division got killed, would they still do great work elsewhere in the company?). While I can't characterize hire/no-hire decisions for old legal reasons, I can certainly say that many of the people who struggled at MSFT but excelled at Google favored closed-door remote-work style hacking over personal interaction code-design. One style is not necessarily better than the other, but for people who can only work in one mode or the other, they will find themselves career-limited in the long term if they go someplace that does not fit with their work style.

xtracto 15y ago

>versus intuitively deciding whether someone will fit in the Google clique. Which I thing is also very important. Imagine making your current colleagues work with someone that just does not fit! everybody might become miserable. Also, one point I did not see mentioned, and have not seen in any interview I have taken is code reading. If I were looking for a colleague to work in my project, I would give him two or three pages of code from my system which I think are "interesting" and ask him to tell me what it does and some other stuff he observes. It is most likely that reading the current code is something he/she will be doing at least in the beginning, I would like to make shure she knows how to read code (extra points if it is a language she does not write in, but can grasp the idea of what happens).

Estragon 15y ago

> a certain monoculture I'm curious about the common characteristics you saw in people there.

larsberg 15y ago

> deciding whether someone will fit in the Google clique That can be shockingly important. You can be a great developer, but still not a good fit for a company. As an example, I saw several employees top-out at relatively low points at MSFT but then go to Google and have heard back that they have done shockingly well. I would bet that the reverse is also true. Some of the best interviewers I've had on my loops were people who had a great grasp of whether a person was not only smart, but whether they would be successful long-term (e.g. if this entire division got killed, would they still do great work elsewhere in the company?). While I can't characterize hire/no-hire decisions for old legal reasons, I can certainly say that many of the people who struggled at MSFT but excelled at Google favored closed-door remote-work style hacking over personal interaction code-design. One style is not necessarily better than the other, but for people who can only work in one mode or the other, they will find themselves career-limited in the long term if they go someplace that does not fit with their work style.