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From what I have been told, Google is willing to accept false negatives instead of admitting false positives.
by azth 14y ago
From what I have been told, Google is willing to accept false negatives instead of admitting false positives.
- ajross 14y agoThe same is historically (and notoriously) true of Microsoft. I think the point is more that with this kind of screen there is just an inherently high false negative rate. That's a problem only if it's actually preventing you from hiring successfully.
- sseveran 14y agoI know of quite a few false positives at google.
- azth 14y agoI do/did too. It is not fool-proof, but their ratio seems to be lower than other places I have seen.
- rhizome 14y agoIs it that, or is it that they're big enough not to notice as much?
- hboon 14y agoCan you give examples? While I'm lucky to be way from the corporate world for the last few years, I'm still very interested in practises such as hiring and interviewing.
- raverbashing 14y agoYes, it's impossible to get rid of "false positives" But my perception of Google interviews is that it's very picky about some areas but leaves huge gaps. Let me guess, the false positives are the ones that know big-o for all sorting algos but can't implement them. Or create a "Car" class inheriting from Wheel, Engine and Door
- DannyBee 14y agoI'm not sure that's a really good perception. I've been on 3 of our hiring committees for about 5 years now. The vast majority of candidate packets I see are well rounded in the interview space (IE don't just test theoretical aspects, but practical stuff as well). There are occasional ones where one or more interviews is unhelpful or useless. It would be very odd to see an interview where someone started out by asking about algorithm complexity, rather than "how do i sort this", "code it", "great, how fast does that run", "can it be made faster" or something similar. I have never seen anything close to the last one. Most false positives i've seen are culture fit or motivation issues, not technical capability ones.
- raverbashing 14y agoThanks for your answer. The last example was really an exaggeration. "Most false positives i've seen are culture fit or motivation issues, not technical capability ones." Interesting. Well, "everybody wants" to work at Google, but usually the way companies work is opaque to the outside (but then again, it's supposed to be like that usually) Even though the interview is certainly intended to remove people that may not be a great fit (because of the time it takes, for a start) maybe something could be done in that respect I've seen it all and some technical people really aren't a fit to certain cultures. Not to mention some work environments are the opposite of Google and bringing people from those environments may be a challenge.
- w1ntermute 14y agoMore accurately, Google has the freedom to do that, because there are so many people applying to Google that the amount of talent they forfeit by not taking those guys is negligible.
- jrockway 14y agoNot true -- we need all the talent we can get. If someone that's good gets rejected, we'll contact them in a few months and hopefully not mess it up again. Mistakes are made in the interview process, but hopefully they aren't unforgivable.
- munin 14y agotelling a candidate "you are not smart enough to work for Google" is probably pretty unforgivable ... I guess just don't talk to those people again?
- jrockway 14y agoI'm not a recruiter and have, in fact, interviewed a total of zero people at Google. But I'm betting we don't call people and say "you are not smart enough to work at Google". If anything, that's a bit too honest for a large corporation, don't you think :) But seriously, interviews are very very subjective and interviewers have very wide latitude to ask anything they want. Individual interviewers pick the questions they'll ask, and everyone has their favorites. I have a friend that has a phone interview question that I probably couldn't answer correctly with an hour and a whiteboard: I just don't get it. So if I got a few more interviewers like that when I applied, I would not be working for Google, even though I'm theoretically "smart enough to work at Google". Furthermore, you may be really smart, but that may not come out in the interview. If your interviewer asks you "what's two plus two" and you answer "four" and the rest of the interview consists of you making a latte, the interviewer may write "My candidate knocked the question out of the park. I asked him what two plus two was and he got the answer instantly. And then he made me a cup of coffee! Must hire!" When the hiring committee reads this, though, they might not reach the same conclusion: "It's great that he got an easy question and can make coffee, but is that really what we want?" In that case, you didn't mess up the interview at all: Google did. So anyway, one should not be disheartened if they "fail" a Google interview. Hiring is a fine art and we are constantly learning. Please re-apply if you are interested in the work we do, and always give feedback to your recruiter. It's OK to call your recruiter after the interview and say "I was being hired to work on TCP optimization and they asked me questions about Java dependency injection frameworks, even though I said I've never used Java."