19 ms·

How Google Hires

296 points by Libertatea 12y ago

jjtheblunt 12y ago
The title is a bit presumptuous, to say the least, particularly having interviewed there and having been told by multiple interviewers to steer clear of where they work.
- bigdubs 12y ago
  I doubt, seriously, that anyone at google told you not to work there.
  - MaysonL 12y ago
    They didn't tell him not to work at Google, just not on the project they were on. (My interpretation of GP's comment).
    - jjtheblunt 12y ago
      No, they tended to like the project, it seemed, but most were exasperated with where Google was located and how it limited chances for decent quality of life (i.e., California) and another clearly explained frustration with lack of real assignment for his first many months. No joke. (Typed from a lab at Apple, by the way, where I, as a result, went instead. And that's after being told the interviews went extraordinarily well and that they wanted to pursue next steps.)
      - groby_b 12y ago
        I have no idea why somebody who doesn't like working at a place would participate in the interview process - it's entirely voluntary. So keep in mind that maybe, just maybe, you met a person with an ax to grind instead :)
        jjtheblunt 12y ago
        That's possible, but it was 3 or 4 or the 7 interviewers on the day I mentioned who advised similarly...I really thought, at the time, they were just not ok with California crappiness and cost of living. I don't remember why.
  - jjtheblunt 12y ago
    Yes, it seemed surreal; it was my impression that the frustration was more about constraints on where to live, in California, than with Google. One interviewer (at least) expressed disappointment with having no real assignment for his first many months, and feeling no way to prove his use during that time.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- astrocyte 12y ago
  So, your hiring practice is biased. Google is aware of this and accepts this results in only getting 'some' (a specific grouping) of the best people. Google has had success with these individuals. Thus, there is no reason to change up the formula. In cases whereby you don't initially capture a broader spectrum of the best via direct hiring and thus miss out on more forward thinking products and approaches, you use your capital in attempts to acquire them. This is a solid approach and an industry-wide norm. Thus, your level of comfort in stating this truth. Caveats : Someone who refuses to play ball with boat loads of cash which of course is rare but will likely be the type that develops something that is the biggest threat to your business. *Edit : the claimed VP Google worker who suggested the above deleted their comment..
WizzleKake 12y ago
The problem, however, is that most standardized tests of this type discriminate against non-white, non-male test takers (at least in the United States). Can anyone explain this? I don't understand the explanation that follows.
- untog 12y ago
  The core of it (as I understand it) is that these standardized tests are written by groups of white men. Thus, the "standard" they are working to is, in fact, not all that standard, but is actually a self-replicating formula that makes sure that the next series of people to create the standardized tests are also white men.
- gmarx 12y ago
  I don't think anyone is going to touch that; I will point out though, one wouldn't expect the SAT to predict college performance because it is used to sort people into less and more competitive schools and within those schools people select their majors (and some majors are more cognitively demanding than others)
- Retric 12y ago
  Consider, some groups are more willing to guess when given incomplete information and the SAT promotes guessing. If there was a larger penalty for wrong answers other groups would do better. Another issue is retaking the SAT tends to increase scores as you keep your best individual score. Individually adding ~30 points might mean little, but when you look at large groups of people such small changes become important.
  - shamney 12y ago
    is there any evidence for this theory or did you just make it up?
    - Retric 12y ago
      From a quick google: "We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer significantly fewer questions than men." http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/18/sat-strategy-by-gender-men-guess-women-leave-it-blank/ http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/18/sat-strategy-by-gender-me... Retaking the test: http://philvol.sanford.duke.edu/documents/SAN01-20.pdf http://philvol.sanford.duke.edu/documents/SAN01-20.pdf PS: Making an unbiased test is really hard, the SAT comes reasonably it’s not there.
abc_lisper 12y ago
Now. Only if they give me feedback on what I did wrong - that would be more useful I think. As it stands, however, that is calling for a lawsuit. Sigh. Catch-22.
- agarden 12y ago
  Laszlo Bock talked about that in an interview in The Guardian[0]. Here is the quote: > After six weeks of this, 99 are rejected. They’re not told why. “If somebody just breaks up with you,” Bock says, “that’s not the time to hear: ‘And really, next time, send more flowers’… For the most part people actually aren’t excited to get that feedback, because they really wanted the job. They argue. They’re not in a place where they can learn.” 0. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/04/how-to-get-job-at-google-meet-man-hires-fires http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/04/how-to-get...
  - lfowles 12y ago
    Just stop replying after you tell the candidates their deficiencies wrt the position. It's not that much different than what companies do now where they stop replying immediately after the interview. Even if the candidates are in denial and argumentative at first, they will have time to reflect on a specific issue. If 9/10 employers tell you that your breath is terrible, maybe it's time to investigate your morning bathroom routine regardless of how perfected you think it is now.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Minimal upside, lots of downside. Most hiring managers (reasonably) are vigilant about avoiding post-interview drama, which is what this is an invitation for.
      - lfowles 12y ago
        I understand. During my job search I was getting pretty frustrated at the little feedback I received during the interview process. Some interviews were more qualitative "we want to watch your coding process" where there was no feedback from the interviewers and a stone wall from the company after the interview, which lead me to question whether or not I actually knew the skills on my resume as well as I had represented them. (As a fresh college grad, I didn't, but it wasn't obvious at the time.)
googlyfuck 12y ago
Google has a single question to find out if the candidate would be a good fit or not: "do you want to support our services, and see them running for the long-term?" The correct answer is "no, I want to shutdown as many Google services as possible, preferably after they have active users we can then infuriate. " Your hired!
woah 12y ago
Does Google hire the best people?
- dang 12y ago
  We took that out of the title since it's so baity. All: please let's not argue about that ludicrous title, which I'm sure the author had nothing to do with. At first glance, this piece looks a lot more substantive than the usual posts about hiring. Let's discuss the strongest bits. (Come to think of it, that's the Principle of Charity applied to articles.)
- coldcode 12y ago
  Like everyone they hire the best, the average and the worst in some proportion. No matter how you interview, you really don't know the what their contribution will be until X days after the hire date. And X is often a random value.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  The title really needs a [citation needed] (Since "the best" was removed from the title, this is what it was referring to) Best is really dependent on many factors (And it's pointless to hire "the best people" then set them on boring tasks, which seems to happen a lot at Google)
- erobbins 12y ago
  Not exactly. They hire the people who are best at interviewing at google, and they believe their process correlates the 2 things well. I'm not so sure it does, but I am not in HR/recruiting so I haven't studied the problem.
  - astrocyte 12y ago
    This ^. I'd venture to even suggest that this strict and narrow hiring focus results in many of the short comings of their products. Can't have it all I guess.
QuercusMax 12y ago
Is anybody else annoyed by these kinds of articles confusing Fermi problems (how many piano tuners in Seattle or golfballs in school bus) with Brainteasers (why manhole covers are round, or crazy questions about perfectly rational guys on an island wearing hats)? It seems to me that those types of questions are very different in terms of what they're testing for. Fermi problems in particular show how you might go about approaching a problem, and there may be many different correct answers or ways to approach it, and the goal isn't to get to the "right answer". Brainteasers, in contrast, either test whether you can recall or figure out an extremely specific problem, or whether you're good at solving certain types of logic puzzles under pressure. It may well be that both of these types of questions don't give useful information about a candidate, but they are vastly different overall.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Yes, they are different What I think end up happening with those Fermi Problems (or other problems) is that the interviewer knows one specific answer and then ends up rejecting alternative answers
  - tptacek 12y ago
    That is true of a surprising number of concrete-seeming programming questions, too, which is another reason you should standardize your questions.
    - QuercusMax 12y ago
      I know Google has interviewers copy down character-for-character what is written on the whiteboard for their whiteboard programming questions. Presumably this is so that their hiring committees can dispassionately review what the candidate produced, instead of relying on the interviewer to report success or failure.
    - raverbashing 12y ago
      Yes, but for something slightly more complex than a "fixed answer" problem I would expect some flexibility in the answer. (Especially because of limited time in an interview and the candidate is under pressure)
dsacco 12y ago
It looks like there is a trend starting in the software industry to encourage empirical hiring. This particular article follows about a month after another hiring post reached the front page of HN.[1] I really agree with it, and I hope more people are looking at it seriously instead of fixating on the fact that the word "Google" is in the title. Giving all the candidates the same questions and the same exact interview methodology is much more fair and empirical than simply having an interviewer wing it (which is virtually certain to bring in bias). Most interviewers I know think they are better than the average interviewer due to illusory superiority cognitive bias [2]. However, when it comes down to it, you cannot easily judge the difference between candidates if you ask one a completely different question than another. This goes against all the principles of psychometric testing, yet it is still ubiquitous because no one has bothered to empirically look at whether or not they're really interviewing in a rigorous way. There is a serious issue in the industry right now where otherwise capable people fail interviews due to their appearance, manners of speaking or other harmless idiosyncrasies. It's because interviewers are very personally attached to their subjective methods, and they tend to really enjoy having personal ownership over the interviewing process instead of surrendering control to a standardized script. This trend looks like the software hiring equivalent of a professor grading papers without reading the name attached to the paper -i f we can have several candidates answer the same exact questions and perform the same exact activities on an interview it makes it much easier to determine who is the real "best candidate" when it comes time to comparing their results. If this really takes off, the only remaining problem as I see it is designing interviews that accurately correlate to the job activities. [1]: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dchichkov 12y ago
  From their article it looks like what they are doing is pseudo-science at best. Hopefully not harmful pseudo-science, but it could be actually harmful. If one is not careful enough it is rather easy to replace more-or-less working common sense with some horrible pseudo-scientific approach. For example, optimizing for 'individual employee performance numbers'? Without consideration that, say, adding yet another employee with 'a good number' may actually diminish the total sum? Regarding prediction of 'employee performance numbers' based on 'interview scores'. It is not surprising that the result is completely random. As far as I understand it, in the big companies performance numbers don't show actual contribution of an employee. At best they are showing "how this person was able to use the resources around them to achieve goals", note, mostly via using human resources of informal social networks. But usually performance numbers are just random. And at worst they could be negatively correlated with actual contributions.
bengali3 12y ago
> All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts, where they are asked to solve engineering problems during the interview. I disagree that a whiteboard session can be considered a work sample test. Whats wrong with 'complete steps 1,2 & 3 and i'll be back in 30 minutes'? For engineering we actually found giving a 2-3 hr 1 problem test has been a better predictor, and 3-4 30 minute face to face (usually 2 on skype prior to onsite Test, then 2 follow ups). Alone time gives the candidate time to digest and solve the problem on their own which is more 'real world' like and shows what can be done on their own. Some questions are intentionally vague to compensate for 'able to make decisions with little information'. We have no right answer but will ask why you made these decisions. This frees up our staff time tremendously and weeds out those that may need a lot of hand holding early on.
- tptacek 12y ago
  This is exactly correct. A work-sample test needs to capture the normal parameters of the work. If team members aren't routinely called on to solve programming problems in a high-stakes stick-the-landing-or-you're-fired exercise on a whiteboard in front of an audience, then the prediction the test is trying to make is confounded by all those factors. * Eliminate live audiences * Let people work in the environment they'll be able to choose on the job * Ideally, let people work in their own comfortable environs, even if they won't be able to do that on the job * If you're worried about cheating, build that assessment into your in-person followup interview
  - Estragon 12y ago
    How often did people cheat in remote work-sample tests?
    - tptacek 12y ago
      I never once saw it happen.
      - JonMR 12y ago
tptacek 12y ago
I've written a bit about this: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ The worst thing you can do is unstructured interviews. Unfortunately, that's exactly what almost every company does: they create ad-hoc committees of workers and have them each design an interview, often on the fly, for each candidate. Everything you do to add structure and remove degrees of freedom from interviewers will improve outcomes. Every company that hires more than one tech worker in a year should be working on this problem, and hopefully documenting their result. Our structured interview process differed from Google in that we (a) completely standardized interviews and (b) designed the questions in those interviews to minimize the need for free-form follow-up questions ("Tell me about a time..." and then digging into the answer to mine conclusions). We tried to flip the script: instead of having the interviewer ask followups of the candidate, we put candidates in a position to ask lots of questions of the interviewer, within a framework that generated lists of "facts" that we could record and compare to other candidates. Example: "I am going to describe a trading system in broad strokes. I know lots of things about it works, and I want you to ask me enough questions so that you can roughly diagram it on a whiteboard, capturing its components." Then, later, "I want to have a conversation where we rank these components in order of sensitivity to latency". The interviewer captures the answers, but the back-and-forth is dominated and mostly directed by the candidate. The problem I see with the Google strategy is that it combines interviewer-directed free-form questions with an open-ended and somewhat fuzzy question that really evaluates less the candidate's ability to do the work and more their presence of mind during the hostile, stressful interview process. Things I positively responded to in this article: * The notion that we come to snap judgements about candidates within minutes of the interview and are then hostage to confirmation bias for the rest of the interview * The effectiveness of combinations of evaluation techniques; for us, a combination of work-sample testing and scripted interviews were extremely effective.
- mbesto 12y ago
  > (a) completely standardized interviews and (b) designed the questions in those interviews to minimize the need for free-form follow-up questions Doesn't this just make the system easier to game? It's like SAT prep. SAT scores correlate with the amount of time/money preparation for it, not your actual knowledge.
jim_greco 12y ago
Have they changed this process recently? It was only 3 years ago they were trumpeting their brain teasers in the WSJ. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204552304577112522982505222 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702045523045771125...
- ssclafani 12y ago
  Yes, from a 2013 interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google: "We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time." "They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
throwaway6497 12y ago
Isn't this the Nth PR article about Google hiring practices. To be honest, Google technical hiring bar is no different from FB, Twitter, MS, Amazon, LinkedIn, Dropbox etc but they are the only company consistently coming out with PR fluff about hiring the best. This is not only disingenuous but frankly (to put it crudely) makes Google appear as a attention mongering whore. I guess, Google PR machine has to keep this show going to keep the mind-share among potential recruits.
- sinatra 12y ago
  I can give you Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox. But, there's no way Microsoft and Amazon have the same hiring bar as Google. This is based on my own personal experience interacting with them and what I've heard from friends.
  - qmalxp 12y ago
    The bar is lower or higher for MS/Amazon?
  - r00fus 12y ago
    Would be very interesting to hear your take on the differences...
cbhl 12y ago
My biggest fear is that this article and this book leads to people blindly copying the wrong parts of Google's hiring process for the wrong reasons, the way 20% is treated in this Dilbert comic: http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-04-05 http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-04-05 Google interviews a lot of people in any given week. Not everything in this article applies to Engineering interviews; it's a broad overview. The way the interview process is designed needs to be interpreted in that context. What I'm really excited about is patio11 and tptacek's Starfighter. I really want it to be the "Khan Academy" of interviewing -- best-in-class, various progressions, and really good suggestions on what puzzle to tackle next. Up until now, I've been directing people at the USA Computing Olympiad's training server, but its one-size-fits-all approach doesn't resonate well with people who don't have confidence in puzzle-solving (and give up on the first problem) or people who don't have the leisure of n years of high school/collage to work through all the problems (e.g. women who are going through HackBright and similar accelerated learn-to-code programs).
- andrewvc 12y ago
  The desire to create an 'objective' measure for programming capabilities is really sort of ridiculous. Given how much of a team sport software development is, it completely underestimates so many of the key factors that go into being an effective developer. Unfortunately, as developers, we're keyed in toward quantifying everything, even if it's to our own detriment. I cut my google interview short when I discovered that their process was to interview me, then bin me, then pick who I'd be working with after I'd gone through a pretty arduous process. I told them that I was interviewing them as much as they were interviewing me, and I had no interest in 'getting the job', then being told after the fact who I'd be working with. The idea that I'd keep interviewing them without even knowing who I'd be working with just seemed absurd to me.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    The idea that there is one single "objective" interview process is ridiculous. The idea that we should be vigilant about bias, subjectivity, and nondeterminism is the opposite of ridiculous.
siliconc0w 12y ago
Someone should sort a consultancy similar to pivotal where they come in and teach you how to interview. Most SMBs are terrible at it. There are also different 'best' engineers for the role/company. A company may say they want the 'best' but they really want an engineer that is going to stick around and solve their boring problems in boring ways. Even the edgiest startups likely have mostly boring problems to solve. I see it as sort of a moneyball situation. You're looking for value. You can spend a lot of money and time searching for that unicorn 10x engineer when you could have hired 2-3 3x engineers and overall spent a lot less time and money and got your product out the door months earlier.
edgyswingset 12y ago
My experience with Google hiring has been scheduling a technical phone interview and then promptly never hearing back from my recruiter ever again. I tried reaching out when I had an offer from Microsoft only to find out he's no longer at the company.
morgante 12y ago
It's too bad that Google has likely permanently ruined their HR image. They have developed an overwhelming reputation for arbitrary interviews and prolonged hiring decisions. I'd like to think I'm a pretty good developer and have made a positive impact everywhere I've worked. Yet I'd never even consider applying to Google, because I know exactly how that process would go down. 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.) 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months. 3) I'll have to drill on data structures and efficiency of sorting algorithms I've literally never implemented outside of an interview or academic setting. 4) Even having drilled on those arbitrary questions, I'll likely fail the interview because after a multi-day gauntlet of questions a random engineer didn't like the particular assumptions I put into my Fermi model of golf balls. 5) Of course, if they ever bother to let me know I failed, it won't be for months. (Note: this is all based on actual Google hiring experiences.)
- bitwize 12y ago
  Google is looking for people with interesting stories. They're big on diversity. A straight-laced bloke like me from a regular family hasn't a chance without that MIT/Stanford sheepskin. But if you were adopted into a trisexual human/Klingon line marriage... well, Google could use someone with your fresh perspective, even if you only went to clown school. Hell if you went to clown school you're a shoo-in. Want to work at El Goog? Cultivate as much weirdness as you can without becoming a criminal or jeopardizing your competence.
- bwy 12y ago
  I wonder when these "experiences" happened. I went through Google's process this semester looking for an internship position and it was no different than the dozen other companies I've gone through. Things might have changed since the days of random Fermi questions. Edit: correspondence with the recruiter was no less timely than it was with other companies, and the only major difference I can think of is the host-matching process we went through.
  - morgante 12y ago
ulysses 12y ago
So, the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google thinks that: "All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts, where they are asked to solve engineering problems during the interview." is a work sample test.
r00fus 12y ago
From the article: "A good rule of thumb is to hire only people who are better than you. Do not compromise. Ever." Is it only me that sees this as an unsustainable goal that will likely lead to idealist driven results? While, when interviewing, I tend to be impressed with folks who seem more well versed and smarter than me, but realistically I also feel there's a potential risk that those folks may not be sufficiently challenged in our organization. Wouldn't the (unrelenting) drive to find people who are "better than you" lead to some of the problems in bias-matching and with first impressions dominating your perception? Sounds a bit dogmatic and contrary to the entire focus of the article which espouses a more rigorous, measurable and evidence-based approach to hiring.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Here's a mathematical model of it: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg... The reason it converges to some relative percentile (apparently just under the 90th) is because of the noise in the interview process. If people could reliably measure the quality of an applicant and consistently hired only people better than them, they'd only hire the very best (100th percentile) candidate, who probably wouldn't want to work there. But because peoples' judgments are off, they end up getting folks who are good, but probably not absolutely best - but they also avoid the bozos, because it's pretty unlikely that a bozo would appear better than half the people you know.
  - r00fus 12y ago
    The rubric presented "hire above the company mean" doesn't align with the dogma in the wired article "always hire people better than you, don't compromise". It's the latter I question. Also the assertion that "it's pretty unlikely that a bozo would appear better than half the people you know" sounds just full of assumptions that may not be valid. Just thinking from a non-Google point of view, not every wants to work at new_untested_startup or boring_postIPO_company. It seems unrealistic to a) set hiring targets and b) keep raising the bar unless you have incredible cachet and a large pool of candidates to work with. So what does the rest of the industry who don't have that luxury do?
yodsanklai 12y ago
Does anyone have tips to prepare an interview at Google for a software engineer position? I'm ok with algorithms, but besides that, what to expect?
jaimebuelta 12y ago
Well, I interviewed a couple of times for Google (2009 and 2012, they turned my back both times at different stages of the process), and it seems like their process is, obviously, tailored for their particular use case. They have a TON of applications, so they are more worried in filtering and discarding people than reaching out candidates, or even encourage people to apply. Their offer (prestige, great perks, great salary, etc...) is obvious to start with, so they are not bothering is going for you. You are the one that should prove worthy and eager to work for them. I guess that's similar to places like Ivy league Universities, etc... That's ok. It obviously works for them. It's just that I think it's not the most common case for all companies.
- MCRed 12y ago
  Except they did "bother to go for" me, to the point where they didn't stop until I threatened them with a harassment lawsuit. Google does not have a lot of prestige, they have a long record of questionable at best ethics. However, people who are just out of college are much less likely to be aware of this, and thus more likely to apply. Which means google does reach out to higher skilled, higher experience people like me. They pursued me more aggressively than any company has ever in my career. By the way, if you feel you need to prove worthy and eager to work for a company, then your esteem of the company is out of place. You are likely going to end up taking a worse job or taking worse compensation because you aren't valuing yourself highly enough.
MCRed 12y ago
Everyone claims they want to hire the best, but their hiring process is all about filling the pipe with unwashed masses and then putting them thru a grueling filtering process. All of these companies, including google, are following a silly, company-centric process. Putting junior engineers in there to make candidates jump thru hoops to get a job? Why are you even bringing in people you don't already know can do fizz buzz? Bring in people who couldn't have the resume they have without being decent programmers. Google is doing cattle calls? Seriously? That reflects badly on them. You should have senior people review the resumes. They should be able to tell from the resume whether the candidate is a good fit or not. Seriously. I can. Bring them in, spend the interview time talking to them. Ask them about a project they are proud of or liked or was challenging and get them to explain something technical to you. That's all it takes. Then spend a significant amount of time selling them on your company and why they should want to work there. They should be asking you as many questions as you're asking them! I do like to ask a little brain teaser, but it's relatively quick. IF you're making them write code, you've failed. I'm dead serious about this. I've hired a lot of people, never asked them to write code, then had them turn out to be great hires. Never hired someone who couldn't code. I've seen people lie on resumes (actually got a resume from someone who claimed to be on a team I'd lead, but that he hadn't been on!) Should take very little time to figure out if they're lying on their resume or not. Cultural fit is very important, but people apply that wrongly. They seem to think "I'm a nerdy white male who hates the new star wars trilogy, so they should too". Wrong. Cultural fit is about finding the guy who will show up to help you move without being asked simply because you mentioned you were moving and he's the kind of guy who jumps in and does shit like that. The kind of person who is brilliant but also able to communicate those brilliant ideas with others without it always being about drama. The kind of person who has enough backbone to improve the final product. The kind of woman who takes bugs and gets them cleared even though she could have reassigned them to someone more appropriate, simply because she knows that other person is overloaded. You don't find that on a white board.
- jeff_marshall 12y ago
  I would agree. I recently went through a phone interview with $BIG_COMPANY. I'm not actively looking for a job, but the opportunity was interesting (I'd be able to learn some things that aren't possible at the small companies I've worked at for the last decade). I had explained to the recruiter that I had spent the last several years programming almost exclusively in C on embedded systems. The call (~45 minutes) was spent doing a programming exercise involving string manipulation where the interviewer was essentially silent, while I dealt with the details of getting string manipulation on C correct (the actual problem was trivial from an algorithm standpoint, and could be banged out in python or a similar language in ~10 minutes with access to a REPL to check the details). I wasn't about to try to remember the proper syntax for another language on the fly (especially since the interviewer didn't want me to use anything other than a shared text buffer during the interview), and didn't have the prototypes for various string-related functions memorized, so I'd bet I came across as incompetent in the reviewers eyes. Never mind the fact that they could have asked interesting questions about how I wrote a rather complex piece of an IP stack from scratch recently, and successfully deployed it to various customers. I suppose if you have a big enough candidate pool and a reasonable compensation package, you'll find someone acceptable with this approach - but you'll spend a lot of interviewer-hours doing it. To be honest, I don't have anything against them, but I'm unlikely to accept another interview if their recruiters call again.
samspot 12y ago
These sound like great techniques, but I am not convinced that they can overcome the start-of-interview confirmation bias. I use the same questions for every candidate, yet I often find myself rooting for some of them more than others. There is also the 'good team fit' metric, which is automatically going to bias you toward people who remind you of yourself, which is largely those of the same gender/race/background.
Decade 12y ago
Secret not mentioned: Aggressively filter applicants, so only the “best matches” even get an interview. I’ve sent 150 applications to Google in the last 4 months, and not a single response.
- ejk314 12y ago
  They may have blacklisted your name because you're spamming them with applications. "I've left her 15 messages and haven't gotten a single response," sounds just about as crazy...
  - Decade 12y ago
    The problem with that comparison is that responding to job postings at Google is really fast. Once you enter your data in their system, it’s just click, tab-tab-tab, enter. It’s not like I’m spending hours every day begging for Google to give me a job. And I’d be really disappointed if all the submissions just went into the same person’s inbox. Somebody at Google should speak up if that’s the case. The way I expect Google to run, each submission just goes to that division’s hiring staff, and Google has a lot of divisions.
- poikniok 12y ago
  Maybe the next 150 will do it...
- Decade 12y ago
  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I’m not just blindly spamming Google. For every one of those 150 applications, I looked at the job description and thought to myself, “Yeah, I can do that,” before hitting the Submit button. I have a lot of skills, and a lot of the postings are duplicates. I’m not applying to jobs that I don’t think I can do, like Strategic Negotiator for Network Content Distribution in Asia or anything like that. If you notice Thomas’ posts about Matasano, they don’t filter based on resume at all. I wish everybody did that.
pbreit 12y ago
What's with the title edit? Actual title: "Here’s Google’s Secret to Hiring the Best People" Current HN title: "How Google Hires"
therandomguy 12y ago
I had heard horror stories of Google hiring practice: long timelines, brainteasers, GPA, top schools etc. Hence I had never really considered Google as an option. Then a recruiter got in touch and scheduled the interviews. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to go in. But I did. And it turned out to be the best interview experience I ever had. By far. I didn't make the offer and despite that I felt great about the process and myself. I called up all my talented friends and encouraged them to apply at Google. They have definitely gotten this right.
- ploxiln 12y ago
  I've also done an interview at google and would have to agree. I decided to take another offer. I'm sure google's offer would have been great, but the timeline was taking too long, and I wanted to start at the other place, so I didn't wait for it (2 weeks at that point).
  - nilkn 12y ago
    I had a similar experience. Google's interviews were generally great (and the interviewers were kind -- it might have helped that I generally did well in them), but the overall process was far slower than some startups and I eventually had to shut down the process at Google to take another offer that was too good to turn down. The bottom line is that, unless you request everything to be expedited from the beginning, it can take a few months to finish the entire process with Google. Even requesting a schedule change to be made would take about half a week for me. At least that was my experience -- I can't speak for others.
    - andyjdavis 12y ago
      >it can take a few months to finish the entire process with Google. That is not too bad for such a large company really. Personally I have always worked for small software companies where the hiring process frequently consists of one interview, a bit of a programming test and an offer all concluded in 72 hours (frequently less). Compared to that a few months seems slow but I once had a friend get hired as a trader at a huge international financial organization and that took a glacial 6 months. Whats more there was the expectation that you would more or less just walk out on whatever job you happened to have accepted in the interim, get on a plane and fly to where they wanted you as soon as you finally received an offer. Looking back on it I suspect that agreeing to that was itself part of their selection criteria.
deeviant 12y ago
How Google actually hires: Lean heavily on brand name and the preconceived prestige of a google position, give the same stock interviews that most companies give that are heavily tilted towards false-negatives rather than false-positives, and then pay well. Speaking as somebody whose SO works at Google, I think it's fair to say that Google does not hire the best people, but hires a lot of people that think they are. CL's being delayed by a week or longer because of nitpicks regarding comment capitalization/grammar/wording, why didn't you follow the exact idiom of this totally non-related library/code component that I wrote, or just pure spite is common place. Also, memes have almost completely subverted the english language at Google. Really, the window into Google that I have is hardly showing me "Best of The Best" material.
mkramlich 12y ago
I have no doubt that Google has great folks on staff. However I concluded that despite that with respect to their hiring process they still suffer from being Too Big and Too Famous. Therefore they treat people too much like cattle, like a commodity, and they bias too strongly towards reaching a false negative, and towards 20-somethings. I'm sure their process is different if you're very elite and famous yourself (eg. Norvig, Rossum) or you come in via an acqui-hire. But for everybody else they treat folks too much like commodity cattle and bias strongly to false negative. Fortunately, for truly talented engineers with lots of great alternatives, we can reject or avoid them just as much. Problem mitigated.
TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
I interviewed with Google several times over the last decade. The last time I had more than a dozen interviews, including two visits to their campus ... and they took about 6 months to get back to me with a decision ... which was no. Can't pretend I was happy with the process. Sort of got the sense that I was replaceable commodity, which I'm sure I am. They didn't particularly care about me. I wasn't applying for a technical role, and I probably had the same qualifications as dozens of other candidates, so they really didn't care about what I thought about waiting for months at a time with radio silence. I'm at a start-up company now, and very happy. I'm working on a Google-X style moonshot, and I know if I was at Google I would have no chance of working on one of their Google-X projects, because everyone at Google is trying to work on one of those. I also get the sense, based on stories, that there is a lot of politics now in Google (as there must be in most big organizations), and so somebody with no political skills, like me, is better off in a start-up.
decisiveness 12y ago
The problem with "Tell me about a time when ..." questions is that they more so test the strength of self-righteous memory than offer a clear picture of valuable job skills. These questions assume the interviewee has a vivid set of occurrences of which they can commend themselves. A good candidate who frequently leads, salvages, solves problems better than the rest probably doesn't store a list of these occurrences as special times they were able to do good work, they think of them as the norm, and may have trouble praising themselves in detail. In fact, I'd be more weary of the candidates that have a go to story to answer these questions as it may mean it's the type of thing that doesn't happen regularly.
- ddp26 12y ago
  I don't understand. Isn't the point that your example good candidate will prepare for interviews by reviewing those occurrences such that they are vivid, but a bad candidate will be unable to do so regardless of how much they prepare?
  - freehunter 12y ago
    No, the idea is that people who find it easy to praise themselves may actually do fewer praise-worthy things. Like when I sit on my butt for weeks, then wash the dishes one time and consistently remind my wife of that one time I washed the dishes. Whereas she might wash the dishes every night and never asks for praise. In that situation, if someone asked "tell me what special activities you've done in the past month", I might point to that one time where I washed the dishes, whereas my wife, not seeing dish washing as anything impressive, might say she's done nothing special. Even though I only washed the dishes once, I come off looking better there since I have an example I can point out. Simply saying "I did my job every day" isn't good enough. However, not doing your job except on one occasion makes that one occasion seem special.
    - grayclhn 12y ago
      In your example, "I washed the dishes once or twice" is not going to impress the interviewer and is quite revealing. (This is true for the more general version of your anecdote as well.)
deleted 12y ago
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doktrin 12y ago
I feel like everyone obsesses over google's hiring practices. I hesitate to be negative over this, but I am so incredibly tired of it. To my mind there's no point to any of this. Just about everyone reading these articles will never work for google. I'll never work for google. Anyone qualified to work there doesn't need these write ups, and for everyone else, myself included, it won't matter.
raz32dust 12y ago
This is not my experience. I interviewed in the Bangalore office, and I had 5 algorithm rounds straight in the on-site interview. I was exhausted after R3, and screwed up R4 and 5. Me being an experienced candidate, it seemed ridiculous that they'll judge me on the basis of algorithmic ability alone (No design, no behavioral questions, nothing).

296 points by Libertatea 12y ago

The title is a bit presumptuous, to say the least, particularly having interviewed there and having been told by multiple interviewers to steer clear of where they work.

bigdubs 12y ago
I doubt, seriously, that anyone at google told you not to work there.
- MaysonL 12y ago
  They didn't tell him not to work at Google, just not on the project they were on. (My interpretation of GP's comment).
  - jjtheblunt 12y ago
    No, they tended to like the project, it seemed, but most were exasperated with where Google was located and how it limited chances for decent quality of life (i.e., California) and another clearly explained frustration with lack of real assignment for his first many months. No joke. (Typed from a lab at Apple, by the way, where I, as a result, went instead. And that's after being told the interviews went extraordinarily well and that they wanted to pursue next steps.)
    - groby_b 12y ago
      I have no idea why somebody who doesn't like working at a place would participate in the interview process - it's entirely voluntary. So keep in mind that maybe, just maybe, you met a person with an ax to grind instead :)
      - jjtheblunt 12y ago
        That's possible, but it was 3 or 4 or the 7 interviewers on the day I mentioned who advised similarly...I really thought, at the time, they were just not ok with California crappiness and cost of living. I don't remember why.
- jjtheblunt 12y ago
  Yes, it seemed surreal; it was my impression that the frustration was more about constraints on where to live, in California, than with Google. One interviewer (at least) expressed disappointment with having no real assignment for his first many months, and feeling no way to prove his use during that time.

deleted 12y ago

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astrocyte 12y ago
So, your hiring practice is biased. Google is aware of this and accepts this results in only getting 'some' (a specific grouping) of the best people. Google has had success with these individuals. Thus, there is no reason to change up the formula. In cases whereby you don't initially capture a broader spectrum of the best via direct hiring and thus miss out on more forward thinking products and approaches, you use your capital in attempts to acquire them. This is a solid approach and an industry-wide norm. Thus, your level of comfort in stating this truth. Caveats : Someone who refuses to play ball with boat loads of cash which of course is rare but will likely be the type that develops something that is the biggest threat to your business. *Edit : the claimed VP Google worker who suggested the above deleted their comment..

WizzleKake 12y ago

The problem, however, is that most standardized tests of this type discriminate against non-white, non-male test takers (at least in the United States). Can anyone explain this? I don't understand the explanation that follows.

untog 12y ago
The core of it (as I understand it) is that these standardized tests are written by groups of white men. Thus, the "standard" they are working to is, in fact, not all that standard, but is actually a self-replicating formula that makes sure that the next series of people to create the standardized tests are also white men.
gmarx 12y ago
I don't think anyone is going to touch that; I will point out though, one wouldn't expect the SAT to predict college performance because it is used to sort people into less and more competitive schools and within those schools people select their majors (and some majors are more cognitively demanding than others)
Retric 12y ago
Consider, some groups are more willing to guess when given incomplete information and the SAT promotes guessing. If there was a larger penalty for wrong answers other groups would do better. Another issue is retaking the SAT tends to increase scores as you keep your best individual score. Individually adding ~30 points might mean little, but when you look at large groups of people such small changes become important.
- shamney 12y ago
  is there any evidence for this theory or did you just make it up?
  - Retric 12y ago
    From a quick google: "We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer significantly fewer questions than men." http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/18/sat-strategy-by-gender-men-guess-women-leave-it-blank/ http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/18/sat-strategy-by-gender-me... Retaking the test: http://philvol.sanford.duke.edu/documents/SAN01-20.pdf http://philvol.sanford.duke.edu/documents/SAN01-20.pdf PS: Making an unbiased test is really hard, the SAT comes reasonably it’s not there.

abc_lisper 12y ago

Now. Only if they give me feedback on what I did wrong - that would be more useful I think. As it stands, however, that is calling for a lawsuit. Sigh. Catch-22.

agarden 12y ago
Laszlo Bock talked about that in an interview in The Guardian[0]. Here is the quote: > After six weeks of this, 99 are rejected. They’re not told why. “If somebody just breaks up with you,” Bock says, “that’s not the time to hear: ‘And really, next time, send more flowers’… For the most part people actually aren’t excited to get that feedback, because they really wanted the job. They argue. They’re not in a place where they can learn.” 0. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/04/how-to-get-job-at-google-meet-man-hires-fires http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/04/how-to-get...
- lfowles 12y ago
  Just stop replying after you tell the candidates their deficiencies wrt the position. It's not that much different than what companies do now where they stop replying immediately after the interview. Even if the candidates are in denial and argumentative at first, they will have time to reflect on a specific issue. If 9/10 employers tell you that your breath is terrible, maybe it's time to investigate your morning bathroom routine regardless of how perfected you think it is now.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Minimal upside, lots of downside. Most hiring managers (reasonably) are vigilant about avoiding post-interview drama, which is what this is an invitation for.
    - lfowles 12y ago
      I understand. During my job search I was getting pretty frustrated at the little feedback I received during the interview process. Some interviews were more qualitative "we want to watch your coding process" where there was no feedback from the interviewers and a stone wall from the company after the interview, which lead me to question whether or not I actually knew the skills on my resume as well as I had represented them. (As a fresh college grad, I didn't, but it wasn't obvious at the time.)

googlyfuck 12y ago

Google has a single question to find out if the candidate would be a good fit or not: "do you want to support our services, and see them running for the long-term?" The correct answer is "no, I want to shutdown as many Google services as possible, preferably after they have active users we can then infuriate. " Your hired!

woah 12y ago

Does Google hire the best people?

dang 12y ago
We took that out of the title since it's so baity. All: please let's not argue about that ludicrous title, which I'm sure the author had nothing to do with. At first glance, this piece looks a lot more substantive than the usual posts about hiring. Let's discuss the strongest bits. (Come to think of it, that's the Principle of Charity applied to articles.)
coldcode 12y ago
Like everyone they hire the best, the average and the worst in some proportion. No matter how you interview, you really don't know the what their contribution will be until X days after the hire date. And X is often a random value.
raverbashing 12y ago
The title really needs a [citation needed] (Since "the best" was removed from the title, this is what it was referring to) Best is really dependent on many factors (And it's pointless to hire "the best people" then set them on boring tasks, which seems to happen a lot at Google)
erobbins 12y ago
Not exactly. They hire the people who are best at interviewing at google, and they believe their process correlates the 2 things well. I'm not so sure it does, but I am not in HR/recruiting so I haven't studied the problem.
- astrocyte 12y ago
  This ^. I'd venture to even suggest that this strict and narrow hiring focus results in many of the short comings of their products. Can't have it all I guess.

QuercusMax 12y ago

Is anybody else annoyed by these kinds of articles confusing Fermi problems (how many piano tuners in Seattle or golfballs in school bus) with Brainteasers (why manhole covers are round, or crazy questions about perfectly rational guys on an island wearing hats)? It seems to me that those types of questions are very different in terms of what they're testing for. Fermi problems in particular show how you might go about approaching a problem, and there may be many different correct answers or ways to approach it, and the goal isn't to get to the "right answer". Brainteasers, in contrast, either test whether you can recall or figure out an extremely specific problem, or whether you're good at solving certain types of logic puzzles under pressure. It may well be that both of these types of questions don't give useful information about a candidate, but they are vastly different overall.

raverbashing 12y ago
Yes, they are different What I think end up happening with those Fermi Problems (or other problems) is that the interviewer knows one specific answer and then ends up rejecting alternative answers
- tptacek 12y ago
  That is true of a surprising number of concrete-seeming programming questions, too, which is another reason you should standardize your questions.
  - QuercusMax 12y ago
    I know Google has interviewers copy down character-for-character what is written on the whiteboard for their whiteboard programming questions. Presumably this is so that their hiring committees can dispassionately review what the candidate produced, instead of relying on the interviewer to report success or failure.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    Yes, but for something slightly more complex than a "fixed answer" problem I would expect some flexibility in the answer. (Especially because of limited time in an interview and the candidate is under pressure)

dsacco 12y ago

It looks like there is a trend starting in the software industry to encourage empirical hiring. This particular article follows about a month after another hiring post reached the front page of HN.[1] I really agree with it, and I hope more people are looking at it seriously instead of fixating on the fact that the word "Google" is in the title. Giving all the candidates the same questions and the same exact interview methodology is much more fair and empirical than simply having an interviewer wing it (which is virtually certain to bring in bias). Most interviewers I know think they are better than the average interviewer due to illusory superiority cognitive bias [2]. However, when it comes down to it, you cannot easily judge the difference between candidates if you ask one a completely different question than another. This goes against all the principles of psychometric testing, yet it is still ubiquitous because no one has bothered to empirically look at whether or not they're really interviewing in a rigorous way. There is a serious issue in the industry right now where otherwise capable people fail interviews due to their appearance, manners of speaking or other harmless idiosyncrasies. It's because interviewers are very personally attached to their subjective methods, and they tend to really enjoy having personal ownership over the interviewing process instead of surrendering control to a standardized script. This trend looks like the software hiring equivalent of a professor grading papers without reading the name attached to the paper -i f we can have several candidates answer the same exact questions and perform the same exact activities on an interview it makes it much easier to determine who is the real "best candidate" when it comes time to comparing their results. If this really takes off, the only remaining problem as I see it is designing interviews that accurately correlate to the job activities. [1]: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority

deleted 12y ago
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dchichkov 12y ago
From their article it looks like what they are doing is pseudo-science at best. Hopefully not harmful pseudo-science, but it could be actually harmful. If one is not careful enough it is rather easy to replace more-or-less working common sense with some horrible pseudo-scientific approach. For example, optimizing for 'individual employee performance numbers'? Without consideration that, say, adding yet another employee with 'a good number' may actually diminish the total sum? Regarding prediction of 'employee performance numbers' based on 'interview scores'. It is not surprising that the result is completely random. As far as I understand it, in the big companies performance numbers don't show actual contribution of an employee. At best they are showing "how this person was able to use the resources around them to achieve goals", note, mostly via using human resources of informal social networks. But usually performance numbers are just random. And at worst they could be negatively correlated with actual contributions.

bengali3 12y ago

> All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts, where they are asked to solve engineering problems during the interview. I disagree that a whiteboard session can be considered a work sample test. Whats wrong with 'complete steps 1,2 & 3 and i'll be back in 30 minutes'? For engineering we actually found giving a 2-3 hr 1 problem test has been a better predictor, and 3-4 30 minute face to face (usually 2 on skype prior to onsite Test, then 2 follow ups). Alone time gives the candidate time to digest and solve the problem on their own which is more 'real world' like and shows what can be done on their own. Some questions are intentionally vague to compensate for 'able to make decisions with little information'. We have no right answer but will ask why you made these decisions. This frees up our staff time tremendously and weeds out those that may need a lot of hand holding early on.

tptacek 12y ago
This is exactly correct. A work-sample test needs to capture the normal parameters of the work. If team members aren't routinely called on to solve programming problems in a high-stakes stick-the-landing-or-you're-fired exercise on a whiteboard in front of an audience, then the prediction the test is trying to make is confounded by all those factors. * Eliminate live audiences * Let people work in the environment they'll be able to choose on the job * Ideally, let people work in their own comfortable environs, even if they won't be able to do that on the job * If you're worried about cheating, build that assessment into your in-person followup interview
- Estragon 12y ago
  How often did people cheat in remote work-sample tests?
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I never once saw it happen.
    - JonMR 12y ago

tptacek 12y ago

I've written a bit about this: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ The worst thing you can do is unstructured interviews. Unfortunately, that's exactly what almost every company does: they create ad-hoc committees of workers and have them each design an interview, often on the fly, for each candidate. Everything you do to add structure and remove degrees of freedom from interviewers will improve outcomes. Every company that hires more than one tech worker in a year should be working on this problem, and hopefully documenting their result. Our structured interview process differed from Google in that we (a) completely standardized interviews and (b) designed the questions in those interviews to minimize the need for free-form follow-up questions ("Tell me about a time..." and then digging into the answer to mine conclusions). We tried to flip the script: instead of having the interviewer ask followups of the candidate, we put candidates in a position to ask lots of questions of the interviewer, within a framework that generated lists of "facts" that we could record and compare to other candidates. Example: "I am going to describe a trading system in broad strokes. I know lots of things about it works, and I want you to ask me enough questions so that you can roughly diagram it on a whiteboard, capturing its components." Then, later, "I want to have a conversation where we rank these components in order of sensitivity to latency". The interviewer captures the answers, but the back-and-forth is dominated and mostly directed by the candidate. The problem I see with the Google strategy is that it combines interviewer-directed free-form questions with an open-ended and somewhat fuzzy question that really evaluates less the candidate's ability to do the work and more their presence of mind during the hostile, stressful interview process. Things I positively responded to in this article: * The notion that we come to snap judgements about candidates within minutes of the interview and are then hostage to confirmation bias for the rest of the interview * The effectiveness of combinations of evaluation techniques; for us, a combination of work-sample testing and scripted interviews were extremely effective.

mbesto 12y ago
> (a) completely standardized interviews and (b) designed the questions in those interviews to minimize the need for free-form follow-up questions Doesn't this just make the system easier to game? It's like SAT prep. SAT scores correlate with the amount of time/money preparation for it, not your actual knowledge.

jim_greco 12y ago

Have they changed this process recently? It was only 3 years ago they were trumpeting their brain teasers in the WSJ. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204552304577112522982505222 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702045523045771125...

ssclafani 12y ago
Yes, from a 2013 interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google: "We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time." "They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

throwaway6497 12y ago

Isn't this the Nth PR article about Google hiring practices. To be honest, Google technical hiring bar is no different from FB, Twitter, MS, Amazon, LinkedIn, Dropbox etc but they are the only company consistently coming out with PR fluff about hiring the best. This is not only disingenuous but frankly (to put it crudely) makes Google appear as a attention mongering whore. I guess, Google PR machine has to keep this show going to keep the mind-share among potential recruits.

sinatra 12y ago
I can give you Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox. But, there's no way Microsoft and Amazon have the same hiring bar as Google. This is based on my own personal experience interacting with them and what I've heard from friends.
- qmalxp 12y ago
  The bar is lower or higher for MS/Amazon?
- r00fus 12y ago
  Would be very interesting to hear your take on the differences...

cbhl 12y ago

My biggest fear is that this article and this book leads to people blindly copying the wrong parts of Google's hiring process for the wrong reasons, the way 20% is treated in this Dilbert comic: http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-04-05 http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-04-05 Google interviews a lot of people in any given week. Not everything in this article applies to Engineering interviews; it's a broad overview. The way the interview process is designed needs to be interpreted in that context. What I'm really excited about is patio11 and tptacek's Starfighter. I really want it to be the "Khan Academy" of interviewing -- best-in-class, various progressions, and really good suggestions on what puzzle to tackle next. Up until now, I've been directing people at the USA Computing Olympiad's training server, but its one-size-fits-all approach doesn't resonate well with people who don't have confidence in puzzle-solving (and give up on the first problem) or people who don't have the leisure of n years of high school/collage to work through all the problems (e.g. women who are going through HackBright and similar accelerated learn-to-code programs).

andrewvc 12y ago
The desire to create an 'objective' measure for programming capabilities is really sort of ridiculous. Given how much of a team sport software development is, it completely underestimates so many of the key factors that go into being an effective developer. Unfortunately, as developers, we're keyed in toward quantifying everything, even if it's to our own detriment. I cut my google interview short when I discovered that their process was to interview me, then bin me, then pick who I'd be working with after I'd gone through a pretty arduous process. I told them that I was interviewing them as much as they were interviewing me, and I had no interest in 'getting the job', then being told after the fact who I'd be working with. The idea that I'd keep interviewing them without even knowing who I'd be working with just seemed absurd to me.
- tptacek 12y ago
  The idea that there is one single "objective" interview process is ridiculous. The idea that we should be vigilant about bias, subjectivity, and nondeterminism is the opposite of ridiculous.

siliconc0w 12y ago

Someone should sort a consultancy similar to pivotal where they come in and teach you how to interview. Most SMBs are terrible at it. There are also different 'best' engineers for the role/company. A company may say they want the 'best' but they really want an engineer that is going to stick around and solve their boring problems in boring ways. Even the edgiest startups likely have mostly boring problems to solve. I see it as sort of a moneyball situation. You're looking for value. You can spend a lot of money and time searching for that unicorn 10x engineer when you could have hired 2-3 3x engineers and overall spent a lot less time and money and got your product out the door months earlier.

edgyswingset 12y ago

My experience with Google hiring has been scheduling a technical phone interview and then promptly never hearing back from my recruiter ever again. I tried reaching out when I had an offer from Microsoft only to find out he's no longer at the company.

morgante 12y ago

It's too bad that Google has likely permanently ruined their HR image. They have developed an overwhelming reputation for arbitrary interviews and prolonged hiring decisions. I'd like to think I'm a pretty good developer and have made a positive impact everywhere I've worked. Yet I'd never even consider applying to Google, because I know exactly how that process would go down. 1) Most likely result: I never hear back at all, because I didn't attend Stanford/MIT. (Never mind that I got accepted but didn't attend due to better financial aid elsewhere.) 2) If they do decide to interview me, I won't hear about it for months. 3) I'll have to drill on data structures and efficiency of sorting algorithms I've literally never implemented outside of an interview or academic setting. 4) Even having drilled on those arbitrary questions, I'll likely fail the interview because after a multi-day gauntlet of questions a random engineer didn't like the particular assumptions I put into my Fermi model of golf balls. 5) Of course, if they ever bother to let me know I failed, it won't be for months. (Note: this is all based on actual Google hiring experiences.)

bitwize 12y ago
Google is looking for people with interesting stories. They're big on diversity. A straight-laced bloke like me from a regular family hasn't a chance without that MIT/Stanford sheepskin. But if you were adopted into a trisexual human/Klingon line marriage... well, Google could use someone with your fresh perspective, even if you only went to clown school. Hell if you went to clown school you're a shoo-in. Want to work at El Goog? Cultivate as much weirdness as you can without becoming a criminal or jeopardizing your competence.
bwy 12y ago
I wonder when these "experiences" happened. I went through Google's process this semester looking for an internship position and it was no different than the dozen other companies I've gone through. Things might have changed since the days of random Fermi questions. Edit: correspondence with the recruiter was no less timely than it was with other companies, and the only major difference I can think of is the host-matching process we went through.
- morgante 12y ago

ulysses 12y ago

So, the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google thinks that: "All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts, where they are asked to solve engineering problems during the interview." is a work sample test.

r00fus 12y ago

From the article: "A good rule of thumb is to hire only people who are better than you. Do not compromise. Ever." Is it only me that sees this as an unsustainable goal that will likely lead to idealist driven results? While, when interviewing, I tend to be impressed with folks who seem more well versed and smarter than me, but realistically I also feel there's a potential risk that those folks may not be sufficiently challenged in our organization. Wouldn't the (unrelenting) drive to find people who are "better than you" lead to some of the problems in bias-matching and with first impressions dominating your perception? Sounds a bit dogmatic and contrary to the entire focus of the article which espouses a more rigorous, measurable and evidence-based approach to hiring.

nostrademons 12y ago
Here's a mathematical model of it: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg... The reason it converges to some relative percentile (apparently just under the 90th) is because of the noise in the interview process. If people could reliably measure the quality of an applicant and consistently hired only people better than them, they'd only hire the very best (100th percentile) candidate, who probably wouldn't want to work there. But because peoples' judgments are off, they end up getting folks who are good, but probably not absolutely best - but they also avoid the bozos, because it's pretty unlikely that a bozo would appear better than half the people you know.
- r00fus 12y ago
  The rubric presented "hire above the company mean" doesn't align with the dogma in the wired article "always hire people better than you, don't compromise". It's the latter I question. Also the assertion that "it's pretty unlikely that a bozo would appear better than half the people you know" sounds just full of assumptions that may not be valid. Just thinking from a non-Google point of view, not every wants to work at new_untested_startup or boring_postIPO_company. It seems unrealistic to a) set hiring targets and b) keep raising the bar unless you have incredible cachet and a large pool of candidates to work with. So what does the rest of the industry who don't have that luxury do?

yodsanklai 12y ago

Does anyone have tips to prepare an interview at Google for a software engineer position? I'm ok with algorithms, but besides that, what to expect?

jaimebuelta 12y ago

Well, I interviewed a couple of times for Google (2009 and 2012, they turned my back both times at different stages of the process), and it seems like their process is, obviously, tailored for their particular use case. They have a TON of applications, so they are more worried in filtering and discarding people than reaching out candidates, or even encourage people to apply. Their offer (prestige, great perks, great salary, etc...) is obvious to start with, so they are not bothering is going for you. You are the one that should prove worthy and eager to work for them. I guess that's similar to places like Ivy league Universities, etc... That's ok. It obviously works for them. It's just that I think it's not the most common case for all companies.

MCRed 12y ago
Except they did "bother to go for" me, to the point where they didn't stop until I threatened them with a harassment lawsuit. Google does not have a lot of prestige, they have a long record of questionable at best ethics. However, people who are just out of college are much less likely to be aware of this, and thus more likely to apply. Which means google does reach out to higher skilled, higher experience people like me. They pursued me more aggressively than any company has ever in my career. By the way, if you feel you need to prove worthy and eager to work for a company, then your esteem of the company is out of place. You are likely going to end up taking a worse job or taking worse compensation because you aren't valuing yourself highly enough.

MCRed 12y ago

Everyone claims they want to hire the best, but their hiring process is all about filling the pipe with unwashed masses and then putting them thru a grueling filtering process. All of these companies, including google, are following a silly, company-centric process. Putting junior engineers in there to make candidates jump thru hoops to get a job? Why are you even bringing in people you don't already know can do fizz buzz? Bring in people who couldn't have the resume they have without being decent programmers. Google is doing cattle calls? Seriously? That reflects badly on them. You should have senior people review the resumes. They should be able to tell from the resume whether the candidate is a good fit or not. Seriously. I can. Bring them in, spend the interview time talking to them. Ask them about a project they are proud of or liked or was challenging and get them to explain something technical to you. That's all it takes. Then spend a significant amount of time selling them on your company and why they should want to work there. They should be asking you as many questions as you're asking them! I do like to ask a little brain teaser, but it's relatively quick. IF you're making them write code, you've failed. I'm dead serious about this. I've hired a lot of people, never asked them to write code, then had them turn out to be great hires. Never hired someone who couldn't code. I've seen people lie on resumes (actually got a resume from someone who claimed to be on a team I'd lead, but that he hadn't been on!) Should take very little time to figure out if they're lying on their resume or not. Cultural fit is very important, but people apply that wrongly. They seem to think "I'm a nerdy white male who hates the new star wars trilogy, so they should too". Wrong. Cultural fit is about finding the guy who will show up to help you move without being asked simply because you mentioned you were moving and he's the kind of guy who jumps in and does shit like that. The kind of person who is brilliant but also able to communicate those brilliant ideas with others without it always being about drama. The kind of person who has enough backbone to improve the final product. The kind of woman who takes bugs and gets them cleared even though she could have reassigned them to someone more appropriate, simply because she knows that other person is overloaded. You don't find that on a white board.

jeff_marshall 12y ago
I would agree. I recently went through a phone interview with $BIG_COMPANY. I'm not actively looking for a job, but the opportunity was interesting (I'd be able to learn some things that aren't possible at the small companies I've worked at for the last decade). I had explained to the recruiter that I had spent the last several years programming almost exclusively in C on embedded systems. The call (~45 minutes) was spent doing a programming exercise involving string manipulation where the interviewer was essentially silent, while I dealt with the details of getting string manipulation on C correct (the actual problem was trivial from an algorithm standpoint, and could be banged out in python or a similar language in ~10 minutes with access to a REPL to check the details). I wasn't about to try to remember the proper syntax for another language on the fly (especially since the interviewer didn't want me to use anything other than a shared text buffer during the interview), and didn't have the prototypes for various string-related functions memorized, so I'd bet I came across as incompetent in the reviewers eyes. Never mind the fact that they could have asked interesting questions about how I wrote a rather complex piece of an IP stack from scratch recently, and successfully deployed it to various customers. I suppose if you have a big enough candidate pool and a reasonable compensation package, you'll find someone acceptable with this approach - but you'll spend a lot of interviewer-hours doing it. To be honest, I don't have anything against them, but I'm unlikely to accept another interview if their recruiters call again.

samspot 12y ago

These sound like great techniques, but I am not convinced that they can overcome the start-of-interview confirmation bias. I use the same questions for every candidate, yet I often find myself rooting for some of them more than others. There is also the 'good team fit' metric, which is automatically going to bias you toward people who remind you of yourself, which is largely those of the same gender/race/background.

Decade 12y ago

Secret not mentioned: Aggressively filter applicants, so only the “best matches” even get an interview. I’ve sent 150 applications to Google in the last 4 months, and not a single response.

ejk314 12y ago
They may have blacklisted your name because you're spamming them with applications. "I've left her 15 messages and haven't gotten a single response," sounds just about as crazy...
- Decade 12y ago
  The problem with that comparison is that responding to job postings at Google is really fast. Once you enter your data in their system, it’s just click, tab-tab-tab, enter. It’s not like I’m spending hours every day begging for Google to give me a job. And I’d be really disappointed if all the submissions just went into the same person’s inbox. Somebody at Google should speak up if that’s the case. The way I expect Google to run, each submission just goes to that division’s hiring staff, and Google has a lot of divisions.
poikniok 12y ago
Maybe the next 150 will do it...
Decade 12y ago
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I’m not just blindly spamming Google. For every one of those 150 applications, I looked at the job description and thought to myself, “Yeah, I can do that,” before hitting the Submit button. I have a lot of skills, and a lot of the postings are duplicates. I’m not applying to jobs that I don’t think I can do, like Strategic Negotiator for Network Content Distribution in Asia or anything like that. If you notice Thomas’ posts about Matasano, they don’t filter based on resume at all. I wish everybody did that.

pbreit 12y ago

What's with the title edit? Actual title: "Here’s Google’s Secret to Hiring the Best People" Current HN title: "How Google Hires"

therandomguy 12y ago

I had heard horror stories of Google hiring practice: long timelines, brainteasers, GPA, top schools etc. Hence I had never really considered Google as an option. Then a recruiter got in touch and scheduled the interviews. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to go in. But I did. And it turned out to be the best interview experience I ever had. By far. I didn't make the offer and despite that I felt great about the process and myself. I called up all my talented friends and encouraged them to apply at Google. They have definitely gotten this right.

ploxiln 12y ago
I've also done an interview at google and would have to agree. I decided to take another offer. I'm sure google's offer would have been great, but the timeline was taking too long, and I wanted to start at the other place, so I didn't wait for it (2 weeks at that point).
- nilkn 12y ago
  I had a similar experience. Google's interviews were generally great (and the interviewers were kind -- it might have helped that I generally did well in them), but the overall process was far slower than some startups and I eventually had to shut down the process at Google to take another offer that was too good to turn down. The bottom line is that, unless you request everything to be expedited from the beginning, it can take a few months to finish the entire process with Google. Even requesting a schedule change to be made would take about half a week for me. At least that was my experience -- I can't speak for others.
  - andyjdavis 12y ago
    >it can take a few months to finish the entire process with Google. That is not too bad for such a large company really. Personally I have always worked for small software companies where the hiring process frequently consists of one interview, a bit of a programming test and an offer all concluded in 72 hours (frequently less). Compared to that a few months seems slow but I once had a friend get hired as a trader at a huge international financial organization and that took a glacial 6 months. Whats more there was the expectation that you would more or less just walk out on whatever job you happened to have accepted in the interim, get on a plane and fly to where they wanted you as soon as you finally received an offer. Looking back on it I suspect that agreeing to that was itself part of their selection criteria.

deeviant 12y ago

How Google actually hires: Lean heavily on brand name and the preconceived prestige of a google position, give the same stock interviews that most companies give that are heavily tilted towards false-negatives rather than false-positives, and then pay well. Speaking as somebody whose SO works at Google, I think it's fair to say that Google does not hire the best people, but hires a lot of people that think they are. CL's being delayed by a week or longer because of nitpicks regarding comment capitalization/grammar/wording, why didn't you follow the exact idiom of this totally non-related library/code component that I wrote, or just pure spite is common place. Also, memes have almost completely subverted the english language at Google. Really, the window into Google that I have is hardly showing me "Best of The Best" material.

mkramlich 12y ago

I have no doubt that Google has great folks on staff. However I concluded that despite that with respect to their hiring process they still suffer from being Too Big and Too Famous. Therefore they treat people too much like cattle, like a commodity, and they bias too strongly towards reaching a false negative, and towards 20-somethings. I'm sure their process is different if you're very elite and famous yourself (eg. Norvig, Rossum) or you come in via an acqui-hire. But for everybody else they treat folks too much like commodity cattle and bias strongly to false negative. Fortunately, for truly talented engineers with lots of great alternatives, we can reject or avoid them just as much. Problem mitigated.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago

I interviewed with Google several times over the last decade. The last time I had more than a dozen interviews, including two visits to their campus ... and they took about 6 months to get back to me with a decision ... which was no. Can't pretend I was happy with the process. Sort of got the sense that I was replaceable commodity, which I'm sure I am. They didn't particularly care about me. I wasn't applying for a technical role, and I probably had the same qualifications as dozens of other candidates, so they really didn't care about what I thought about waiting for months at a time with radio silence. I'm at a start-up company now, and very happy. I'm working on a Google-X style moonshot, and I know if I was at Google I would have no chance of working on one of their Google-X projects, because everyone at Google is trying to work on one of those. I also get the sense, based on stories, that there is a lot of politics now in Google (as there must be in most big organizations), and so somebody with no political skills, like me, is better off in a start-up.

decisiveness 12y ago

The problem with "Tell me about a time when ..." questions is that they more so test the strength of self-righteous memory than offer a clear picture of valuable job skills. These questions assume the interviewee has a vivid set of occurrences of which they can commend themselves. A good candidate who frequently leads, salvages, solves problems better than the rest probably doesn't store a list of these occurrences as special times they were able to do good work, they think of them as the norm, and may have trouble praising themselves in detail. In fact, I'd be more weary of the candidates that have a go to story to answer these questions as it may mean it's the type of thing that doesn't happen regularly.

ddp26 12y ago
I don't understand. Isn't the point that your example good candidate will prepare for interviews by reviewing those occurrences such that they are vivid, but a bad candidate will be unable to do so regardless of how much they prepare?
- freehunter 12y ago
  No, the idea is that people who find it easy to praise themselves may actually do fewer praise-worthy things. Like when I sit on my butt for weeks, then wash the dishes one time and consistently remind my wife of that one time I washed the dishes. Whereas she might wash the dishes every night and never asks for praise. In that situation, if someone asked "tell me what special activities you've done in the past month", I might point to that one time where I washed the dishes, whereas my wife, not seeing dish washing as anything impressive, might say she's done nothing special. Even though I only washed the dishes once, I come off looking better there since I have an example I can point out. Simply saying "I did my job every day" isn't good enough. However, not doing your job except on one occasion makes that one occasion seem special.
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    In your example, "I washed the dishes once or twice" is not going to impress the interviewer and is quite revealing. (This is true for the more general version of your anecdote as well.)

deleted 12y ago

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doktrin 12y ago

I feel like everyone obsesses over google's hiring practices. I hesitate to be negative over this, but I am so incredibly tired of it. To my mind there's no point to any of this. Just about everyone reading these articles will never work for google. I'll never work for google. Anyone qualified to work there doesn't need these write ups, and for everyone else, myself included, it won't matter.

raz32dust 12y ago

This is not my experience. I interviewed in the Bangalore office, and I had 5 algorithm rounds straight in the on-site interview. I was exhausted after R3, and screwed up R4 and 5. Me being an experienced candidate, it seemed ridiculous that they'll judge me on the basis of algorithmic ability alone (No design, no behavioral questions, nothing).