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Google May Try To Recruit You For a Job Based On Your Search Queries
HughPickens.com writes: If Google sees that you're searching for specific programming terms, they may ask you to apply for a job as Max Rossett writes that three months ago while working on a project, he Googled "python lambda function list comprehension." The familiar blue links appeared on the search page, and he started to look for the most relevant one. But then something unusual happened. The search results split and folded back to reveal a box that said "You're speaking our language. Up for a challenge?" Clicking on the link took Rossett to a page called "foo.bar" that outlined a programming challenge and gave instructions on how to submit his solution. "I had 48 hours to solve it, and the timer was ticking," writes Rossett. "I had the option to code in Python or Java. I set to work and solved the first problem in a couple hours. Each time I submitted a solution, foo.bar tested my code against five hidden test cases."
After solving another five problems the page gave Rossett the option to submit his contact information and much to his surprise, a recruiter emailed him a couple days later asking for a copy of his resume. Three months after the mysterious invitation appeared, Rossett started at Google. Apparently Google has been using this recruiting tactic for some time.
After solving another five problems the page gave Rossett the option to submit his contact information and much to his surprise, a recruiter emailed him a couple days later asking for a copy of his resume. Three months after the mysterious invitation appeared, Rossett started at Google. Apparently Google has been using this recruiting tactic for some time.
and Google may succeed
Told me to write a mail program. It's now called Google Maps. You're welcome.
My queries in the past few years have never triggered that, so google must not have interest in say advanced compiler theory, aspect oriented extensions to scripting languages, atomicity and failure recovery for clustered filesystem design.....google you're too lame for me I guess
Finally, they're going to start recruiting the same labour pool as everyone else–developers with a mastery of the CTL+C / CTL+V development environment.
Let me know why Google is evil for this, too.
I searched for "C# DataGridView Windows Forms ADO.NET"
Google gave me a sidebar that said, "You might have better luck searching with Bing!"
So that means Google feels it is more important to have technical skills than to have soft skills. Hopefully they have stronger filters on the interview side of things, or over time they will have tons of brilliant engineers that can solve puzzles but can't work with other people or understand user's problems.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
I set to work and solved the first problem in a couple hours. Each time I submitted a solution, foo.bar tested my code against five hidden test cases." After solving another five problems the page gave Rossett the option to submit his contact information
Curious: what prompted Max Rossett to spend hours solving programming puzzles before being even given the opportunity to submit contact information for a job consideration?
Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
I don't fucking care if you're the almighty Google or not, webp is not a supported image file format for the Web.
But I haven't received any offers. I do try to intersperse those searches with lots of tits and ass queries in case there are other types of positions to be filled.
I guess I should turn all the cool W10 spyware back on just in case they'll hire me.
God plays this trick on me all the time. But I purposefully flunk the tests so He'll leave me the x!y@z+ alone.
Since most of my queries regarding coding are Perl or Bash related. Sorry, Google, I'm old school. Perl and Bash are still my bread and butter, and Perl developers are still getting heaps of job offers. Some amazing stuff is being done with Perl (Fastmail and others), but it's no longer the flavour of the month for the kids, so it gets ignored. Perl, though, does not suffer the internal split that Python has with 2.x vs 3.x development. Python devs still overwhelmingly use 2.x. Perl just works.
Professional masturbater, here I come! Thanks Google!
I searched for "How can I do evil after claiming that I will do no evil", and the search result was a job offer letter from Google.
I do searches like that all the time and keep getting the prompt. I'm looking for the Stack Exchange, not a job offer!
I got invited into Google Foobar last winter, pretty much an identical experience to what's written in the article. I love my job as a college physics professor, so I didn't go for the "recruitme" command when it appeared, but it was a really fun brain-stretcher. I got through eight of 'em before work caught up with me and I ran out of free time to work on a really hard one.
I won't spoil the puzzles, but they require working skills in discrete math, logic, data structures, algorithms, and cryptography, and the easiest ones are about at the limit of what I'd be comfortable asking an undergraduate to solve. They're all a lot of fun, in a nerd sniping kind of way. And I really liked that none of them relied on arcane knowledge of fiddly trivia, all it takes is high school math/CS and tons of brainpower.
Rumor has it the selection process happens through your Google search history over a long period of time, so you're not going to be able to just spam Python jargon at the search engine and get in tomorrow. But if you do get an invite, drop what you're doing and accept it!
I was really disappointed that when the semester ended and I had time to go back to Google Foobar, I was locked out. Sure, I failed a puzzle, so the rules say it's game over, but I'd really love to take a crack at more of them just for fun. Maybe someday I'll get another invite.
But I only have limited experience as a lesbian bondage school girl uniform milf best deals memory SD card entity framework linq execute not in select no duplicates top ten nick cage movies minecraft obs settings
crazy dynamite monkey
I guess I'll just have to write a bot generating random technical search queries then...
Welcome in the 21st century...
Recruitment companies are going to sue Google for using it's search monopoly to rob them of their commissions.
yup, I search for all kinds of stuff there. One day I got a mysterious search result saying "we need dudes like you"
Golly gee, now I'm working with them!! /s
Obviously trying to boost google search usage.
Told me to write a random maze generator. It's now called Apple Maps. You're welcome.
If Microsoft was to do the same thing in Bing - or God forbids in Windows 10 directly, it would be a scandal and there would be endless blog posts and tv interviews about it. And of course people on Slashdot would get their panties in a bunch.
But with Google it's kewl.
lucm, indeed.
Is it now rational for a CEO at a tech company to insist that google searches be blocked? I mean, your programmers are searching for solutions to stuff a lot, and you wouldn't want google to take the fact that they are searching for solutions and....
1)- Directly recruit your top men.
2)- Figure out what you are working on.
3)- Hey, google knows a lot about the people who are logged into it. They can probably flag by race and sex pretty easily...
If you're in charge of programmers at any level, do you now have to weight the possibility that the tools you supply them will be used to recruit them away from you? Do you have to weight the advantages of letting your programmers have access to a superior search versus the cons of that superior search poaching your peeps?
Don't know why, but I only get offers to become a porn evaluator.
I don't want to work in the porn industry?
Or use the language's built-in help features, or its dedicated documentation, on or offline. If you need to google everything, you're probably not the best for the job.
I'm tired of these targeted job adverts anyway. If I'm really looking for a job, then I'll probably figure out where to look myself. If they really want me, they should either contact me directly, if not, stay the fuck out of my life.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
"64-year-old engineer sues Google for age discrimination" http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
:-O
Even too much knowledge of 1980s pop culture will put you on thin ice: "Median age at Google is 29, says age discrimination lawsuit" http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Teletubbies is still fine. FOR NOW!
Real programmers don't need to search Google, they already know how to do it.
This will result in a bunch of people, who want to work at their dream version of Google, spamming the search engine with terms they think will make them get an offer. If it works, they're going to find that artificial passion will not get them past the quiz.
Pure speculation of course. :)
Person is researching python lambda function list comprehension for a programming project. Gets sidetracked for a couple of hours by popup puzzles.
Yep. This is the employee we want.
Have gnu, will travel.
Google isn't the first doing this. The NSA does it too. One 5am Saturday I was searching lisajous trajectory calculations and all of the banner ads pointed me to NSA's official recruiting website. I'd never before seen such ads. Google is just following this precident
My local Spy Agency (I am in a five eyes country that I shall not name) is also doing this. I keep getting recruiter adds when I do certain searches.
the Air Force used to recruit people based on their video game scores?
... was the search query that brought me into the foobar console. I was trying to template a C++ class so that it could accept a mock object for unit testing. Sadly, all their games are in java or python. The one it assigned me was "guard game". I wrote them a note that I'm just a mechanical engineer and that I only know C++ and Mathematica. Then I signed out. So sad :-(
-Chris Chiasson
Just a college student... I was either researching cfd or computer vision.
Unfortunately, the problems were too hard for me. I banged my head against the first one for a while and gave up. Maybe when I've got 10 years of experience under my belt...
When you search for Gloryhole and Rim jobs on bing
Spoken like a true idiot.
This is a scam, so let me explain how it works. And then the history behind it.
You are a company, and you want to find creative innovation without needing to pay for it.
You pretend to hire people, and you give part of the problem, and see if people can solve it. You make it part of "see how smart you are."
You appeal to peoples intellect, while you are getting free work from your creative ideas or knowledge.
So next time you get it, don't get suckered in for doing free work for which you will never get credit for.
History.
My friends father is from former communist country and he told me a story how outside his mathematics polytechnic institute, there was a flier from this company that says they are looking for mathematicians who just graduated. Great position with good pay. Before the interview, he was given a piece of paper, sliding ruler, and 1 hour to solve one very complicated math problem. He was suppose to make some proof or something. It was cutting edge according to the father. He took it, and did his best. His friend, a week later was chatting up with him, and somehow they ended up talking about the job. The girl who was chatting said she had a really hard problem. The more she talked, my friends father realized that she was doing the second part of the equation from where he left because she used his proof! That was in 1960s. Later they started contacting other students, and they found out that everyone did a little part of complicated work. Now, he can't imagine it was not checked, but all the work was portioned under the guise of "hey are you smart and creative? Prove it to us."
So long story short. He just wrote a free code for a billion dollar company for which he will not get compensated, but it will solve their problem. In a funny way, he got himself out of the job if he did a good job. There is another sucker who will be given instructions, "optimize this code! You got 1 hour. Go!"
Since I know Google, Microsoft and Apple and other employees visit /. read this -- fuck you for being part of the machine that has became an insidious and invasive parasites that you help to create. fuck you because you are the biggest fucking hypocrites in the world. privacy matters, you drive towards manipulating others into giving you something you will not pay in the first place is despicable. free society can only function when individuality is protected not categorized for monetary gains.
so yeah - fuck you.
To be their Anal Porn Guru. That's the "official" title, anyway.
That's pretty stupid. If somebody was searching for that term, then they obviously don't know the subject and need to read about it. Why would you hire someone who does not know the subject?
That is all.
You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada!
This is obviously a cunning plan to profile them nerds better. If your average slashdotter has ghostery, adblock, etc. installed and use google without logging in, how do you profile them. You give them the elusive chance of hitting Google Foobar and have them log in for every query. Cause then you could brag to your friends (assuming you have friends..) you got invited. Whooppee :P. Now, where is my Google login button..
In the fall of 2003 I was building a versioning and content-addressable file system (for Windows even, imagine the pain!) to store digital assets for computer games. I googled for papers on "the elephant file system", and was greeted with a "you should work at Google!" link. 12 years later, the story hits slashdot...
The worst bit is you can't even google for the answer, cause they'll know.
Everyone else, you're out of luck.
FWIW, I'm a Google engineer. I'm 46. Many members of my previous team were in their 50s and 60s, and the median age there was probably around my age. That team was working on complex internal enterprise systems, where decades of experience with complex business logic was at a premium. My current team is younger... but I'm not the oldest.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.