7 ms·

I think this is very unfortunate. I've seen a lot of good candidates get rejected for no obvious reasons. The lack of communication seems driven I think by the

I think this is very unfortunate. I've seen a lot of good candidates get rejected for no obvious reasons. The lack of communication seems driven I think by the sheer deluge of the number of resumes/interviews going on at Google, and what appears to be, a reliance on temps and contractors as part of the process. I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule. Given the sheer size of Google however, I'd expect lots of false positives and negatives in their filters. Also recognize that regular Googlers are selected to do these interviews, and some of them have little training in giving interviews. If you're unlucky, you might get a bad interviewer. I consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc)

colmvp 13y ago
"I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule." Unfortunately, I've read similar anecdotes on HN. Pretty disrespectful of the candidates time.
- maddddddddddddd 13y ago
  a "software engineer" should have a strong understanding of networking and systems administration. perhaps the candidate shouldn't have disrespected the interviewers time and applied for a junior developer position.
JonFish85 13y ago
Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company. On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or disagree with the interview style, comments like that would piss me off to no end. Start a game of needling and insults? You know what, I've had enough.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  I am not a programmer. The OP mentioned that in a number of the scheduled interviews that he had face to face, the interview finished quickly, and the interviewer talked about working at Google. Does this strike anyone else as 'palliative interview'?
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    Nice catch. I was actually going to bring this up. I have a lot of friends who are interview pros. They say if an interviewer decides earlier on you're not going to get hired, they basically fold up their sheets and ask non-related general questions to pass the rest of the time.
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      Guilty as charged :-) As an interviewee, I have, more than once, thanked my hosts for their tea and cake and left early when I detected that the interview was turning into a chat. Would a collegiate interviewing model not work better for an intellectually driven organisation like Google? Each team interviewing for their own positions, but with some form of 'tenure track' process for the longer term?
      - at-fates-hands 13y ago
        It would certainly make more sense. Sure, have one or two screening calls, but the main interviews should really be done by the team you're going to be on. Not some expert in algorithms who deems your solution to a question not good enough. I mean, how many times have you heard an engineer say, "It's not pretty, but it gets the job done." ?? The 'tenure track' is a great idea. How would you implement it though? Just curious.
coldpie 13y ago
My recruiter failed to call me at the scheduled time. Twice. I wasn't too terribly dismayed, as I was already home at the time anyway, but that put me in a pretty bad mood to begin with. I failed the first phone interview spectacularly because he asked about data structures and estimating powers of two, and I haven't done any of that after 4 years in the industry. I guess fair enough; if that's what they expect of their employees, I'm not their man. Overall, a disappointing experience.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  Google and other major SV companies are known for heavily theoretical interview processes. IMO, your recruiter should have made this clear and suggested you brush up.
  - coldpie 13y ago
    There were a lot of things my recruiter should have done, but didn't. Call me on time, for example ;)
- potatolicious 13y ago
  This is typical for all of the big "A-tier" tech companies I think. I used to do a lot of interviewing when I was at Amazon, and invariably the interviews leaned very heavily on CS fundamentals. I'm all for CS fundamentals, but in many places it's clearly being used as an approximation of good-code-shipping-ability. I think part of the problem is that you're not really allowed to interview people in a way that holistically assesses their ability, so you end up doing cargo cult-y things that sort of, kind of sounds like they're relevant. For example, when I was at Amazon, we specifically were disallowed from using real-time typing/sharing tools to conduct coding questions. Nowadays I find that pairing with someone on a limited-scope coding problem, as well as talking deeply about software design and architectural decisions, is the best way to assess. But then again, I'm also no longer interviewing complete newbies - which I think Amazon/Google/Microsoft's recruiting systems are heavily optimized for. When faced with a candidate who has a dearth of real-world things to dig into, of course you fall back on data structures and algorithms. When you apply this to experienced professionals, who have a long track record that they can talk in depth about, it becomes silly.
kstrauser 13y ago
This happened to me! I'm a software engineer. Someone at Google thought I'd make a good security engineer and called me in to interview for it. Why not, right? Sure, I'll give it a try. When I got there, I was greeted by my first interviewer who started asking me questions about SONET. I stumbled for a moment then commented that I could try to guess a few answers, but I didn't have any experience with optics. The interviewer looked back and forth between me and his paperwork a few times, got flustered, then asked if I was interviewing to be a network architect. No, I didn't expect to be. Well, that's what they had me scheduled for. He asked me a few more questions about things I'd never heard of, then we sat back and chatted about valley life for the rest of the hour. The trip to MTV was fun, but it would've been more interesting if I'd gotten to interview for a job I actually knew about.
typon 13y ago
> Given the sheer size of Google Microsoft has more employees and the three times I interviewed with them (and got accepted) it was a great experience, with perfect communication from their recruiters and interviewers. The one time I interviewed with Google (and got accepted, but I rejected them for MS) I pretty much went through a similar experience as the blog post, although the interviews themselves weren't bad, just the recruiting process. So yea, size isn't an excuse.
- lmartel 13y ago
  I'll second this; Microsoft, for all the flak they get re: corporate culture, their products etc, have a great, smooth interview process.
- varelse 13y ago
  When I was at Google, I was told over and over again that blind allocation was necessary because no other method of placing employees would scale to Google's size. Whenever I pointed out that the bigger the company, the more teams there would be to absorb and place incoming employees, the googlers in question would just ignore the response and emphasize that blind allocation was necessary because no other method of placing employees would scale to Google's size. Sigh...
  - mikeash 13y ago
    I always love it when people make appeals to scale when they just don't apply. For it to work, there has to be some kind of non-linearity at play. In any circumstance where the total cost rises in proportion to the total size, it's just nonsensical.
- cdjk 13y ago
  I interviewed at Microsoft quite a while ago, and the process was fairly pleasant. My only complaint was that eight hours of straight interviews is a little long.
- faddotio 13y ago
  Really? Microsoft's HR departments are completely siloed by business unit, and they don't share notes. If the rec you're applying for dries up, they do F-all to guide you into a new one. Each time you engage with a different BU you're completely back to square one.
strlen 13y ago
> consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc) First, given you understand your limitations as an interview, you're probably a better interviewer than most -- including myself :-) An employer I worked for made it very difficult (but certainly not impossible, implausible, or even socially unaccepted) to stop interviewing altogether. Instead, they'd take a different approach: in addition to trying to match interviewers with candidates, they would also perform analysis on interviewer's previous feedback (e.g., are they constantly voting down candidates that go on to receive an offer after additional review, or vice-versa?) and weigh the feedback accordingly. I'd be highly surprised if Google doesn't do this. I do agree that usual "watch an experienced candidate do the interviews" approach to training is insufficient: this is much like expecting one to become a better candidate by watching a strong quickly "get" an algorithmic question with an a-ha insight, it looks easy when you already know the answer. I love the anagrams example from Programming Pearls -- it appears as "aha" problem, seems obvious to those who already know the answer -- but the book describes in detail on how it represents an entire class of problems and how to achieve that seeming insight using a more structured approach. As an aside I actually finding interviewing others to be much harder than being interviewed myself -- if I screw up as a candidate worst thing that can happen is I don't get an offer, if I screw up as an interviewer people other than myself (the candidate, the company) will be affected. There's plenty of sites that talk about how to prepare for being interviewed, candidates spend dozens of hours before going for an interview, but there's less material out there for individual engineers who want to become better interviewers. Joel and Yegge are prominent exceptions, but most other pundits say only the obvious, e.g., "ask questions that can tell you if the candidate can do the job?"

colmvp 13y ago

"I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule." Unfortunately, I've read similar anecdotes on HN. Pretty disrespectful of the candidates time.

maddddddddddddd 13y ago
a "software engineer" should have a strong understanding of networking and systems administration. perhaps the candidate shouldn't have disrespected the interviewers time and applied for a junior developer position.

JonFish85 13y ago

Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company. On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or disagree with the interview style, comments like that would piss me off to no end. Start a game of needling and insults? You know what, I've had enough.

keithpeter 13y ago
I am not a programmer. The OP mentioned that in a number of the scheduled interviews that he had face to face, the interview finished quickly, and the interviewer talked about working at Google. Does this strike anyone else as 'palliative interview'?
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  Nice catch. I was actually going to bring this up. I have a lot of friends who are interview pros. They say if an interviewer decides earlier on you're not going to get hired, they basically fold up their sheets and ask non-related general questions to pass the rest of the time.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    Guilty as charged :-) As an interviewee, I have, more than once, thanked my hosts for their tea and cake and left early when I detected that the interview was turning into a chat. Would a collegiate interviewing model not work better for an intellectually driven organisation like Google? Each team interviewing for their own positions, but with some form of 'tenure track' process for the longer term?
    - at-fates-hands 13y ago
      It would certainly make more sense. Sure, have one or two screening calls, but the main interviews should really be done by the team you're going to be on. Not some expert in algorithms who deems your solution to a question not good enough. I mean, how many times have you heard an engineer say, "It's not pretty, but it gets the job done." ?? The 'tenure track' is a great idea. How would you implement it though? Just curious.

coldpie 13y ago

My recruiter failed to call me at the scheduled time. Twice. I wasn't too terribly dismayed, as I was already home at the time anyway, but that put me in a pretty bad mood to begin with. I failed the first phone interview spectacularly because he asked about data structures and estimating powers of two, and I haven't done any of that after 4 years in the industry. I guess fair enough; if that's what they expect of their employees, I'm not their man. Overall, a disappointing experience.

cookiecaper 13y ago
Google and other major SV companies are known for heavily theoretical interview processes. IMO, your recruiter should have made this clear and suggested you brush up.
- coldpie 13y ago
  There were a lot of things my recruiter should have done, but didn't. Call me on time, for example ;)
potatolicious 13y ago
This is typical for all of the big "A-tier" tech companies I think. I used to do a lot of interviewing when I was at Amazon, and invariably the interviews leaned very heavily on CS fundamentals. I'm all for CS fundamentals, but in many places it's clearly being used as an approximation of good-code-shipping-ability. I think part of the problem is that you're not really allowed to interview people in a way that holistically assesses their ability, so you end up doing cargo cult-y things that sort of, kind of sounds like they're relevant. For example, when I was at Amazon, we specifically were disallowed from using real-time typing/sharing tools to conduct coding questions. Nowadays I find that pairing with someone on a limited-scope coding problem, as well as talking deeply about software design and architectural decisions, is the best way to assess. But then again, I'm also no longer interviewing complete newbies - which I think Amazon/Google/Microsoft's recruiting systems are heavily optimized for. When faced with a candidate who has a dearth of real-world things to dig into, of course you fall back on data structures and algorithms. When you apply this to experienced professionals, who have a long track record that they can talk in depth about, it becomes silly.

kstrauser 13y ago

This happened to me! I'm a software engineer. Someone at Google thought I'd make a good security engineer and called me in to interview for it. Why not, right? Sure, I'll give it a try. When I got there, I was greeted by my first interviewer who started asking me questions about SONET. I stumbled for a moment then commented that I could try to guess a few answers, but I didn't have any experience with optics. The interviewer looked back and forth between me and his paperwork a few times, got flustered, then asked if I was interviewing to be a network architect. No, I didn't expect to be. Well, that's what they had me scheduled for. He asked me a few more questions about things I'd never heard of, then we sat back and chatted about valley life for the rest of the hour. The trip to MTV was fun, but it would've been more interesting if I'd gotten to interview for a job I actually knew about.

typon 13y ago

> Given the sheer size of Google Microsoft has more employees and the three times I interviewed with them (and got accepted) it was a great experience, with perfect communication from their recruiters and interviewers. The one time I interviewed with Google (and got accepted, but I rejected them for MS) I pretty much went through a similar experience as the blog post, although the interviews themselves weren't bad, just the recruiting process. So yea, size isn't an excuse.

lmartel 13y ago
I'll second this; Microsoft, for all the flak they get re: corporate culture, their products etc, have a great, smooth interview process.
varelse 13y ago
When I was at Google, I was told over and over again that blind allocation was necessary because no other method of placing employees would scale to Google's size. Whenever I pointed out that the bigger the company, the more teams there would be to absorb and place incoming employees, the googlers in question would just ignore the response and emphasize that blind allocation was necessary because no other method of placing employees would scale to Google's size. Sigh...
- mikeash 13y ago
  I always love it when people make appeals to scale when they just don't apply. For it to work, there has to be some kind of non-linearity at play. In any circumstance where the total cost rises in proportion to the total size, it's just nonsensical.
cdjk 13y ago
I interviewed at Microsoft quite a while ago, and the process was fairly pleasant. My only complaint was that eight hours of straight interviews is a little long.
faddotio 13y ago
Really? Microsoft's HR departments are completely siloed by business unit, and they don't share notes. If the rec you're applying for dries up, they do F-all to guide you into a new one. Each time you engage with a different BU you're completely back to square one.

strlen 13y ago

> consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc) First, given you understand your limitations as an interview, you're probably a better interviewer than most -- including myself :-) An employer I worked for made it very difficult (but certainly not impossible, implausible, or even socially unaccepted) to stop interviewing altogether. Instead, they'd take a different approach: in addition to trying to match interviewers with candidates, they would also perform analysis on interviewer's previous feedback (e.g., are they constantly voting down candidates that go on to receive an offer after additional review, or vice-versa?) and weigh the feedback accordingly. I'd be highly surprised if Google doesn't do this. I do agree that usual "watch an experienced candidate do the interviews" approach to training is insufficient: this is much like expecting one to become a better candidate by watching a strong quickly "get" an algorithmic question with an a-ha insight, it looks easy when you already know the answer. I love the anagrams example from Programming Pearls -- it appears as "aha" problem, seems obvious to those who already know the answer -- but the book describes in detail on how it represents an entire class of problems and how to achieve that seeming insight using a more structured approach. As an aside I actually finding interviewing others to be much harder than being interviewed myself -- if I screw up as a candidate worst thing that can happen is I don't get an offer, if I screw up as an interviewer people other than myself (the candidate, the company) will be affected. There's plenty of sites that talk about how to prepare for being interviewed, candidates spend dozens of hours before going for an interview, but there's less material out there for individual engineers who want to become better interviewers. Joel and Yegge are prominent exceptions, but most other pundits say only the obvious, e.g., "ask questions that can tell you if the candidate can do the job?"