4 ms·

For those unfamiliar with the company in the article, Rachel's talking about her experience at Google. One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially

For those unfamiliar with the company in the article, Rachel's talking about her experience at Google. One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially Google) is that most employees hate doing interviews, they think it's worthless and a waste of their time. They don't seem to realize that this is a necessary part of the job (especially with a company that went from 20 to 20000 in such a small amount of time). In the end, would you rather have your co-workers be interviewed by yourself (or another technical fellow) or by an uninformed HR department? Having said that, I would've loved to work with Rachel. I have a deep fascination and respect for responsible and involved people who can pull the weight of an entire team when everyone else ain't doing shit.

tptacek 14y ago
Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. Everyone in software management is familiar with the concept that good employees are worth Nx more than average developers. But a good chunk of them have also attached themselves to the idea that employee quality scales continuously from average to good, and so there's significant incremental value to sussing out everything you can about a candidate. I don't believe this is true. I believe there are "average" (meaning, in reality, "bad") candidates and there are "good" candidates, and you need to find out which of those two buckets people are in, do some extra checking for culture/work habits/communications skills, and then stop. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Tangential point: some people just can't interview effectively, and you need to keep them away from your interviewing process. You're probably not going to be able to perfectly balance the recruiting load across your team.
- nbm 14y ago
  I would be interested to hear what you think a good number of interviews would be and their composition, to ensure a high hiring bar but also not too heavily incurring false positives, and taking into account travel costs (assumed to be paid for by the company) and time cost to the candidate. As a candidate, I found the Facebook and Google interviews to be fairly daunting by description, but even with 10 hour timezone difference in jet lag, I did not feel I was being overworked, that the interviews overlapped dramatically in their content, or that I was being asked anything unnecessary (well, there was one interviewer...). In both cases, I felt I had an opportunity to show off some depth in a number of areas, and that I may have been less likely to succeed if my best interview was discounted. That said, I had a decade of experience before going through those gauntlets, and I am well aware that my experience of these things will differ to others. As an interviewer and candidate evaluator, sometimes it is fairly clear from just a subset of interviews that a candidate is one we should make an offer to. But sometimes there are one or two interviewers who just did not get enough signal to be comfortable to hire, but the remainder made up for that. Improving that situation is something I am trying (in my own, admittedly limited, way), so any insight would be appreciated.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Answered above. Would love feedback. This is the most important part of my job.
- btilly 14y ago
  Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. There is a reason for the regimented process that you're talking about. The challenge for any large company is to delay, for as long as possible, the inevitable reversion to hiring the mean. Under normal circumstances, different teams will have different standards, and by the time you realize this you'll have a lot of teams whose standards have slipped, and you will have a lot of marginal employees. Therefore smart large companies try to create a minimal process that aims to create uniform process across the whole company. The process tries to be lightweight as possible on individual people, but fights the good fight against entropy. Unfortunately for Rachel, Google's process centers around the idea of having well-calibrated interviewers whose interview characteristics had been so well tested against others that hiring committees know exactly what to make of their interview feedback. (What absolute scale you grade on does not matter much. How your scale compares to everyone else, and how well it predicts everyone else, does.) Once an employee winds up as a well-calibrated interviewer, HR would like to use that person as much as possible (and each use does a better job calibrating the employee, and increases their desirability as an interviewer). This is inconvenient for the employee to whom it happens. But, on average across all developers, the process is quite light-weight. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Google's process has been sustained company-wide for a number of years now. There is much that is imperfect about it, but evidence suggests that it is sustainable.
rm445 14y ago
Even if you buy into it from a business perspective, putting 10(+)% of your time into interviewing is quite a change of role. It must really bite when you're busy, especially if, as in the article, your team-mates aren't doing interviews.
michaelochurch 14y ago
One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially Google) is that most employees hate doing interviews, they think it's worthless and a waste of their time. In a closed-allocation company (which Google is) you don't work for the company. You work for a manager, who decides whether you get to have a career there. This means that citizenship is worthless from a career perspective, unless the manager makes it a priority, which is unlikely (because what does a middle manager gain from citizenship work?). With Google's blind matching in addition, the people you interview are unlikely to end up on your team. Companies get exactly what they deserve when they create perverse incentives and then wonder why 9 in 10 people are playing politics instead of doing what's good for the company. If you let the manager unilaterally wreck a report's career, then people are going to work to play their managers rather than doing what's best for the company. So you get political behavior. Having said that, I would've loved to work with Rachel. I have a deep fascination and respect for responsible and involved people who can pull the weight of an entire team when everyone else ain't doing shit. I agree. Losing her was a huge loss for Google, and I hope her current venture does well.

tptacek 14y ago

Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. Everyone in software management is familiar with the concept that good employees are worth Nx more than average developers. But a good chunk of them have also attached themselves to the idea that employee quality scales continuously from average to good, and so there's significant incremental value to sussing out everything you can about a candidate. I don't believe this is true. I believe there are "average" (meaning, in reality, "bad") candidates and there are "good" candidates, and you need to find out which of those two buckets people are in, do some extra checking for culture/work habits/communications skills, and then stop. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Tangential point: some people just can't interview effectively, and you need to keep them away from your interviewing process. You're probably not going to be able to perfectly balance the recruiting load across your team.

nbm 14y ago
I would be interested to hear what you think a good number of interviews would be and their composition, to ensure a high hiring bar but also not too heavily incurring false positives, and taking into account travel costs (assumed to be paid for by the company) and time cost to the candidate. As a candidate, I found the Facebook and Google interviews to be fairly daunting by description, but even with 10 hour timezone difference in jet lag, I did not feel I was being overworked, that the interviews overlapped dramatically in their content, or that I was being asked anything unnecessary (well, there was one interviewer...). In both cases, I felt I had an opportunity to show off some depth in a number of areas, and that I may have been less likely to succeed if my best interview was discounted. That said, I had a decade of experience before going through those gauntlets, and I am well aware that my experience of these things will differ to others. As an interviewer and candidate evaluator, sometimes it is fairly clear from just a subset of interviews that a candidate is one we should make an offer to. But sometimes there are one or two interviewers who just did not get enough signal to be comfortable to hire, but the remainder made up for that. Improving that situation is something I am trying (in my own, admittedly limited, way), so any insight would be appreciated.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Answered above. Would love feedback. This is the most important part of my job.
btilly 14y ago
Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. There is a reason for the regimented process that you're talking about. The challenge for any large company is to delay, for as long as possible, the inevitable reversion to hiring the mean. Under normal circumstances, different teams will have different standards, and by the time you realize this you'll have a lot of teams whose standards have slipped, and you will have a lot of marginal employees. Therefore smart large companies try to create a minimal process that aims to create uniform process across the whole company. The process tries to be lightweight as possible on individual people, but fights the good fight against entropy. Unfortunately for Rachel, Google's process centers around the idea of having well-calibrated interviewers whose interview characteristics had been so well tested against others that hiring committees know exactly what to make of their interview feedback. (What absolute scale you grade on does not matter much. How your scale compares to everyone else, and how well it predicts everyone else, does.) Once an employee winds up as a well-calibrated interviewer, HR would like to use that person as much as possible (and each use does a better job calibrating the employee, and increases their desirability as an interviewer). This is inconvenient for the employee to whom it happens. But, on average across all developers, the process is quite light-weight. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Google's process has been sustained company-wide for a number of years now. There is much that is imperfect about it, but evidence suggests that it is sustainable.

rm445 14y ago

Even if you buy into it from a business perspective, putting 10(+)% of your time into interviewing is quite a change of role. It must really bite when you're busy, especially if, as in the article, your team-mates aren't doing interviews.

michaelochurch 14y ago

One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially Google) is that most employees hate doing interviews, they think it's worthless and a waste of their time. In a closed-allocation company (which Google is) you don't work for the company. You work for a manager, who decides whether you get to have a career there. This means that citizenship is worthless from a career perspective, unless the manager makes it a priority, which is unlikely (because what does a middle manager gain from citizenship work?). With Google's blind matching in addition, the people you interview are unlikely to end up on your team. Companies get exactly what they deserve when they create perverse incentives and then wonder why 9 in 10 people are playing politics instead of doing what's good for the company. If you let the manager unilaterally wreck a report's career, then people are going to work to play their managers rather than doing what's best for the company. So you get political behavior. Having said that, I would've loved to work with Rachel. I have a deep fascination and respect for responsible and involved people who can pull the weight of an entire team when everyone else ain't doing shit. I agree. Losing her was a huge loss for Google, and I hope her current venture does well.