4 ms·

Alternatively, she has good qualifications and Google has interview practices or policies that are - intentionally or not - age-discriminatory. Generally speak

Alternatively, she has good qualifications and Google has interview practices or policies that are - intentionally or not - age-discriminatory. Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;) Considering that the typical programming interview in this industry does not involve writing any actual code (no, waving your arms against a whiteboard in a coding-like way doesn't count), I'm generally inclined to believe interviews are more problematic than interviewees.

Ntrails 11y ago
>Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;) Google have [probably] rarely interviewed anyone who was not well qualified - yet around 90% of candidates fail the interview. I am assuming there will be ~10 interviewed candidates per role and they have pre-screening essentially for "qualified on paper". I've no position on whether they're discriminatory, but that statement simply doesn't hold water.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  I trust then Google is not one of the companies whining about "talent shortages" then?
  - techdragon 11y ago
    Biggest point here. You can't flunk out 90% of your applications and complain you have a shortage of qualified staff. You have people begging to work for you, how about you hire a few of them and teach them anything that's missing. Oh the horror, the employees aren't replaceable meat cogs in some giant machine.
    - plonh 11y ago
      That is illogical. If a million plumbers and no programmers applied to be programmers, would Google be wrong to not hire them? We are talking about skilled jobs in a specific trade.
      - vonmoltke 11y ago
        Why are you interviewing the plumbers? If a million plumber and no programmers applied, you would immediately reject every resume and not interview anyone. Note that this assumes none of the plumbers have been working on teaching themselves software development in order to make a career change and thus do not have non-work evidence of competence.
- potatolicious 11y ago
  > "Google have [probably] rarely interviewed anyone who was not well qualified - yet around 90% of candidates fail the interview." This statement hinges on the belief that these 90% of candidates fail because, while qualified on paper, they are not actually qualified for the job. I suspect it isn't actually true, and that in reality the Google interview process fails very large number of actually-qualified candidates, while also admitting a large number of not-actually-qualified candidates. In short, I suspect beyond pre-screening people for paper qualifications, the actual on-sites have an effectiveness in the order of a coin toss. But yet we take pride in failing hordes of people, because it somehow implies nice things about our surviving it. Somehow the fact that the process for hiring programmers doesn't involve any programming, and that we are hiring people to architect large systems by solving isolated CS101 algorithms questions, doesn't bother us.
  - genericuser 11y ago
    It doesn't really hinge on them not being qualified for the job the way I read it. It hinges on them not being 'the most qualified' for the job. As failure of the interview to me is defined as not getting the job. And interviewing 10 people for every position leads to them choosing a most qualified out of those 10 and leaving notes for future teams looking to fill a position. I am no way saying their practices are not discriminatory, just that I read that statement differently. I think due to the complete lack of disclosure about why you don't get a job in the tech industry it will be interesting to see Google have to justify their decisions with the facts to a court. I personally ask after most every interview what I could do to improve, or what I did wrong. With very rare exceptions I am told they can not disclose that information for liability reasons. (Google and Amazon both definitely gave me this answer) A handful of companies have told me things like, we went with a candidate that had more experience in ________. And once a company told me that a project was cancelled so they unfortunately no longer had a position available.
    - potatolicious 11y ago
      > "And interviewing 10 people for every position leads to them choosing a most qualified out of those 10 and leaving notes for future teams looking to fill a position." I'd agree with you if the above was true - but it isn't at Google, nor is it true throughout the majority of the industry. Most companies (Google included) hire based on a fairly simple "first past the post" system. A candidate comes in, interviews, and a hire/no-hire decision is made shortly after. In cases where two candidates are interviewing simultaneously some comparison might be made between the two, but otherwise the candidates are decided upon serially. I don't know of any companies that practice the "interview N people, choose best" methodology - if they did, then yes, I agree that "failing" 90% of people might be more reasonable. I don't even know if that strategy is practicable - sourcing candidates generally takes a long time. Getting N people to interview within a short time window for the same position is nearly impossible for any N > 2.

Ntrails 11y ago

>Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;) Google have [probably] rarely interviewed anyone who was not well qualified - yet around 90% of candidates fail the interview. I am assuming there will be ~10 interviewed candidates per role and they have pre-screening essentially for "qualified on paper". I've no position on whether they're discriminatory, but that statement simply doesn't hold water.

vonmoltke 11y ago
I trust then Google is not one of the companies whining about "talent shortages" then?
- techdragon 11y ago
  Biggest point here. You can't flunk out 90% of your applications and complain you have a shortage of qualified staff. You have people begging to work for you, how about you hire a few of them and teach them anything that's missing. Oh the horror, the employees aren't replaceable meat cogs in some giant machine.
  - plonh 11y ago
    That is illogical. If a million plumbers and no programmers applied to be programmers, would Google be wrong to not hire them? We are talking about skilled jobs in a specific trade.
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
      Why are you interviewing the plumbers? If a million plumber and no programmers applied, you would immediately reject every resume and not interview anyone. Note that this assumes none of the plumbers have been working on teaching themselves software development in order to make a career change and thus do not have non-work evidence of competence.
potatolicious 11y ago
> "Google have [probably] rarely interviewed anyone who was not well qualified - yet around 90% of candidates fail the interview." This statement hinges on the belief that these 90% of candidates fail because, while qualified on paper, they are not actually qualified for the job. I suspect it isn't actually true, and that in reality the Google interview process fails very large number of actually-qualified candidates, while also admitting a large number of not-actually-qualified candidates. In short, I suspect beyond pre-screening people for paper qualifications, the actual on-sites have an effectiveness in the order of a coin toss. But yet we take pride in failing hordes of people, because it somehow implies nice things about our surviving it. Somehow the fact that the process for hiring programmers doesn't involve any programming, and that we are hiring people to architect large systems by solving isolated CS101 algorithms questions, doesn't bother us.
- genericuser 11y ago
  It doesn't really hinge on them not being qualified for the job the way I read it. It hinges on them not being 'the most qualified' for the job. As failure of the interview to me is defined as not getting the job. And interviewing 10 people for every position leads to them choosing a most qualified out of those 10 and leaving notes for future teams looking to fill a position. I am no way saying their practices are not discriminatory, just that I read that statement differently. I think due to the complete lack of disclosure about why you don't get a job in the tech industry it will be interesting to see Google have to justify their decisions with the facts to a court. I personally ask after most every interview what I could do to improve, or what I did wrong. With very rare exceptions I am told they can not disclose that information for liability reasons. (Google and Amazon both definitely gave me this answer) A handful of companies have told me things like, we went with a candidate that had more experience in ________. And once a company told me that a project was cancelled so they unfortunately no longer had a position available.
  - potatolicious 11y ago
    > "And interviewing 10 people for every position leads to them choosing a most qualified out of those 10 and leaving notes for future teams looking to fill a position." I'd agree with you if the above was true - but it isn't at Google, nor is it true throughout the majority of the industry. Most companies (Google included) hire based on a fairly simple "first past the post" system. A candidate comes in, interviews, and a hire/no-hire decision is made shortly after. In cases where two candidates are interviewing simultaneously some comparison might be made between the two, but otherwise the candidates are decided upon serially. I don't know of any companies that practice the "interview N people, choose best" methodology - if they did, then yes, I agree that "failing" 90% of people might be more reasonable. I don't even know if that strategy is practicable - sourcing candidates generally takes a long time. Getting N people to interview within a short time window for the same position is nearly impossible for any N > 2.