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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%
by 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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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.
- andrewvc 12y agoI fully agree! What I see is a rush toward quantifying everything that's quantifiable and discarding everything that isn't, which is terrible.
- cbhl 12y agoFor what it's worth, if you really wanted to interview Google, and you were in college, an internship is the way to go. If you get considered for full-time after an internship they usually give you the option to go back to the same team. But if you already have been in industry a while, then you don't qualify for an internship and that's a bit broken.
- tptacek 12y agoJust to be clear: there are three of us; Erin and I started the firm.