At Google it's pretty well-recognized that good candidates have about a 50/50 chance. I hear that a few years ago HR even tested it by taking some successful Google engineers and having them go through the interview process, with interviewers and a hiring committee that didn't know they were Googlers, and about half of them got "hired".
So, don't feel bad you didn't get an offer (it doesn't sound like you do... just saying).
Google recognizes that the number of good candidates that get turned away is a problem, but figures that it's better to turn away good people than to hire weak candidates... so they try to set the bar really high. And it works, at least in the sense that it's very good at weeding out all the poor-to-mediocre candidates. I say that based on the fact that nearly everyone I work with at Google is outstanding. I've yet to find a plodder.
Is your experience at Apple similar, with respect to your colleagues? Does the same perception exist at Apple of Apple interviews, that a lot of good people get turned away?
As in, you had to go through a day long gauntlet of interviews asking irrelevant questions to get the gig. Surprise, they didn't get the best candidates that way!
Actually, Google does succeed at hiring very good people. What Bock said was that among the people who made the cut, very high interview scores didn't correlate with very high job performance scores. That study doesn't say anything about how people with low to average interview scores fare, though, because only people with high interview scores get hired.
If the valet at the company you are interviewing misplaces your car key for about 1/2 hour, are they so big they can't even figure out how to keep track of a few car keys
You really based your opinion on the quality of an employer by the fact that a contractor was new, or having an off day?
This approach provides the interviewer with a lot more insight than casual chats, including helping you to find those people who are really capable but aren't good conversationalists.
That sounds like a good approach, but how do you know that it produces good results?
That's obviously an excellent question, which is closely related (though not identical) to the mentioned study. I have two answers, neither truly satisfactory, but that's because -- as TFA implies -- no one really knows how to interview effectively.
First answer: I perceive that it gives me a lot more insight into the candidate, because it clarifies and expands upon the observations I get from chatting, making me better at identifying both those who can talk but can't do, and those who can do but can't talk.. Obviously, that's just my perception, and even if it agrees with the perceptions of a lot of other people, it's ultimately not meaningful.
Second answer: I can see the results in the caliber of the people I work with. While Bock points out that crunching the data doesn't show any correlation between job performance and interview score, that analysis only considers people who were hired. It would be very reassuring if interview scores had a nice, perhaps even linear, correlation with post-hire performance scores (both of which are on the scale 0-4), there's another metric that is even more important: How many of those who are hired suck?
The answer to that question is very, very few. In the 2.5 years I've worked for Google what I've found is that my co-workers are, almost without exception, outstanding. Only a small number are truly brilliant, of course, but there is basically no deadwood at all. Since I came to Google as an engineer with >20 years of industry experience, including a fair amount of work with people from high-profile companies, I feel like I'm in a pretty good position to judge how unusual Google is in that respect -- and it's really, really unusual.
Perhaps the reason is something other than the interview approach, but the quality of Google hires provides, to me, pretty strong confirmation that the approach is effective at weeding out the poor and mediocre candidates. I don't think anyone would argue that it's necessarily good at identifying strong candidates, and the study mentioned by Bock demonstrates that it is not at all effective at predicting relative performance among strong candidates.
Is Google doing this out of the goodness of their corporate heart? What do they gain by fibering up (as opposed to "wiring up") all these cities? Quicker access to their browsing habits? Quicker access to all the personal information they put into Gmail, Google Drive, Google Documents, Google Places, Google+ contacts?
Except that Chrome phones home the first time you start it up to check for upgrades. This has the unfortunate 'effect' of informing Google of the browser ID at this IP address, and as a consequence it informs the NSA of the linkage of browser ID and IP address.
Except that (a) this isn't true and (b) even when it was true the connection was over TLS, so the NSA couldn't snoop it.
Post NSA, I try to avoid Google services. They try to grab data for themselves, but in the process grab it for the NSA, and if the choice is NSA+Google or no Google, then I go without Google.
Effectively all Google services are over TLS -- Google was the first major Internet service to start encrypting everything -- and Google does not give data to the NSA except with a valid, narrowly-tailored order.
And it's perfectly possible that my anti-tiger rock really keeps tigers away from my home.
Strong claims require strong proof. I think in this case if the government could prove that its measures were effective, they would trot out some carefully-sanitized examples.
I should correct one part of that last post. While there's very little pretension on display at Google, I do have to admit that there is a certain organizational hubris. There's an assumption that because you work at Google you must be smart and capable, and can be trusted to do the right things. I think that's a very good thing, but others may disagree.
I'm not going to tell you that you should have regretted it, but I think you made a bad decision. It's likely she asked you about the RFC in order to see if this was something you already knew about. If you had indicated knowledge of it, she'd have moved to something else. Since you didn't already know it, it was exactly what she needed, an opportunity to watch you try to work your way through a problem. And the fact that your solution was more wrong than right apparently didn't dissuade her from thinking your approach indicated good ability.
This is assuming that she was asking you to come up with a solution, not just to regurgitate facts. If it was the latter, well, she was a poor interviewer, sorry. Google tries to train people not to do that, but training can fail sometimes.
unless users actually refuse to use Target's web site because they don't want to be tracked.
Target's website refuses entry for those customers who do not have tracking cookies enabled. It is Target's choice, not the customers'.
It's the customers' choice to enable cookies.
I'm sure Target has carefully evaluated the situation, and the result is the decisions they've made.
Yeah, preventing customers from walking through the main entrance and buy things is always a good thing for a store to do.
Sure it is, if it allows the store to profit even more from those who do come in. Are you also going to tell me that Costco is foolish for refusing entry to non-members?
Perhaps you read something different than what I intended. You won't find a lot of pretension at Google, and I don't think my post displayed much of it either. I didn't demonstrate any false modesty, either... I'm a good engineer and I have a long string of real successes to prove it. That's not self-aggrandizement, just fact, and I felt it was necessary to establish that fact in order to ground my observations of the effectiveness of Google's interview process.
Casual chats are okay, but they miss a lot, and favor those who are good at chatting over those who aren't.
For years my approach was to give a couple of simple programming problems to weed out those who'd waste my time, followed by a chat like you describe. It was okay. But the interview training given to me by Google showed me a much better way. It's not about "puzzles", those are pointless and Google has never used them. What works much better is to give people problems to solve and watch how they go about it. You want problems that are fairly realistic, but sufficiently self-contained they can be solved and coded in 30 minutes, and sufficiently open-ended that when you get a really good candidate who just blasts through it there's plenty of room to explore variations. You should also not be afraid to give hints if the candidate is clearly getting hung up on some bit. Obviously if you end up having to walk the person through the whole solution they're not a good hire, but even sharp people sometimes need something pointed out when they're under time pressure and being watched.
Above all, you want to identify the people who really engage with the problem, who forget about the interview and dive into it, and who show good problem-solving ability and agility.
This approach provides the interviewer with a lot more insight than casual chats, including helping you to find those people who are really capable but aren't good conversationalists.
This is true. Google's hiring process is very slow. When I was hired it didn't really affect me because I was in a position to be picky and intentionally spent many months looking for a new job. But I'm sure it does mean a lot of people have taken something else by the time they get their Google offer. However... I know a couple of people who had taken another position, and still made the decision to go to Google instead, so having taken another job doesn't necessarily preclude accepting the offer.
Q. What are some things that the managers are ranked on?
A. Some of them are very straightforward â" the manager treats me with respect, the manager gives me clear goals, the manager shares information, the manager treats the entire team fairly. These are fundamental things that turn out to be really important in making people feel excited and happy and wanting to go the extra mile for you.
Might also explain projects with no benefit. As long as their employees like the manager, everything's cool.
The manager isn't really responsible for project success. That's on the engineers, especially the tech leads. Managers are responsible for keeping the employees happy and focused, and clearing distractions and obstacles. Product direction decisions are primarily the responsibility of the product managers (who aren't usually people managers) and VP-level management.
Do you want me to mansplain or do you want me to actually solve real problems? Your choice google.
The latter. In fact, mainsplaining to your interviewers at Google will get you dinged for "poor culture fit", even if your answers are correct and your code is good.
Google didn't miss that variable. The study was an analysis of how interview scores correlated with job performance, not how well interview scores correlated with whether or not the candidate was a good hire. An employee who does a decent job, getting acceptable but not outstanding performance reviews is still a good hire, whether interview scores were marginal or outstanding. Some small fraction of hires turn out to have been mistakes, of course, but at Google that percentage is quite small, which indicates that the interview process does a reasonably good job of avoiding false positives. It just doesn't do much more than that.
I suppose it's news that the internal study found no correlation between interview scores and job performance, but everyone at Google recognizes that getting hired is a crapshoot. Not totally random, of course; there are plenty of candidates who simply aren't going to get hired, ever, because they don't have what it takes. But (I'm speaking of engineers here, dunno about other areas), everyone knows that candidates who are of the caliber Google seeks may or may not pass the interview process, and whether or not they do is pretty much a toss of the dice. I've heard rumors of a an internal study that took successful Google engineers and put them through the interview and hiring process, obscuring their employee status... and about half of them were "re-hired".
Also, as McDowell's blog post says, Google has always instructed interviewers not to use "brainteaser" questions. It probably does still happen once in a while -- indeed one of my interviewers asked me a "bonus" question, after I'd already demolished his design/coding problem, which arguably falls into that category (I failed to answer it) -- but they're doing it wrong and the hiring committee will let them know it.
Anyway, so if Google's process has such random results, why do they continue to use it? Simple: because nobody has found a better way. And the study results mentioned are a little misleading if you don't understand them in context: The study was of tens of thousands of interviews and their correlation with the performance of people who were hired. And nearly all of the people who are hired by Google go on to have successful careers at Google. What the study shows is that the degree of success is not correlated with the strength of the hiring recommendations.
On the other hand, as someone who came to Google with 20+ years of industry experience already behind him as a basis for comparison, I'll tell you one thing about the Google hiring process: It hires good people. It also fails to hire a lot of good people, but there are vanishingly few plodders or obstructionists around. In the 2.5 years I've worked for Google I have worked with well over 100 engineers (my work tends to touch lots of teams), and I've met one, maybe two, who weren't bright, highly competent and very effective, and even those one or two would be good-performers most places. That is very different from my prior experience, and I worked with a lot of high-profile companies.
As another data point, at every one of my prior employers I was something of a star, commonly called a "genius" and similar in performance reviews. At Google... I'm merely competent, perhaps a bit below average. Many of my colleagues are much smarter than me, and the superstars at Google are absolutely brilliant. One woman in particular who I've worked with quite a bit is always at least four steps ahead of me. She constantly says things that I think are stupid... until I have time to catch up with her thought process. She also talks faster than anyone I've ever met, in an attempt to try to keep up with her brain, I think. Talking to her is exhausting, but exhilarating. I've taken to structuring my conversations with her so they are always interrupted after no more than five minutes because that's about all I can take before I need to go process for a while. My consolation is that I notice many other people interact with her in the same way. Overall, my experience of Google employees that they're all smart, energetic and talented, with a strong leavening of the truly brilliant, and that perception extends even outside of engineering. Hell, our building facilities manager is really sharp.
What I experience of my colleagues is exactly what Google aims to achieve: since there's no known way to make accurate hiring decisions, the interview process aims primarily to filter out candidates who aren't fairly outstanding. In the process, it excludes a lot of really talented people, but it's very effective at excluding basically all of the poor to mediocre candidates.
I'm just glad the dice went my way when I interviewed.
Target needs to re-evaluate their purpose for having a website - do they want to use the website to place cookies on peoples' disks? Or does target want to use the website to sell merchandise?
Clearly, Target wants to track the users to whom they sell merchandise so they can sell them more merchandise. These aren't conflicting goals, unless users actually refuse to use Target's web site because they don't want to be tracked. But hardly any users refuse, so the net value to Target favors tracking. I'm sure Target has carefully evaluated the situation, and the result is the decisions they've made.
I feel funny defending Facebook, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't sell personally-identifiable information to others. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
...Says the dude on the internet that apparently didn't read the note above the "Allow" button when he signed up for Farmville.
Actually, I never signed up for Farmville... and I don't even use Facebook any more:)
But, yes, if you explicitly give them permission to share your info then they have your permission.
Slashdot Mirror
At Google it's pretty well-recognized that good candidates have about a 50/50 chance. I hear that a few years ago HR even tested it by taking some successful Google engineers and having them go through the interview process, with interviewers and a hiring committee that didn't know they were Googlers, and about half of them got "hired".
So, don't feel bad you didn't get an offer (it doesn't sound like you do... just saying).
Google recognizes that the number of good candidates that get turned away is a problem, but figures that it's better to turn away good people than to hire weak candidates... so they try to set the bar really high. And it works, at least in the sense that it's very good at weeding out all the poor-to-mediocre candidates. I say that based on the fact that nearly everyone I work with at Google is outstanding. I've yet to find a plodder.
Is your experience at Apple similar, with respect to your colleagues? Does the same perception exist at Apple of Apple interviews, that a lot of good people get turned away?
As in, you had to go through a day long gauntlet of interviews asking irrelevant questions to get the gig. Surprise, they didn't get the best candidates that way!
Actually, Google does succeed at hiring very good people. What Bock said was that among the people who made the cut, very high interview scores didn't correlate with very high job performance scores. That study doesn't say anything about how people with low to average interview scores fare, though, because only people with high interview scores get hired.
If the valet at the company you are interviewing misplaces your car key for about 1/2 hour, are they so big they can't even figure out how to keep track of a few car keys
You really based your opinion on the quality of an employer by the fact that a contractor was new, or having an off day?
Except that no employee is ever allowed to solve a problem. Even if their solution is correct, they'll be fired as an example to everyone else.
You know I'm right, so don't bother.
You're not right, not at Google. But that's a separate issue from interview methodology.
This approach provides the interviewer with a lot more insight than casual chats, including helping you to find those people who are really capable but aren't good conversationalists.
That sounds like a good approach, but how do you know that it produces good results?
That's obviously an excellent question, which is closely related (though not identical) to the mentioned study. I have two answers, neither truly satisfactory, but that's because -- as TFA implies -- no one really knows how to interview effectively.
First answer: I perceive that it gives me a lot more insight into the candidate, because it clarifies and expands upon the observations I get from chatting, making me better at identifying both those who can talk but can't do, and those who can do but can't talk.. Obviously, that's just my perception, and even if it agrees with the perceptions of a lot of other people, it's ultimately not meaningful.
Second answer: I can see the results in the caliber of the people I work with. While Bock points out that crunching the data doesn't show any correlation between job performance and interview score, that analysis only considers people who were hired. It would be very reassuring if interview scores had a nice, perhaps even linear, correlation with post-hire performance scores (both of which are on the scale 0-4), there's another metric that is even more important: How many of those who are hired suck?
The answer to that question is very, very few. In the 2.5 years I've worked for Google what I've found is that my co-workers are, almost without exception, outstanding. Only a small number are truly brilliant, of course, but there is basically no deadwood at all. Since I came to Google as an engineer with >20 years of industry experience, including a fair amount of work with people from high-profile companies, I feel like I'm in a pretty good position to judge how unusual Google is in that respect -- and it's really, really unusual.
Perhaps the reason is something other than the interview approach, but the quality of Google hires provides, to me, pretty strong confirmation that the approach is effective at weeding out the poor and mediocre candidates. I don't think anyone would argue that it's necessarily good at identifying strong candidates, and the study mentioned by Bock demonstrates that it is not at all effective at predicting relative performance among strong candidates.
I know of 2 large cable modem ISPs that have no general server ban
Which?
Out of curiosity, why did you pick Google Fiber to complain about? Every ISP includes the same terms.
Is Google doing this out of the goodness of their corporate heart? What do they gain by fibering up (as opposed to "wiring up") all these cities? Quicker access to their browsing habits? Quicker access to all the personal information they put into Gmail, Google Drive, Google Documents, Google Places, Google+ contacts?
Money.
Google expects it to be a profitable business: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-expects-google-fiber-to-be-profitable-2013-5
Except that Chrome phones home the first time you start it up to check for upgrades. This has the unfortunate 'effect' of informing Google of the browser ID at this IP address, and as a consequence it informs the NSA of the linkage of browser ID and IP address.
Except that (a) this isn't true and (b) even when it was true the connection was over TLS, so the NSA couldn't snoop it.
Post NSA, I try to avoid Google services. They try to grab data for themselves, but in the process grab it for the NSA, and if the choice is NSA+Google or no Google, then I go without Google.
Effectively all Google services are over TLS -- Google was the first major Internet service to start encrypting everything -- and Google does not give data to the NSA except with a valid, narrowly-tailored order.
Her blog says that the Polish police have a report. But they aren't going to do anything about it.
And it's perfectly possible that my anti-tiger rock really keeps tigers away from my home.
Strong claims require strong proof. I think in this case if the government could prove that its measures were effective, they would trot out some carefully-sanitized examples.
I should correct one part of that last post. While there's very little pretension on display at Google, I do have to admit that there is a certain organizational hubris. There's an assumption that because you work at Google you must be smart and capable, and can be trusted to do the right things. I think that's a very good thing, but others may disagree.
I'm not going to tell you that you should have regretted it, but I think you made a bad decision. It's likely she asked you about the RFC in order to see if this was something you already knew about. If you had indicated knowledge of it, she'd have moved to something else. Since you didn't already know it, it was exactly what she needed, an opportunity to watch you try to work your way through a problem. And the fact that your solution was more wrong than right apparently didn't dissuade her from thinking your approach indicated good ability.
This is assuming that she was asking you to come up with a solution, not just to regurgitate facts. If it was the latter, well, she was a poor interviewer, sorry. Google tries to train people not to do that, but training can fail sometimes.
unless users actually refuse to use Target's web site because they don't want to be tracked.
Target's website refuses entry for those customers who do not have tracking cookies enabled. It is Target's choice, not the customers'.
It's the customers' choice to enable cookies.
I'm sure Target has carefully evaluated the situation, and the result is the decisions they've made.
Yeah, preventing customers from walking through the main entrance and buy things is always a good thing for a store to do.
Sure it is, if it allows the store to profit even more from those who do come in. Are you also going to tell me that Costco is foolish for refusing entry to non-members?
Perhaps you read something different than what I intended. You won't find a lot of pretension at Google, and I don't think my post displayed much of it either. I didn't demonstrate any false modesty, either... I'm a good engineer and I have a long string of real successes to prove it. That's not self-aggrandizement, just fact, and I felt it was necessary to establish that fact in order to ground my observations of the effectiveness of Google's interview process.
Brin and Page might have to brush up on their programming skills a bit to pass a Google interview but, yes, they're definitely capable of doing it.
Casual chats are okay, but they miss a lot, and favor those who are good at chatting over those who aren't.
For years my approach was to give a couple of simple programming problems to weed out those who'd waste my time, followed by a chat like you describe. It was okay. But the interview training given to me by Google showed me a much better way. It's not about "puzzles", those are pointless and Google has never used them. What works much better is to give people problems to solve and watch how they go about it. You want problems that are fairly realistic, but sufficiently self-contained they can be solved and coded in 30 minutes, and sufficiently open-ended that when you get a really good candidate who just blasts through it there's plenty of room to explore variations. You should also not be afraid to give hints if the candidate is clearly getting hung up on some bit. Obviously if you end up having to walk the person through the whole solution they're not a good hire, but even sharp people sometimes need something pointed out when they're under time pressure and being watched.
Above all, you want to identify the people who really engage with the problem, who forget about the interview and dive into it, and who show good problem-solving ability and agility.
This approach provides the interviewer with a lot more insight than casual chats, including helping you to find those people who are really capable but aren't good conversationalists.
This is true. Google's hiring process is very slow. When I was hired it didn't really affect me because I was in a position to be picky and intentionally spent many months looking for a new job. But I'm sure it does mean a lot of people have taken something else by the time they get their Google offer. However... I know a couple of people who had taken another position, and still made the decision to go to Google instead, so having taken another job doesn't necessarily preclude accepting the offer.
Might also explain projects with no benefit. As long as their employees like the manager, everything's cool.
The manager isn't really responsible for project success. That's on the engineers, especially the tech leads. Managers are responsible for keeping the employees happy and focused, and clearing distractions and obstacles. Product direction decisions are primarily the responsibility of the product managers (who aren't usually people managers) and VP-level management.
Do you want me to mansplain or do you want me to actually solve real problems? Your choice google.
The latter. In fact, mainsplaining to your interviewers at Google will get you dinged for "poor culture fit", even if your answers are correct and your code is good.
Google didn't miss that variable. The study was an analysis of how interview scores correlated with job performance, not how well interview scores correlated with whether or not the candidate was a good hire. An employee who does a decent job, getting acceptable but not outstanding performance reviews is still a good hire, whether interview scores were marginal or outstanding. Some small fraction of hires turn out to have been mistakes, of course, but at Google that percentage is quite small, which indicates that the interview process does a reasonably good job of avoiding false positives. It just doesn't do much more than that.
I suppose it's news that the internal study found no correlation between interview scores and job performance, but everyone at Google recognizes that getting hired is a crapshoot. Not totally random, of course; there are plenty of candidates who simply aren't going to get hired, ever, because they don't have what it takes. But (I'm speaking of engineers here, dunno about other areas), everyone knows that candidates who are of the caliber Google seeks may or may not pass the interview process, and whether or not they do is pretty much a toss of the dice. I've heard rumors of a an internal study that took successful Google engineers and put them through the interview and hiring process, obscuring their employee status... and about half of them were "re-hired".
Also, as McDowell's blog post says, Google has always instructed interviewers not to use "brainteaser" questions. It probably does still happen once in a while -- indeed one of my interviewers asked me a "bonus" question, after I'd already demolished his design/coding problem, which arguably falls into that category (I failed to answer it) -- but they're doing it wrong and the hiring committee will let them know it.
Anyway, so if Google's process has such random results, why do they continue to use it? Simple: because nobody has found a better way. And the study results mentioned are a little misleading if you don't understand them in context: The study was of tens of thousands of interviews and their correlation with the performance of people who were hired. And nearly all of the people who are hired by Google go on to have successful careers at Google. What the study shows is that the degree of success is not correlated with the strength of the hiring recommendations.
On the other hand, as someone who came to Google with 20+ years of industry experience already behind him as a basis for comparison, I'll tell you one thing about the Google hiring process: It hires good people. It also fails to hire a lot of good people, but there are vanishingly few plodders or obstructionists around. In the 2.5 years I've worked for Google I have worked with well over 100 engineers (my work tends to touch lots of teams), and I've met one, maybe two, who weren't bright, highly competent and very effective, and even those one or two would be good-performers most places. That is very different from my prior experience, and I worked with a lot of high-profile companies.
As another data point, at every one of my prior employers I was something of a star, commonly called a "genius" and similar in performance reviews. At Google... I'm merely competent, perhaps a bit below average. Many of my colleagues are much smarter than me, and the superstars at Google are absolutely brilliant. One woman in particular who I've worked with quite a bit is always at least four steps ahead of me. She constantly says things that I think are stupid... until I have time to catch up with her thought process. She also talks faster than anyone I've ever met, in an attempt to try to keep up with her brain, I think. Talking to her is exhausting, but exhilarating. I've taken to structuring my conversations with her so they are always interrupted after no more than five minutes because that's about all I can take before I need to go process for a while. My consolation is that I notice many other people interact with her in the same way. Overall, my experience of Google employees that they're all smart, energetic and talented, with a strong leavening of the truly brilliant, and that perception extends even outside of engineering. Hell, our building facilities manager is really sharp.
What I experience of my colleagues is exactly what Google aims to achieve: since there's no known way to make accurate hiring decisions, the interview process aims primarily to filter out candidates who aren't fairly outstanding. In the process, it excludes a lot of really talented people, but it's very effective at excluding basically all of the poor to mediocre candidates.
I'm just glad the dice went my way when I interviewed.
Target needs to re-evaluate their purpose for having a website - do they want to use the website to place cookies on peoples' disks? Or does target want to use the website to sell merchandise?
Clearly, Target wants to track the users to whom they sell merchandise so they can sell them more merchandise. These aren't conflicting goals, unless users actually refuse to use Target's web site because they don't want to be tracked. But hardly any users refuse, so the net value to Target favors tracking. I'm sure Target has carefully evaluated the situation, and the result is the decisions they've made.
I feel funny defending Facebook, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't sell personally-identifiable information to others. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
...Says the dude on the internet that apparently didn't read the note above the "Allow" button when he signed up for Farmville.
Actually, I never signed up for Farmville... and I don't even use Facebook any more :)
But, yes, if you explicitly give them permission to share your info then they have your permission.
"Google attempts to maximize the ability of users to distinguish ads from organic results" What a ridiculous statement.
Like I said, I can't really go into the details that would support it, so I'm not surprised you find it ridiculous. It's not, though.