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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!
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
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!
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.
That's a load of crap. People have lives outside of work. Most of the brilliant programmers I've know do nothing outside of work related to coding. I've known great programmers whose passion outside of work is music...
Do they have some objective job performance metrics that the rest of the world seems to have missed?
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.
Best not to rely on any one criterion. Personal projects are a positive indicator, but lack of them shouldn't be a show stopper. I've known some very good people, who are very interested in their work, who wouldn't have anything to do with the work when they're not on the job. Some of them even have lives (or so I've heard).
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.
Would you hire a doctor based on how many "hobby appendectomies" the candidate has performed in their garage? No.
I think your suggestion biases you towards "developer as tinkerer/craftsperson", rather than "developer as professional". I think there's room and need for both.
That's a load of crap. People have lives outside of work. Most of the brilliant programmers I've know do nothing outside of work related to coding. I've known great programmers whose passion outside of work is music...
I think that the technique of asking for personal programming projects works much better for recent college grads than it does for seasoned programmers. If a 22 year old never had the ambition or desire to work on something outside of their classes then I really do think that is a red flag. Unless they can instead show a very impressive research project for school, which they would have spent a good deal of their free time on, I would then assume they just went into computer science because someone told them it was a good career path.
But for someone in the field for a decade or more, they very likely only do programming at work. They probably have a family that takes a good amount of their time and other hobbies to keep ties with their social network. And personally most of my side projects are still ones that will make my job easier, such as something that scripts a complicated build process. For seasoned developers that don't have any side projects to show, I would ask what technical books / journals / blogs they read in their free time to keep up to date on the industry. If they can't answer that either, then I would start to think that they probably aren't too passionate about their career. But that alone wouldn't be a complete deal breaker if other indicators show they would perform well at the job I am hiring them for.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
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.
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.