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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."
From TFA: "[Google] has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools"
Nice to know that the new hotness is still the same old and busted.
Everything works if you're trying to hire 500 people a year or 1,000
Time to sell your Google stock.
Any technology company that needs to hire more than 1,000 people a year is clearly doing something wrong.
There's a simple reason why people don't hire ambitious people: Ambitious people want to rise in the ranks and that would force YOU to work harder, or that new guy will saw off your chair's legs while you're not watching.
That sedate vegetable who's too lazy to tie his own shoelace if you don't make him, on the other hand,...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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. There's no indication that any of his strategies were crucial to winning any war the Americans were in. He sounds like a fratboy who never grew up...
I may be wrong but in all my readings about great commanders, none of the articles featured front chair legs being sawn off.
What a dick.
Actually, you can argue with the results... Ask yourself this... did Rickovers' recruitment process enable him to employ significantly higher quality candidates for the nuclear programme? If they did, then I concede that I was wrong. Would someone else running the programme have failed? What was so special about Rickover that only he could have succeeded? I don't remember reading about Chester Nimitz pulling any of this shit. Did he fail? What about Arleigh Burke? What about George Marshall? I did not say that he was a failure - merely that he was a complete asshole... It was his success in other areas of his work that enabled him to pull all of this unnecessary sadistic BS for his own personal pleasure...
How many can expect to get hired by Google? A very tiny miniscule microscopic fraction of CS and IT graduates... that's about all. For the rest of us, this is non-news.
And again, it's not like Google's methods and philosophies can be adopted by other firms. Totally useless article, waste of time, IMO.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Maybe YOU could have called THEM the first time you didn't receive your call? Would have saved everyone a lot of grief....
I had a similar experience. I received this email from a hr person speaking on behalf of Google telling me she was interested in discussing job opportunities with me. I have my CV on a website (with a note that I'm quite happy in my current job) so that's how she found me. Normally I politely decline such offers. Anyway this was Google so I decided to hear her out. It turned out she didn't actually read my CV and also did not have anything concrete to offer (i.e. something matching my CV). What she offered was this very long, open ended process of phone interviews and maybe, just maybe, I'd get hired.
Eh, no thanks I'm not that desperate, thank you very much. Hint: if you want to recruit me consider that A) I have a nice job B) You practically need to beg me to work for you rather than the other way around.
If Google wants to get the best they need to treat people a little differently. Coming in with this arrogant attitude practically guarantees that they offend people like me long before a concrete job offer is on the table. Putting dump HR processes in front of me is pretty much guaranteed to piss me off in minutes. Don't waste my time with that!
All sillyness aside, I have seen several under-qualified people snag a IT job from a "qualified" guy simply because he was bi-lingual.
right now corperations are panicking that the increasing number of spanish speaking only customers is exploding.
So they are putting everyone to the top of the pile that can speak spanish or other languages.
Personally hiring based on education is a stupid thing to do, hire based on experience and capabilities and then education if they are not experienced enough. A guy with 20 years of IT behind him is far better than some kid with a masters in EE and CS to run the IT department.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Phone for pizza.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
"The company continues to seek overqualified employees who can be promoted quickly"
Remember, boys and girls: "overqualified" is simply HR's way of saying "can be underpaid."
Or you could order in pizza. It's not rocket science - they're just looking for some tiny inkling of intellectual flexibility. Haven't got sufficient resources for the rush job in-house? Then outsource the development...
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
How interesting. Much of the experience other /. posters have had with Google's HR are very similar to what I was put through when I interviewed with IBM in the mid '80s. And the opening (I hesitate to use the term "opportunity") at IBM wasn't even permanent: it was a 6 month contract.
First, it took 3 attempts to connect for a phone interview, and there was a significant degree of consternation at IBM that I would not permit such a call during the day (while I was working at a client's office). Then followed in person interviews at their Canadian head office, during which it became obvious in a hurry that they had not read my resume or confused it with another (my degree is NOT in Engineering from U of T, and I have NEVER worked as a mainframe systems programmer). Five different people, 4 hours. The only part that was really interesting was the lunch in the IBM cafeteria, where I quickly grew to understand where the "Big" in "Big Blue" came from.
Another phone interview followed, and then, despite two follow up letters from me, I heard nothing, so I just assumed that they were not interested and did not have the courtesy to contact me to tell me so. Fine. I took another contract I was interviewing for, and forgot about them.
Four months later, I got a phone call from IBM asking me when I can start. Huh? You think I'm going to wait around for 4 months while you decide? What planet did you say you were from?
What I took away from that experience was this: when HR and the company hiring process gets seriously confused and out of control, the company suffers big time. IBM had to take a major kick in the pants before they smartened up. Until they did, they were heading for irrelevance very quickly. I'm guessing that Google might have to go through the same thing. Not for a while, because they have a strong core and strong growth. But sooner or later it will happen. Every week that passes by, they take one more step away from upstart towards mature. And in IT, mature = complacent = stagnant = doomed.
Even then, the experience sometimes doesn't tell you the whole story. At a previous job, my employer hired a programmer with a master's in CS and time at Microsoft on his resume to write device drivers. A problem that I quickly ran into was that the guy couldn't read a schematic to save his life, which meant that I (who had been writing the drivers up till then, along with juggling a hundred other things) had to take time from *my* job to write up functional specs just so he could do his thing. Coupled with his attitude that he was better than everyone else because of the degree and the Microsoft experience, it made him an almost totally useless employee IMHO.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I've never heard of Mr. Rickover so it might easily be true that he acted from the best of motives when performing his alleged stunts. But let's suppose he really was the right guy with the right plan producing the right results - if an organisation allows him to get away with this kind of stuff how does it then prevent the genuine a-holes getting away with the genuine sadism?
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
There has never been a nuclear accident on a US Naval vessel -- largely because of that asshole.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Agreed, but I'd also give kudos to the geek that has foresight enough to see that the untold wealth in stock options can buy himself a lifetime of freedom to work on whatever the hell he wants after he cashes out. :-D
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
My old company, a DoD contractor, regularly hires kids straight out of school using the carrot-and-stick payscale: they give you a job and lots of promotions, so you always feel like you are moving forward even though you are consistently 10K underpaid. After about 5 years they taper off your yearly pay increase and you plateau, again, 10K under the competition. So you either move on or accept the fact that you make pretty good money (compared to your bartending friends) at a fairly cushy job in a really good environment.
So how does this relate to you? I think you are over qualified and expensive and Google is looking for young engineers who aren't old dogs with their own bag of tricks. While that might not be smart from your point of view, it seems to be their hiring model, as it is with many companies. You're best off forging your own path, creating your own companies, and recruiting those Google guys when they become old and tired themselves.
Now I am a contractor making 6 figures and will quickly recoup that $60K I lost working at an underpaying company, which, by the way, greatly built my resume.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
That being said, would you drink water used as primary coolant from a reactor? Don't think I would... :)
"had to take time from *my* job to write up functional specs just so he could do his thing"
Newsflash: it's not your job, it's someone elses job you are being payed to do. A functional spec means that others can understand and use your stuff if you get hit by the proverbial truck. 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. I have been a developer for almost two decades and have at times been involved with custom devices, nobody has ever expected me to understand electronic diagrams much less program from them.
In other news: Just because you understand schematics does not mean you know anything about managing a software project. Your job was so successfull your employer split it in two and all you can do is bitch about it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I think you may be in the wrong place, you want http://digg.com/
Recently I was interviewing for a SRE position at Google and everything was going allright, until an interviewer asked me how to implement a singleton in Java. Then I explained the standard pattern using a static initializer and told him the so-called "double check" pattern a lot of developers use doesn't work in Java (this is well documented here). Since the interviewer didn't have a clue about that problem, he spent some 15 minutes fighting my point, and in the end of the interview he even said the correct way of implementing it is to use a double check, although I have explained him 10 times the Java memory model makes that construct break. I even told him to search for "java singleton problem" in Google to understand what I told him, but maybe this was a bad idea, he seemed to be already in a bad mood in the beggining of the interview, this made him even more poignant. Guess what? They sent me the "raw dismiss letter" after that interview...
Then here goes my advice for you if you're going to apply for google: pray for luck! If you get a *single* dumb interviewer in your way, you'll be out. It's not a fair process, they don't care about giving feedback for you promptly (expect at least 1 week to have feedback after any iteration with them), and sometimes the interviewers don't know exactly what they are talking about. Be warned.
The real question is, if I went to Wharton, Kellog, HU, SU, Yale, etc....why would I want to work at Google? If I went to MIT I would want to compete against Google. They should focus on getting the best employee they can, while they can, regardless of education. Google is at it's peak right now. The employees should enjoy it. Eventually, they are going to enter the Consumer Support game and they will also have to start selling into Corporations and then Small/medium sized businesses. When that happens they are going to be hiring from ITT and every other vocational school there is. Companies like MSFT, IBM, ACN, HP et al are getting the large numbers of "above the mean" kids. They might not be getting the top 1% but they don't need to. History repeats itself and Google will make the same mistake of arrogance these other companies have made.
...then why are they working for someone else? The answer is that they are not smart, only arrogant and self-involved. Anyone who has worked for a small businessman knows that the key is to make your employee think they are brilliant just up to but not crossing the "so brilliant, you could leave". The result is a sucker who will be a money making commodity. That is all that is going on here.
I can't believe the entire readership of slashdot fell for it.