The Key To Interviewing At Google

Nerval's Lobster writes Wired has an excerpt from a new book of Google-centric workplace advice, written by Laszlo Bock, the search-engine giant's head of "People Operations" (re: Human Resources). In an interesting twist, Bock kicks off the excerpt by describing the brainteaser questions that Google is famous for tossing at job candidates as "useless," before suggesting that some hiring managers at the company might still use them. ("Sorry about that," he offered.) Rather than ask candidates to calculate the number of golf balls that can fit inside a 747 (or why manhole covers are round), Google now runs its candidates through a battery of work-sample tests and structured interviews, which its own research and data-crunching suggest is best at finding the most successful candidates. Google also relies on a tool (known as qDroid), which automates some of the process—the interviewer can simply input which job the candidate is interviewing for, and receive a guide with optimized interview questions. It was only a matter of time before people got sick of questions like, "Why are manhole covers round?"

Comments

Feynman interview joke & manhole covers

[Anonymous Coward]

  Probably this was brought to the mind of many people reading the article, so I might as well post it.
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/posts/details/12395

Re:First, manhole covers are not always round

[hawguy]

So the question can be used to weed out pedants. I guess it is useful after all.

Or to find the engineers that can spot the missing parts of vague software specifications -- just because a user asks for something in the specs doesn't mean that he knows that the case he wrote up doesn't handle all of the options the software will encounter in the real world.

He may ask for software to generate quotes for manhole cover manufacturing, and only ask for a radius because clearly that's all you need to describe a round manhole cover, yet the smart engineer will ask how to handle the other shapes. Few companies want an engineer that blindly adheres to specs even when they don't make sense in the real world... that's more like a job for consultants so they can get paid to do the work and the paid again to do it the right way.

Re:First, manhole covers are not always round

[TheGratefulNet]

let me ask just one more question-

does that apply to front-yard chickens, as well?