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Google Respins Its Hiring Process For World Class Employees
An anonymous reader writes "Maybe you've been intrigued about working at Google (video), but unfortunately you slept through some of those economics classes way back in college. And you wouldn't know how to begin figuring out how many fish there are in the Great Lakes. Relax; Google has decided that GPAs and test scores are pretty much useless for evaluating candidates, except (as a weak indicator) for fresh college graduates. And they've apparently retired brain teasers as an interview screening device (though that's up for debate). SVP Laszlo Beck admitted to the New York Times that an internal evaluation of the effectiveness of its interview process produced sobering results: 'We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It's a complete random mess.' This sounds similar to criticism of Google's hiring process occasionally levied by outsiders. Beck says Google also isn't convinced of the efficacy of big data in judging the merits of employees either for individual contributor or leadership roles, although they haven't given up on it either."
This has led TechCrunch to declare that the technical interview will soon be dead.
It was and has been a PR move for all along, with people praising all that HR innovation and crap, in the end? It's all bullshit and no one has the slightest idea of what they are doing, would like to rub this one on the face of some writers who can only spit google this, google that, look it's so much innovation science!
Like useing water tanks to get the weight of a airplane? or other over the top ideas?
Also some the questions are dumb or can just lead to a long line of followup questions to get more info.
Also some of the questions can have more then one way to answer or be open to ideas that can be very differnt from each other.
GPAs and test scores in schools should be changed.
Maybe have a split GPA one GPA for core classes one for gen EDUS's and one for the filler / non core classes or make them pass / fail.
also get rid of testes the people who are good at test cramming can master.
I've never applied to Google because I'd heard enough about the interview process to realize it was mostly an unintentional way of asking if you're a recent graduate with a mind uncluttered by practical on-the-job knowledge, so you can focus on algorithms and brainteasers that have very few real world applications (and none in the job you're applying for.)
Google has decided that GPAs and test scores are pretty much useless for evaluating candidates...
Doesn't this lead one to believe in grade inflation at universities? If everyone scores from 3.7 to 3.98, how do you tease apart who really did well.
Almost none of the questions I've seen have provided enough information to get past the "it depends" stage. That they make candidates make wild-assed-guesses and then try to justify them is possibly a good way to test for poor managerial qualities, but the answers never have the level of explanation that the real life answers have. The days when a back-of-the envelope calculation is enough are long gone (and probably never existed int he real world anyway). So it's good to see a major employer rejecting them. Shame it didn't happen 20 years ago/
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
also get rid of testes the people who are good at test cramming can master.
I truly hope you did not mean what you wrote.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"Have you ever built something that worked, show me, explain it." IMHO that is key to successfully hiring developers.
Equally important, and admittedly a little strange to some, it to ask about their personal programming projects. Nothing work related, nothing school related, just things that they sat down and programmed motivated by their own personal needs or curiosity. If a person can not offer "something" a warning bell is going off. I don't care how small, trivial, silly, etc the personal project is. I mostly want to see that personal projects exist. To me they are an indicator that the interviewee is someone who has a genuine interest in programming, that they are not merely someone who got a degree because a parent or guidance counselor told them it was a good career path.
But not because Google went about it wrong and screwed up its hiring process.
I've been now through a few hiring processes, have sat on Interviews, decision committees. And while I like to think that my Interviews and candidate ratings were spot-on (I correctly predicted one failure and one early resignation), I'm pretty sure that's just skewed by the small sample size. What I do know is that I went through all kinds of approaches, both as an interviewer and an interviewee. I've done brainteasers, role-playing, decision explanations, code walkthroughs, resume deep-dives, online candidate research, just shooting the breeze, and more. And I haven't found a single thing that strongly correlates with acing the interview or hiring a good worker. Resumes can lie (sometimes subtly), and you'll never find out without hiring a private investigator. Role-playing can confuse people, especially if they're trying to figure out what you're looking for. Brain teasers can be memorized, shooting the breeze can lead to unreasonable judgments (positive or negative), interviewers and interviewees can have a bad day, the other person doesn't like your first name, and a million other things.
Especially when you start talking 10s of thousands of interviews, you're actually looking at so much data, so many influencing variables that I doubt you can find one common variable that stands out from the rest. What I'm concerned about (and that comes partially from being married to someone in HR) is that there is still a drive to find the one process that will automate the hiring process. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist. Well, let me walk that back a tiny bit: there's one thing that will work better than anything else: have the interview done by the best people you have, have them take it seriously, and spend some time on it. But it takes time, is fuzzy, and is entirely reliant on managers knowing who their best people are.
I'm glad to see that Google doesn't think Big Data is the answer to everything. I just hope that this percolates through to the rest of the HR universe. There's much too much of a drive to automate hiring, like performance reviews and firing has been.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I have walked out of job interviews where they asked nothing but puzzles. I solve technical challenges and write code. If you really have trouble determining how many toasters you can use to cook 50 pancakes, guess what. I am not the right person for you. If you are looking for someone who can code their ass off, I am the right person.
I have interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years. I have been the hiring manager a few times and never once pulled the puzzle bullshit. I have found the best indicator in the world is to just casually bullshit about technology. You can very quickly find someones strengths, weaknesses and if they are full of it. In a casual chat, people let their guard down and you get a look in.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
As in, you had to go through a day long gauntlet of interviews asking irrelevant questions to get the gig. Surprise, they didn't get the best candidates that way!
I like TechCrunch's suggestions, as they closely mirror what the Google HR guy is implying, except for one thing:
"Finally, if they’ve gotten this far, give them an audition project. Something relatively bite-sized, self-contained, and off-critical-path, but a real project, one that will actually ship if successful."
It isn't as if I couldn't be fired on the spot in the first 3 to 6 months at any permanent job- there is this thing called being a new hire. If I had someone tell me they were going to provisionally hire me and rate my progress based on a project, fine. If they told me I would be a temp until the work is completed, I would then inform them that they will need to pay me at my contract rate until I am perm- otherwise, they are just getting me at a lower rate for contract work, and that is sketchy behavior at best.
I've just gone through interviews at Google and Apple.
At Google, I was asked mainly theoretical questions - big-O, maths/stats, etc. And one "real" architecture/design question at the end. There were 5 interviewers and maybe 7 questions, sometimes 2 per interviewer but usually just 1 that lasted the whole hour. According to my recruiter before the decision, it was maybe 50/50 that I'd get an offer, and I did very well on the real-system design question (by inference, not so well on the others :). I didn't get the job.
At Apple, I had a seven-hour interview with seven interviewers. There were many many questions, far too many to easily remember categories, but they were all focussed on things I might end up doing, or problems that I might end up encountering. I got the job. I guess I do better with "real world" issues than the "consider two sets of numbers, one is ... the other is ...) type.
I have the self-confidence^W^W arrogance to believe I'm an asset to pretty much any company out there, but interview processes are nothing more than a gamble. Sure you can weed out the obvious under-qualified applicants, but frankly (unless the candidate is lying, and in the US that's a real no-no, in the UK padding your CV seems to be sort of expected...) that sort of candidate ought to have been pre-vetoed by the recruiter before getting to the interview.
I've yet to see the interview that guarantees a good candidate will do well. It's all about preparation: can you implement quicksort or mergesort right now, without looking it up ? The algorithm takes about 20 lines of code... Some interviews will require you to have knowledge like that; others are more concerned with how you collaborate with other candidates; still others are concerned with your code quality (I've seen a co-interviewer downmark a candidate for missing a ; at the end of a coding line. I wasn't impressed ... by the co-interviewer. But that's another story); still others are ... you get my point. Whether you do well or not can depend more on the cross-intersectional area of the interviewers style and your own credo than any knowledge you may or may not have.
So go in there expecting to be surprised, prepare what you can, be prepared to do wacky things to please "the man" interviewing you. For a good candidate, over a large number of interviews, you'll do well. The problem is that we often want a specific job, and we get depressed by the first dozen or so failed interviews. There's nothing more you can do than pick yourself up and try again. It's instructive to note that second-interviews at companies often go better than first-interviews, possibly because you're forewarned about the style a bit more, and therefore a bit better prepared...
Physicists get Hadrons!
If only they could figure out how to hire HR people who aren't so f---ing stupid, maybe they could come up with a decent process. The zero relationship thing doesn't surprise me at all. I thought the brain teasers as an interview sounded like one of the dumbest ideas ever.
Maybe they could test people on their problem solving abilities or even on skills related to their jobs?
It's nice to see a large company try to objectively evaluate its hiring process and express some self doubt. All to often the hiring process at a company is assumed to be good because the company is successful, which is an obvious fallacy since many factors contribute to a company's success. In fact I wouldn't hire anyone who didn't immediately question such an assumption :)
All too often the hiring process at a company, or the admissions process at a university, is treated as though it were created with some magical special sauce, when in fact it does little more than reinforce some (often unstated) prejudices. It's especially troubling coming from organizations that supposedly value rational and scientific analysis.
I think before you start giving interviewing advice to corporations, you might want to:
* learn how to spell
* learn grammar rules
* learn capitalization rules
* learn how to organize your thoughts
You have two posts, and I'm unsure what either one is getting at, beyond "test scores are bad" and "interview questions are bad".
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The IT has a systemic culture that expects new hires to know everything on the first day. If you only select the people who meet your immediate needs then you will probably find that you will need to spend more effort (free lunches, trips to museums, volleyball days, etc) to keep your employees motivated in the long term. My grandfather was hired into a company where he worked his whole life. He loved his company because they respected him as a person and a hard worker, not because of what he could provide the company today.
For Google interviews the answer to "run of the mill" brain teasers should be "Hang on while I Google it" ;).
Google should be hiring people to answer questions Google can't answer.
More importantly Google should also be hiring people who ask the right questions. It often doesn't matter if they don't know the answers yet.
And my follow-up question would be: how would you go about finding out? Oh, here's my laptop. Knock yourself out.
Brainteasers for me were never about someone getting the answer right, it's how they work through a problem where they don't know the answer. Yours is a perfectly good answer, and leaves plenty of space to explore how you go about your research. To me, that's far more valuable than someone who has memorized the answer to a brain teaser.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Might also explain projects with no benefit. As long as their employees like the manager, everything's cool.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
When I clicked through to RTFA, I found that the posts all date from 2009, and the article itself is dated 10/29/09. So maybe this is old news, folks?
Do they have some objective job performance metrics that the rest of the world seems to have missed?
GPAs are sometimes ignored by corporations. They often waive their official GPA requirements if you worked in the field while earning your degree. 25-30 hours a week as a programmer while going to college full time and most corps won't care whether your GPA was 2.5 or 3.5 when applying for a development job.
Everyone heard how bullshit their interview process was and skipped.
Supposedly brain teasers are used to figure out how you think about problems. Of course, when some candidates know the answers coming in -- or are familiar with that type of brain teaser, despite having no application to the job they do -- they tend to think about the problem better than people who don't.
I have colleagues and friends who've gone through Google hiring in the last 2 years. I've seen excellent personnel whom I've recommended not get the interview for 3 months, finally be interviewed because it turned out they were still looking to upgrade their position, and finally given job offers _over one month_ after the interview. Every single one of them found another role in the meantime, including promotions in their old company as new budgets were made to include a new position for them. The people who are still available after such a lengthy process are those who've effectively paid aa quite large Google hiring tax, of either weeks unemployed or of months at a lower salary.. While Google pays well, they don't pay well enough for people to pay such a task on the mere _hope_ of getting the Google role.
I've also seen some excellent personnel rejected because they applied for a specific role, which had requirements not in the job description and for which they were not made an offer. They were then unable to apply their existing interview results for roles which better suited their skills and which were not published as available when they applied to Google. They had to start over from the beginning. Coupled with the long hiring time for Google, and these personnel were long gone by the time they were made an offer or even interviewed for the second role.
Not Beck.
The days when a back-of-the envelope calculation is enough are long gone (and probably never existed int he real world anyway).
Very much disagree on the lack of back-of-the-envelope calculations. von Braun and co. solved some of the hardest problems of Satern V development with paper napkins. I use quick calculations and engineering judgement all the time, and hire folks who are good at them too. In fact, we often spend far too much effort doing excessive studies when a few minutes of napkin math would give you the 80% answer. However, being able to figure out brain teasers and being able to quickly perform sound engineering judgements in a real work environment are two very different things.
"Let me explain to you the kind of man a Google employee is. He's a man who knows that when you put another man's cock in your mouth, you make a pact. A bond that cannot be broken. He's a man so dedicated that he will get down on his knees and put that cock right in his mouth. "
I completely agree and would take it further and say that a lot of what gets into great universities in the first place are just exemplars people who are just personally ambitious with a drive to succeed (as opposed to curious or broadminded or interested in contributing to society in a constructive way) and rather cut throat. Which explains the behavior of a lot of academic departments.
This is far far bigger news than Cheney's "deficits don't matter' . For one, it's true. For another, someone credible with some skin in the game and a need to be right is saying it. It should get more airplay. The news is focusing in on the retiring of Google Brainteasers. That's not the headline. Here's the headline:
GPAs don't matter.
GPAs don't matter.
and for the curious (and my enemies) I had an A minus GPA.
Actually dismissing a question as stupid can work too. I was once asked a bunch of questions regarding the performance of a half dozen sorting algorithms, I recalled the details of only a couple. My answer: "Sorry, its been years since my data structures and algorithms exam. I bought the Knuth books so I can look up this stuff rather than have to memorize it."
I view interviews as two way. I'm evaluating the company. For example if the "senior engineer" giving me the above test doesn't know who Knuth is I probably don't want to work there. He did, but he pointed out my unconventional answer to the manager of the team. A person with a business background not a technical background. This manager asked what "Knuth" was and I explained. He then got a big smile, he loved my answer. A few days later I got a job offer. I worked there for four years, he was a suit, but he was a good one. He shielded us from as much BS as he could and he trusted and generally accepted our technical recommendation even when he personally had doubts.
apparently not one of the questions you want to ask?
If you know what you're looking for, you don't even really need a brain teaser. The old design-a-trivial-function along with some basic questions about data structures or design patterns will weed out most of the really bad candidates. Ten seconds into "design a function on the whiteboard," I already know if it's going to go badly or not. If they're just crapping code onto the whiteboard, it's going badly. In ten seconds I've pulled back the veil of all the buzz words they used to get through HR to the interview and can see exactly how they're going to work under pressure. I'll take a high school dropout who actually takes the time to make sure he understands the question and shows me he can design a solution over a PhD who tries to BFI his way through.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Most corporations don't care about GPA, especially once you've got a few years of experience under your belt. Although I did send a CV for a research programmer position at a scientific research company on the east coast. They're first contact with me was to send me a form asking for everything going back to my high school GPA, SAT scores, activities, and college transcripts (undergrad and graduate). This happened about 4-5 years AFTER I received my PHD, with several years of post-graduate research experience. Of course, the initial job ad said they were looking for, "outstanding scientists with world class credentials", so I should've interpreted the use of that language to mean that they were a tad pretentious.
For Google interviews the answer to "run of the mill" brain teasers should be "Hang on while I Google it" ;).
And if they say no, ask them if it's better to use Bing instead.
When I clicked through to RTFA, I found that the posts all date from 2009, and the article itself is dated 10/29/09. So maybe this is old news, folks?
The NYT interview with Laszlo Bock is from June 19, 2013. 3 days ago.
So...what's old news, again?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do you want me to mansplain or do you want me to actually solve real problems? Your choice google.
They're first contact with me . . .
"They're" should say "Their". I'm usually careful about this sort of thing. D'oh!
... not some paid actors: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/students/
over and over you see in the tech industry these guys who work in fucking garages and could never make it through these bullshit processes, people like Woz, Jobs, Gates, Brin, Page, etc. none of those people would have been hired if they went through this shit.
it really begs the question. why even bother working for one of these bizarro bureaucratic shit holes? google is not a fucking good company, its a massive shit pile of bureaucratic horse pucky.
you know who said "NO" to the NSL letters from the FBI ? a little piss-ant ISP.
you know who said "YES SIR" ? Google. Thats your fucking innovation. Fucking google.
Fuck google. Fuck apple. Fuck microsoft.
Imagine all the time they waste on this HR bullshit that could be spent building stuff.
Start your own fucking company. These corporate douches can all eat shit.
I was all prepared to snark with, "Great, without technical questions, now hiring will be based on personal acquaintances only, resulting in unintended disadvantages to minorities and groups not typically represented in the technical work force." Sadly, though, I read the techcrunch.com piece linked in the Slashdot summary, and they not only outline a great alternative hiring process, they specifically caution against homogeneity.
Techcrunch.com's "discuss their past projects" reminds me of the best interview question I've ever learned. I learned it by being on the receiving end of a Microsoft interview 15-20 years ago. Every time I made a bold claim of my capabilities, the phone interviewer simply responded with, "can you give me an example of that?" Now when I interview people that I'm hiring, it's my number one question. I use that line over and over again, on every interview I conduct.
The bigger story is that the current model of HR mass screening resumes by who-knows-what criteria (keywords I guess?) is completely broken. Is there evidence that companies know how to hire effectively? Are there any companies that do it right? Hell, nepotism has more going for it than the tech interview.
as long as the problems are realist or at least in the field asking IT / software people about medical questions is bad. or even out of field tick questions.
Stuff like "If you could be any superhero" seems to boarder on non professional questions or turning into a pop culture quiz.
also if asked by some who needs a answer and you have a lot of follow up questions it can get lost in the paper work.
We've had similar experiences here. The best advice I can offer was already offered by Sal Kahn recently being interviewed by the president of MIT. Interested? Go find it on youtube.
I suppose it's news that the internal study found no correlation between interview scores and job performance, but everyone at Google recognizes that getting hired is a crapshoot. Not totally random, of course; there are plenty of candidates who simply aren't going to get hired, ever, because they don't have what it takes. But (I'm speaking of engineers here, dunno about other areas), everyone knows that candidates who are of the caliber Google seeks may or may not pass the interview process, and whether or not they do is pretty much a toss of the dice. I've heard rumors of a an internal study that took successful Google engineers and put them through the interview and hiring process, obscuring their employee status... and about half of them were "re-hired".
Also, as McDowell's blog post says, Google has always instructed interviewers not to use "brainteaser" questions. It probably does still happen once in a while -- indeed one of my interviewers asked me a "bonus" question, after I'd already demolished his design/coding problem, which arguably falls into that category (I failed to answer it) -- but they're doing it wrong and the hiring committee will let them know it.
Anyway, so if Google's process has such random results, why do they continue to use it? Simple: because nobody has found a better way. And the study results mentioned are a little misleading if you don't understand them in context: The study was of tens of thousands of interviews and their correlation with the performance of people who were hired. And nearly all of the people who are hired by Google go on to have successful careers at Google. What the study shows is that the degree of success is not correlated with the strength of the hiring recommendations.
On the other hand, as someone who came to Google with 20+ years of industry experience already behind him as a basis for comparison, I'll tell you one thing about the Google hiring process: It hires good people. It also fails to hire a lot of good people, but there are vanishingly few plodders or obstructionists around. In the 2.5 years I've worked for Google I have worked with well over 100 engineers (my work tends to touch lots of teams), and I've met one, maybe two, who weren't bright, highly competent and very effective, and even those one or two would be good-performers most places. That is very different from my prior experience, and I worked with a lot of high-profile companies.
As another data point, at every one of my prior employers I was something of a star, commonly called a "genius" and similar in performance reviews. At Google... I'm merely competent, perhaps a bit below average. Many of my colleagues are much smarter than me, and the superstars at Google are absolutely brilliant. One woman in particular who I've worked with quite a bit is always at least four steps ahead of me. She constantly says things that I think are stupid... until I have time to catch up with her thought process. She also talks faster than anyone I've ever met, in an attempt to try to keep up with her brain, I think. Talking to her is exhausting, but exhilarating. I've taken to structuring my conversations with her so they are always interrupted after no more than five minutes because that's about all I can take before I need to go process for a while. My consolation is that I notice many other people interact with her in the same way. Overall, my experience of Google employees that they're all smart, energetic and talented, with a strong leavening of the truly brilliant, and that perception extends even outside of engineering. Hell, our building facilities manager is really sharp.
What I experience of my colleagues is exactly what Google aims to achieve: since there's no known way to make accurate hiring decisions, the interview process aims primarily to filter out candidates who aren't fairly outstanding. In the process, it excludes a lot of really talented people, but it's very effective at excluding basically all of the poor to mediocre candidates.
I'm just glad the dice went my way when I interviewed.
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ya racist fool
"outstanding scientists with world class credentials"
you are
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
They often waive their official GPA requirements if you worked in the field while earning your degree. 25-30 hours a week as a programmer while going to college full time and most corps won't care whether your GPA was 2.5 or 3.5 when applying for a development job.
Not a bad approach. Several years into my BS I switched from full-time student to full-time employment and part-time student. My grades went down, but I actually learned more in my classes because I saw the applications. It also cured me of the suspicion that classes only taught ivory tower nonsense.
In fact, we often spend far too much effort doing excessive studies when a few minutes of napkin math would give you the 80% answer.
PLEASE tell me you didn't work on challenger...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I work on the pre-hiring screening tool validations at Evolv (full disclosure: Lazslo sits on Evolv's board). I am not at all surprised that silly tech interview questions predict next to nothing. What I can tell you is that validated personality and work-style questions absolutely do predict success among entry-level workers (and if you do it right, professional individual contributors). Like they touch on in the interview, a combination of a structured behavioral interview plus some simple personality screening can be a great screening tool, but you have to balance the raw "big data" results with practical, legal, and applicant experience concerns.
Yeah,. . . I just committed a Palin,. . . Oops! ;-)
Let us not forget that judging how well someone is doing at their job is not necessarily any easier than judging how well they would do from an interview.
Who knows where the randomness comes from. Maybe they are pretty bad at both categories, but also are not horrible. Maybe their style of interview is as good or better than most, but they are just shitty at judging on the job performance.
Lets just not pretend that they are 100% accurate at measuring everything except for interviewee skill.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The issue is that the reduced funding for schools (both K-12 and college) has resulted in corruption in the degree. The schools cannot properly evaluate much less teach the concepts to students. There is a large amount of "don't let anyone fail" that puts pressure to simply let those that can't get though school or don't try hard enough to pass anyways. Someone that is getting a degree in the department I work for (at a university) will most likely get a PhD despite not really even being qualified for a BS. Why? His family is rich and is willing to fund grants.
i think i'd rather blow my fucking brains out than spend any appreciable amount of time with a bunch of stuck up, self satisified mutual dick sucking circle jerk asswipes that would post something so fucking pretentiously awful as what you just posted here.
Google didn't miss that variable. The study was an analysis of how interview scores correlated with job performance, not how well interview scores correlated with whether or not the candidate was a good hire. An employee who does a decent job, getting acceptable but not outstanding performance reviews is still a good hire, whether interview scores were marginal or outstanding. Some small fraction of hires turn out to have been mistakes, of course, but at Google that percentage is quite small, which indicates that the interview process does a reasonably good job of avoiding false positives. It just doesn't do much more than that.
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One of the best, and most grueling interviews, I went on - and was offered the job - was a mix of "get to know you" conversations, paired with 3 fairly tough technical interviews (for a release/devops type of role, in NY)
First technical interview: the guy came in, wrote a line of mocked-up logging data on the board, in the format his company uses internally. Proceeded to ask me to 'code' on the whiteboard a function that would parse that line of data, and do a couple calculations based on it, in the language or pseudo-language of my choice. What I wrote was a bastardized mix of python and java, but he understood where I was going. He then started drilling deeper - asking what changes I'd make if I had to scale my log parser up to handle tens or hundreds of millions of lines like that a day - where would I think bottlenecks would come up, how I'd approach removing them, etc. Tough, relevant, and actually interesting questions.
Second technical interview: A discussion of how I'd approach coding an api for use by other developers on the team - how I'd approach it for a couple "uninteresting" functions, what considerations I'd make, and then we launched into a pretty rigorous review of compilers, phases of compilation, linking, etc. on Linux and the JVM. Again - relevant to the role, and the guy asked some hard, open-ended questions.
Third technical interview: A database guy came in and asked me to basically "design a database for something like twitter" on the board - again, pseudo-language, and then we talked about how I'd scale up the system to handle hundreds of millions of transactions a day, and where the bottlenecks would arise, and how those bottlenecks might change my original design approach.
I got an offer, but I ended up turning it down - we didn't see eye to eye on money, and given that they were asking me to relocate to an expensive urban area from my cushy suburban home, compensation was pretty important. But that interview sticks in my memory as absolutely one of the most interesting, relevant, and "hard" interviews I've ever been on - also one of the more "fun" interviews.
Contrast that with an interview with a certain fruit-flavored company headquartered in Cupertino, a few months later: one of the most bizarre interviews I've sat through - only met with 2 pairs of engineers the whole day, spending exactly 90 minutes with them. None of the interviewers asked me any "hard" or in-depth technical questions, instead focusing on little short "what's this do, what's that do?" questions, and then trying to impress me with how smart they were by asking me technical "brain teasers."
One of them: "Assume you just ran "chmod 444 /bin/chmod - how do you recover?!" My answer: "I copy chmod from another system running the same binary, preserving permissions, and use that version to fix permissions on the local chmod, then delete the copied chmod file." The response, "Well sure, you could do that. But we're looking for something more." And they proceeded to arbitrarily shut down every possible solution I came up with, and ask me "and then?"
"write a short c program to manipulate the file modes directly."
"Oh but you don't have a compiler. What then?"
"Use any of the scripting languages on the system to do the same thing."
"Oh, there's no scripting languages installed. What then?"
"Copy the chmod file over another, executable file, and run it that way, then put the system back in shape afterwards."
"Oh, but what if you didn't have any executable files you could overwrite?"
It was fucking annoying, and I'm not entirely sure it wasn't designed specifically to push my buttons and piss me off (it succeeded). When I spoke with the recruiter (who told me they were going to "keep looking for other candidates"), she actually told me "the main concern from the engineers was that you seemed like you might get frustrated easily, and they're a very low key, relaxed sort of group." I patiently explained to her that when you bring a
...started with a phone interview a couple of years back (2006 maybe?). I was asked some run-of-the-mill questions, then the bombshell: An obscure question about an obscure RFC that had to do with big integer number representations. I told the interviewer that I really didn't know, and would she like me to wing an answer or get back to her on it? She told me to wing an answer. So I did. Later, I looked up the RFC and saw that I was more wrong than right.
Strangely, they offered to fly me to Mountain View for a second interview. Not so strangely, I declined. And I've never regretted the decision.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If GPAs are not an indicator but Google thought they where then their sample should show a negative correlation. i.e. people who were hired with low GPAs against the policy must have had something going for them?
Check your facts. Google is pretty much the only large company challenging those letters: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+challenges+national+security+letters
For Google interviews the answer to "run of the mill" brain teasers should be "Hang on while I Google it" ;).
And if they say no, ask them if it's better to use Bing instead.
Don't Bing the interview.
If you can't beat 'em, start a company that will become them...? Because that's just what we need more of, more evil companies...
If you're going on a fist-in-the-air rant, do it proper and scream for an entirely new economic system. Preferably one that doesn't allow corruption, prevents mindless entities (like governments and corporations and other organizations) from having any sort of power, and that is focused on the betterment of humanity.
Bonus points if you mention nano-tech and the glowing golden hope of a post-scarcity utopia where no one has to labor because robots and 3D printers do it all for us.
Well, you were willing to tease meaning out of his gibberish, and you figured out the main thrust of his thought. You're obviously an engineer, he's clearly an executive.
Brin and Page might have to brush up on their programming skills a bit to pass a Google interview but, yes, they're definitely capable of doing it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Thank god. its about time. Its a totally useless exercise to do interviews like that. Much like 'final exams' all it really does is test your ability to take tests.
What is a respin? My cache doesn't have a hit for this word. I pull up things like Teddy Respin, the Respin Cloud City, respite, and other words. But respin isn't in my brain anywhere.
M-W is no good: "To view the definition of respin, activate your Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary FREE TRIAL now!"
http://askville.amazon.com/respin/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=651119
"It means that changes to a software/hardware product are being prepared before the product is released."
Once back in 2005 a friend of mine got me interested applying for a job for Google. I'm long time networking, network management and (*nix) sysadmin guy, 20 years under my belt by that time. I'm not really a programmer nor developer, but fairly strong programming (I've written C for *BSD, Linux and before those to some Unix system utilities and few small kernel drivers for linux long time ago, shell and perl, some python etc. no problem I can handle it.), and problem solver with capability to work as technical lead also (done that for a large U.S based telecom systems provider few years as a contractor).
The key interests in that position was not about development, but systems performance and availability. Anyway, I was interviewed 4 times 45-50 minutes each time over the phone by different people at each stage, each at end saying they approve my skills. Before last interview I was told by HR guy that I'm right top of the interviewed this far they want to hire. That was very nice to hear :) But then last interview I was interviewed by a polish guy who is the team leader. During the interview I understood that I've got about 10 years more and above all more deep experience of the area of what we were talking. Over the course of conversation I understood that the guy just did not want to hire me for some reason I did not understand at that time. He was simply asking more and more detailed questions about apache module configurations and seemingly wanted just to find a spot where I failed to answer correctly or the way he wanted to have answered. I tried to answer my best but at some point I just said that there is no point trying to remember these details by heart as you can check them up from documentation whenever there is a need. Then he got his point where he could write in his papers that interviewed did not know and he picked another similar question. His modus operandi was quite obvious, he wanted to hire someone else and definitely did everything he could to get there.
OK, the interview was over and I was called back from Google HR next day. I was told that unfortunately they do not hire me this time, but asked that please apply again for some other job opening. I asked that would he be so kind and tell me who they hired. He said that he couldn't tell me details. I asked politely that whether the hired guy was also same nationality as the interviewer, which he replied just "yes". I told to HR guy quite frankly that I've got to consider first if I'm going to waste my time more on Google interviews.
The guy doing the interview was newly selected group leader and wanted to have his countrymen hired and very likely he also was afraid that I could challenge his position at some point as I certainly had more experience than him. As he introduced himself in the beginning I knew he had at most 7-8 years experience in that field compared to my 20 years.
Right, then about three years after that I was contacted by Google and some guy which name I can't recall any more told me over the phone that he's after the "cold cases", figuring out why a guy like me hasn't applied again. He asked my CV again because he thought it would be appropriate. Right I did update it, told that I'm not really interested any more talking about moving to an other country unless there is really special they can offer. He wanted to call me in the evening and we had a nice chat almost one hour about many things I've done before the 2005 and since then. He wanted to know if I'm with the ~2% of the best sysadmins of the world they try to hire. I don't know what he thought at the end of conversation, but I just told that I hardly apply any more as I'm not really interested at that stage (48 years old) to start over once again in new country. What Google had to offer was too little and too late for me.
I think it may be that Google tries hard to hire the best people, there is nothing wrong in pursuing that. But there is a great threat lurking right there each large enterprise. The kind of which Nokia also fell:
* The company can still do quite well even when they hire few incompetent people, but once the incompetent gets to hire more of their kind the company is in great danger. And unless they figure it out soon enough then are doomed.
In an ideal world you'd be right, but in the real world the experiments you advocate aren't practical.
And I have to say it's a bunch of hogwash. It's easy to beat the tests even though the shrinks say it's designed to flag fakers. Not only that but pretty routinely we've had candidates we gave a thumbs up to who later committed crimes - some pretty serious. Personally I think it's all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. A mere criminal background check is more useful than our screening. But I think employers are catching on, as our revenues are down about 90% since 2008.
Maybe picking employees is like picking stocks. Sure that guy has been doing well the past 10 years. He's from a top school. Then his wife leaves him and he hits the crack pipe. You have no way of predicting that.
Conversely, the next candidate is from Podunk U and slid by with a C average. He's got a passion for coding though and was going through a lot of teenage shit in school. A few years out, the open source projects he worked on in his free time taught him a lot and he's just entering what will turn out to be 15 years of solid coding performance that vault him into the top 1% of programmers. You can't see that coming either; because his resume looks like shit.
Finally, between these two extremes you have a lot of average people. Even with all the right bullet-points, they still fit a bell curve and you can't predict where they fit. The coin isn't heads or tails until you... hire it and find Shroedinger's cat stinking up the cubicle or purring contently.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
-- grabs his wizards' hat and robe and heads to the interview
the Great Melting Pot of US graduates?
Oh, well, lay them all off and start over. They're all for shit anyway. They can get jobs with the NSA.
Having done a fair amount of interviewing and hiring, I knew the day that the big G called me that I had to say no.
What baffles me is that Google "could" have looked at the history of hiring and found this out many years ago. I took classes with the HR director at Southwest Airlines, who themselves had recorded and performed the same evaluation of hiring practices since the 60's. They too found that technical skill was only a minor indicator of success. Southwest found that personal intent, ethics and attitude were bigger drivers of success than technical expertise.
In fact, many companies have done these long-term studies before, and found similar results. There are volumes and volumes of studies... so why did the "big data" company ignore the data? It's just ridiculous!
I can just imagine that Google has a big problem now...
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
It's true. Here's my theory: Non-quantifiable job candidate attributes are devalued or ignored in relation to level of perceived quantified 'risk' and the number of nodes between the hiring person and the person who directly works with the job candidate in the decision/power network of the company (usually the decision/power structure is the 'American business style' hierarchy we all know and love but many businesses today cluster into 'fiefdoms' due to managerial neglect).
So it comes down to 'data driven' HR people who are ignorant of the functional job requriements.
Both are a problem, but in tandem they create a ridiculous feedback loop of gamesmanship for work tasks, best exemplified in the film Office Space, "That just makes you work hard enough not to get fired..." which the system cannot correct for because even if an HR person *tried* to adjust their quantitative measures to find better candidates there is not way for them to check the effectiveness of their changes.
You can see the same dearth of qualitative judgement in journalism, most explicitly TV News. TV News producers are **idiots**...I know, I worked for an Iowa Fox affiliate briefly. News producers *decide* what is news and how to cover it, but tune in you'll see the same senseless decision making as from an HR office similar to Google.
News producers can get fired easily, and therefore barely contextualize themselves as 'deciders'...they usually do what was done previously, either the last week, or the last year or w/e...because ratings are quantitative, and TV ratings and ad revenue are what the **news producer's boss** use to judge the producer's performance.
So at best it's a 'cover your ass' issue....otherwise good office drones have to take the 'safe' hiring option b/c they can't justify another choice quantitatively...and quantitatively is how they keep from **getting fired**
Better numbers is only part of the solution...the end is always a human who must **interpret** data. Even the *best* data is subject to the same fault: User Error
Solution: Get rid of redundant decision makers who bottleneck power in the internal system (fire middle managers) and *empower* your primary decision makers to take managed risk based on a *comprehensive* analysis that includes some kind of operational component (on the job interview)
Thank you Dave Raggett
1)Will I and the coworkers get along with this person.
2)Will they work hard.
Soooooo many people in the tech industry fail at these 2 points. I would much rather have someone who has skills in the same ballpark that meet 1 and 2 then someone who is an expert in the area but is an ass.
Even though you didn't like the Apple interview you have to agree that it was successful. Do you think you would have been happy there? Do you think they would have been happy working with you?
Many people have technical ability, very few people are a good fit for any given team.
My kingdom for a mod point!
Most corporations don't care about GPA, especially once you've got a few years of experience under your belt.
Here in the UK many companies do care about your GPA (degree classification) when hiring, even if you have 20 years experience in industry since graduating.
It's absolutely terrible in the Cambridge area. A very large number of companies won't even read your CV unless you've got a 2:1 or a 1st.
In my mid-late teens I developed a mental illness that went undiagnosed and untreated until after I'd left university, with a 3rd and some self-harm scars (fairly minor, though).
I was lucky in that one big company gave me a break, lots of training and looked after my health.
Ever since, I've done OK, passing all my training and becoming Chartered.
I'll be on anti-depressants for the rest of my life and will need occasional counseling and psychiatric care, but most of my employers have never needed to know.
But that old 3rd class degree weighs heavily around my neck and prevents me from getting interviews with a lot of companies.
I agree with your points but you might get your point over better if you used less profanity.
And please don't start the 'beg the question' thing again!
Ha! Goes to show you how much you know. He worked on Columbia.
I would rather slather my crotch in gravy and run naked through an animal shelter filled with starving rottweilers than work at Google.
One of the best, and most grueling interviews, I went on - and was offered the job - was a mix of "get to know you" conversations, paired with 3 fairly tough technical interviews (for a release/devops type of role, in NY
If that ever happened in my company I would sit all the managers down and deliver this announcement:
"I will immediately fire the next manager in this company who takes longer than 10 minutes to interview a job candidate. I will use their salary to send the interviewee on a cruise to the Bahamas."
Ugh, just terrible. Instead of toying with people, why don't you you first talk to them? Ask them about themselves. What do they like to do for fun? Any hobbies? You know, treat them like human beings, not a toy to play with. That way you can get a feel for their personality without being a jerk and screwing with them.
;) ).
And here's a novel idea: if you're hiring a programmer (for instance), how about, I don't know, asking them to write a "Hello, World! " program. From what I've read, that right there will thin out a good half to three-quarters of the candidates. You could even have one of your minions do this part.
Have them meet the team; do they hit it off at all? Ratchet up the programming exercises. This is not rocket science (unless you work for NASA, that is
A new economic system would be nice, but no one's invented such a system yet which would prevent corruption or mindless entities from having power. It's a fantasy. Karl Marx tried inventing a new system, but that was a complete disaster, and wasn't any better than the system he was trying to replace, and instead was worse in most ways.
Google employees are on average quite young and in my experience naive beyond their youth. I think they're particularly ill-suited to the kind of experience-based critical thinking necessary to evaluate applicants.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
It does not necessarily mean their hiring process is flawed. It could mean the their employee evaluation process is flawed.
Vonce the rockets are up, who cares vhere ze come down? That's not my department!
Joe Dwaggon is very helpful because he always writes as much of his gibberish into the Subject field as he can, because he knows that makes his post absolutely perfect.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
with fraudulent resume, fraudulent credentials and sometimes fraudulent identity. As a technical recruiter with no experience in coding, it has always been traditional to pass along candidates that look good on paper after an initial HR screen for a tech interview with a stakeholder. Trouble started coming when individuals would share tech interview questions on online pages particular to either international sites or user groups. The answers were there too. I have used some usual introduction type questions that a tech may use as a foundation for the rest of the interview at times. Agencies would ask those they referred for the questions and they would coach the next interviewees on how to answer. My 'favorite' one was having someone on a speaker phone where another person was answering the question in the background in a foreign language. The first time it seemed only a coincidence, after the third and then fourth answer it was an obvious ruse. I ended the call. I get helping people and attempting to get them in the door, however, when it is used when the inexperienced coder gets through the door, especially from some international areas, then their fellow country folk tend to cover for them until they are found out. If only we in the US and Europe would cover for each other this way. Anyway, I agree that the tech interview will go away in some form or another. I like the idea of a test, however, it must be valid and then also the set of questions should be fluid and change often, although validated. I mean by this that the test should have multiple questions that would be randomly asked so that someone could not coach someone else through the q and a. My other favorite by the way was when engaging an agency of someone I knew well and actually trusted not to share information with candidates, went so far as to share questions that I asked and the person copied and pasted the answer verbatim from the original source. What were they thinking???
over and over you see in the tech industry these guys who work in fucking garages and could never make it through these bullshit processes, people like Woz, Jobs, Gates, Brin, Page, etc. none of those people would have been hired if they went through this shit.
I have said it before and will say it again, most companies have NO INTEREST in hiring entrepreneurs like Jobs or Brin, and that includes Google. Google already have Brin and Page, they don't need more Brins or Pages. They (including Google) just want more cogs for their wheels to churn out profit.
Start your own fucking company. These corporate douches can all eat shit.
Exactly, if you are the next Jobs (for real), go start your company and don't bother with getting hired.
Oliver.
That hiring process leaves too much room and incentive for the employer to string along people for subpar wages.
A probationary period direct-and-full hire fixes that by removing the avenue of classification abuse.
If you wanted to go further, you could make it such that you could freely choose the mode of work - defaulting to FT direct - so that the employer has to make any alternative an attractive option, not a benefits dodge. To disincentivize employers from not hiring unemployed/new entrants, the unemployed would have protected hiring status that favors long-term & direct-hire employment.
In short, temporary labor has no good purpose as long as it can be used to dodge benefits.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
While you take the low road twice over with the guy(first by having him as a contractor, then by using that to screw him over at the worst possible time).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I figure there is at least 1 fish
You sometimes want the more thorough designer/developer that takes time to work through a problem and come up with a good solution than the one that has all of the APIs memorized and can come up with a hack solution quickly but may or may not have any design skills at all.
If they're hiring you as a contractor, then they should be paying you contractor rates for that time, so they have an incentive to either hire you full time or let you go. Google doesn't like to do contracting, however, because they have a lot of trade secrets that they don't want to trust contractors with.
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For a lot of tech jobs, the answer to the second question would probably be 'no' for Woz, Jobs, Gates, Brin, and Page. That doesn't mean that they're not competent, it just means that they wouldn't fit in with the existing team, and that can be highly destructive to a creative environment. That same attribute makes them more likely to go and start a company, which also makes them less attractive to a big company: employees who leave to start a new company often take the best of their colleagues with them, so they increase turnover of the staff that you most want to keep.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It was the engineer who did a quick calculation who was right about Challenger ("Hey guys, it's too cold and the O-rings might fail!"). It was the managers who were wrong ("This shuttle must launch!")
All hiring is based on 'do I like them do I not like them'. Everything else is simply legally defensible filtering criteria to winnow down the pool to that point.
I asked that would he be so kind and tell me who they hired. He said that he couldn't tell me details.
This is annoying, but it's something that legal tells most companies. If you were not hired for some reason that is not directly related to your ability to perform the job, then you might have grounds for a lawsuit. It's best not to give out any information.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm not him, but it was almost certainly etsy. I happen to know someone who interviewed with them, and he also said something similar to the OP: the interview process was fun, and challenging, and he actually enjoyed it.
So you go tell your managers that, and etsy can carry on doing what they're doing: they appear to be doing something right, so if you can't be bothered to learn from that, more fool you.
Interviews, personal essays, "outside interests," and all that other bullshit which makes for a year of pain and agony for the high school applicant and his/her parents do nothing to predict performance in college. I dunno if they help predict the one thing most colleges seem to care about, i.e. alumni donation level. I just know the whole application process is a huge waste of time and effort, and riddled with fraud. Kids take the SATs 5 times (but only have to submit their choice of results), buy 'personal' essays, inflate their "club officer list," and so on.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I've been learning a fantastic interview technique from one of our manages. Somehow the company hired an unusually high percentage of really good technical people - unfortunately we didn't do the same for management. But it is possible to identify good people. No, I'm not telling how ;-)
I take it you applied to D.E. Shaw Research?:)
n/t
This. Why should I memorize all that stuff for an interview. Seems like when I say on my resume I know about algorithms, they think I should know about sorting algorithms and its performance of the top of my head. No, I don't and couldn't care less, because sorting algorithms are not the only kind of algorithms. A helpful example perhaps, but I do really get annoyed at people asking me stuff that can be found on a manual, book or specs. I know how to do math, but i don't expect you to ask me to solve differential equations on an interview, yet at the time, i solve many of them and more, but my priorities in life are not keeping all that stuff ready to recite at any and all interviews.
I would like to propose the hypothesis that one's ability to handle home AV hookup and PC + networking etc. is a better predictor of coding ability... Can still be an a**hole though...
"... they may actually have contracts to prevent "poaching" of employees, so this trick should only be pulled with serous thought and legal review."
Such contracts are quite likely to be illegal, as evidenced by the Apple-Google-Pixar-et-all suit.
It's possible that non-compete agreements might an issue, but those are frequently unenforceable and, if some employee signs an employment contract containing one, it's prima facie evidence that they are too dumb to be worth hiring anyway. Failing to have a competent lawyer review your employment contract is also a bad move; it's unlikely that the lawyer will cost anywhere near as much as the contract is worth.
Can you tell I am a contractor? I really need to just write some angry contract-related blog posts and get it out of my system.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I thought it is widely accepted in the States that college background does not equate to a good, productive employee. In many countries, unfortunately the diploma is still over valued (even 10+ years after graduation.)
HR departments' emphasis are legal to protect the company against would-be employees with potential to harm the company. HR's normally look at candidates with a negative eye. It is not surprising that HR's screening process cannot screen for highly productive, innovative, "make-it-happen" type of candidates. A top class business person (employed or self-employed) needs innovative initiative, drive to make things happen, and of high moral standards to succeed. All of these are not graded in school, college or even HR initiated job interviews.
Interviews should be done in two major stages: The screening by HR legal types to weed OUT the harmful (from a legal standpoint), and the screening by successful managers to weed IN the desired candidates. HR for the negative weeding, and Managers for the positive weeding. I don't think the two can be merged since they have different purposes.
Managers should have the final say on who to hire because in the end, they are the ones who have to assign work to the new hire, and have to take responsibility for their successes and failures... not HR. In this final stage, the HR legal types should stay out of the process because they will just ruin what should be a really "getting to know each other" early encounter between the future the boss and the subordinate.
Nothing is perfect though... there are managers who prefer to hire second-class people because first-class hires endanger their own positions. But most top class managers, who have self-confidence in what they are doing, will select really first-class people to work under them. Through experience, really good managers develop a skill to choose and use talented subordinates, so they are better equipped to weed IN candidates at interviews.
I thought I was logged in when I clicked submit the first time around, so I'm redoing this, now logged in so it is not an anonymous post... I thought it is widely accepted in the States that college background does not equate to a good, productive employee. In many countries, unfortunately the diploma is still over valued (even 10+ years after graduation.) HR departments' emphasis are legal to protect the company against would-be employees with potential to harm the company. HR's normally look at candidates with a negative eye. It is not surprising that HR's screening process cannot screen for highly productive, innovative, "make-it-happen" type of candidates. A top class business person (employed or self-employed) needs innovative initiative, drive to make things happen, and of high moral standards to succeed. All of these are not graded in school, college or even HR initiated job interviews. Interviews should be done in two major stages: The screening by HR legal types to weed OUT the harmful (from a legal standpoint), and the screening by successful managers to weed IN the desired candidates. HR for the negative weeding, and Managers for the positive weeding. I don't think the two can be merged since they have different purposes. Managers should have the final say on who to hire because in the end, they are the ones who have to assign work to the new hire, and have to take responsibility for their successes and failures... not HR. In this final stage, the HR legal types should stay out of the process because they will just ruin what should be a really "getting to know each other" early encounter between the future the boss and the subordinate. Nothing is perfect though... there are managers who prefer to hire second-class people because first-class hires endanger their own positions. But most top class managers, who have self-confidence in what they are doing, will select really first-class people to work under them. Through experience, really good managers develop a skill to choose and use talented subordinates, so they are better equipped to weed IN candidates at interviews.
You are correct. In statistics this is called restriction of range, and it will always lower correlation.
http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/A68809.html
Not sure how the director of HR at Google could be unaware of this, but there you go.
Interviewing with Google was the worst experience in my professional career. The head hunders were the nicest people, as opposed to the engineer who was a total asshole, couldn't be understood with an extremely heavy accent, was rude without being impolite or polite, and didn't hide the fact that he had something more interresting to do than interviewing that day, and basically just hung up on me. Next time Google calls me for a job, I'll tell them that my time is precious as well.