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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."
I worked in HR for a while, and the boss there - someone I regard highly - had a saying: "Problems aren't encountered, they're recruited". By that token, the converse is also true. If you actively seek people who expect to do better things (not just want to), they probably will, and so will your company.
Word to the wise.
Meta will eat itself
The results? Zero persons hired. And we are all card-carrying, Linux-using, OpenBSD-loving, certified nerds. Heck, just check my Journal if you don't believe me (Last entry: "How to compile gcc-4.1.1 on Solaris 8").
(All the names have been changed to protect the guilty, of course)
The moral of the story: it's tough kids. It's even worse than that. It's double-extra tough, with a heaping plate of steaming geekiness on the side. Is it worth it? Hey, don't ask me, I don't know. What I know is that we all now have great jobs, that are well paid, and did not take all this insanity to get. But these jobs are not 'cool' Google jobs, of course. YMMV.
Ask me again in a couple of years, when I try to get another job at the Googleplex...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
> who couldn't afford anything more than Bumfsck Community College
They're doing worse than discriminating against those without wealthy parents that can afford the expensive out of state top schools. They're interviewing people with degrees from lesser schools with no intent on hiring them. My undergrad degree is in electrical engineering and my masters is in computer engineering both from Clemson. At the time, Clemson was less than $500/semester which was all I could possibly afford. When I interviewed with Google I got the impression that they had zero intent on hiring me no matter what happened. I was asked several times why I didn't go to a "better" school. For the job they contacted me about I wrote the top textbook on the subject, currently used at Stanford, Univ of Colorado, and GA Tech among others, so I thought I would have been treated more respectfully. They called me. I wasted over $3k in expenses out of pocket to interview with them. And no I didn't get to meet Larry Page.
Officially they said I didn't have the experience they needed. That's a load of crap. I did distributed systems over the Internet for over a decade before Google was even started. I founded the first commercial ISP in this state. I was CTO of three Internet start-ups between 1994 and 2003. All three are still in business. They're not doing great and I didn't make much money but they have survived which is more than you can say about most Internet start-ups.
They hired someone that wasn't qualified and has no experience but had a degree from Stanford. After that bad experience I sold all of my Google stock. I don't think a company can survive long-term making those type of brain-dead decisions. Thank you Google for wasting my time.
I applied for a Software Engineering position at Google in Sydney being an Australian Resident a while ago. While I wasn't successful (it was a long shot, so I wasn't too concerned), I was utterly amazed at how incompetent their HR department at Mountain View was.
:-)
;-)
The story is as below:
1) So I get the 'thank you for your interest we really want to talk to you blah blah' email from one of the people in HR, requesting a phone interview from the US to my mobile (note: I live in AU), so I give them my full, prefixed international mobile number: +614XXXXXXXX, and we arrange a time. I was to be interviewed by their head honcho of Open Source Chris DiBona.
So, I wait patiently for a call a few days later, the phone never rings.
Turns our they couldn't get the number right, or at least, didn't know how to call an Australian international mobile number.
They said they left messages on my phone, but I don't have voicemail on, the mobile phone isn't an answering machine, and it's on and in full coverage all the time...
I only find this out later that day when I emailed them requesting what happened...
2) So, we re-organised the interview (over email with their HR people), again with Chris DiBona.
There's a mess up again, and nobody calls. Again, I waited patiently with the phone, awaiting for the call, nothing happened.
3) So, we reschedule the interview AGAIN (this time, not with Chris, but another person high up the chain who will remain unnamed). They forget to call.
4) So, it's a week and a bit later, as due to the time difference, the turn-around on sorting out these stuffups takes about 2.5 days each time.
I re-schedule again, but I don't pause my life for it anymore (decided to go to work anyway). Guess what, he forgets to call, and the HR girl who tries to contact me, forgot to press the '+' in '+61' to call my international phone number, so she couldn't get to me.
5) It's almost two weeks later now, and we re-schedule again, with a lady. I finally get a call in the morning.
40 minutes of questions on B+ trees and Index tables, and I'm done.
6) I get an email a week after that saying 'thank you for your interest blah blah, but you don't fit the profile for' - This being for a different job to that of what I actually applied for.
So, understandably, by the end of this all, I really didn't give a shit if I didn't get the job, well, at least the job I applied for.
My skill set is great, my academic record 'alright', but to be honest, if a company can't pull its shit together like that, then I'm really not that interested in working for them, regardless of the inherit 'coolness' factor.
In any case, I'm doing better now that I envisage I would be if I were simply a Software Engineer at Google in any case, but that's how things in life pan out don't they
Good to know. Thanks. Saves me the effort of wasting my time talking to some snotnosed hotshot who imagines that imagining he's real smart is the same thing as actually having done it. The upside of this is of course that with a continually increasing stock price you can entice young people to work in a place with an aura of becoming something magical in the future. The downside is that when the stock price flattens out, the idea of being interviewed in a cow costume, especially when you just graduated Stanford with a 4.0 won't seem that interesting. And coupled with the fact that your employee base has no depth it will mean retention falls through the floor.
Good job Google. Good to know that we greybeards are at least as disposable to you as your Indian help desk.
And if you are from Google please ignore this posting as I have nothing to offer someone as young and brash as you are.
Sounds like a similar experience I had, and a coworker had.
In my case, the first interview was great. It was with the guy who wrote the Borland C++ Compiler, and it lasted about an hour and a half on the phone. At the end, he seemed happy, I was happy, and he even said he hoped to be able to meet me when I got there.
The second interview was with a guy on the billing team. It was strange - he kept trying to twist the answers ("Well, what happens if your database doesn't support joins?"). It was also fairly short - the questions I asked him at the end was almost longer than the intereview.
I got a call back about 4 days later saying they didn't like the way I "think". Which turns out was better than the reaction my coworker got in his 3rd interview when the guy, who was asking him to discuss proofs, asked if he was "dense".
No matter, both of us are now working for a competitor about 15 hours north and I couldn't be happier.
Random Musings
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft had a problem: They just weren't cool enough any more. For the past decade, Microsoft's hiring strategy had worked on a very simple model: "Everybody wants to work here, so we just have to decide which people we want." When Microsoft stopped being cool, they suddenly had to work a lot harder, and in a completely different way, to attract the employees they needed. In a mature company, the hiring process works both ways; the applicant tries to convince the employer to hire them, and the employer tries to convince the applicant that they would like to have the job. Just like Microsoft ten years ago, Google is in the middle of shifting from "the cool place where everybody wants to work" to being one of many options to be judged each on their individual merits.
When I visited Google in August, I spent the entire day inside a 10'x10' room answering questions. When I asked questions of my interviewers, the response was always either "I don't know anything about that, you should ask someone else", or "I'd love to talk about that, but I've got a time limit and lots of questions I need you to answer". I don't blame my interviewers for this; they did the best they could. I blame HR for setting up the process the way they did. In the end, Google was absolutely certain that they wanted to hire me, but they hadn't done anything to convince me that I wanted the job they were offering. None of my interviewers took me to their corner of the building and showed me what it was like to work at Google; none of my interviewers talked about the interesting problems they had worked on recently; in fact, none of them told me even remotely as much about Google as I had learned in 15 minutes of looking at the Google jobs website.
Was the hiring process unusually bungled in my case? Probably -- Google HR had trouble figuring out what I do (which is a separate issue for Google to fix. Note to recruiters: If you can't understand something on someone's CV, ask someone with a technical background to explain it to you. The question "do you have a Master's degree?" should never be asked of someone who has a doctorate). But even if they had decided what job I was being considered for before starting to interview me, I doubt it would have made any difference.
If you want to hire good people, be prepared to spend at least as much time showing them why they should accept your offer as you do deciding if you want to make them an offer. "We're cool" may be enough to convince some people; but the smarter people are, the less likely they are to drink Kool-Aid.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
No, you don't. In Australia the last decade or so, there has been a HUGE backlash against private (high) schools and universities. Why? Because to protect their reputation, and be able to justify raising their fees, they spoonfeed the kids.
Did you know that after first semester in Australian universities, nearly /eighty/ per cent of dropouts are from private schools, when the kids find out that they're expected to study and research for themselves, and that study and research required as a result of lectures does not mean "go to TA / tutor and ask him the answers to the questions".
Likewise, some of the private universities are risking their reputation by becoming in danger of being degree factories. Several investigations show that "international" and "full fee paying" students have passed and been graduated with lower results than other students who have been failed.
Today Google is arguably the number one place to work for in the US. You can put someone through 5 or 6 phone interviews today and ask three months later for a "2nd round" after having an onsite because there is little demand and endless supply. It becomes almost a badge for those who are there. Those around ask why it only took this person 9 interviews to get the job when it took you 11. Trust me on this I worked for the number one company for talent, it happens.
However, this position in the marketplace to shall pass and the bad habits of today will linger. There talking about now "standardizing" the interview process. What a novel concept. It only took this company five years to figure that one out. We did that in an afternoon in my own team at my former employer. I can't think why having 5000 engineers asking all different questions might not be a good thing.
Apparently nobody at Google has ever looked for a job before also from the TFA, taking two months to get back to someone after an "onsite" and to ask them for a "2nd round" interview. If I haven't heard from someone in two weeks after coming to there office, I am moving on at that point.
Finally, why are the co-founders still approving people to hire? Yes, I understand that the culture and the people you hire are important aspects of the firm. But were not talking about the first 100 employees anymore, were talking about employee 6,000 to 7,000. All this does is frustrate people inside the firm and job seekers.
This stupidity will cost and its going to cost Google shareholders about $1 billion. This is a small field and the number of talented people that Google is looking for are few. Someone is going to go through this process, get pissed off, and pull a YouTube, which Google will purchase. At that point, you will be able to put an actual value to how idiotic this process really is.
Disclaimer: No I have never interviewed with Google, nor do I plan to, but had many friends go through the process.
How about a piece about people who turned Google down? Google were desperate to hire the writer of SquashFS onto their team of geeks, offering him all sorts of incentives to scrabble aboard (this was pre-IPO too). He turned them down because he didn't feel he would be free enough to continue development of SquashFS.
Kudos to the geek who puts OSS before a cushy job at Google and untold wealth in stock options.
The only descriminating Googles does is in looking for SMART people. Is it really a surprise that smart people get into top schools , schools that have the most rigorous entry and graduacation requirements.
I graduated from a tiny little religous college in Texas that few have probably ever heard of... My degree was not even in Computer science, it was Business administration. Yet, according to my recruiter I received very high scores going through the hiring process and received a great job offer. I have been at Google for longer than 2 years now.
Google demands smart people. The will hire them wherever they can find them, regardless of school or location around the world.
Perhaps a Stanford PhD is guaranteed to be smart, but a BA/BS/MBA is a different issue. Yale gave Mr. C-average (aka, G.W. Bush) a bachelor's degree, and Harvard gave him an MBA. He did become President, so they certainly picked a winner, but that doesn't mean he is smart rather that he is very well-connected.
>Clemson is a nationally recognized research university.
Hence a PhD from there should be a good researcher. However, Clemson is a public university with 12,000 undergrads and as such the quality of a BA/BS is going to be extremely varied (don't know if the Clemson poster had a BS, MS or PhD). Even Berkeley has sub-par students, and that is despite being the top public university in a state of over 30 million people (vs. only 4 million in South Carolina). I previously taught at Georgia Tech (another big public nationally recognized research university) and found that the top undergrads there were as good as anyone I taught while a grad student at Yale, but on average (although certainly not always) the Yale undergrads were better students.
I've had a similar experience to what many posted here. I had a phone interview with a fairly qualified technical manager who wanted me to debug Javascript over the phone from a website she had given me. Ok, no problem. Then she starts asking me about technologies and languages that 1) aren't on my resume at all, and 2) have nothing to do with the job I'm applying for. After stating these facts many times, she came back with "oh we're looking to hire you for a different job, not that one." Uh....considering I had none of the qualifications of what she was actually talking to me about and all of the qualifications of the job which I had initially applied for, I cut the conversation short. Then a few months later my husband got an email from a Google recruiter (we were able to verify the email address, name, and the fact that it really was sent from a Google Recruiter) that basically said: "John, we're hiring. You interested?" The response he sent back was: "Dave, no".
Brin = University of Maryland graduate
Page = University of Michigan graduate
These fools working at Google need to learn a thing or two about probability. The Intelligence distribution relative to the mean (measured by I.Q.) at Ivy League schools is nearly identical to that of state schools. Key phrase: relative to the mean. The only difference between the population in an Ivy and the population of (insert state school) is that the ivy's population has a higher average intelligence. What does this mean? There is a huge population of very bright individuals within the state university population that are just as smart or smarter than the average ivy leaguer. Brin and Page are an obvious example of this!
Why do Brin and Page play it up as if they're hot-shot Stanford grads? Do they not remember their roots in STATE UNIVERSITY? I've interviewed there myself and let me tell you: there is a subset of people working at Google that graduated from top schools and think they're the smartest and that nobody from a lesser school is worthy of working with them. If you interview with one of these people be very careful and be on your best.
I interviewed at Google, and the first person (kid) to interview me had the juevos to ask me "you know you're kinda of old to work here. You really want to work for kids?". I thought long and hard about filing suit... but my alzheimers caused me to forget about it...
Yep, I know which one this was. I apologize for the mixup. I did route you to someone else after that because I was heading out of town and honestly I thought I wasn't the right person to interview you.
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
On the other hand, I do have 10 years professional experience as a programmer in the USA at such high-profile companies as Computer Associates, Netscape Communications, America-Online, and Sun Microsystems, where I have been extremely successful, always one of the top-rated employees everywhere. I have actually been programming for 18 years, and turned 30 last june. I don't actually feel young anymore, but I would think I would still fit well with the corporate culture of Google. I bought a house in Silicon Valley at 21, I have been making 6 figures since 2000, and my career continued to flourish even during the dot-com bust.
However, my lack of degree made me a complete non-starter at Google. They wouldn't even schedule me for an interview. At least they didn't waste much of my time !
But the emails and calls from Google recruiters keep coming. This very morning, I got an email from another one about a possible 3 months temporary position as a software QA. I really went off on them about how mismatched that was for me, and told them to delete my resume from their database, since I just accepted a new job, at conditions sufficiently advantageous to guarantee a comfortable early retirement.
Google's stupidity in hiring practices was their loss, IMNSHO.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog