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Google Adjusts Hiring Processes
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Google is attempting to fine tune its hiring process as it ramps up recruiting to keep pace with its success, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'In Google's early years, [Sergey] Brin or co-founder Larry Page interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion, Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume complete with rubber udders around Halloween. Even today, at least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications.' While the interview process can remain 'glacial,' Google's new head of human resources notes that the average number of in-person interviews for each candidate offered a job has declined to 5.1 from 6.2. The company continues to seek overqualified employees who can be promoted quickly."
What is wrong is if they turn down a highly qualified candidate who couldn't afford anything more than Bumfsck Community College.
I'm sorry but that is a somewhat inaccurate view. The top undergrad schools offer very good financial aid packages and there are lots of scholarships so that really doesn't apply to them at all. For grad schools you have fellowships both from departments and from outside sources which can more than pay for the cost of tuition. Yes there are other good reasons for why a student lacking money would have more trouble getting into such schools but paying for them would be a much smaller problem.
I see two big hints they weren't going to hire you:
1) You paid for your own interview. Never do that. They've made no commitment to you beyond a bit of time.
2) During the interview, they're asking totally irrelevant questions.
The days when an interview were completely controlled by the employer left over a decade ago. Irrelevant questions should be answered shortly, and the questions should be dragged back to topic, or ask back directly if they have a prejudice for particular classes of schools and such.
The "Not qualified" might have simply been "won't survive in this corporate culture".
I SUGGESTED that to them. They WERN'T InTeReStEd...
I'm moving to the US soon. I'm not Google's target audience, for a few reasons. But nonetheless ... ha ha. International student, financial aid, in the same package. Note, though, that I'm not suggesting that international students (or even new permanent immigrants) should get any breaks there. But it's quite a dent in most people in this category's ability to do so.
Sergey Brin is a University of Maryland graduate. You'd think he might be able to realize that there is more to a person than where they got their degree, but I guess they have classes to correct that at Stanford.
>Rickover sounds like a complete asshole. I seriously doubt if any of the bullshit
>he pulled during recruitment interviews ever enabled him to recruit smarter or
>better personnel.
Well, you're wrong. I experienced the program he created (long after he personally was not there), and it worked.
He created the Navy's nuclear program basically from scratch. He decided it had to be done *right* - we couldn't just have all this egalitarian time serving mediocrity form and run the thing. A *combination* of good engineering and safety systems AND *smart, motivated people* who HAD to do EVERYTHING right was the philosophy he instilled (and still was, in the 80s and 90s when I experienced) it.
He took on this task in a Western culture that was already turning to mush, schools that were already starting to turn out I'm OK -You're OK fools, and a postwar military that was already going slack and being turned into just another massive government program. What he accomplished is nothing short of amazing.
A common technique used on prospective cops is designed to see how well the candidate handles argumentative behaviour and/or unreasonable demands from the inteviewer.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I know three employees of Google. The interview process is strictly standardized. One introductory phone interview from an HR person, followed by another, more technical, phone interview. If you make it past those two, they either fly you out to Mountain View (all expenses paid) for a tough in-person final interview. After that, you still may or may not have the job. I have also spoken to a Google recruiter out here Boston. She told me the exact same thing.
I'm not calling this guy a liar... but his story sounds odd. Seriously, even if he flew out to CA for a week to do interviews, how could it add up to $3000? A flight from NY to CA can be had for about $500 round trip... and that is coast-to-coast. Say $100/night for a decent hotel for a week. Plus $500 in food would make it $1500.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
A functional spec means that others can understand and use your stuff if you get hit by the proverbial truck.
Thanks for telling me what I've already known for 20 years. You jumped to an incorrect conclusion - I'm *not* the person that designed the hardware, I'm not an electrical engineer, and I wasn't a project manager. I'm a software engineer just like this other guy was, but unlike the guy with the impeccable pedigree, I had a good understanding of how computers actually work. I fail to see why he couldn't have done the same. Any CS graduate should have had some exposure to and at least a basic ability to grok an electrical schematic of a digital circuit. I don't expect they'd be capable of doing a full circuit analysis nor be able to understand how a complex analog circuit works, but they should at least be able to grasp the basic idea of what's going on.
And what is so fucking hard about writing down the instruction set, ports, adresses and so on, a little effort on your part and ANY programmer can write software for your christmas lights or whatever the hell your plugging into the machine.
As I mentioned before, I didn't design the hardware, so writing that functional spec wasn't my job. Besides, what is so unreasonable about expecting that someone that writes drivers might actually know a little bit about hardware in general? This wasn't a microcontroller or FPGA design where you'd actually have to look at the code to see what the circuit does. This was a stupid-simple 8255-based circuit on an ISA board with all the I/O clearly labelled on the schematic. Personally, I think that the reason there are so many piss-poor drivers out there is because there are so many programmers now that don't have the first idea how hardware really works. That's fine for an applications guy that's writing a spreadsheet, but that's not acceptable for someone that's writing drivers. Unfortunately, in the real world management does not always have a clue and doesn't always push the EEs to document things in a manner sufficient to hand-hold the software guys, so if you've not yet run into that situation and have always had good functional specs, then count yourself as lucky. Incidentally, the "Christmas lights" that were being plugged into the machine happened to be a controller board for a 100-watt carbon dioxide laser.
I might also point out that this guy didn't have the first idea how to use an oscilloscope either. If part of what the driver does is set I/O lines at specific states for the specific lengths of time, it sure helps to be able to test it without running to an EE every time you need to check your code.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
My cellphone has the plus sign on my star / asterisk key.
I had some "hot seat" interviews in the past.
During one interview, every time I gave a response, the interviewer responded with "No, that doesn't work - the product won't do X" so I had to come up with another option. Finally, after about 4 go-rounds of this, I said "Well, at that point I'd go find the person who was responsible for us using this product, explain how it didn't remotely meet our needs, and rather than waste 10x more time trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole, we should start from scratch and consider it a lesson learned." The guy said "I see."
He then got up, walked out of the room, and 5 minutes later came back with someone from HR and a written job offer. "Everyone else kept going on and on and on and on and on trying to solve the problem by trying to work around something that was obviously broken - you're the only one who knew when to cut your losses and move on."
The point of an interview is to figure out how well the person will fit and how well they'll do the job. Clever hacks and workarounds are nice, but only when they are more efficient and effective than something not as clever would be. It seems like a lot of geek types forget that - it isn't about showing off.
I eventually became a hiring manager at that same company, and I would go out of my way to throw the candidates I interviewed off balance. My favorite technique was to ask them what their favorite tool was, then say "That's stupid" and see how they'd react. The worst response I ever got was "Well, I guess it is, sorry" and the best I ever got was "No, your dismissal without providing a counter argument is stupid. This tool is great for this task because x, y, z. Now tell me why using a tool that can do all that is stupid, and I'll see if you make any sense." People who can think on their feet and come up with practical solutions rather than get flustered or go into some kind of "best practices" parrot mode aren't worth a lot.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
There is irony in Google's admission that it needs the very type
of personnel for whom they have been alleged to treat shabbily,
such as Brian Reid, whose age discrimination case is on appeal:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5283653.html
As part of the suggested settlement for the Reid v. Google suit,
Google was admonished to bring about a drastic overhaul
of hiring practices biased toward creating disparate impact.
Reid's eye-opening comments are in the public Santa Clara
County case documents, as well as in John Battelle's "The Search".
(At Amazon, one would do well to "search inside the book"
[using A9 technology, not Google's!] to land on pages
223 and 233 or thereabouts.)
It was two trips from and back to a small airport in SC so the tickets weren't cheap of which Google paid for the first. I also had a nonrefundable ticket out to Google that I couldn't use because my wife had to have an unexpected surgery. Add-in the two rental cars and the lost pay from four days of work (I bill per hour), and it totaled more than $3k. The plane ticket isn't the only cost of going to a job interview.
I was pretty surprised at the abruptness of the dismissal, but if there would have been another 10 interviews before reaching "2nd round," as some say, then I'm glad I dropped out at the fourth interview. It's a bit of a shame, I think my skill set, background, and technical approach would have been very well suited to google, and helped them.
But the opportunities in this industry are endless, so life goes on :)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Sounds about right. Airfares can be quite variable. I frequently have to go to California (from Toronto) for week trips. I have to put at least USD$2K in the budget I think. Some times it's 25% than that, some times it's 25% more. And obviously no lost wages for me.