Google Has Toughest Interview Process For Developers, But Not the Worst (getvoip.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A casual survey of candidates' reactions to the interview processes of the biggest tech companies in the world shows Google as having one of the most grueling hiring gauntlets in the sector — but Twitter's is perceived as the worst. The survey measured the amount of time candidature took, as well as the number of stages and the methods involved at each stage, and additionally estimated whether the job-seekers felt positive or negative about the procedure.

Comments

One kind of employee

[drinkypoo]

Google is making sure they only have employees that think a certain way by using their hiring process. But is that the only kind of employee they need to be healthy long-term?

Re:One kind of employee

[TheRaven64]

Google's process is very much geared towards finding problem solvers, ignoring the need of finding the people who can identify the correct problems to solve. Their interview process isn't too bad with that goal in mind. The real problem is what happens afterwards. They make you wait a few months while they make a decision, and then they want you to start the following week. The only people who are still looking for a job by the time Google decides that they actually want them are PhD students who applied during their final year. Everyone else has already taken a good offer somewhere else.

Re: One kind of employee

[Anonymous Coward]

I like your way of thinkng, but let's not underestimate Google or overstate the survey. Google has many divisions and many kinds of requirements, for starters.

Re:One kind of employee

[shawn2772]

Google is making sure they only have employees that think a certain way by using their hiring process. But is that the only kind of employee they need to be healthy long-term?

That's a valid question. It seems to be working reasonably well so far, but you're right: Google's process strongly favors selecting engineers who are fascinated by hard technical problems and are able to think and solve problems on their feet. There's also a strong element of luck in the process. Being capable is a requirement for being hired by Google, but it's in no way a guarantee.

Re:One kind of employee

[JustBoo]

Google is making sure they only have employees that think a certain way by using their hiring process. But is that the only kind of employee they need to be healthy long-term?

Yep, it's the kind of "engineer" (ha!) that has replaced engineering principles with religion. The kind that has to worship Google first and foremost. I learned long ago just because someone has a PhD. or a fancy degree from an Ivy league college, does NOT mean they are smart or talented.

Given people who work for Google really work for an Advertising Company and everything they do is driven by and for that, kind of proves the above. Add in the fact most of them think they are doing humankind some kind of favor by working for an Advertising Company and we come back to Religion.

Re:One kind of employee

[Anonymous Coward]

"The only people who are still looking for a job by the time Google decides that they actually want them are PhD students who applied during their final year. Everyone else has already taken a good offer somewhere else."

That was pretty much my experience. I interviewed with them and a few other companies. The other companies got back to me after a few weeks and gave me a couple weeks to accept or decline their offers, I got back to Google saying I had other offers and if they were interested in hiring me they needed to get back to me by X date or else I wasn't interested in working for them. I think like a week after the date I gave them they finally got back to me informing me that they'd decided not to continue the hiring process as they'd decided I would be a poor fit. And as far as I can tell, they're only interested in hiring people who can solve permutation type problems as when I got laid off from my previous job a few of us interviewed there and all of us just got a million and one permutation problems. I really wouldn't say they were interested in problem solvers since all the questions were variations on the same problem. Figure out one, and you had them all. It was a moderately hard problem, but still, only one.

Re:One kind of employee

[TangoMargarine]

Homo Neophilus? ;)

Re:One kind of employee

[Penguinisto]

This, right here.

It's one thing to search for a savant at trivia and mathematics all at once. I get that; software requires a little of both (and more) at times.

The problems arise when we get down to the practical level. Drop everything and join us *now*! may be a great test to see how exploitable a candidate is to corporate whim, but it's a lousy way to get top-shelf employees. Another problem I'd noticed is that there isn't much testing for people who have good strategic/long-cycle thinking (and not just for code maintainability reasons.) They really should fix these things.

...and yeah, after 3 weeks of no decision being made? Screw it - I got bills to pay and a career to pursue, so instead I'm taking the not-as-prestigious-but-still-well-paying offer that comes along in the interim. As a bonus, skipping out on Google HR's chronic indecision habit means that I don't have to move to California. ;)

Re:One kind of employee

[sconeu]

To be fair, the last time I spoke with Google about a job (I interviewed there some years ago, and get sporadic calls asking if I'm still interested), they were quite upfront about the fact that they were first and foremost an Advertising Company.

You may not like the fact that it's their primary business, but they do tell you what you are signing up for.

Re:One kind of employee

[fahrbot-bot]

... because someone has a PhD. or a fancy degree from an Ivy league college, does NOT mean they are smart or talented.

Not necessarily smart or talented anyway. They are, however, by definition, fairly educated, but this doesn't always help. Some of the worst code I've seen has been written by people with PhDs, often because they over thought things and made the code unnecessarily complicated or thought too narrowly about the implementation. In the long run, experience is often, but not always, more valuable than education.

[ Speaking as someone with only a BSCS, but 30+ years experience, doing applications and systems programming in 20+ languages, on just about every version of *nix (and Windows), on just about everything from PCs to Cray supercomputers, in commercial application and government research environments... I know I'm not the best and/or brightest, but I'm fairly high up on the learning curve and generally get assigned the hard problems because I can pull from a broad experience base, think unconventionally and get them solved. What I like doing most now is passing on what I've learned along the way and helping others get their work done. ]

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

R&D may not benefit from having employees who want to worm in deep, become difficult to replace, and get stuck in a long-term process. The work they're doing is on a few-years cycle and most of that work product then gets thrown away.

As a consumer I've stopped adopting their products, and I do not consider their offerings for new products and services. They're already burned me by discontinuing things without turning them over to somebody else to run. I don't blame them; it was my mistake to trust them. But if I was still considering their services, I wouldn't be concerned by this question. They have so many employees, the only way that they're going to create a group-think problem is if they use a 90s-style microsoft process with too many managers. They don't have that, these days not even MS does.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

No, people who apply are going to quit the other thing and get on the plane. Duh. They're the most desirable employer in their field(s). People who disagree, (including myself) didn't apply there.

A person who applies to the industry leader and then turns down the job because they "already found something" don't even have a serious professional career, they're a fry cook looking for a paycheck. That isn't bad, but it isn't what the successful companies are looking for. ;)

The fact is, google has good pay and a person who actually just wanted the money would know to quit the other job and follow it.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

If you can't solve the job-application-timing problem smoothly, why are you sure you're a good candidate for the position they had open? Maybe the timing and availability are part of what they are looking for.

It seems you considered only the short term affect on yourself, and didn't apply Theory of Mind to consider what Google's perspective is. Everybody should value themselves, but why would everyone assume they're an awesome fit for jobs even when they don't know what exact help the employer needs?

I'm not even convinced you understand the reason for the existence of jobs. If we lived in the jungle with no technology, would you be expecting a job to be provided? Is gathering your own food to put in your mouth a job, or just life? Is the idea of a "job" about you, or about the person who is willing to trade the food for the work?

Re:One kind of employee

[TheRaven64]

The fact is, google has good pay

No they don't. They have okay pay, but there are at least half a dozen large companies that pay better, try to hire the same people, and will give them an answer sooner.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

For your analysis to be reasonable, they would have to be a normal or average company.

They have a reputation as a highly desirable employer. That has to be considered in the analysis for the analysis to be reasoned. That is a key factor in the expectation to drop other offers. Especially when you attempt to comment on how the expectation affects their ability to retain "top-shelf" employees.

People who applied for a job there were aware of their reputation before applying. Those of us who want something different than that hopefully didn't even apply over there.

If you got bills to worry about, get to work and focus on the things important to you. Quit worrying about landing a dream job that is a limited opportunity; you've already taken on too many responsibilities to expect to have that many choices left.

The question isn't do you agree, the question is does google agree. Their hiring process is there to meet their needs, not yours or mine.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

Yep, it's the kind of "engineer" (ha!) that has replaced engineering principles with religion.

So, a No-True-Scotsman on engineers, where if they come to a conclusion you disagree with it means that they are overly religious and not engineers?

I learned long ago just because someone has a PhD. or a fancy degree from an Ivy league college, does NOT mean they are smart or talented.

And a corollary; it doesn't mean that they're not smart or talented. And if google was selecting based on letters next to names and fancy schools, why would they have a difficult interview process? That they're deciding based on a difficult process instead of based on the resumes directly contradicts your conclusion that they value fancy degrees.

Re:One kind of employee

[vux984]

What are you on about?

Maybe the timing and availability are part of what they are looking for.

If they'd hired him, he'd be available.

And as for the timing, what hypothetical requirement would require that you be 'available to hire' on an arbitrary schedule?

The only candidate who would satisfy that requirement would be someone who was chronically unemployed or unemployable.

Is the idea of a "job" about you, or about the person who is willing to trade the food for the work?

Its about both. If a person expects me to sit around not trading food for work with someone else on the chance that he may wish to trade food for my work at some point one day... I'm not going to starve myself waiting on him.

I have to eat every day. You may not need me to work everyday. But if you want me to make an agreement with you such that you'll provide me food in exchange for work, AND you want exclusive access to my availability so that I am available to work when you need me to work, then you're going to have to provide me food even on days you don't need the the work. Because I'm not going to sit there and fast on the days you don't need me. And trading work for food ad hoc 'day laborer' style on the days you don't need me creates stress i don't need, work i don't want to do, and bottom line is that I can get a better deal from someone else who is willing to commit to providing me food daily, in exchange for that exclusivity and availability.

If we setup the tax system to provide me a living wage, then at that point, I'd be willing to try out your system of work-as-needed when needed for pay for the time i work.

But short of that, its not going to happen. I've specialized to do a certain type of work, and live in proximity to where that work is needed. I don't have the necessary hunter gatherer skills, nor do i live in a place where i could use them if I had them -- and neither does anybody else like me. So if you want us to do this specialized work for you, you'll need to commit to providing all my food requirements.

IF you and others like you are who need this sort of work done are not willing to, then I WILL work on my hunter gatherer skills, move somewhere where I can use them.

As it happens I do consulting; and in this role, I AM in fact willing to work for you for short stints. But I am not sitting there on a chair waiting for you to call. If you want that arrangement, fine, but then your going to need to provide food while sit there.

So instead I make deals with others all the time for short stints, so when you do call me I might not be available that day or even that week. AND I get paid quite a bit more food, because I do sometimes have stretches of not working, so I need extra food to cover that. And I'm not going to work for anyone whose just covering the food i need that for just that day, since they aren't committed to giving me work or food tomorrow.

Re:One kind of employee

[Penguinisto]

That leads to another question: Is it really a "dream job" under those conditions? Sure, you get one hell of a resumé boost, but it doesn't appear that there's all that much dream to the job otherwise.

Re:One kind of employee

[david_thornley]

Not necessarily. If I accepted a position and things were going well there, I'd feel that I owed the company that had hired me to stay on long enough to be overall profitable to them. I do realize that I can't expect the same sort of feeling back, but I base my actions at least partly on who I am, not who I'm dealing with. I do have a serious professional career, take it seriously, and try to be professional about things. So far, it's paid me a lot of money, while I'm generally doing stuff I rather like.

Google isn't the ultimate employer, and there's no reason to think that, if I'm good enough for Google, I'm not good enough for another top-ranked company. Or, maybe, I've joined a startup and leaving right then would essentially scuttle it.

It's all right for Google to think they're the best in the business, and everyone else should jump at any chance to work for them.. They will lose out on a lot of very good people that way.

Re:One kind of employee

[gweihir]

I don't think so. Look at what they do today: They still only have search and ads, the rest is just toy projects, or failed or a massive nightmare like Android due to bad management practices. They will hire problem solvers, but as soon as you also bring experience and larger insights to the table, their process fails. I did not get hired by them in 2008, (apparently partly due to economic reasons, as I had applied on the request of a friend that wanted me for his team) and in retrospect, I think that was a good thing. They kept pestering me for a few years afterwards, until I told them that sure, I would interview with them again and that my daily rate for that was $1500. That finally got the message across.

Re:One kind of employee

[gweihir]

Drop everything and join us *now*! may be a great test to see how exploitable a candidate is to corporate whim, but it's a lousy way to get top-shelf employees.

Indeed. This way you get sort-of the "crop of the cream", i.e. the worst of the best ones.

Re:One kind of employee

[gweihir]

Google is trying to get very good people on the cheap. Instead they get very intelligent people that lack wisdom and experience on the cheap. I think in the long run that will backfire massively and I also think this effect is already visible.

Re:One kind of employee

[gweihir]

Very true.

Re:One kind of employee

[Darinbob]

But Google has interviewers who do not even understand the job that the candidate will be hired for. So they stick to more generalities rather than adequately understanding the specific qualifications of the candidates. That just seems silly. If they want to hire a security expert then they should have security experts grilling that person, not web developers or hardware engineers or marketing people.

Re:One kind of employee

[Darinbob]

Google is hardly a dream job. It may seem that way from the outside to an entry level person, but there's a lot of downgrade it. The commute is awful as they crowd far too many people in a tiny area and the offramps back up onto the freeway. Shuttles to remoter locations don't have frequent pickups and often have to move because the owners of the parking lots they go to will change their minds about allowing Google to stop there. Their vaunted 15% time to work on fun projects has changed, now those projects must be something to help the bottom line instead of being a free-for-all university style. The workload and stress can be very high. The pay may be good, but you can get good pay in the area at many places. They are first and foremost an advertising company, that's what it is all about and everything else they do is intended to feed directly into advertising.

Re:One kind of employee

[sribe]

Indeed. This way you get sort-of the "crop of the cream", i.e. the worst of the best ones.

Perfect description!

Re:One kind of employee

[sribe]

A person who applies to the industry leader and then turns down the job because they "already found something" don't even have a serious professional career, they're a fry cook looking for a paycheck.

You're off-point. This wasn't about turning down a job offer with Google; this was about not waiting any longer to find out if a job would be offered.

The process as described is unreasonable and utterly disrespectful to applicants. There is no rational reason Google could not make its decisions more quickly.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

*woosh*

The parts that are different than what he said are different for reasons. I rounded in favor of the guy to better explain the problems and misconceptions his analysis had. When you detected me being "off-point," that is what it sounds like when a person says something different than what is in your echo chamber. New analysis isn't automatically wrong, but it might be different than what you already considered. It has at least some chance of value or insight.

If you think their process is "disrespectful," then you'd be an awful candidate. There is no rational reason why google should choose your system instead of their own. You just wave your hands, and conclude [some nasty words]. If they are expectant of faster answers than google gives, I say it is "utterly" disrespectful of the applicant to abuse them by applying anyways. And if they consider the process of applying for a job at a corporation unreasonable, then they're insane for having still done it.

I wouldn't apply for that sort of corporate job if they doubled their salaries, but that doesn't mean they're doing something wrong. It means I should make different choices. They're not violating laws, ethics, or commonly recognized moral codes. They're simply and only making choices you dislike. Waaa. Waaa. So not impressed by people feeling oppressed by other people's freedom. Nobody has a right to work at google. Nobody has a right to be considered by them. Nobody has a right to a return phone call. Nobody has a right to demand things that they don't have a right to; those things they need to achieve by mutual consent.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

The fact is, google has good pay

No they don't. They have okay pay, but there are at least half a dozen large companies that pay better, try to hire the same people, and will give them an answer sooner.

That is statistically unlikely. Why is google winning the hiring battle against them then? Such an outrageous claim requires, if not a citation, at least some analysis and not just the recital of an unlikely conclusion.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

What are you on about?

Didn't read past the first line. It might work better to understand what I said before trying to respond, or else to ask questions. By claiming in the first line that you both disagree, and didn't understand, you really give me no reason to wonder what your point of views is. ;)

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

That leads to another question: Is it really a "dream job" under those conditions?

If not, then don't apply for it. And I'd apply that same logic to any well-known company. If you have something to offer as an employee other than being able to promise to cash your paychecks, then you have significant choice as to where to offer your services. It should be places that you approve of, places that you're fond enough of that you'll walk in the door with high morale and a chance to contribute.

A bored or disgruntled Einstein would sure be an awful employee. Just as, an engaged and interested Einstein would be a great advantage.

Morale and attitude is part of "work ethic." People who complain about a company's practices are not qualified to work there, and it would be unethical of them to attempt it or to pretend to want the job so they can hang out in the building long enough to pad their resume.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

If an employer isn't understanding of a new hire getting recruited away by somebody bigger... they might have a pretty toxic "Dilbert" style workplace. An employee isn't promising to stay, unless they did promise. But few valuable employees agree to indentured servitude. So generally, it was understood from the start by both parties that it might not work out, or last forever.

This is normal, and just, and shows only freedom and consensual relationships. A company wants new hires to stay, but that isn't an expectation. It is something they need to achieve. I can tell you this; if the pay is as good, the benefits as good, and the work as interesting, then why would they even leave? It seem implied in the scenario that google is the preferred employer. If the little guy provides the same pay and conditions as the big guy, usually people prefer the smaller company. It is because smaller companies don't provide the same compensation or work conditions that people are so likely to quit whatever they had to take the offer.

Re:One kind of employee

[Aighearach]

It is not a reasonable argument; a person who doesn't want the job, shouldn't apply for it. There is nothing for you to prove. It doesn't matter if one of us thinks it is desirable job unless they applied. If they applied and didn't want it, they are doing something wrong.

Re:One kind of employee

[rioki]

I had a very similar experience with Google. In my decade of work experience as a software engineer, I have been soling "big picture" issues all the time. It very rarely went down the "quick sort" level of algorithms and I have been working on compilers and language interpretation most of the time. The general work can be summered, here are some requirements, make it working software. Yet, when I interviewed with Google a few years back, all I got was CS 101 "quick sort" style questions. I was mildly prepared for it, but their insistence on low level questions was slightly disturbing. Yes, Google was the hardest to interview, but not in a good way, more in the "moving Mt. Fuji" style of bad interview.

Re:One kind of employee

[Hognoxious]

Seems they like ones who know what geolocation is, but don't know what HTTP headers are for.

Being pretty dumb at geography & foreign languages appears to be a bonus.

http://i.imgur.com/ZGEXUYq.jpg

Re:One kind of employee

[cthulhu11]

Indeed, the way they want them to think is "I've only been alive for 23 years". I've stopped bothering applying for Google jobs, the screening process makes it clear that they only talk to me for statistics.

Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[brunes69]

I am a dev, and for a long time was a hiring manager. The idea that grilling, testing, or creating "challenging" interview questions for candidates, and thinking that it will give you ANY introspective on how they will perform on the job, is complete and total poppycock.

Honestly, I feel kind of bad for silicon valley companies that have gotten this strange idea that if you hire a whole bunch of "smart" developers who can answer a bunch of esoteric interview questions, and/or complete silly coding assignments in under an hour, that it will somehow magically enable those developers to coalesce as a team, work hard, solve difficult problems together, and release a viable product.

Raw intelligence is not everything. In fact, it is not even in the most important facet when hiring a software developer. Much more important are experience problem-solving and collaborate in a team environment. I have zero interest in the zen guru who sits at his desk all day churning out algorithms without involving his other team members in what he is doing - because other people need to understand what he is doing and contribute to it as well, if you want to create a successful organization (which will result in a successful product)

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[drinkypoo]

I have zero interest in the zen guru who sits at his desk all day churning out algorithms without involving his other team members in what he is doing - because other people need to understand what he is doing and contribute to it as well, if you want to create a successful organization (which will result in a successful product)

Perhaps it's the special snowflake effect that comes from hiring all these ostensible geniuses that makes gapps and google web apps so shit. I can't think of a single one that didn't start out more usable than it is today. Inbox barely works; it eats mouse clicks left and right, just completely ignores them. I have to click 2-3 times just to get an email to open and the menu buttons on the emails themselves only work without actually opening the email maybe one load in ten. (One load of the site, that is.) And what's sad is that most of these sites perform badly in Firefox, but they perform worse in Chrome! They can't even make a webapp work properly in their own browser.

Re: Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this.

Most of Google's best offerings were acquisitions, and most of these were far better before Google acquired them.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[91degrees]

The problem is, Microsoft and Google use these processes. Then the cargo cult nature of managers comes in and they assume that they are successful because if these processes (rather than because they have a large segment of the market tied up).

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

I am a dev, and for a long time was a hiring manager. The idea that grilling, testing, or creating "challenging" interview questions for candidates, and thinking that it will give you ANY introspective on how they will perform on the job, is complete and total poppycock.

I'd actually really like to agree with you, because there is a huge amount of error in any hiring process that tries to evaluate engineers in anything less than a few months of focused work.

But, I don't, for the very simple reason that I have seen the outcome of Google's hiring process firsthand, after 20 years of work in the industry to provide context... and I can state with absolute certainty that the average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry. So, whatever errors there are in the process it actually works, in the sense that it effectively ensures that vanishingly few candidates who aren't highly capable get hired. Even better, Google's process seems to do an excellent job of weeding out prima donnas who can't work well with others.

So, while in the abstract I agree that it's extremely difficult to figure out who's good and who's not in a 45-minute interview with a coding problem or two... Google's process actually works very well. Google HR even has empirical data to back that up: they've found that while there is no correlation between the scores that any individual interviewer gives candidates and the job performance post-hire, there is a strong correlation between the mean scores given by the four to five interviewers who interview a candidate and post-hire performance.

Of course, that evaluation can only consider the candidates who were hired, and it's widely believed at Google that therein lies the major flaw in the hiring process: It's great at excluding unqualified candidates but does so only by also excluding lots of qualified candidates. My first tech lead at Google put it this way: If you take any successful Google engineer and run them through the hiring process anonymously, they've got a roughly 50% chance of being hired. I wonder if it's even that high.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Bengie]

There's too many types of intelligence to say "raw intelligence". There is always someone that would be considered very smart that will be "stupid" by some sort of metric of intelligence. Some people have a strong memory, some are great at divergent thinking, some have strong abstract reasoning, and many others. No one person is great in all areas. Most people that excel at one are horrible at another.

And a proper team takes all types. Like you pointed out, no matter how smart someone is, without some basic soft skills, they're worthless.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[aliquis]

Perhaps it's the special snowflake effect that comes from hiring all these ostensible geniuses that makes gapps and google web apps so shit. I can't think of a single one that didn't start out more usable than it is today. Inbox barely works; it eats mouse clicks left and right, just completely ignores them. I have to click 2-3 times just to get an email to open and the menu buttons on the emails themselves only work without actually opening the email maybe one load in ten. (One load of the site, that is.) And what's sad is that most of these sites perform badly in Firefox, but they perform worse in Chrome! They can't even make a webapp work properly in their own browser.

Obligatory: Works fine here!

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Feral Nerd]

I am a dev, and for a long time was a hiring manager. The idea that grilling, testing, or creating "challenging" interview questions for candidates, and thinking that it will give you ANY introspective on how they will perform on the job, is complete and total poppycock.

Honestly, I feel kind of bad for silicon valley companies that have gotten this strange idea that if you hire a whole bunch of "smart" developers who can answer a bunch of esoteric interview questions, and/or complete silly coding assignments in under an hour, that it will somehow magically enable those developers to coalesce as a team, work hard, solve difficult problems together, and release a viable product.

Raw intelligence is not everything. In fact, it is not even in the most important facet when hiring a software developer. Much more important are experience problem-solving and collaborate in a team environment. I have zero interest in the zen guru who sits at his desk all day churning out algorithms without involving his other team members in what he is doing - because other people need to understand what he is doing and contribute to it as well, if you want to create a successful organization (which will result in a successful product)

I agree with that. I got invited by a headhunter to one of those famous Google job interviews for a position in either the UK or Switzerland of all places. I wasn't really about to uproot my entire existence and move to another country (never mind learning how to drive on the wrong side of the road since Switzerland was not an option) but the opportunity of going through the world famous interviewing process of the Google genius recruitment team was too tempting to turn down. Needless to say I failed this interview which I take it is the first hurdle in Google's long and painful interview process. The reason I flopped was probably because of my poor attitude since I concluded about 3 minutes into the interview that even if I had been interested in moving to the UK when the interview started this interviewer was a wasting my and Google company time. The interview consisted of a teleconference where a Google employee quizzed me about various really technical issues with most of the interview revolving around the nitty gritty details of how command piping is implemented in different *nix versions. I have been asked by employers to solve all kinds of programmatic and system administration related problems in my two decades as a programmer but why on earth would I be an expert in the command/data piping mechanism in *nix type operating systems and why would I be a bad developer if I don't know that? Another typical task that I have been presented with at various times during interviews is solving some math puzzle to which I usually reply that I can knock you together a *nix daemon and client capable of network communications in about 5 minutes with a basic toolkit I developed years ago and keep on a USB stick on my keychain. Or perhaps you'd like me to put together a web service in C/C++? ... but please don't ask me to solve differential equations programmatically off the top of my head. That is not something I have ever been asked to do by an employer in 20 years of programming and it's something I'm not likely to ever be asked to do judging from the job advertisement I responded to.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[NoNeeeed]

Genuine question, because I occasionally have to interview people: how do you interview people, and what sort of questions do you ask to try and work out if they are the right kind of person?

Being a small firm we don't hire very often, so we don't get much practice, it's good to hear how other people do it.

We will ask people to talk us through how they would solve a problem, or work with a client, but we are far more interested in their approach and how they think through the problem, and they are not abstract "invert this binary tree" type puzzles but real-world issues we've encountered.

We do ask developers to do a couple of simple programming tasks just to make sure they can actually code fluently (in any language, using any tool they like, and on a laptop not a whiteboard). As a sanity check it seems to work quite well.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

The interview consisted of a teleconference where a Google employee quizzed me about various really technical issues with most of the interview revolving around the nitty gritty details of how command piping is implemented in different *nix versions. I have been asked by employers to solve all kinds of programmatic and system administration related problems in my two decades as a programmer but why on earth would I be an expert in the command/data piping mechanism in *nix type operating systems and why would I be a bad developer if I don't know that?

Are you sure that he was really asking you to display your *knowledge* of command piping? If so, that was a very bad Google interviewer, because Google interviews are supposed to test problem solving ability, not knowledge. It's assumed that smart people who are good problem solvers can learn whatever they need to learn, so testing knowledge is a waste of time.

My guess is that the interviewer was actually using the discussion of command piping to see how you thought about problems, and didn't actually expect you to know all of the details. I could be wrong, of course -- I certainly wasn't there! -- but people aren't chosen to do phone screens until they've proven themselves to be good interviewers in face to face interviews, and what you describe is an extraordinarily bad Google interviewer.

Or perhaps you'd like me to put together a web service in C/C++? ... but please don't ask me to solve differential equations programmatically off the top of my head. That is not something I have ever been asked to do by an employer in 20 years of programming

Heh. As it happens solving a differential equation programmatically is something that I've done for an employer. Google, as it happens, though I could see having used a similar method elsewhere, given the right sort of problem.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[GerryHattrick]

In distant days, when compiling 80-column self-punched card programs on an ICL1901 with tape drives (for defence-sensitive applications of which I cannot even now speak), the most reliable man in our team was also the thickest. After him came the (only) girl, who was determined. Then a 'recovering' junkie who was very good, whenever awake. They were lovely people, and the cheerful heart of the team. That's all, from history.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Alomex]

The idea that grilling, testing, or creating "challenging" interview questions for candidates, and thinking that it will give you ANY introspective on how they will perform on the job, is complete and total poppycock.

Except that Google keeps track of this and has the data to back it up. So on the one have you have your single anecdotal experience and on the other hand we have 10 years of Google hiring experiences.

Of course it is not perfect and they end up hiring some duds and letting some jewels go, but that is not the threshold sought, they simply aim to hire better than the average company.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[yodleboy]

if you mean youTube and not an actual site called "pootube", then I have noticed lately that I have to click the play button twice. First time, it just starts buffering but never plays, second time , play starts. No errors though.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Anonymous Coward]

The sorts of problems you mention seem to stem from a different but somewhat related issue - the new age programmer, the Web 2.0 guy.

For some reason we seem to have had a wave of people who have come along with things like Ruby on Rails, HTML5, and node.js. These folks seem to be insistent on reinventing the wheel without ever learning anything from those before them and inevitably just create problems that were already solved long ago. Node.js is pointless. No really. It is. It's a thin wrapper around IO completion ports backed up by a fucking terrible language. HTML5 repeats all the mistakes of earlier versions of HTML in trying to do way too much, in not supporting developers, and in completely failing in areas like accessibility. Ruby on Rails isn't inherently bad, but it also seems to bring nothing to the table that wasn't already there. There's all the NoSQL stuff too, now, NoSQL has a time and a place, it's not inherently bad, but it's getting used regularly in general because these new age developers apparently never learnt the who what and why of ACID principles. They don't know what those things are, so they don't know why some storage options may be more suitable for some circumstances than others.

So your Google Apps are shit simply because they're being written by a bunch of new age hipsters who have no idea how to write good software, and no idea how to pick the right tool for the job. They use whatever is new and hip, just because it's new and hip. They believe if something is new and hip then it's inherently good, even if it's pointless or the wrong tool for the job. They don't know how to write software that avoids common pitfalls and so they implement those pitfalls that no one over the age of about 30 would because people in that age range had it fucking drilled into them at University and throughout their working lives.

I'm not even one of those who complains about ageism, I don't give a shit if a company wishes to hire those who are young, what I do have is a problem when they hire those who are incompetent because their testing failed to catch that incompetence because it was testing for something other than the ability to simply write good software. There are plenty of great young developers out there, I'm just concerned Google's signal to noise ratio isn't that optimal. It's easy to point at Google and say it's successful so they're obviously doing it right, but as pointed out, most of Google's actual successes have been acquisitions propped up by a handful of talented more experienced devs - the big name hires that everyone knows when the name is announced. Very little seems to come from their army of previously unknown developers, nearly all of those folk seem to remain unknown. The only people with a name at Google are those who made a name for themselves before they joined - no one makes a name for themselves actually at Google (unless you count Sergey and Larry - even Schmidt was well known before Google).

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Anonymous Coward]

I too was lured by the idea of "trying" the legendary interview process. So two year ago I responded to headhunters for both google and amazon.

I made it through phone interviews at each.

The amazon face to face interviews went well all 8 of them..it was a long day...the last manager guy talked all about performance plans, benefits and salary and said they'd be sending out an offer. After about two weeks I got an email from the hr recuiter lady saying that project had been cancelled and they would like me to come out to interview for some other position. I declined the offer to interview for front-end shit....but hey I got a free trip to Seattle out of it.

The google one I thought I screwed up on the phone interview because I said I wasn't sure if I wanted to relocate, but I got the call for an interview. There were a couple stupid brain teaser questions but nothing completely goofy. And the couple of technical questions I didn't know I just described how I would find out the info or approach the problem. I did have one guy where we got sidetracked when he told me what he was working on and we spent about 30 minutes talking about his problem. They made me an offer, I thanked them and declined saying I decided not to relocate to CA. Two days later they contacted me with a list of other locations that would be viable and may be more to my liking. It was tempting to pursue but nearest one was still about 4 hours away and the wife wasn't interested so I declined.

From what I've read online, I do think the interviews for new grads are probably more challenging than normal, but for a more senior level position I didn't think it was that bad. But I actually like interviewing, so my opinion may be skewed already.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

Genuine question, because I occasionally have to interview people: how do you interview people, and what sort of questions do you ask to try and work out if they are the right kind of person?

I'll give you Google's answer to this question, if you like.

Google does a series of four interviews, each with a different interviewer. All interviewers submit their responses to a hiring committee in writing. Each gives a hire/no-hire recommendation as well as scoring the candidate on a 1-4 scale (0 == if you hire this person, I'll quit; 2.5 == I have no opinion[1]; 4 == if you don't hire this person, I'll quit). Each interviewer also provides a detailed account of what they asked, how the candidate responded and what conclusions the interviewer drew. If the interview included writing code, the code is included in the feedback. The hiring committee, which includes no one who interviewed the candidate, takes the feedback from the interviewers and comes to a hire/no-hire consensus decision.

Each interview is nominally 45 minutes long, scheduled one hour apart, leaving 15 minutes between interviews for bio breaks, logistics, etc. Between the second and third interviews an additional "interviewer" takes the candidate to lunch. The "lunch interviewer" submits no feedback and answers the candidate's questions about the company, as well as giving them a break (and food).

For the actual interviews, each interviewer is instructed to focus on evaluating how smart the candidate is and how well they solve problems, not on how much they know. Basic CS knowledge is necessary because that's the language of the interview, and the candidate must know some programming language, but it doesn't matter which one.

Interviewers select their own questions to ask, but there are some criteria. First, the answers should not depend upon having some particular bit of knowledge. Other than basic CS knowledge, it's expected that the interviewer can provide the candidate with whatever information is required, though not necessarily all at once. It's good to provide partial information and see how the candidate goes about determining what else is needed, and obtaining the missing information. Similarly, answers should not depend on the candidate having some flash of insight. Such "aha!" questions say little about ability. The best questions are also progressive in nature; they start simple and build in difficulty and complexity as they're explored. This has a lot of benefits, not least that it allows weak candidates to feel like they had some success and walk away feeling like it was a good experience... even as the question showed the interviewer that the candidate isn't qualified.

Interview questions must also be calibrated. That is, the interviewer must know before going into the interview how well different kinds of candidates respond to the question, and must have a pretty deep understanding of the solution space. The calibration process begins by running peers through the question in a mock interview. That allows the interviewer to get a feel for what Google-caliber engineers do and do not see when looking at the problem and potential solutions. Different people are different, so it's recommended to have at least three or four peers help with initial calibration. Calibration is further refined by using the same question with many candidates. Google engineers have a small handful of questions they always use. They should always enter an interview armed with a well-calibrated question, plus a backup question or two in case the candidate is really outstanding and flies through the first question, or in case the first one turns out to be unsuitable in this particular case.

The interview begins with a few minutes of introductions/small talk to help the candidate relax. Most interviews consist of a single problem. The candidate is asked to devise an algorithm to solve it, describing the algorithm first verbally/pictorially, and then implementing the algorithm either on a w

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[drinkypoo]

Remember when they actually coded to web standards, instead of whatever feature they pulled out of thin air and implemented in Chrome one week prior? Those were the days.

I do, but I also remember when they created "google gears" and used that for a while, then discontinued it when HTML5 offline storage came around. I guess that was the end of those days.

Along the same lines, why is the page load for G+ so massive and slow? FB loads in about half the time. Granted, my connection is pretty weak, it's only 6 Mbps, but one would think that would be enough for social networking

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[alexhs]

To start, I'm not doing interviews, so my answer is more about how I would like the interviews to be, so keep that in mind :)

Asking how they would solve a problem (as long as it's relevant to your business) or work with a client, real-world puzzles relevant to your domain are good practices.

However I notice you let developers choose any language they want to solve some programming tasks. It seems too generic.

You're hiring someone for a business in a specific domain, so it's good to ask generic questions about the domain, but you're also hiring someone at a more-or-less specific position (rather less in smaller firms), so you have to ask questions relevant to the actual position. If every developer you hire decides to use another language for the new tools he develops, you will end up with a mess.

At least, give him a list of the languages you're actually using in-house to choose from. You're a small firm, so probably he will have to be fluent in most of the languages you're actually using, so give exercises in the most important ones, not only solving problems, but also "spot-the-bug", "tell us what this piece of code is doing", etc.

Languages usually have big libraries coming with them, don't expect the developer to know all of them by heart, unless you're explicitly hiring an expert in some language with some framework, so answer if he's asking about some library calls, and accept sensible made-up library calls.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[SQLGuru]

The main thing I look for is not experience (unless there is a time-sensitive need) but passion for the job. Someone who goes out of their way to explore technology and play with the latest trends on their own time are much more likely to be self-starters and capable of taking on any task I give them.

Here is an actual e-mail I sent to our recruiters to help them train people screening candidates (formatting is lost, but you should get the gist):

I take a different approach to interviewing than most technical people, I thinkâ¦â¦

Iâ(TM)ve been in numerous technical interviews where they wind up being more or less like taking a certification exam. I think these are HORRIBLE interviews. Good/advanced developers donâ(TM)t know all of the ins and outs of what they are working on to that level ---- they understand the concepts and know the âoemagic wordsâ and then just throw them into a search engine to get a Stack Overflow link where they can copy and paste from the example. What makes them good is the understanding of what they need to do and knowing how to quickly find what they need. None of this makes them great test takers (they may be â" but that is a different skill from being a good consultant). Also, Iâ(TM)ve had plenty of candidates who have studied for the exam (but might not have ever worked with a technology) score âoebetterâ than someone who knows their stuff because they could give those book answers.

So, then, how do I interview? I ask a lot of the same type of questions that a non-technical person doesâ¦..Iâ(TM)m just looking for knowledge and understanding instead of team dynamics or personality. I also try to make the interview more of a conversation and less of a âoequestion 1, question 2â â" this allows them to open up a lot faster. Iâ(TM)ll scan through their resume and look for one of the more recent projects / roles / jobs and ask open ended questions about that project (and usually try to hit on more than one of them over the course of the interview). As the interview goes on, Iâ(TM)ll tailor the questions based on whether they appear to be more junior or more senior as well as the type of role they are looking for.

These questions are not asked word for word, but represent the sentiment of the question. Iâ(TM)m also assuming that a high-level description and a list of technologies were included on the resume; if not, I might ask for some of that background just to help direct questions.
Example question Key things Iâ(TM)m looking for in the answer
How big was the project X team? Iâ(TM)m just trying to determine how relevant the experience is. If the project was rather small or was a team of 1, it might not have followed any best practices or even any of the latest techniques. Depending on the role being interviewed for, I may move on to another project from their resume.
What was your role on project X? Which team were you on? Iâ(TM)m trying to gauge how senior they are. The lead on a 10-man team says more than being the lead over a single intern. Iâ(TM)m also feeling out whether they have experience interactive with PMs or Testing team or DBAs, etc.
The next few questions are where I get âoetechnicalâ. After these questions, I might probe into specific technologies and how they relate to the project, but only high level probing for understanding of the technology.
Describe the application architecture of project X. Iâ(TM)m looking for understanding of patterns (MVC, MVVM, etc.) as well as descriptions of how the application was divided in terms of layers (database, business tier, UI, etc.)
Who was responsible for the architecture of project X? For senior candidates, I expect them to either have been responsible or for having had significant input.
For junior candidates, Iâ(TM)m looking for a description of how well they interac

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Hognoxious]

There actually is a site called pootube, but they aren't (AFAIK) part of the Google empire.

So what d'ya recon, Sparky?

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[ErichTheRed]

"the new age programmer, the Web 2.0 guy"

Agreed mostly. The thing I'm seeing is that developers write for the abstraction layer they're using, not really understanding all the magic that goes on under the hood. That wrapper on top of a framework on top of a client-side language runtime running in a Docker container running on a virtual machine running on an IaaS platform of choice eventually talks to a final operating system, and eventually to real, physical hardware. If a developer doesn't have at least some CS background that touches on how the magic happens at a low enough level, solving performance problems becomes difficult. No one should be coding in assembler unless there's no other choice, but assuming the OS or runtime is going to do everything for you really limits what you can do.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Gr8Apes]

Why, oh why, did you post as AC? That is a whole lot of very valid criticisms about just about any average developer under about 28 to 30. Not sure what happened, but somewhere learning about what CS is to just learning a language or two seems to have happened. I blame the Agile crowd for perpetuating this.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[interval1066]

I'm of two minds on this; obviously, if an engineer can solve an ege-type, logical puzzle you'll only encounter in a text book I think there's value in that. But those aren't the problems you'll encounter in the real world. I really pride myself in being ale to wrangle the technology; getting memcached to work the way I need it to on a particular issue, configuring named zone files so they're tuned to give us the highest throughput on lookups, and applying THE RIGHT design pattern to a particular coding problem. That's what I do, and I try to do it to my best ability. So when I'm confronted with the Bus Gold Ball Problem and answer with "calculate the volume of the bus, which would be easy, and start throwing gold balls in a pool until I get the same amount of water displaced" and I get back "well we wanted to see your math" I get discouraged. Archimedes was a genius. You're telling me Archimedes wouldn't have gotten the job? (If Archimedes had invented Ruby on Rails it would fit in an embedded application with no problems.)

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[interval1066]

Yeah, the programming needed to calculate how much money to extract from a 'customers' bank account for 'using' AdWords can be quite challenging indeed.

Are you saying that's what's used to steer those self-driving cars rather than some sort of proportional integral derivative algorithm?

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Shortguy881]

There are extremes in any situation. Being in the same boat, developer and interviewer, I routinely use short coding assignments. I don't get as crazy as some of the google/twitter questions, but I am continually surprised by the number of candidates that have all the right buzz words on their resume and slip past the phone screen and cant work through a simple for loop question.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[interval1066]

c/gold/golf/ jeezuz.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Grishnakh]

Yep, I have to say the same thing. Google Mail works just fine for me, and I've been using it for years (mostly in Firefox, but sometimes in Chromium). It's uglier than it used to be, I'll admit, just like pretty much all modern UIs, but I certainly don't have any problems with lots of mouse clicks being ignored or anything like that. It's ugly, but it works.

Same thing with Google Maps. It's uglier (and slower, on the PC/web browser version) than it used to be, but it still works. The Android phone version works well though. I use it as a backup for the HERE-based nav system in my car. Google Maps will notify me of traffic problems which the built-in nav doesn't. I do want to try Waze sometime, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Maybe the parent's problem is with crappy Windows.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Feral Nerd]

The interview consisted of a teleconference where a Google employee quizzed me about various really technical issues with most of the interview revolving around the nitty gritty details of how command piping is implemented in different *nix versions. I have been asked by employers to solve all kinds of programmatic and system administration related problems in my two decades as a programmer but why on earth would I be an expert in the command/data piping mechanism in *nix type operating systems and why would I be a bad developer if I don't know that?

Are you sure that he was really asking you to display your *knowledge* of command piping?

No, he did not want go test if I knew how to pipe data from the 'ls' command to the 'grep' command using the | character. He wanted me to explain exactly how it is implemented on a system level as in: How is it coded? I have studies many aspects of the *nix operating systems but the nitty gritty of how piping is implemented in code is something I have never felt the need to explore.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[serviscope_minor]

Along the same lines, why is the page load for G+ so massive and slow? FB loads in about half the time. Granted, my connection is pretty weak, it's only 6 Mbps, but one would think that would be enough for social networking

Luddite! Move to silicon valley, that's the answer.

Also, my connection is 5Mbps on a good day :) And woe betide if I'm on my phone and down to 3G non HSPDA or even 2G (sometimes).

Basically google's stuff is written with the assumption that you're (a) a google employee with (b) the latest hardware and (c) a state of the art data connectino at all times.

One of my complaints is with maps. I pre-cache areas if I need to go somwehere for a while. However on a crap connection a simple search can take minutes to complete. That means it's downloading many megabytes of data to return what amounts to a few k of search results.

Eh but it works in California so who cares?

And no: before some smartarse comments, I'm not complaining about free stuff. I paid good money for my phone (a google Nexus as it happens). So this ain't free, this is all paid for.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Jiro]

The main thing I look for is not experience (unless there is a time-sensitive need) but passion for the job.

As far as I am concerned, if you are doing this, you are part of the problem. Hiring people based on "passion" contributes to an environment where in order to make a living, you need to BSing skills just for the interview. It also ensures that people who have other priorities in life, perhaps a family or just anything that gives them a life outside the job, are screwed over in favor of the obsessive willing to work 10 hour days because they really have passion.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[cerberusss]

For the love of FSM, someone mod this up, this is extremely informative.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[serviscope_minor]

I'll give you Google's answer to this question, if you like.

You missed the prior stuff like the online coding test.

I got contacted by a google recruiter once, presumably because of my reputation within the field and publication record etc. They wanted me to do an online coding exam. I think it was only a couple of hours worth plus another few hours for boning up on the sort of stuff that's going to be in it.

Except I was already working myself half to death being junior academic staff (never accept a temporary lecturer position---especially to replace someone who's just left) and simply didn't have the time (80+ hour weeks will do that). They seemed to know who I was and the position I was in but unwilling to alter their process to accept the reailty of the situation.

Guys, you contacted me to tempt me away from my existing job. I'm not going to start jumping through hoops to please you especially when I don't have any time.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[MountainLogic]

On the technical side I ask basic questions. I put up a list of numbers on the whiteboard and ask them to write a function to sort them in ascending order. For example, 1, 5, -13, 2.5. I'm make it clear I don't care if they remember a particular sorting algorithm. Frank, I feel it is more meaningful if they mumble an apology about not remembering quick sort and accomplish it anyway. I just want to see if they can do a basic task than any programmer doing the type of work I do must be able to do. Some create a detailed compliable function and others write a pseudo code fragment. Either is fine, but I do ask everyone to review the code for correctness and completeness to make it check-in ready. You would think that every high school kid could do this, but you would be surprised at how many experienced programmers can't do this. This does not show if you are creative or smart. It only tells me that you have spent time writing code.
For softer skills I just chat about their past work and work environments. Honestly, the worst interviewer I had for soft skills turned out to be my best hire so it is at best it is a gamble and anybody who says otherwise is fooling themselves.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[fahrbot-bot]

Has anyone else been having problems with pootube recently?

Never heard of it. Is that a German porn site?

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[chihowa]

Achieving a pretty damn good command of English grammar is something that most reasonably intelligent children accomplish in grade school. If you're needing to "allocate time" to it at this point in your life, you're already making a bad impression on others. If you're living in a country and can't be bothered to learn the local language well, poor attitude is going to be what people think when they interact with you. Why would anyone assume that you're going to bother to do a good job at the work you're hired to do when you barely give a shit about communicating effectively with the people around you?

Frankly, your initial post didn't bother me but this attitude always strikes me as bizarre. You're the only one who sees your intellectual laziness and your incompetence outside of your tiny field of expertise as a positive trait.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[doru]

[...] while there is no correlation between the scores that any individual interviewer gives candidates and the job performance post-hire, there is a strong correlation between the mean scores given by the four to five interviewers who interview a candidate and post-hire performance.

So, the performance does not correlate with the individual scores but it correlates with their mean ? How does this even work?!

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

You're not going to be able to measure the things you're saying are more important. That is probably why you only state conclusions of what would be getting done better in a "successful" organization, but don't identify any process improvements; only desired traits that you don't know how to measure.

It may be that company reputation and workplace morale and ethics culture are the biggest factors in determining teamwork and collaboration, and not (in most cases) based on who the individuals are that are hired. It may be that google has such a reputation that people arrive there eager and expecting to be a team member. And it may be that companies that had weakness in this area had made a different mistake than you uncovered. Should I just trust you to be such a guru to tell me the answer, or should I want to contribute and understand it myself? You don't seem to really make a case that what you observed is relevant to google's workplace.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

Yeah, they're right across the way from the people who blame everything on upstream.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[NormalVisual]

I don't think it's an Agile thing, I think it's more that CS programs are focusing on the hotness of the day instead of solid CS fundamentals and basic digital electronics, and that it seems a lot of today's coders just don't have a lot of interest in how things really work. Last year I had to explain what a daemon was to a 23 year old web dev a couple of months away from his MSCS because he'd never heard the term before. That shouldn't happen - either he should have been exposed to it in school, or he should have come across the term in the course of being a geek that likes computers, IMO.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

Their HTML5 implementation sucks pretty bad. If you're humble enough to still run the flash player, nothing ever changed.

I was using the HTML5 player for months until a few weeks ago when it started sucking and blowing in a non-advantageous pattern.

They also disabled the opt-out for the new player; if you say yes, they want to feed out HTML5 unless it is disabled in the browser. This would be a major inconvenience, except that I don't use audio/video anywhere else online than youtube. And I don't trust websites enough for embedded content.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Alomex]

The people that didn't make it through the process didn't get to work there and have their performance evaluated.

They have hired people using various different parameters which have evolved over time. Their current hiring profile is quite a bit different than ten years ago.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

and I can state with absolute certainty that the average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry

Appealing to absolutes doesn't exactly engender confidence in your analysis. It may be that many of those employees shine due to the work environment and culture, and that in other places they would become withdrawn and the magic wouldn't be there.

If a company has a workplace culture that values the company, the workers might give everything a bit more "little-league hustle" and when people are doing that in positive environment it really encourages teamwork. I've experienced that in multiple industries.

Lots of people have assumptions they absolutely believe in, and yet people who study the hiring process claim that it is largely unsolved, and the things that lead to positive results are difficult to define in a way that leads to a clear process. Clearly google's process is working, but it isn't enough to identify elements of it that you approve of in order to know why it works. There are too many known unknowns.

Excluding qualified candidates is only a problem if they have a shortage. So far, it looks like they have "a line around the block and down the street" and it might not matter. Of course, for other companies trying to emulate their practices it would usually matter a lot more.

And a 45 minute interview might not tell you how well they will cooperate over the course of a project, but it does at least tell you how they cooperate during that 45 minutes. Presumably there is a lot more to the grading than just the technical merits of their solution. You might indeed at least know how willing they are to work with one other person for a short time, depending on the structure of the problems.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

The reason I flopped was probably because of my poor attitude...

...quizzed me about various really technical issues... revolving around the nitty gritty details of how command piping is implemented in different *nix versions

It may be that they wanted to know how you respond to stupid questions. Do you turn into a Superior Being Gazing Down On Them, or do you approach the problem in a positive way that would help build team morale?

Maybe they want some insight into your thinking around portability, and solving problems generally where you can't be sure that the implementation is what you used in the past. It may (or may not) be that the "correct" answer to some of the questions is to RTFM.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

Guys, you contacted me to tempt me away from my existing job. I'm not going to start jumping through hoops to please you especially when I don't have any time.

They more likely contacted you to find out if you're eager to jump through their hoops to get out of your current job into something better. ;) Between a temporary academic lecturer and google, whose time do you predict google values? This isn't a hard question. ;)

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

Exactly. Asking for passion is just asking for employees to be using The Method during the interview. If the job is acting, that makes perfect sense; an actor should interview as if they are playing the role of an actor applying for a role. But you can't method act a solution to a technical problem, and spewing the expected bullshit while emoting what you think people want will really end up frustrating technical co-workers.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

anybody who says otherwise is fooling themselves

That's the important thing to remember; these are heavily studied problems, and there is a consensus in the field studying them that they don't understand it well enough to predict outcomes. The uncertainties are still the main signal component.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[friesofdoom]

This is how I feel with any head-hunter and any job: If they came looking for me, there should be no interview process, no tests, no bs questions, about team spirit. If my reputation led you to me, that should be all you need.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[david_thornley]

The last time I had to pull that on a user, I apologized for it, and told the user that it meant I was going to have trouble testing a possible fix. (Eventually, I just found out what the fix on the floor was, and automated it.)

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

Except that Google keeps track of this and has the data to back it up.

False. Google keeps track and has the data, that part is true. But the part they have the data to back it up is false; they have the data for whatever their proprietary purposes are, and they will not release that data to back it up.

So we can't use the secret data in our analysis, we can only use the fact that google has secret data. This does not somehow propel you above and beyond anecdote. The anecdotes presumably are all fatally flawed, and yet, they are not secret and can be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. All we can analyze about google is the known details of their process, and the apparent success of the company. None of that uncovers the issues directly.

It may very well be that google is worse at hiring than their competitors, but they have a more successful workforce for other reasons, such as the practices in place after people are hired. We just don't have the information we would need in order to do that part of the analysis. So we can't come to reasoned conclusions about those parts.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[david_thornley]

Probably a Windows user. Possibly his institution primarily used Windows (dumb choice for computer science; if you don't know your way around Linux or Unix when you graduate you've had a bad education). Anyway, if you had no trouble explaining to the MSCS what a daemon was, or what it was for, I wouldn't criticize the program too much. Somebody might just fail to catch a concept. If the guy couldn't get the concept easily after a brief explanation, then I'd badmouth the program.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Grishnakh]

Well presumably, that's why they have not one, but four interviewers. If one is a problem, you theoretically should see that after a number of interviews where the bad one is giving particular ratings to candidates and the other three are all giving opposite ratings.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Grishnakh]

Yes, but the problem here is that not all your employees, or even all your programmers, need to do that kind of work. If you're working on embedded devices for instance (like Android/iOS/WP phones or Fire tablets), you're going to have some people writing low-level driver code for interacting with hardware, and those people never work with binary trees. There's lots of other programming jobs that just aren't challenging in that way, like most web programming.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Alomex]

You are confusing the fact that *you* haven't seen the data with it not existing or not being available to some of us for examination.

Does google collect data? yes. Do they search for correlations? yes. Have they claimed to find ones that lead to better employees? yes.

This is just like a reporter filing an item from abroad. You cannot be positive about what happened unless you see it with your own eyes, but at some point you have to make a judgment call and choose to trust the statements or not. Is there a reason why they would be making these things up?

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[gweihir]

Very much this. Example: An intelligent novice describes in documentation what his thing does. Mostly worthless. Somebody experienced and wise describes in addition why it does it this way, what the implications are and what alternatives where not selected and why. Google hires the first kind.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[SQLGuru]

Having passion means that it's the only thing you do all-day every-day in spite of other obligations. It means that when you talk about the subject, you get excited. It means that when facing new technology, you don't shy away.

If you want people that have no passion for their job, they're going to do the minimum...they'll fly under the radar......they'll never be "rock stars".....maybe not even "good" but just "meh".

I have a family, cook meals, chauffeur kids, etc.....but it's a passion for me. That means that I stay abreast of industry trends....I read sites like Slashdot (marginal, I know)....I play with technology in my spare time. But I also don't shirk my other duties. Passion isn't time bound but a state of mind.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[GodelEscherBlecch]

"calculate the volume of the bus, which would be easy, and start throwing gold balls in a pool until I get the same amount of water displaced"

I don't see these problems as the magical divining rods that many interviewers do, but sometimes you get an answer that is so terrible that it immediately clears any doubt that it is time to move on to the next candidate. This is one of those answers

Not only do you just throw out the hardest part of the problem by asserting that it's 'easy' (it's not), you then proceed in such a way so as to guarantee that your estimate is at least 2x too high. Your answer is a perfect example of what these problems are meant to screen for. They are supposed to get you to demonstrate your ability to unpack a problem that may be easy to say and sounds simple then find all the weird little places where it is actually devilishly complicated, and come up with ways to address them. Because in the end, identifying and addressing 'all the weird little places' is where good and bad developers part ways. I'm generally happy if a single person can either identify them or address them. A person who can do both is gold. A person who can do neither is not getting hired.

I want to hire the guy who's response to this question is to ask me whether the bus has emergency exit hatches or any of those side-facing seats for the elderly, or if it is like some of the metros here in Seattle that have a split windshield with one panel angled in about 10 degrees at the top. I might at least settle for the guy who knows what happens when you try to fill a volume with spheres.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[david_thornley]

Also, try to measure "passion". I develop software, and I've been reading widely and trying to become better for decades now. Is this passion? Or are you going to look for signs of emotion, and pass me over because I'm emotionally cool and don't show emotions easily.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Javagator]

what sort of questions do you ask

One question I ask is for them to give me an example of some difficult or challenging programming problem that they have solved at work. That way they don't have to try to come up with a solution to a tough problem on the fly.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[AuMatar]

Sounds like something a very reasonable question to me. I wouldn't expect the person I'm asking to know all the details- I expect him to come up with a reasonable guess as to how it might be implemented. How would you take the ouput of 1 process and send it to the input of another. Can you do so efficiently? What lower level Unix IPC mechanisms might you use? Sockets? Anonymous pipes? Named pipes?

Like I said- I wouldn't expect someone to come up with the exact method, or even the best method in a short interview. But if they couldn't come up with a reasonable one then they just don't meet my quality bar. And no, I don't work for Google.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[AuMatar]

When you're a big company like Google, you *aren't* hiring for a specific domain or position. You have a lot of work to be done. What you're doing is hiring someone capable of begin a successful programmer at the company. They can then learn what they need on the job, or be switched between roles to one where they'll be more successful. SO long as they stay with the company, you still did the right thing by hiring them.

Hiring for specific roles is something small and mid-size companies/departments need to do. Startups need someone capable of doing everything. As they grow bigger, they need to fill specific roles. When they grow big enough that recruitment is a major issue, they're looking for smart people and are willing to train them.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Darinbob]

Head hunters only do the work to find people. In my experience they put in zero effort to determine if someone is a good fit. They're looking for buzzwords in linkedin and elsewhere. They shotgun the resumes to the employers and cross their fingers. I expect the interview because that's the only way to tell if I'm going to be suitable to do the job they want filled, and the only way for me to tell if I will like the job or not.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[interval1066]

Yeah, ok. Hope your golf ball bus filling business is a great success.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Darinbob]

Turns out you do need the acting skills. My job hiring success went way way up when I stopped being myself who never asked questions in response, didn't show excitement at things that weren't exciting, and so forth. Long stretch of job interviews once where nothing happened. Then finally one hiring manager said that I sounded like a great fit for the job but it seemed like I wasn't interested in the job. Which wasn't true.

Now while it should be true that you really should only have to impress the technical coworkers, it's not how it really works in practice. I had one HR manager actually ask me technical questions and then argue that I got one of them wrong (which I did not). Anyone you meet while on the interview can veto you so you need to be on your best game for all of them.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[GodelEscherBlecch]

"...candidate showed a lack of aptitude bordering on open disdain for abstract thinking that leads one to wonder why on earth he chose this profession..."

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[interval1066]

"Interviewer lives in ivory tower exemplifying disdain for all the little people who don't see the world through his myopic little Rube Goldberg spyglass."

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Lehk228]

as a 30 year old i can tell you exactly why everyone significantly younger than myself sucks, and it's not just a judging the shit out of the FNG thing.

I was in hichschool during the dotcom bubble burst and graduated as tech was making it's recovery

at and before my generation, just about everyone going to college for computer related fields did so because they were interested in it, my graduating class and beyond were when tech was well known among the general population as a means to financial success, this is also when tech disciplines started getting infiltrated by useless Feminists and Brogrammers who with no real interest or talent in writing decent code.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

I'll give you Google's answer to this question, if you like.

You missed the prior stuff like the online coding test.

I got contacted by a google recruiter once, presumably because of my reputation within the field and publication record etc. They wanted me to do an online coding exam. I think it was only a couple of hours worth plus another few hours for boning up on the sort of stuff that's going to be in it.

I think maybe you're talking about the phone screen? I've never heard of an online coding exam at Google.

I did leave out the phone screen, which is a one-hour phone interview that includes similar questions and in which coding is normally done in a Google Doc (when I did the phone screen the recruiter who set up the doc neglected to give me edit permission, so we just skipped it). The phone screen is similar in style to the face to face interview but there's only one (for full-time hires; internship candidates do multiple phone screens and no face-to-face) and the bar is much lower because the goal is just to decide whether it's worth bringing the candidate in for interviews.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

Sounds good, but, WHO IS WATCHING THE WATCHERS? Frankly, i have no problem with "smart" interviews, but tell me, what about the other side of the equation, the INTERVIEWER. Who is evaluating him? Frankly, the bar for the interviewer is low, that it would result in many good candidates to just leave the interview process in the first minute and never ever come back....But, again, not my problem.

The hiring committees evaluate the interviewers. In some cases they actually send feedback to the interviewer. I suppose there may be rare cases in which they send feedback to the recruiters who schedule the interviewers, suggesting that one particular interviewer not be scheduled any more, though I've never heard of that happening.

What basis do the committees use for evaluating the interviewers? Obviously they can glean some information from the writeup the interviewer did. What's actually more informative is the interviewer's history. The system provides the committee with a histogram of past interview scores, with the bars colored to indicate what percentage of candidates the interviewer scored in each bucket were rejected or received an offer. An interviewer is considered "calibrated" after they've done 25 interviews, which is enough that the histogram provides useful information about how that interviewer rates people.

HR does some additional statistical analysis to correlate interview scores with post-hire performance, but what that has found is that while some really good interviewers' scores are strongly correlated with offers (perhaps because committees trust them? There are some potentially destructive feedback loops here), there don't seem to be any interviewers whose scores are strongly correlated with post-hire job performance.

However, the aggregate interview scores for a candidate do turn out to be quite a good predictor of post-hire performance. This seems like a good indicator that the system works well. It seems that while individual interviewers may get a bad read due to, for example, personality conflicts, the averaging of four interviewers washes out some of those sources of error.

Frankly, the bar for the interviewer is low, that it would result in many good candidates to just leave the interview process in the first minute and never ever come back

If a candidate leaves without completing the interview, that definitely raises a lot of red flags, and if it happened repeatedly you can bet that action would be taken. Probably just sending the interviewer back to interview training, but if that didn't fix it then that interviewer wouldn't be interviewing any more. Similarly, recruiters poll candidates about their experience in being interviewed (before an offer/rejection is sent), and that feedback is also used to refine the process and, if necessary, correct interviewers.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[zAPPzAPP]

Most of the time I am not sure what Google app I am supposed to be in at the moment. They all seem to share some settings, but also have unique ones. I keep bouncing between (assumingly) gmail, g+, yt and others. But the names for each service change at random intervals too.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

And the couple of technical questions I didn't know I just described how I would find out the info or approach the problem

As an interviewer: That's absolutely the right approach. In fact, it's what interviewers really want... to give you something you don't know how to deal with, then watch you find your way through and around it. The candidates who flounder helplessly are not who we want to hire. People who dig in, use what they do know and start looking to figure out what they don't know... those are the people who will do well on the job. Real problems never come neatly packaged with all of the information and knowledge required.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[khchung]

I can state with absolute certainty that the average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry.

So, Google manages to get a whole bunch of star programmers together and churn out... absolute shit?

Look at the product offerings from Google since Gmail and Google Maps, how many of those people actually want to use? Google Wave? Google+?

This just proves GP's point. Even if Google's process actually get them a whole team of geniuses (however you define the term), then they churn out stuffs that only similar geniuses would like to use.

Developers who don't develop programs *for* the users (i.e. able to see what works from users' standpoint) is worth less than one who could, even if they are a "star" however you define that.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

Are you sure that he was really asking you to display your *knowledge* of command piping?

No, he did not want go test if I knew how to pipe data from the 'ls' command to the 'grep' command using the | character. He wanted me to explain exactly how it is implemented on a system level as in: How is it coded? I have studies many aspects of the *nix operating systems but the nitty gritty of how piping is implemented in code is something I have never felt the need to explore.

Ah, okay. That's an excellent question, but only if you don't know the details of how it's implemented. If you do know, and tell the interviewer what you know, then all he's learned is that you spent some time looking at obscure code. If you don't know, then you have to think, you have to dig into what the issues might be, what options are available, and figure out how you would build such a thing.

Watching how you go about working your way through something like that is exactly what the interviewer wants. He really wasn't asking to see what you knew, he was asking to see what you would build.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

[...] while there is no correlation between the scores that any individual interviewer gives candidates and the job performance post-hire, there is a strong correlation between the mean scores given by the four to five interviewers who interview a candidate and post-hire performance.

So, the performance does not correlate with the individual scores but it correlates with their mean ? How does this even work?!

It's just the Central Limit Theorem at work. You have four interviewers. Think of each as a function that take a candidate and outputs a score which is perturbed from the "true" score by an error function. Each error function is different, and has a different distribution. But the Central Limit Theorem tells us that given a sufficiently large number of interviewers, the distribution of scores will converge on a normal distribution, regardless of the error distributions. The mean of this normal distribution will even converge (in this case) on the true score.

In practice it's not this neat and tidy, and four is far from enough to make the aggregate function converge, but it turns out that it does a good enough job of approximating the true score, even though the individual interviewers don't.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

So when I'm confronted with the Bus Gold Ball Problem [quora.com] and answer with "calculate the volume of the bus, which would be easy, and start throwing gold balls in a pool until I get the same amount of water displaced" and I get back "well we wanted to see your math" I get discouraged.

Yeah, that would be a really sucky interview question.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

"...candidate showed a lack of aptitude bordering on open disdain for abstract thinking that leads one to wonder why on earth he chose this profession..."

+1

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

I can state with absolute certainty that the average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry.

So, Google manages to get a whole bunch of star programmers together and churn out... absolute shit?

I disagree with your assessment of Google's products, but even if we accept it hypothetically, the things you complain about aren't the programmers' job. Deciding what products should do and how they should look is the job of product management and UX design. But if you want to do anything at the scale Google does it, you need really good, and really clever, people. Try building YouTube... not the penny ante little system that existed when Google bought it, but the behemoth that exists now. Only Netflix generates more traffic and Netflix has a dramatically easier problem because their catalog is many (five? six?) orders of magnitude smaller.

Look at the product offerings from Google since Gmail and Google Maps, how many of those people actually want to use? Google Wave? Google+?

Android? Google Docs? And, FWIW, I think Google+ is by far the best of the social networks around, especially if you like to engage in serious conversations.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[ruir]

I though I was reading slashdot and not a damn report or a book. I am a non-english speaker, and when writing in English I have to go over what I write between 5 and 10 times, because frankly my mother tongue often gets in the way of things, and it is very different. Doing that in Slashdot? Dream on.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[ruir]

It is not a matter of not being capable of handling the stress. I handle it pretty well in my way, often in very big malfunctions I am the senior guy cracking jokes to keep the team going on in good spirits, however I also have a personality where I do not take shit from people. Because I do not have to. I easily recognise others, like the guy you are saying "he does not handle the stress". No sir, he just does not care a flying fuck about whinny people like you.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[aliquis]

Maybe the parent's problem is with crappy Windows.

Here in Sweden it's called SBS - Skit bakom spakarna - Shit behind the controls.

I've never(? Maybe in some obscure webkit/KTHML beta browser with a weird java-script engine or such) had a problem with it. And I do use Chrome, I don't know what's doing.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[serviscope_minor]

I think maybe you're talking about the phone screen? I've never heard of an online coding exam at Google.

You have now!

Basically it was some kind of algorithmic programming task. Then the system fed in test data to see if your code worked, including feeding in awkward values. It also varied the size and measured the algorithmic order and memory use of your code. I don't think it was made by google, but it seemed a pretty neat tool. Still didn't have time though.

Maybe it was an external recruiter that I didn't notice? I don't recall, it was 5 or 6 years ago.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[doru]

If for each individual score < P Si > = 0, then < P (Mean of Si) > = 0. No correlation in the beginning ensures no correlation in the end.

Think of each as a function that take a candidate and outputs a score which is perturbed from the "true" score by an error function.

In this case, the individual scores are correlated to the performance, and the distribution of the mean depends on the expectations of each "error function". The expectation of the mean of Si does not converge to P, but to P + the mean of the expectations. The CLT reduces the standard error of the mean but does not reduce the bias.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[shawn2772]

I don't recall, it was 5 or 6 years ago.

Ah, okay. My guess is that this was phased out before I encountered it. Google has tried a lot of different things. There's a relatively new one called "foo.bar" which is somewhat similar, but initiated by a challenge offered by Google web search, rather than by a recruiter.

http://thehustle.co/the-secret-google-interview-that-landed-me-a-job

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[drinkypoo]

drinkypoo calling someone else a special snowflake? Oh, the irony of it all.

Please log in so that there will be some point in berating you. I have some time on my hands.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

You are confusing the fact that *you* haven't seen the data with it not existing or not being available to some of us for examination.

LOL, ok. Fair enough. ARE YOU claiming secret knowledge? Is that the basis for your statements, and do you believe that people should consider that as showing you to be an authority of some sort?

It is almost as if somebody cracked your account and wants to make you look foolish.

(And I stand by my claim; google has the data but hasn't told us what it says. We only have reason to believe that their choices match their goals. We do NOT have reason to believe we know their goals, or what their data says about their progress. All we know is that the system they have in place is probably consistent with whatever those goals are.)

This is somewhat like your example; seeing "with your own eyes" is a part of convincing yourself you have knowledge, but you didn't see what you didn't see. You may or may not have seen the part of the thing that explained it. You may instead have seen the part of it that is misleading. Knowing what data you have, and what data you don't have, assists in understanding this and not jumping beyond the known knowns.

If you choose to trust a statement, that should not lead you to adopt the view that it is proven. Believing loses predictive value when it masquerades as knowing.

There is no reason to believe that because google has data, and is believed to have high quality employees, that therefore their hiring process achieves that. It could be for other reasons. They have data, but because it is secret we can't evaluate it. Or to rephrase, we don't know the value of the data. You can't believe them, because they're not telling you. The reporter in your example is only asking you to believe the facts that they are reporting. The part that google reports is what they do, and how well they think it works for them. It is all conclusory. And they don't claim to actually tell the world their corporate goals; business planning is secret for reasons. It is irrational to believe everything a company says, when it is known they're expected to say what benefits them.

If a "reporter" for an organization that was known to follow corporate communication principles of truthfulness sends back a foreign report... nobody would reprint it, or assign it value.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

It doesn't sound like you learned to act. Thinking that that is what happened might slow your progress.

What happened was, you discovered one part of "worker morale" that is considered part of having a good work ethic. A positive attitude isn't something that some people might randomly have; it is expected. And it includes being interested.

If you think about it from the perspective of the cat herder, it makes a lot more sense than when you think the good workers are acting. No, they're genuinely eager. In the same way that a kids sports team that is successful has kids who hustle; not just because they were told, but because they internalized hustling and paying attention to the ball as important parts of the activity. Kids who always try to hustle and be on task will make a much better team (and usually have more fun) than a team where each player just wants to score goals. Just wanting to score is like just wanting a paycheck; it doesn't score very well.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Alomex]

Gosh, you really underestimate some of the people who hang around here. On top of that, it doesn't particularly require super secret clearance to look at the hiring data within Google.

Make of that what you wish.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Aighearach]

Sonny, I've been here long enough I don't have to estimate who I see around this dump. But I'm sure I misunderestimated at least a few of them.

And yes, if you want to know how secret a large companies HR data is, just go try to get access to it. It turns out that it is all either trade secrets, or buried in NDAs and other contract restrictions. Much of the data would be illegal for them to share with me in a useful format. So yeah. For the purposes of public discussion, it is not only secret, it is un-knowable. Reasonable conversations cannot be based on claims of knowledge of that data, and people with actual access to the data are not going to be making useful public statements about what it contains.

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[Hognoxious]

Thanks. I'd been wondering if it was something I'd done.

Isn't it amazing how a company that constantly waves its willy about hiring only the best of the best is able to consistently produce such utter shite?

(is THAT on topic, twat with the modpoints?)

Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock

[cthulhu11]

Each of the three times I've talked to Google about a job they pulled the same shit on me -- and I'm not even a developer. Examples: obsessing over the reasons for . and .. directory entries, minutia of switch implementation of spanning trees. Very little pertaining to sysadmin work was actually asked. Once I was given an interactive coding interview. They'd told me to watch several videos about how to interview with Google, and they failed me because I did want the videos said to do.

Worst?

[nospam007]

" but Twitter's is perceived as the worst"

It's just because your answers have to be 140 characters or less.

Re:Worst?

[aliquis]

" but Twitter's is perceived as the worst"

It's just because your answers have to be 140 characters or less.

Worse yet:
To answer the interview you need to enter your e-mail address and you never get the confirmation e-mail even though you've tried and tried to get one.

Mine is actually the toughest

[EmagGeek]

I have a very rigorous hiring process. First of all, you cannot apply. I don't post job openings anywhere. There is no official mechanism to approach me for a job.

When I decide I need to hire someone, I seek out applicants on my own, based on reputation in industry, published works, patents, and other factors. When I identify someone I want to hire, I send my talent team to make contact in person (i.e. stalk them haha), often literally with a tap on the shoulder.

The process works. In 15 years, I've never had anyone leave (except to retire), and I've never had to let anyone go.

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[vikingpower]

The process works. In 15 years, I've never had anyone leave (except to retire), and I've never had to let anyone go.

Killing them with subsequent, nightly incineration in an empty neck of the woods? I see.

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[tlambert]

The process works. In 15 years, I've never had anyone leave (except to retire), and I've never had to let anyone go.

Is this because they are all buried in the building basement?

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[Vasheron]

When I decide I need to hire someone, I seek out applicants on my own, based on reputation in industry, published works, patents, and other factors. When I identify someone I want to hire, I send my talent team to make contact in person (i.e. stalk them haha), often literally with a tap on the shoulder.

Who do you think work for? The CIA?

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[aliquis]

I have a very rigorous hiring process. First of all, you cannot apply. I don't post job openings anywhere. There is no official mechanism to approach me for a job.

When I decide I need to hire someone, I seek out applicants on my own, based on reputation in industry, published works, patents, and other factors. When I identify someone I want to hire, I send my talent team to make contact in person (i.e. stalk them haha), often literally with a tap on the shoulder.

The process works. In 15 years, I've never had anyone leave (except to retire), and I've never had to let anyone go.

I saw a video of some gang whatever they was called in Rust. They surrounded one guy nude and sang weirdly or whatever. He copied their acting (afraid to be killed?) and because they got alone well enough they chanted one of us and now he was a member.

I imagine that's something similar ..

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[JustBoo]

When I decide I need to hire someone, I seek out applicants on my own, based on reputation in industry, published works, patents, and other factors. When I identify someone I want to hire, I send my talent team to make contact in person (i.e. stalk them haha), often literally with a tap on the shoulder.

Who do you think work for? The CIA?

Porn sites. You just KNOW IT man.

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[EmagGeek]

I love all of the funny responses! You guys are a trip.

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[phantomfive]

The process works. In 15 years, I've never had anyone leave (except to retire), and I've never had to let anyone go.

You must pay them a lot.

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[EmagGeek]

Let's just say I don't pay poorly at all.

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[phantomfive]

Now I want to know what company you are running.

Re:Mine is actually the toughest

[corrie]

When you've completed your novel, please let us know where to find it on Amazon. What you have so far is a good plot idea, and I would like to encourage you to stick with it.

No Microsoft or Apple?

[ZeRu]

Was expecting them to be the worst, not Twitter.

Re:No Microsoft or Apple?

[Vasheron]

I got an offer from Apple. The hiring process was relatively painless: telephone interview, coding assignment, and six (not overly difficult) on site interviews.

why twitter is so negative

[Skapare]

interview answers must fit in 140 characters or fewer

Re:why twitter is so negative

[Darinbob]

He was only retweeting it.

Do harder interviews net the best candidates

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Read "The Meritocracy Myth." If you're of above average intelligence or even if you're not and you make up for it with bloody minded determination, you can do any of these jobs. Trying to rank people is just dickishness. IBM recognises that, have a very pleasant interview process, and welcome you like family, and is a great place to work. Google, meh, what have you done since search anyway?

Re:Do harder interviews net the best candidates

[Grishnakh]

Google, meh, what have you done since search anyway?

Mail, Maps, and Voice.

Gmail was in-house, but the others were initially purchased. Maybe you don't appreciate Gmail, but I certainly do, and judging by the sheer number of @gmail.com addresses, a lot of other people do too. And Google Maps is unparalleled as a business directory; if I want to see all the Greek restaurants (or whatever) in a certain area, then see what their operating hours are, see reviews for them, and then pick one and get turn-by-turn directions with traffic updates and rerouting, Google Maps does all of that easily.

Re:Do harder interviews net the best candidates

[david_thornley]

I used to work with a woman, long ago, who had almost no talent for programming. She realized that, and set up her software environment so she could keep things simple, and she worked hard. The result is that she maintained a relatively complicated system well. I respected and liked her. I'd evaluate her as above average intelligence.

That being said, there is no way in the world she could do what I'm doing now. She hit her limits, and worked with them very well. She wanted to be more talented, but then she also wanted to be taller, and neither happened.

Re:Do harder interviews net the best candidates

[Javagator]

Read the "Mythical Man Month". Experiments have been done that show that a factor of ten in productivity is not uncommon between programmers. And this was on fairly simple programs that any programmer could do. On more complex tasks I think the difference would be much higher.

Re:Bullshit

[tehcyder]

> average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry. How could you possibly know that? Do you have access to parallel universes where they work for other companies? Nah. It's just while your fingers doing the typing while your pompous asshole dictates.

I'm taking a wild guess that OP is or was an average Google engineer, and therefore, gosh, a star.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of years ago, we hired a person leaving google (his wife wanted to move back home). He interviewed really well, references gave him good referrals and is a pretty good coder/debugger. He is awful at presenting to customers, defining requirements, etc. So at our company, or at least at my location, he would be an above average mid-level software dev, but at his senior standing he is toward the bottom. So we have an overpaid mid-level guy, who will probably get frustrated and leave due to lack of advancement...which sucks because he is a nice guy. And we are just a large government contractor, although my group doesn't do the "butts in seats" staffing stuff, we get to be a little more selective about what we take on.

tldr; I have one example that disproves the average google engineer is a start anywhere else

It all depends

[Anonymous Coward]

I was contacted by Google about a year ago. They had located my resume online, tracked down my published papers. The phone interview lasted all of ten minutes, and was primarily them trying to sell the amazingness of Google to me - the complete offer was made at the end of the phone call (salary, vacation, signing bonus, bennies) so they had clearly planned it all out ahead of time. So I guess from my terribly limited experience, if you have a skill set they're looking for, the interview is trivial. BTW, I didn't take the job - no desire to relocate.

Re:It all depends

[Aighearach]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that conversation was a pre-interview screening call, and had you said yes, you would have started the interview process being discussed here.

They're not trying to sell you the amazingness of google. They're trying to find out if you think so and are prepared to be a high-morale employee for them.

Re:Gauntlet?

[andrewbaldwin]

It wasn't very well worded I agree - but it is valid English

I suspect that it was meant to reflect "running the gauntlet" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) which, even for the excesses of modern day IT marketing seems a tad hyperbolic (and unlikely to attract candidates)

Re:Bullshit

[shawn2772]

> average Google engineer would be a star virtually anywhere else in the industry. How could you possibly know that? Do you have access to parallel universes where they work for other companies? Nah. It's just while your fingers doing the typing while your pompous asshole dictates.

I'm taking a wild guess that OP is or was an average Google engineer, and therefore, gosh, a star.

Actually, I'd characterize myself as a below-average Google engineer. I mean, they're not going to be firing me or anything, but I feel like most of the people I work with are better than I am.

And, yes, at my previous employers I was a star. Further, I spent better than a decade as a consultant, so I worked in a different company every six months or so. That gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of programmers and see them doing non-trivial amounts of work in lots of different companies. So... I think I have a reasonable basis for comparison.

You might wonder why, if I was a star elsewhere and I'm below average at Google, I'd want to be at Google. The answer is that at Google I don't have to deal with idiots. It's possible my co-workers think I'm the idiot (though they hide it well, if so), but that's their problem. Also, being below average at Google pays better than being a star most other places.

However, my anecdotal experience is obviously far less compelling than Google's statistical analysis of interview performance vs job performance.

Re:Bullshit

[shawn2772]

tldr; I have one example that disproves the average google engineer is a start anywhere else

Counterexamples disprove theorems, but not trends. I'm sure there are plenty of counterexamples, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong about the overall situation. I should point out, though, that my comment about "anywhere else" is obviously limited to the places that I worked. Because I was a consultant for quite a while, I saw a broader selection of places than perhaps most would in a 20-year period, but it's still only a sample and perhaps not a representative one; I can't know.

What's more relevant is the statistical evidence that demonstrates that Google's interview scoring correlates with job performance, of course, but that's only relative to other Google employees, not relative to people at other shops.

Everybody works for Google

[Crowd Computing]

If all you want is the bragging rights to say you work for Google, don't bother. Unless you live in some country sealed off from the global Internet, chances are you're already working for Larry and Serge. Every time you search the fine web, open an account with some site that wants you to prove you're "not a robot" by clicking on some pretty pictures, or even just plain open a web page, you're statistically "helping" Google improve their artificial intelligence algorithms. Everybody works for Google, fewer get paid.

Just curious about people skills

[Mybrid]

My interviewing process for developers focuses as much on people skills as technical skills. Unless all your developers are siloed then they will need to be able to communicate and work with others.

For all the years we've been hearing about how tough the problem solving skills are for tech companies I have yet to hear how tough the interview is for people skills.

Any company that only focuses on technical problem solving is going to be a disaster to manage.

Re:Just curious about people skills

[subanark]

The biggest problem with evaluating people skills is that you need to have interviewers properly trained in doing this. Otherwise you end up losing a lot of diversity due to different thinking and cultural expectations (not to mention people who are good at lying). Being a person that has failed many interviews solely on the "people" skills aspect, let me explain the dangers of heavily evaluating someone on this:

Amazon: "The reason you stated for wanting a new job wasn't: To advance my career. Instead you said your previous job wasn't working out which is a sign of someone who runs away from problems" (Amazon normally doesn't tell you why you weren't hired)

Reason I was basically fired from Amazon (after went from contractor to full time): Not influencing groups outside your own within the company in adopting invocations you created and unable to solve the fundamental communication problem between the developers and testers.

Blizzard: My answer to "If you and another developer have an equally good solution to a problem, which one should be picked" was "flip a coin". The correct answer is "Let's go with your solution this time, and next time we can do mine". Reason for not being hired: Unable to handle conflict (which is right, I can't).

Other companies I interviewed for wouldn't say the reason for not hiring even though I did just fine on the coding parts. I think they just didn't like me. I eventually got another job though a diversity placement program.

Re:Just curious about people skills

[Grishnakh]

But how exactly do you interview for people skills? Give them questions like "Tell me your greatest weakness"? Technical things are testable; people skills really aren't. The best you can do is introduce them to your team, have them hang around a bit, talk to them for a while, and get a "gut feeling" which amounts to nothing more than if you like them or not. A real test would basically be some kind of internship: have them work there for a week and see how they do, but the cost of doing that is pretty high, so no one ever does that.

Re:Just curious about people skills

[luis_a_espinal]

But how exactly do you interview for people skills? Give them questions like "Tell me your greatest weakness"? Technical things are testable; people skills really aren't. The best you can do is introduce them to your team, have them hang around a bit, talk to them for a while, and get a "gut feeling" which amounts to nothing more than if you like them or not. A real test would basically be some kind of internship: have them work there for a week and see how they do, but the cost of doing that is pretty high, so no one ever does that.

I tell them, honesty, with a smile. The interviewers' reaction tells me a lot of what I need to know about the work culture (and give me a chance to bail out if I don't like what I see.)

Re:Just curious about people skills

[david_thornley]

I'm an introvert, and don't express my emotions much. I don't come off as social, and in fact I'm not very social. However, I have worked hard on communication skill, and become quite good at it, and there's been precisely one person in a long career I couldn't work with. (Nobody else could either. Really smart guy, but a personality like a roll of barbed wire.) I'm something of a loner, but do team projects well. I'm more of a "get home to my family" guy after work.

So, given that, how is an interviewer supposed to know how I actually operate?

Re:Just curious about people skills

[subanark]

You simply need to realize that not everyone thinks or operates in the same way. You need to challenge your own bias, and determine if the person you want to hire is truly deferential, or simply brings a different perspective than what you are used too. This kind of perspective needs to be taken beyond the interview as well.

Anyone who says they don't discriminate is either lying or doesn't understand what it means.

Re:Just curious about people skills

[Javagator]

Give them questions like "Tell me your greatest weakness"?

I use to ask this question, but everybody answered "I sometimes work too hard".

Re:Bullshit

[__aaclcg7560]

The answer is that at Google I don't have to deal with idiots. It's possible my co-workers think I'm the idiot (though they hide it well, if so), but that's their problem. Also, being below average at Google pays better than being a star most other places.

I ran into quite a few idiots while working the Google help desk in 2008. The most memorable idiot was a new hire from Stanford University who was shocked — shocked! — that he had to press the power button on his workstation. He actually wanted someone to come out to his desk to turn on his computer. I explained to him that a corporate cubicle farm wasn't a university computer lab.

Re:Bullshit

[Mandatory Default]

I think what you are describing is a mismatch in expectations. Google software engineers develop code. With few exceptions, they don't present to customers (that's a sales engineer's job) and they don't define requirements (that's a product manager's job.) It is a waste of time for a Google software engineer to do those things - it's literally not their job, as defined by the corporate job description for software engineers.

If you want someone who can implement advanced algorithms, code like crazy, and build distributed systems - that's when you want a Google software engineer.

I'm a current Google employee who *can* do requirements and customer presentations - and those skills haven't been useful here.

Tough does not equal bad

[YoungManKlaus]

On the contrary.

Re:Gauntlet?

[cellocgw]

Yr gonna be much better off using the accepted (at least last century) "gantlet" spelling. That way you have no confusion about the spiked gauntlets being thrown at you as you run the gantlet.

Plus you look way literate. Guaranteed to get you some action.

Re:Google doesn’t care about hardware or OS

[Theovon]

Whoops. I wish Slashdot had an edit option. They said I jumped around too much, which suggests they can’t read a resume properly.

Garbage in, garbage out

[maiden_taiwan]

The article draws its conclusions from reviews on GlassDoor.com. That's a very biased sample.

Re:Bullshit

[david_thornley]

There are places where anywhere developing C++ software here would be a star. I've worked in about nine different places long enough to get the feel of them, and they varied from being a great place to work with great colleagues to the one I had a recurring dream about being rescued. I really, really doubt that there's a company out there whose average developer would be a star here.

Re:Bullshit

[zAPPzAPP]

We are talking about the efficiency of the hiring process and this guy got hired.

Re:Bullshit

[shawn2772]

The answer is that at Google I don't have to deal with idiots. It's possible my co-workers think I'm the idiot (though they hide it well, if so), but that's their problem. Also, being below average at Google pays better than being a star most other places.

I ran into quite a few idiots while working the Google help desk in 2008. The most memorable idiot was a new hire from Stanford University who was shocked — shocked! — that he had to press the power button on his workstation. He actually wanted someone to come out to his desk to turn on his computer. I explained to him that a corporate cubicle farm wasn't a university computer lab.

Actually, some of the most brilliant people I've ever met fall into that sort of "idiot" category. I went to school with a guy who made a habit of reading math textbooks. He'd read the definitions, read a theorem, close the book, prove the theorem, open the book and move on. Insanely smart. But he could barely tie his own shoes.

I'm not saying your kid from Stanford was one of those... but it's a distinct possibility. Stanford doesn't tend to graduate CS majors who aren't pretty smart, and Google doesn't tend to hire them. There are exceptions, but they're very rare.

Re:Bullshit

[__aaclcg7560]

Stanford doesn't tend to graduate CS majors who aren't pretty smart, and Google doesn't tend to hire them. There are exceptions, but they're very rare.

Google founders Sergey Bring and Larry Page must have been the exceptions.

Re:Bullshit

[shawn2772]

You're claiming that Page and Brin aren't pretty smart? That's a pretty big claim, considering what they've done. And I don't mean building a business, I mean technically.

Re:Bullshit

[__aaclcg7560]

You're dissing the founders of Google and Stanford University. Let me guess... You're a Cal Berkeley graduate?

Quiz != Interview

[NewYork]

Quiz != Interview