9 ms·

An inside look at Google’s data-driven job interview process

71 points by weu 13y ago

losethos 13y ago
Let's ask God what He would look for. Virtual-Notary.Org hereby notes that on Date: Wednesday September 04, 2013 21:20.31 EDT (UTC-0400) a random drawing in the range [1, 100000], inclusive, based on a hardware source of true randomness, yielded the following decision. Random Value: 57076 gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with love, for the daughters of Jerusalem. 3:11 Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart. 4:1 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. 4:2 Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them. 4:3 Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks. 4:4 Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men. 4:5 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. ---- I wuv God. God says... finally ice_cream idols Thou
hkmurakami 13y ago
On average, Google takes about 45 days to hire. This struck me as exceedingly slow (I know that my friend got an offer in 10 days start to finish, but he's probably an anomaly since he had multiple offers already). Is this in line with other software companies this size? I also wonder if this varies with function. That fifth person is a “shadow interviewer” who is simply training to conduct interviews for future job seekers, and that person’s analysis isn’t included in the decision-making process. This is hilarious! It's just like the ETS (education testing services) that runs all the US based standardized tests.
- packetslave 13y ago
  This is hilarious! It's just like the ETS (education testing services) that runs all the US based standardized tests. What is "hilarious" about it? How would you propose that new-hires learn how to interview?
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    Why would you throw out the new hires' interviews entirely at all? Why not use it, even if you give it a lower weight?
    - mvgoogler 13y ago
      Shadow interviewers don't do a separate interview. They typically observe an interview done by an experienced interviewer and then write up feedback. It is primarily meant to be a learning experience for the shadow interviewer. They will get to see the feedback written by the primary interviewer, and the primary interviewer will usually critique the feedback from the shadow interviewer. The feedback from the shadow interviewer isn't actually dis-carded - it gets sent to the hiring committee, with the indication that it is from a shadow interviewer. It can be given less weight by the hiring committee members, but I've been on hiring committees where the shadow interviewer picked up on something that the primary interviewer missed that affected the hiring decision.
      - hkmurakami 13y ago
        ah interesting. So basically the article got it completely wrong (how am I not surprised? :P)
- wallflower 13y ago
  > Is this in line with other software companies this size? Large companies, yes. Not sure about software. And the thing that struck me as Monty Python ludicrous is that no one from the actual team is interviewing you! Almost every large company and most smaller companies have you interview on site with your actual team members. Is Googlish really that strong a predictor of team fit?
lmartel 13y ago
It's interesting that they mention speed when they're notorious for taking months to get back to their candidates. 45 days doesn't seem like a number to be all that proud of! I suppose the sheer volume of applications makes things harder, but surely companies like Microsoft and Facebook get lots of applicants too.
- ioquatix 13y ago
  In my last interview, they took over 3 months to get back to me. In the end, I emailed them.. seems like my HR manager completely forgot about me. Nice.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  When I interviewed with Google (April 2013), they got back to me a week later, which felt perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, the process of getting to the interview stage was ridiculously, unreasonably prolonged.
simonsarris 13y ago
Whenever you see a selection system that is very specific and continues to build specific criteria - this happens in corporate policies, admissions, interviews, and also seen often in evolution - your suspicions should constantly be raised. The more specificity, the better systems get at optimizing for a few local maxima while potentially ignoring other (or most) maxima entirely. For example we have a fairly "locally optimized" single column spine for something that stands upright, but if we were to design something that stands upright (such as a building) we would rarely use a single column. Anyway, I wonder what Google does to mitigate such a threat from their specific systems described in the article. Further I wonder if they collect any data that might tell them whether their process turns people away, because I've heard lots of horror stories (especially on HN) about the Google interview process. The article doesn't seem to mention whether or not the interviewees enjoy the process. I suspect nobody (at Washington Post or Google) bothered to ask them. (Not that I can blame Google, I've never heard of a company asking recently hired employees about how they could make the interview process better. But I figured the WaPo would have interest in writing that story) The article ends with: > To make sure they don’t miss out on top talent, Google employs a team of full-time screeners to sift through applications. The company would not say how many people are employed in these roles, but it said the group is "sizeable." I suspect at the end of the day their screeners and recruiters are about as "average" as other companies of their size. Numbers certainly wouldn't make up for quality. Just my anecdote, but here's the first part of the email a Google recruiter sent me: > I'm a talent scout on the Engineering Staffing Team at Google. I came across your details and feel that you could be the sort of person we are looking for to work in a new role we're hiring for in our Mountain View HQ, called 'Performance Engineer' for which we're looking for a candidate with a combination of compiler, high performance software design and computer architecture experience. I'm not known for much, but for what I am it's exclusively JavaScript.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  > Further I wonder if they collect any data that might tell > them whether their process turns people away, because > I've heard lots of horror stories (especially on HN) > about the Google interview process. The article doesn't > seem to mention whether or not the interviewees enjoy the > process. I suspect nobody (at Washington Post or Google) > bothered to ask them. There's a fair amount of internal discussion every time a Google Hiring Horror Story comes up in the media. It's worth noting that in those stories, the interview day is generally the only part that goes well. It's all the other stuff (especially scheduling and candidate communication) that needs work.
jmillikin 13y ago
I laughed at this: > The firm recently generated buzz in the talent industry > when it said it had done away with the notorious brain > teaser component of its interviews after statistics > showed the ability to ace them had no correlation with > success at the company. Brain teasers have (to my knowledge) never been used in Google interviews. They're an urban legend which used to be said about Microsoft, and will no doubt be said about whatever big companies come next. Journalists: "$COMPANY gives all its new employees wedgies!" $COMPANY: "We do not think giving employees wedgies is useful." Journalists: "$COMPANY generates buzz by doing away with wedgies!"
- brown9-2 13y ago
  I think what is always left out of these snippets in articles is what job roles they are referring to when they talk about the interviews. Sounds like these teasers have never been used in software engineer interviews but have been used for product management or others.
- lpolovets 13y ago
  It's been a long time since my interview (2005), but I had a couple of brain teasers during my my interview. Not as many as I had at Microsoft, but definitely some. I specifically remember being asked the Two Eggs question (http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/july22012/ http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/july22012/).
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    The two eggs question seems fair to ask an engineer. It's an optimization problem, and could just as easily be rephrased in real world terms (e.g. branching in a hard-realtime microcontroller). The solution can be arrived at through math and reasoning. Typically, trick questions are things like "how many golf balls fit in a bus", "you've been shrunk and dropped in a blender" , or the infamous "why are manhole covers round". These supposedly test the candidate's creativity, but actually just test whether the candidate has read a book of riddles recently.
    - 13y ago
ioquatix 13y ago
It just sounds complicated for the sake of being complicated. I can't see how being impartial is really helpful here - surely they want people to form relationships and figure out whether someone can actually work on a specific project or problem?
- jmillikin 13y ago
  Impartiality is very important when hiring skilled workers. If your hiring process is not impartial, then it's introducing undesirable bias into the hiring decision. The classic example is sexism in orchestras. Orchestra interviews used to consist of the candidate sitting on a stage and performing their piece for a panel of judges. The gender ratio of performers was terribly skewed, even worse than the software development field is today. Orchestra managers excused this by saying that women were simply not as good -- after all, the judges scores don't lie! But a funny thing happens if you put the performers behind a screen. Suddenly, all the factors of their gender and race and grooming go away, and new performers start being a lot more diverse. There actually was a bias, a serious one, and it caused orchestras to lose who knows how many excellent candidates. The current state of the art for programming interviews at big companies is to have the candidate solve actual programming problems, including whiteboard coding. It's not practical to put the candidate behind a screen or modulate their voice, so splitting up the tasks of "interview candidate" and "review interview feedback" is the best that Google has figured out.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    It's also worth pointing out that Google wants to hire people that will last for more than one project. It's great if you're hired for a specific project, but what about when that project's done?
  - vladimirralev 13y ago
    You must realize that your orchestra example doesn't apply here. What they did is clean-cut and simple removal of the gender bias. Provable. Compare this with what google is doing. It would be the equivalent of having orchestra candidates write an "original" tune on paper in 20 minutes and then talk about select topics in music theory and then submit that to a figure skating judge panel.
AznHisoka 13y ago
I'd never be good enough to be a Googler. It's because of 2 things: 1) I graduated from college long time ago, and have worked in a BigCorp for 6+ years, where the toughest technical problem all center around CRUD, nothing that requires any deep algorithmic, machine learning, or NLP techniques (ala building a search engine). 2) During my free time, I hack on my startup, and although the problems are more challenging, I tend not to spend too much time trying to optimize things, or come up with the most efficient, elegant solutions because of time constraints. I just ask myself: is this good enough and move on. Because of this, I develop bad habits that would never be allowed in Google.
- victor9000 13y ago
  I'd much rather have someone on my team who knows how to get shit done. optimizing in a vacuum is easy.
  - tomkarlo 13y ago
    When you're trying to build services for hundreds of millions of people, optimizing gets pretty key, and it's often the harder part than building a MVP or "getting shit done". Ask Twitter.
    - AznHisoka 13y ago
      That's true. It's often the hardest part if your service isn't really anything technically groundbreaking (ie Twitter, Facebook as opposed to Google)
- rlu 13y ago
  Maybe you're right and maybe you're wrong - but I certainly hope that this thought hasn't prevented you from applying. Can't win if you don't play :)
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    >>Can't win if you don't play :) Actually, considering the horror stories we have heard about Google's hiring process, it might be more appropriate to say: "the only winning move is not to play."
akanet 13y ago
For another look at data-driven recruiting, with actual numbers instead of fluff, you can check out http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-hiring-data/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-hi...
notb 13y ago
Google does the same kind of software interviews as anywhere else. They aren't special. You code on a whiteboard and it's supposed to be compilable in C or Java. The process beyond that is just as subjective as anywhere else and is largely based on gut. They depend largely on employee references/friends. The data they collect is really only to make the process more efficient, not more effective. They reward employees that process the most phone screens in a month. The strangest thing, in my opinion, is that the interviewers usually don't make a decision at all, they just give a rating. Then, a group of people who've never even met the candidate decide whether to hire them based on forms that were filled out.
- prophetjohn 13y ago
  | Google does the same kind of software interviews as anywhere else. [...] | You code on a whiteboard and it's supposed to be compilable in C or Java. It may seem like a strange idea, but not all places interview like this. The company I currently work for doesn't do this and the one I will start working for soon doesn't interview like this. The reasoning is that my job is not to stand in front of a white board and write syntactically correct code without the aid of an editor or compiler, so maybe there is a better way to screen candidates that directly test the skills they will use on the job.
  - packetslave 13y ago
    There's a difference between syntactically-correct code (meaning every single paren/brace is balanced, no dropped semicolons, should compile exactly as written, etc.) and what I call "valid" code. Expecting a candidate to write the former without an editor and compiler is silly. A good interviewer (and good hiring committee) wants to see that you can write "correct-ish" code: it looks like it would compile modulo a typo or niggling detail, but the algorithm, data structures, and control flow are clear and valid. A good interviewer will also tell you that up front, e.g. "I'm interested in your code, not your syntax". If they don't, ASK! The problem is: not everyone is a good interviewer, and it's surprisingly hard to teach someone to BE a good interviewer.
    - 13y ago
jka 13y ago
I very much enjoyed the opportunity to interview at Google and to see some of the inside of the campus, but articles like this seem disingenuous to me. My first interview on-site was delayed due to room reservation issues, so it started late, and this continued as a theme throughout the day. That's anecdata, but I have to wonder whether whatever schema and/or processing pipeline are allegedly in place to remove human bias would be able to understand issues like this or of other kinds - i.e. environmental and/or human failures outside the scope of the process. These systems don't tend to critique and monitor the environment, just the data that is entered into them afterwards. This plus the admission from a few Googlers that personal recommendations do really make a big difference make me a little jaded when reading articles like this - I'd much prefer to see admissions of honest weaknesses alongside all the positives, but I guess we're still some way from treating anything except severe security breaches that way in the software/marketing industries (this article is in the latter industry). Edit: I feel like I should add a bit of context about why I feel the article is misleading, given that my post was inspired by personal experience. The misleading aspect is that the article tends to portray the process as striving towards an unbiased science, whereas my perception is that bias is still part of the decision-making process (arguably for good -- personal recommendations can be very positive indicators, as long as they're not from an old-boys-style network), and I feel that there is insufficient measurement and understanding of interview factors to make it a science (i.e. exhaustion/travel factors, cultural differences, personal factors, etc - which I don't think affected me, but are still a real part of interviewing). NB: When I say old-boys network, I imply any kind of non-meritocracy which simply aims to get people 'in the door' without full vetting; I believe this is possible regardless of gender, but just that's the term I know to describe it
exabrial 13y ago
Haven't RTFA, but I hope this is a joke. For a company that boasts making all of it's decisions with solid scientific data, it's hiring process is an emotional ass grabbing parody of twelfth night.
psychotik 13y ago
'On average, Google takes about 45 days to hire.' That's a ridiculously long time to keep a candidate waiting.
- farnsworth 13y ago
  It does sound long, but maybe it's the time from first contact to decision. You schedule an interview a few weeks in advance, for example.
  - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
    It's about 35 days too long from first contact, in my opinion, outside any legitimate logistical concerns (e.g. traveling from out of state).
gojomo 13y ago
The 'hiring religion' of Paul English at Kayak is an interesting contrast to the Google process, especially with regard to English's "7 day rule": http://paulenglish.com/hiring.html http://paulenglish.com/hiring.html
rlu 13y ago
Out of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, Google was the only company that straight up declined to interview me because I did not meet GPA requirements (3.0 cumulative - I had a 3.4 at the time in CS but I hadn't done well in freshman chem or calc 3) I like that they decided to stop asking brain teasers due to a lack of correlation between performance in them and performance once hired. Do they really think that cumulative GPA has a strong correlation on new-hire performance? I certainly don't. (I expect to get some push-back from you guys and I'm interested in the discussion to follow :))
- jacalata 13y ago
  When was this? I thought I read earlier this year that they found it didn't correlate, and so they no longer used it as a hard cutoff?
- jrockway 13y ago
  Was this as an intern or full-time employee? If two classes pulled you down from 3.4 to 3.0, I have to wonder about the total number of credits. Also, what was the exact wording of Google "straight up" declining to interview you?
- twistandshake 13y ago
  when it comes to hiring graduates I believe the GPA averages are put in places as a first cull. these companies get so many graduate applicants each year they place an arbitrary requirement on GPA just so they can slightly reduce the number they take to the next stage of the interview process.
- twistandshake 13y ago
  when it comes to hiring graduates I believe the GPA averages are put in places as a first cull. these companies get so many graduate applicants each year they place an arbitrary requirement on GPA just so they can slightly reduce the number they take to the next stage of the interview process.
- twistandshake 13y ago
  when it comes to hiring graduates I believe the GPA averages are put in places as a first cull. these companies get so many graduate applicants each year they place an arbitrary requirement on GPA just so they can slightly reduce the number they take to the next stage of the interview process.
ojbyrne 13y ago
I've been in the recruitment pipeline at Google 3 times over the last ten years. Each of the latter two times they had no record of the previous recruitment. In the one case where I got to onsite interviews the first set of interviewers had somebody else's resume with my name on the top. It took me most of the morning (because its an all day process) to convince them that I was not actually the piece of paper they were waving at me.
geebee 13y ago
I'm curious about what is meant by the elimination of "brain teasers." Could it be that the brain teaser has just shifted to code questions? Part of the challenge of a technical interview is to get at someone's coding ability without resorting to what are essentially brain teasers disguised as computer science questions - and I'd expect a lot of disagreement around where you draw that line. Here are a few I've been asked: - Print out the fibonacci sequence recursively. - Print all permutations of a string (using recursion). - Swap two integers without creating a third integer. - Out of several million database entries, select a few at random to display to the user. Don't repeat any until they've all been displayed. - Implement mergesort, code a singleton, print a binary tree in order, add a branch, find a cycle in a linked list... Which of these would you consider brain teasers, if any? I'd say the "swap two integers" is the closest... but if you're including a lot of these questions, are you still in brain teaser land? I'd love to see some google data on what types of technical questions correlate with job performance, rather than simple "brain teasers".

71 points by weu 13y ago

Let's ask God what He would look for. Virtual-Notary.Org hereby notes that on Date: Wednesday September 04, 2013 21:20.31 EDT (UTC-0400) a random drawing in the range [1, 100000], inclusive, based on a hardware source of true randomness, yielded the following decision. Random Value: 57076 gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with love, for the daughters of Jerusalem. 3:11 Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart. 4:1 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. 4:2 Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them. 4:3 Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks. 4:4 Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men. 4:5 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. ---- I wuv God. God says... finally ice_cream idols Thou

hkmurakami 13y ago

On average, Google takes about 45 days to hire. This struck me as exceedingly slow (I know that my friend got an offer in 10 days start to finish, but he's probably an anomaly since he had multiple offers already). Is this in line with other software companies this size? I also wonder if this varies with function. That fifth person is a “shadow interviewer” who is simply training to conduct interviews for future job seekers, and that person’s analysis isn’t included in the decision-making process. This is hilarious! It's just like the ETS (education testing services) that runs all the US based standardized tests.

packetslave 13y ago
This is hilarious! It's just like the ETS (education testing services) that runs all the US based standardized tests. What is "hilarious" about it? How would you propose that new-hires learn how to interview?
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  Why would you throw out the new hires' interviews entirely at all? Why not use it, even if you give it a lower weight?
  - mvgoogler 13y ago
    Shadow interviewers don't do a separate interview. They typically observe an interview done by an experienced interviewer and then write up feedback. It is primarily meant to be a learning experience for the shadow interviewer. They will get to see the feedback written by the primary interviewer, and the primary interviewer will usually critique the feedback from the shadow interviewer. The feedback from the shadow interviewer isn't actually dis-carded - it gets sent to the hiring committee, with the indication that it is from a shadow interviewer. It can be given less weight by the hiring committee members, but I've been on hiring committees where the shadow interviewer picked up on something that the primary interviewer missed that affected the hiring decision.
    - hkmurakami 13y ago
      ah interesting. So basically the article got it completely wrong (how am I not surprised? :P)
wallflower 13y ago
> Is this in line with other software companies this size? Large companies, yes. Not sure about software. And the thing that struck me as Monty Python ludicrous is that no one from the actual team is interviewing you! Almost every large company and most smaller companies have you interview on site with your actual team members. Is Googlish really that strong a predictor of team fit?

lmartel 13y ago

It's interesting that they mention speed when they're notorious for taking months to get back to their candidates. 45 days doesn't seem like a number to be all that proud of! I suppose the sheer volume of applications makes things harder, but surely companies like Microsoft and Facebook get lots of applicants too.

ioquatix 13y ago
In my last interview, they took over 3 months to get back to me. In the end, I emailed them.. seems like my HR manager completely forgot about me. Nice.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
When I interviewed with Google (April 2013), they got back to me a week later, which felt perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, the process of getting to the interview stage was ridiculously, unreasonably prolonged.

simonsarris 13y ago

Whenever you see a selection system that is very specific and continues to build specific criteria - this happens in corporate policies, admissions, interviews, and also seen often in evolution - your suspicions should constantly be raised. The more specificity, the better systems get at optimizing for a few local maxima while potentially ignoring other (or most) maxima entirely. For example we have a fairly "locally optimized" single column spine for something that stands upright, but if we were to design something that stands upright (such as a building) we would rarely use a single column. Anyway, I wonder what Google does to mitigate such a threat from their specific systems described in the article. Further I wonder if they collect any data that might tell them whether their process turns people away, because I've heard lots of horror stories (especially on HN) about the Google interview process. The article doesn't seem to mention whether or not the interviewees enjoy the process. I suspect nobody (at Washington Post or Google) bothered to ask them. (Not that I can blame Google, I've never heard of a company asking recently hired employees about how they could make the interview process better. But I figured the WaPo would have interest in writing that story) The article ends with: > To make sure they don’t miss out on top talent, Google employs a team of full-time screeners to sift through applications. The company would not say how many people are employed in these roles, but it said the group is "sizeable." I suspect at the end of the day their screeners and recruiters are about as "average" as other companies of their size. Numbers certainly wouldn't make up for quality. Just my anecdote, but here's the first part of the email a Google recruiter sent me: > I'm a talent scout on the Engineering Staffing Team at Google. I came across your details and feel that you could be the sort of person we are looking for to work in a new role we're hiring for in our Mountain View HQ, called 'Performance Engineer' for which we're looking for a candidate with a combination of compiler, high performance software design and computer architecture experience. I'm not known for much, but for what I am it's exclusively JavaScript.

jmillikin 13y ago
> Further I wonder if they collect any data that might tell > them whether their process turns people away, because > I've heard lots of horror stories (especially on HN) > about the Google interview process. The article doesn't > seem to mention whether or not the interviewees enjoy the > process. I suspect nobody (at Washington Post or Google) > bothered to ask them. There's a fair amount of internal discussion every time a Google Hiring Horror Story comes up in the media. It's worth noting that in those stories, the interview day is generally the only part that goes well. It's all the other stuff (especially scheduling and candidate communication) that needs work.

jmillikin 13y ago

I laughed at this: > The firm recently generated buzz in the talent industry > when it said it had done away with the notorious brain > teaser component of its interviews after statistics > showed the ability to ace them had no correlation with > success at the company. Brain teasers have (to my knowledge) never been used in Google interviews. They're an urban legend which used to be said about Microsoft, and will no doubt be said about whatever big companies come next. Journalists: "$COMPANY gives all its new employees wedgies!" $COMPANY: "We do not think giving employees wedgies is useful." Journalists: "$COMPANY generates buzz by doing away with wedgies!"

brown9-2 13y ago
I think what is always left out of these snippets in articles is what job roles they are referring to when they talk about the interviews. Sounds like these teasers have never been used in software engineer interviews but have been used for product management or others.
lpolovets 13y ago
It's been a long time since my interview (2005), but I had a couple of brain teasers during my my interview. Not as many as I had at Microsoft, but definitely some. I specifically remember being asked the Two Eggs question (http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/july22012/ http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/july22012/).
- jmillikin 13y ago
  The two eggs question seems fair to ask an engineer. It's an optimization problem, and could just as easily be rephrased in real world terms (e.g. branching in a hard-realtime microcontroller). The solution can be arrived at through math and reasoning. Typically, trick questions are things like "how many golf balls fit in a bus", "you've been shrunk and dropped in a blender" , or the infamous "why are manhole covers round". These supposedly test the candidate's creativity, but actually just test whether the candidate has read a book of riddles recently.
  - 13y ago

ioquatix 13y ago

It just sounds complicated for the sake of being complicated. I can't see how being impartial is really helpful here - surely they want people to form relationships and figure out whether someone can actually work on a specific project or problem?

jmillikin 13y ago
Impartiality is very important when hiring skilled workers. If your hiring process is not impartial, then it's introducing undesirable bias into the hiring decision. The classic example is sexism in orchestras. Orchestra interviews used to consist of the candidate sitting on a stage and performing their piece for a panel of judges. The gender ratio of performers was terribly skewed, even worse than the software development field is today. Orchestra managers excused this by saying that women were simply not as good -- after all, the judges scores don't lie! But a funny thing happens if you put the performers behind a screen. Suddenly, all the factors of their gender and race and grooming go away, and new performers start being a lot more diverse. There actually was a bias, a serious one, and it caused orchestras to lose who knows how many excellent candidates. The current state of the art for programming interviews at big companies is to have the candidate solve actual programming problems, including whiteboard coding. It's not practical to put the candidate behind a screen or modulate their voice, so splitting up the tasks of "interview candidate" and "review interview feedback" is the best that Google has figured out.
- jrockway 13y ago
  It's also worth pointing out that Google wants to hire people that will last for more than one project. It's great if you're hired for a specific project, but what about when that project's done?
- vladimirralev 13y ago
  You must realize that your orchestra example doesn't apply here. What they did is clean-cut and simple removal of the gender bias. Provable. Compare this with what google is doing. It would be the equivalent of having orchestra candidates write an "original" tune on paper in 20 minutes and then talk about select topics in music theory and then submit that to a figure skating judge panel.

AznHisoka 13y ago

I'd never be good enough to be a Googler. It's because of 2 things: 1) I graduated from college long time ago, and have worked in a BigCorp for 6+ years, where the toughest technical problem all center around CRUD, nothing that requires any deep algorithmic, machine learning, or NLP techniques (ala building a search engine). 2) During my free time, I hack on my startup, and although the problems are more challenging, I tend not to spend too much time trying to optimize things, or come up with the most efficient, elegant solutions because of time constraints. I just ask myself: is this good enough and move on. Because of this, I develop bad habits that would never be allowed in Google.

victor9000 13y ago
I'd much rather have someone on my team who knows how to get shit done. optimizing in a vacuum is easy.
- tomkarlo 13y ago
  When you're trying to build services for hundreds of millions of people, optimizing gets pretty key, and it's often the harder part than building a MVP or "getting shit done". Ask Twitter.
  - AznHisoka 13y ago
    That's true. It's often the hardest part if your service isn't really anything technically groundbreaking (ie Twitter, Facebook as opposed to Google)
rlu 13y ago
Maybe you're right and maybe you're wrong - but I certainly hope that this thought hasn't prevented you from applying. Can't win if you don't play :)
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>Can't win if you don't play :) Actually, considering the horror stories we have heard about Google's hiring process, it might be more appropriate to say: "the only winning move is not to play."

akanet 13y ago

For another look at data-driven recruiting, with actual numbers instead of fluff, you can check out http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-hiring-data/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-hi...

notb 13y ago

Google does the same kind of software interviews as anywhere else. They aren't special. You code on a whiteboard and it's supposed to be compilable in C or Java. The process beyond that is just as subjective as anywhere else and is largely based on gut. They depend largely on employee references/friends. The data they collect is really only to make the process more efficient, not more effective. They reward employees that process the most phone screens in a month. The strangest thing, in my opinion, is that the interviewers usually don't make a decision at all, they just give a rating. Then, a group of people who've never even met the candidate decide whether to hire them based on forms that were filled out.

prophetjohn 13y ago
| Google does the same kind of software interviews as anywhere else. [...] | You code on a whiteboard and it's supposed to be compilable in C or Java. It may seem like a strange idea, but not all places interview like this. The company I currently work for doesn't do this and the one I will start working for soon doesn't interview like this. The reasoning is that my job is not to stand in front of a white board and write syntactically correct code without the aid of an editor or compiler, so maybe there is a better way to screen candidates that directly test the skills they will use on the job.
- packetslave 13y ago
  There's a difference between syntactically-correct code (meaning every single paren/brace is balanced, no dropped semicolons, should compile exactly as written, etc.) and what I call "valid" code. Expecting a candidate to write the former without an editor and compiler is silly. A good interviewer (and good hiring committee) wants to see that you can write "correct-ish" code: it looks like it would compile modulo a typo or niggling detail, but the algorithm, data structures, and control flow are clear and valid. A good interviewer will also tell you that up front, e.g. "I'm interested in your code, not your syntax". If they don't, ASK! The problem is: not everyone is a good interviewer, and it's surprisingly hard to teach someone to BE a good interviewer.
  - 13y ago

jka 13y ago

I very much enjoyed the opportunity to interview at Google and to see some of the inside of the campus, but articles like this seem disingenuous to me. My first interview on-site was delayed due to room reservation issues, so it started late, and this continued as a theme throughout the day. That's anecdata, but I have to wonder whether whatever schema and/or processing pipeline are allegedly in place to remove human bias would be able to understand issues like this or of other kinds - i.e. environmental and/or human failures outside the scope of the process. These systems don't tend to critique and monitor the environment, just the data that is entered into them afterwards. This plus the admission from a few Googlers that personal recommendations do really make a big difference make me a little jaded when reading articles like this - I'd much prefer to see admissions of honest weaknesses alongside all the positives, but I guess we're still some way from treating anything except severe security breaches that way in the software/marketing industries (this article is in the latter industry). Edit: I feel like I should add a bit of context about why I feel the article is misleading, given that my post was inspired by personal experience. The misleading aspect is that the article tends to portray the process as striving towards an unbiased science, whereas my perception is that bias is still part of the decision-making process (arguably for good -- personal recommendations can be very positive indicators, as long as they're not from an old-boys-style network), and I feel that there is insufficient measurement and understanding of interview factors to make it a science (i.e. exhaustion/travel factors, cultural differences, personal factors, etc - which I don't think affected me, but are still a real part of interviewing). NB: When I say old-boys network, I imply any kind of non-meritocracy which simply aims to get people 'in the door' without full vetting; I believe this is possible regardless of gender, but just that's the term I know to describe it

exabrial 13y ago

Haven't RTFA, but I hope this is a joke. For a company that boasts making all of it's decisions with solid scientific data, it's hiring process is an emotional ass grabbing parody of twelfth night.

psychotik 13y ago

'On average, Google takes about 45 days to hire.' That's a ridiculously long time to keep a candidate waiting.

farnsworth 13y ago
It does sound long, but maybe it's the time from first contact to decision. You schedule an interview a few weeks in advance, for example.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  It's about 35 days too long from first contact, in my opinion, outside any legitimate logistical concerns (e.g. traveling from out of state).

gojomo 13y ago

The 'hiring religion' of Paul English at Kayak is an interesting contrast to the Google process, especially with regard to English's "7 day rule": http://paulenglish.com/hiring.html http://paulenglish.com/hiring.html

rlu 13y ago

Out of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, Google was the only company that straight up declined to interview me because I did not meet GPA requirements (3.0 cumulative - I had a 3.4 at the time in CS but I hadn't done well in freshman chem or calc 3) I like that they decided to stop asking brain teasers due to a lack of correlation between performance in them and performance once hired. Do they really think that cumulative GPA has a strong correlation on new-hire performance? I certainly don't. (I expect to get some push-back from you guys and I'm interested in the discussion to follow :))

jacalata 13y ago
When was this? I thought I read earlier this year that they found it didn't correlate, and so they no longer used it as a hard cutoff?
jrockway 13y ago
Was this as an intern or full-time employee? If two classes pulled you down from 3.4 to 3.0, I have to wonder about the total number of credits. Also, what was the exact wording of Google "straight up" declining to interview you?
twistandshake 13y ago
when it comes to hiring graduates I believe the GPA averages are put in places as a first cull. these companies get so many graduate applicants each year they place an arbitrary requirement on GPA just so they can slightly reduce the number they take to the next stage of the interview process.
twistandshake 13y ago
when it comes to hiring graduates I believe the GPA averages are put in places as a first cull. these companies get so many graduate applicants each year they place an arbitrary requirement on GPA just so they can slightly reduce the number they take to the next stage of the interview process.
twistandshake 13y ago
when it comes to hiring graduates I believe the GPA averages are put in places as a first cull. these companies get so many graduate applicants each year they place an arbitrary requirement on GPA just so they can slightly reduce the number they take to the next stage of the interview process.

ojbyrne 13y ago

I've been in the recruitment pipeline at Google 3 times over the last ten years. Each of the latter two times they had no record of the previous recruitment. In the one case where I got to onsite interviews the first set of interviewers had somebody else's resume with my name on the top. It took me most of the morning (because its an all day process) to convince them that I was not actually the piece of paper they were waving at me.

geebee 13y ago

I'm curious about what is meant by the elimination of "brain teasers." Could it be that the brain teaser has just shifted to code questions? Part of the challenge of a technical interview is to get at someone's coding ability without resorting to what are essentially brain teasers disguised as computer science questions - and I'd expect a lot of disagreement around where you draw that line. Here are a few I've been asked: - Print out the fibonacci sequence recursively. - Print all permutations of a string (using recursion). - Swap two integers without creating a third integer. - Out of several million database entries, select a few at random to display to the user. Don't repeat any until they've all been displayed. - Implement mergesort, code a singleton, print a binary tree in order, add a branch, find a cycle in a linked list... Which of these would you consider brain teasers, if any? I'd say the "swap two integers" is the closest... but if you're including a lot of these questions, are you still in brain teaser land? I'd love to see some google data on what types of technical questions correlate with job performance, rather than simple "brain teasers".