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

Posted by samzenpus on from the I've-been-through-worse dept.

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.

28 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. One kind of employee by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:One kind of employee by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:One kind of employee by JustBoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:One kind of employee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "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.

    4. Re:One kind of employee by Penguinisto · · Score: 2

      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. ;)

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    5. Re:One kind of employee by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      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.

  2. Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

    1. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re: Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by shawn2772 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by aliquis · · Score: 2

      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!

    5. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    6. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by shawn2772 · · Score: 2

      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.

    7. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by Alomex · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by shawn2772 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    9. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by ErichTheRed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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.

    10. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by Shortguy881 · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
    11. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by Jiro · · Score: 2

      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.

    12. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      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.

    13. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by Alomex · · Score: 2

      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?

    14. Re:Interview "Grilling" or "Testing" is Poppycock by doru · · Score: 2
      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.

  3. Worst? by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Funny

    " but Twitter's is perceived as the worst"

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

  4. Mine is actually the toughest by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Mine is actually the toughest by vikingpower · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    2. Re:Mine is actually the toughest by tlambert · · Score: 2

      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?

    3. Re:Mine is actually the toughest by JustBoo · · Score: 2

      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.

    4. Re:Mine is actually the toughest by EmagGeek · · Score: 2

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

  5. Re:Do harder interviews net the best candidates by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

    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.