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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
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
I searched for "C# DataGridView Windows Forms ADO.NET"
Google gave me a sidebar that said, "You might have better luck searching with Bing!"
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.
I guess I should turn all the cool W10 spyware back on just in case they'll hire me.
The author of TFA forgot to mention that *she* also searched for "summer dresses" and "Swiss chocolates", along with "Python Spark list comprehension".
Turns out that helps...
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.
Copy and paste will carry you only so far. The trick is figure out someone else's code snippet and make it work in your own code. Unless you have a good understanding of programming, you will make spaghetti code instead.
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.
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.
I have been an engineer for 30 years, have managed to meet only a handful that are actually brilliant, none of them have had any inkling of being bad at working with other people or understanding user's problem. In fact, their social skills were about where their engineering skills were. Smart is smart. Stop believing childish myths.
I do searches like that all the time and keep getting the prompt. I'm looking for the Stack Exchange, not a job offer!
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.
Perl would suffer the same split problem if Perl6 were ever released. 15 years in the making and it might (finally) be released by the end of this year.
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
Soft skills would be much harder for them to determine via automated systems. This is their way of skimming for a few specific skill sets and obviously is not the only way to apply for a job at Google. Given that of the 4 Google employees (past+present) I know personally 3 of them would have fallen into a soft skill set by my connotation (able to grasp new things quickly but not necessarily deep dive level on most of them) ... this likely isn't a predominant method of recruiting for them.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I guess I'll just have to write a bot generating random technical search queries then...
Welcome in the 21st century...
Mom, get off the line! You're embarrassing me.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You got all of that from a guy getting a job offer from a search query?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Recruitment companies are going to sue Google for using it's search monopoly to rob them of their commissions.
Told me to write a random maze generator. It's now called Apple Maps. You're welcome.
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.
Yeah, you already said "engineers."
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.
But google interviews people based upon a random selection of interviewers. That is, no matter how technical and detailed your knowledge is, you may end up being interviewed by someone in the marketing or accounting department; if you're a hardware guru someone may ask you about Arduino; if you're an embedded systems expert someone may ask you about JavaScript.
So at Google it's better to know how to fit in than know how to do the job. Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V is probably a good job skill for that.
Google can only hope they have that problem. Right now they have social butterflies everywhere with just a few engineers who keep things afloat.
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!
Now my work will block Google since I might get a new job based on my work-related searches.
No access to Google means that I'll be revealed as a fraud, unable to solve the simplest of technical problems without getting the answer from someone else.
I'll be fired, lose my apartment, live on the streets, and go on welfare.
I'll probably get hooked on drugs and maybe, just maybe!, I'll switch to Bing.
Real programmers don't need to search Google, they already know how to do it.
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.
the Air Force used to recruit people based on their video game scores?
But Google values spaghetti code above all else, so you're good.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That is all.
Because then they'll learn Google python and be forever grateful for their middle management position. Cradle to grave. I see anti-trust in the cards for ABC.XYZ.
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..
But Larry Page personally signs off on each employee
Or just a way of getting stuff done for free.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I just would like to point out that your example of "amazing" is in one of the oldest, most boring genres of programs.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I had a job interview with 3Dfx in 1997 for a QA position. The QA manager freaked me out with his tattoos and body piercings (he offered to show me the ones he had below his belt). The second interview was with his boss who was the head of marketing. If you read Dilbert extensively, any hardware company run by the marketing department was ultimately doom. I didn't take the job. No surprise that 3Dfx went out of business a few years later.
That's Microsoft.
Google admires Microsoft
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Um, I believe you're misreading his post. He appears to be asserting that the truly brilliant engineers he met also had excellent social skills.
Personally, I find this extremely hard to believe. Maybe for some other sectors of engineering, such as civil engineering, where being a lead engineer is really more of a project-management role, it would make sense, but not in software engineering. I've worked with plenty of software engineers (and also electrical engineers who did software), and I wouldn't say they had *bad* social skills on average, but they definitely weren't the most outgoing people in the world by a long shot. This includes the more brilliant ones. They weren't bad at all at dealing with people, even having leadership roles to some extent, but they sure as hell wouldn't have been any good at a sales job, for instance, nor were they ladies' men in any way (extremely socially-skilled men can be expected to do much better with the opposite sex: talking your way into a woman's pants is a big benefit to being socially skilled).
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.
I agree that what you're talking about is a problem, and it sounds like your friend's father got really screwed, but having done a bunch of the Google Foobar puzzles, I can assure you that they have nothing to do with actual problems Google needs to solve for its business.
I don't want to give them away -- though I'm sure you can find them on the Web if you hunted -- but by way of example, the first one I did involved finding the smallest numbers which were palindromes (read the same backwards and forwards) subject to certain additional criteria. They're all straight up math/logic brainteasers with no practical use to anyone.
It's the same basic premise, but this is a *lot* more elaborate than what you ran into.
You are writing about social skills yet to be social on slashdot is to have an account and not post as AC.