I interviewed with Google about 2 years ago. First technical phone interview, the guy sounds really grumpy and irritated, and starts off with "I see that you have a Master's in CS. Are you an expert?". I replied something to the effect of "well I think it'd be pretentious for me to call myself an expert, I like to let my work speak for itself.". He responded "well we only hire experts at google".
The interview went downhill from there; several times he told me my solution to his question was incorrect, and I stepped through the code with him and showed him that he was mistaken and my solution was valid. He was just super grumpy the whole time.
Who knows, maybe my name reminded me of his ex wife or something. Regardless, it was a terrible experience.
I don't think that I sucked that hard because 2 weeks later I interviewed with apple, made it all the way to the onsite, and their questions felt harder. Their process was much more pleasant and efficient overall.
Yeah, same experience. I interviewed a long time ago (something like 5-6 years ago), and the interviewer sounded bored and grumpy the whole time. I told them before I interviewed that I didn't know of any of their core languages well enough to interview in them (Python being the only one I could possibly perform well enough with), but they said doing it in Ruby was fine since I was going for a testing position where they used Selenium and Ruby (no clue if that was true since the guy who interviewed me said it wasn't). The interviewer was just severely adversarial the whole time, constantly pointing out "you can't do that" syntactically or "that won't work" even though I'd step through and show them links or irb runs that proved otherwise.
And what's the deal with doing code interviews in Google Docs? I don't know if that's how it's done now, but it was extremely high-pressure. Given that he could see every keystroke and was pretty un-cooperative, it made for a super unpleasant interview with the constant feeling that I couldn't think or explore the problem given.
Still used less than a few months ago. My interviewer was at least pleasant and helpful though. Would be nice if they would just make a plugin for major IDEs/Editors and let people use what they want.
Yes, google docs is still used. Several of the people I did phone screens with commiserated that it's a poor way to code online, but they seemed to have 0 choice in the matter.
Yahoo used collabedit.com, which was much more pleasant (but still realtime).
It's a step up from when I interviewed, also about 5-6 years ago. I had to solve some coding puzzles ("uniquify a list in python while maintaining order") over the phone. Not so easy to dictate python code to someone with a strange accent over a crappy phone line. 2/3's of the interview spent on me or him saying "what?" He also was very grumpy. But it was a fun experience.
Yeah, I had the same problem with G docs. I think an inherent capability of a decent candidate is thinking of all possible avenues at once. When you add in the meta-cognitive overload of an interview to that you're testing other things. It's like adding confounding variables to a neural net. :)
Frankly, if the initial interview at Google sucks and you actually want to work there, make your case to the recruiter.
I had a similar experience as yours - got a guy that seemed uninterested, and who then proceeded to give me interview questions that firstly were totally irrelevant to the position, and totally outside of the area the recruiter had told me I was meant to be asked about. Secondly they made it clear that the guy interviewing me had a very specific idea of what answers he wanted, but didn't have sufficient knowledge of the field to realise that his questions were ambiguous or incomplete.
After the interview, I was just annoyed. I didn't see any point in waiting for feedbackm and fired off an e-mail to the recruiter, telling her I'd lost interest if that was how they managed their tech interviews. I also gave her the details of the questions and answers I had issues with (which was most of them).
She got back to me a few days later, and informed me she'd discussed the interview details with a few people, and everyone agreed with the points I'd made, and she had gotten it set aside and offered me to proceed to the next stage.
But at that point I declined - I'd had interest from a couple of prospects I saw as more interesting, and the (glacial) pace at which the process had been progressing and the issues with the phone interview (conducted by one of the engineers in the group I'd be managing if I'd been offered the position) gave me a fairly negative impression. I've talked to a number of Google recruiters over the years, both people approaching me to get me to interview, and in other situations, and _every one_ of the ones I've talked to have been totally exasperated over the recruitment process they have to deal with.
Google is what you get when you hire essentially random people, all of whom believe or are led to believe that the process that led to them being hired is infallible.
Interviewed for PM there a while back. Slow process. Neither interviewer adapted questions to the candidate, asked trivial stuff, didn't scale up difficulty. Static, reading script, little followup.
Second interviewer didn't read feedback from first, repeated one or two questions. Got to third round and withdrew.
Exactly the same for me. I was approached several times, tried the interview up to the second stage, but it was just horrible. Same as you explained. I also said, no thank you. Not any other technical company I interviewed with was THAT bad. They should really fire all their hiring personal.
I interviewed a few years back, it was a mix of the most interesting and most asinine interviews I have had. A great discussion w/ one woman going into linux internals and kernel programming. I learned a bunch but also it was a good conversation.
That last person I spoke with never introduced himself, asked essentially an open ended question with no real answer. I presented what I thought was reasonable, he said "that's wrong", and never answered what he thought the approach/answer should be. Relayed this to a friend there just after the interview - her response was "that is an idiotic question and actually your answer was correct".
I was declined for the position, but still get calls by google recruiters on a regular basis. I relay the story and politely tell them no thanks.
Combined with the fact that Google ties roles with geographic location, and doesn't reveal what post people will work on during recruitment, this assertion is quite amusing. I suppose he thought he was an expert too! That interviewer is selecting for hubris with this question at least - often those willing to call themselves experts are anything but.
If the best people in x live happily in Toronto and Bangkok and the team is in Mountain View, Google won't be hiring them or even probably interviewing them because of their opaque and broken interview process, which is a shame for Google I guess. The insistence on relocation and the refusal to recruit for actual roles must put an awful lot of good people off.
People in my life think I'm arrogant when I say I'm not interested in working for Google, but it's more just that it's not a "good fit" for either of us.
When I interviewed at the GOOG a year or two ago they asked me to rate myself on a 1-10 log scale for whichever skills I claimed to be proficient in. 9-10 was 'wrote the book' / 'invented the langauge' IIRC.
Given that Google employs or has employed Guido van Rosssum, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, and Josh Bloch, I think that would be a fair assessment of what "expert" means in the context of interviewing there.
It might be apocryphal, but at one point candidates filled a "rate yourself from 1 to 10 in technology X, Y, Z" to help guide the interviewers in choosing questions. The general consensus was "if you rate yourself as a 10 in Python, there's a non-zero chance you'll end up with Guido on your interview panel"
I've interviewed with Google a couple of times for PM type roles over the last few years. I found the interviews pleasant enough, a few brain teasers hidden as algorithm questions and some very basic experiential questions...that sort of thing.
I had the distinct feeling that the outcome of the hiring process really had nothing to do with the interview so long as I answered competently enough.
One interview I nailed, got to the second round phone interview nailed it and then didn't get a call back...ever.
Out of curiosity I send some emails off, turns out the recruiter had quit or "was no longer with the company" or whatever and they had filled the position, please feel free to apply again.
Regardless, it didn't really matter, I had a good time, it was fun, I didn't get the job, but meh. I didn't have to go through the hassle of relocating either.
The few other SV type company interviews I've been on have been similar. Not terribly hard, a few brain teasers, lots of vocalized processing of my thinking process, but even with the ones I got an offer for, came away with the distinct impression that the interview particulars just didn't matter all that much. They were simply confirming some predisposed hiring assumptions and would probably go with whoever went to the best school or whatever arbitrary metric they were using.
They were looking for X, using a hiring process that looks for Y, and it all ended before a committee that hired for Z anyways.
I think this is the most important factoid that's come out of this all is this realization that Google finally had after crunching years worth of data (which was already common knowledge among the rest of the world):
"G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything."
Well, they do predict that people who are given near term ranking and validation of their work will work their asses off to get that ranking and validation.
A little etymology: valedictorian, from valediction, from Latin valere
validate from Latin validus (see valid) from valere
So it's no wonder that valedictorian and validate have the same root. A high achiever is by definition somebody who's efforts have been validated against the measure of achievement (whatever that measure might be) and confirmed to be valere "well", "strong".
It's too bad that what a company needs is an employee that does their job, not one that needs to be constantly validated in their efforts.
And thus a hiring system, put together by validators, who designed the hiring system to validate and filter for people who focus on validation, forgot to look for people who get shit done and don't need to be thanked for it.
And as a result, Youtube becomes more and more unusable every single day.
I think being a valedictorian has a lot more to do with saying goodbye (vale) than it does being validated, but I do think you might be right about Google's bias toward those who seek validation.
Valedictorian used as a noun in 1832, adj in 1834. American English. From Valedictory adj. and -ian variant of -an, Middle English -ien from French loan words, -an "pertaining to" from Latin -anus.
Valedictory first used in the 1650s, from the Latin valedictum from valedicere and -ory from Latin -orius, -oria, -orium "to have a quality proper to the action accomplished by the agent".
valedicere from vale, imperative of valere "be well" and dicere "to say". See also "Valediction" from 1610s.
Validate v. from 1640s from Latin validatus, from validus, from valere "be well", "be strong" (connoted)
I stand corrected--I had understood the original comment as something that contradicted mneary's reply, and I knew the specific etymology of "to bid farewell" just didn't look at the full derivation.
No problem, I missed the edit window on my reply when I realized it might be a little bit terse sounding in tone. I meant it as being helpful.
I'll add that the Latin vale can be used to mean "farewell", which is usually how it's translated, but if you dig down the etymology rabbit hole, they come from two different language families and not surprisingly don't mean the same thing.
"farewell" is from somewhere between 1200 and the 14th century middle English, a composite of faren "fare" and wel "well". The phrase used to be "fare thee well" but was contracted later. All have Germanic roots.
"fare" is old-English fær means "to go forth on a journey" and still hangs around in some words like "sea-faring", "wayfarer" and "farewell" ("fare" eventually turned into the more modern meaning "payment for passage or conveyance", but that's a digression).
"well" in the sense of "farewell" these days connotes good health (as in "are you well?") but originates also in Germanic tongues to mean "satisfactory".
"thee" is also proto-Germanic in origin and I won't belabor it.
Swedish speakers may recognize this in the modern form as "farväl" and Dutch as "vaarwel"
A "valedictory" is usually translated as "a farewell address" and the act of the speech the valedictorian gives is called a "valediction" (a farewell). But this isn't strictly correct. "valedictory" means something more like "words for good health".
So it's more like we commonly translate "hope you feel well!" to "have a safe trip!" which isn't really quite right.
It's interesting then that:
a) "well" has come to adopt the Latin meaning "health" in the sense that "valere" means "well" i.e. "health" (similar to "valetudo" or "valetudinis"). "valere" more strictly translates to "health" (which all the other meanings connote e.g. "strength" "well" etc.). Also found in words like "convalescence" with the "strength" connotation ending up in words like "valiant" and "validity". When we "validate" something, we are proving it to be strong, which is a connotation of "healthy". So it really means "to prove to be healthy".
b) We define Latin words in terms of Germanic explanations, but not the other way around. e.g. if you look up "farewell" in the dictionary it's not defined as a "valediction". Which would come as no surprise to those that know that English is a Germanic language.
I somewhat enjoy interviewing, and I thought about writing up my narrative of the best interview I ever had (it was very exceptional), and at the same time I thought about writing about the strangest interview I ever had, a distinction that belongs to Google. I decided not to because I didn't want to be unfair to them based on my experience which may well be out of the ordinary (I could recount it solely for this crowd if someone is interested).
I didn't get far in that interview (I excused myself), but the entire process was downright Kafkaesque and I get the same eerie feeling reading this article.
> Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead.
I'm sorry, what? This definition doesn't actually describe anything. It's more useful as an example of begging the question[1] than it is of describing what they mean by leadership. And how do they go about deciding if you step up to the plate at the right time in an interview, anyway?
It seems like their "leadership" criteria wouldn't actually select for people with good leadership skills, it would just select for people with good storytelling. Par for the course for interviews, but let's not kid ourselves.
[1] This phrase is commonly used to mean raising the question but I mean it here in the traditional sense, like the comical observation: "If such actions were not illegal, then they would not be prohibited by the law."
The second half (or third third?) of that quote states:
> And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.
Which I think is what the author is trying to focus on. Traditional leadership would be making the decisions and taking risks because it's expected and people are asking you "Hey, what do we do?". Emergent leadership would then be making decisions and taking risks because it needs to happen or equally importantly acknowledging that someone else is more capable of doing so. I would bet that in the interview process they'd focus on the story and trying to determine how you make the decision to either ignore the chain of command or otherwise exert influence on it.
Like you said, that definitely selects more for storytelling skills than leadership skills, but in absence of other more accurate metrics I think that's still better than looking for "President of Chess Club" on a resume.
Unrelated, I'd love to read those narratives. While I can't speak for the community, I feel interviewing is a very hard thing to get right and knowing more about how other people do it AND experience it is important to getting better. Nothing < anecdotes < more anecdotes < data?
Knowing when to lead and when to "let" someone else lead may be important (just as, say, delegating is), but I don't think it settles for a different definition of leadership. Knowing when to lead or not has always been considered a good criteria.
> Nothing < anecdotes < more anecdotes < data?
Well, I'm apprehensive about writing about an odd interview it because I don't want people to think ill of Google merely because I had what might be an uncommon interview process.
PLEASE remember that my anecdote may not be indicative of Google's typical recruiting and I am especially not passing judgement about anything they do (except maybe recruit). I like Google and it's probably a great place to work.
Here's what happened:
Back in 2011 a Google recruiter emailed me saying I might be a good fit for a position called:
> 'Performance Engineer' for which we're looking for a candidate with a combination of compiler, high performance software design and computer architecture experience.
Now I'm not certain how he came to the conclusion I might be a good fit, because I'm a simple JavaScript farmer from a backwards asteroid and the only thing remotely close to that job description in my short life were a few articles about JavaScript Canvas performance that I've written. I relayed that there must be some sort of misunderstanding about my skill-set.
He says ah thanks, sorry for the confusion, have you got any friends? Standard recruiter stuff. We part ways.
Fast forward to 2013 and I've just spent a year of my life slogging through writing a book on HTML5. It got published in July and I was busy resting on newly-built laurels when another Google recruiter contacts me, and I entertain.
Now the timing is not particularly weird but this recruiter contacts me a week before a conference I was invited to. You see, one month before the recruiter email I got an invitation to a conference (EdgeConf), which happened to be invite only, even for the audience members, and which was to take place at Google HQ. This is puzzling if only because I'm still a relative nobody, save for perhaps the just-published book, and I couldn't fathom who might invite me to such a thing, but I figured it was someone in Google.
The recruiter email a week before the event made this theory much more plausible, so I figured there may be some hint of who invited me awaiting at the conference.
Alas, during the talks and the after-party nobody approached me or mentioned who invited me. I did meet the ever-recognizable Paul Irish for a second - we exchanged a handshake and I swooned (who wouldn't?), but no more. The puzzle remained.
But how could it be an invite from anyone other than someone in Google? I don't know anyone. I'm from New Hampshire. I have very little in the way of programmer friends. That's a big part of why I love HN so much, it makes me feel like I'm part of a programmer community that I don't get to have offline.
After the conference I talked to the recruiter on the phone, twice, where I relayed that no I was not interested in leaving New Hampshire, I like my slow life among the moose and other friends I have.
Well that leaves Cambridge, he says, I'm not sure what we do there, he says, I'll get back to you. Cue dial tone. I guess that meant remote is out of the question, but that's not hard to imagine.
On the second call, he talks to me about Cambridge and what they do there, but he was oddly uneasy talking about it, like he knew something I didn't (he certainly must). He made it sound like there was little (web?) developer presence there, and he wasn't totally certain what the projects were, but, and this is the part that really blew my mind, it shouldn't matter.
He didn't literally say those words, but he heavily implied them by telling me that I would not know what kind of a spot I would be interviewing for. Not until after I'd been accepted, at any rate. There was no "You'll work on fixing Google Finance, which can't be hard since we haven't changed it in 6 years and it still uses Flash."
There was almost no discussion of what products I might work on, and it was pointless to have, because I'd be interviewing to be a developer, and I'd be placed afterwards.
So I could interview, but what I'd be doing was really up for grabs, and I wouldn't be doing the grabbing, and my options-that-were-apparently-not-mine-to-make were pigeonholed because of location. It sounded like teams only have people on-site, at least It was implied I couldn't work for a team based in Mountain View if my butt sat in Cambridge.
So I asked if I could be sure of the position and team that I'd be working for before I interviewed properly, and he said no. At this point I had to cut things short.
I don't understand the concept of interviewing not for a job but for a slot in a pool of talent to be assigned only after I am accepted. That sounds like an insurmountable amount of work to find out if a job is something I'd want to do or not. What if I don't like the app? Or the team? It seems like a very stressful way to begin at a company.
So there you have it. That's everything I remember at the moment.
To this day I never found out who invited me to that conference.
I'm sure I'm remembering some of the details wrong. For instance, cell phones do not have dial tones to cue. But you get the idea.
> To this day I never found out who invited me to that conference.
Pretty sure I did, dude. :) Also, while I sometimes offer names of friends recruiters should talk to, I didnt' around this time. So that part's still a mystery.
Additionally, it was a pleasure to meet you.
The "I would not know what kind of a spot ... what if I didn't like the app" doesn't strike me a strange situation at all. The agency I work for, we do it all the time. We hire developers, at least half of them, into a developer pool and just assign as needed to projects as they come and go.
Sure, after you've worked for a while you have "your" projects, but we generally don't know which ones those will be in advance.
When I was hired, the recruitment was extremely vague about what kinds of apps I would be working on. During the interview, I asked for more detail, and didn't get it. Similar situation: the apps I'm working on are whatever apps the business customer and I decide are needed to be worked on.
Some candidates do ask during interviews what projects they'll be working on. I'll be frank with them. I'll tell them "these are our current top priorities, but you'll be working on whatever is needed, helping out other developers and teams as needed, and generally filling in all over the place for at least the first six months." I actually like setting it up that way. Have a developer work with different teams, on different apps, before they "settle down" to the maintain and develop "their" apps. (If that ever even happens)
Some people view passion as an important part of motivation in a job - as in a passion for robotics meaning a programmer spends more time and energy in solutions for a particular team that makes robots than they would otherwise in any other position.
Clearly, given your process, you won't be hiring people who are passionate about certain areas, though they will be happy to work on anything, so the hiring process suits you and finds you generalists who are happy to work on any project (exactly what you want), but it will put off some potential employees.
> He didn't literally say those words, but he heavily implied them by telling me that I would not know what kind of a spot I would be interviewing for. Not until after I'd been accepted, at any rate. There was no "You'll work on fixing Google Finance, which can't be hard since we haven't changed it in 6 years and it still uses Flash."
This is typical of Google recruitment from what I gather. Of the calls I've had from Google (I clearly match some weird mix of keywords), only one involved a specific position. For the rest getting them to confirm the position was in London (in one case it turned out that, no, in fact, the position involved Trondheim, Norway, and I'd been approached because I'm Norwegian, and they thought not to mention this until I asked for specifics) is about as far as they'd go. [I always push for position because my languages means I frequently get approached by cagey recruiters trying to get me to move to some god-forsaken place in Germany I have no interest in visiting, much less living in.]
Even nailing down whether or not my expected salary range was anywhere near what they could offer seemed a near impossible task (at least one recruiter said she didn't know as it'd be determined by a different team). I started pushing for this and rejecting the ones who couldn't answer, after I managed to get one Google recruiter to admit that my then-current salary was well above what they'd be willing to offer for the type of position he was hiring for (I didn't manage to get a proper job description out of him, though).
> I don't understand the concept of interviewing not for a job but for a slot in a pool of talent to be assigned only after I am accepted.
The hilarious part, to me, is that this is as old school as you get. E.g. the British Civil Service recruits this way. You apply to a department, say the Court Service, and is assessed roughly for a salary band, and interviewed. You're then put in a pool, and the recruiters work to place you in a specific position for the duration of your interview validity (12 months when my ex worked there). But the British Civil Service interview process is far more transparent and efficient for the most part than my experience of Google's.
I have a friend in the US Foreign Service and this is very similar to the experience he had. Only after they qualify do they find out the job -- and location! -- to which they'll be posted.
This doesn't seem very strange to me at all, certainly not Kafkaesque -- for large companies that are very selective, always in need of new candidates, and do a huge variety of things, I imagine most would want to have the chance at anyone who qualifies.
Anything else seems less scalable and less efficient for both recruiters and candidates. The recruiters or candidates need to do all the matching up front, instead of doing it only once the candidates and company are found to be right for each other. It saves everyone's time to go through the effort to match up for a specific team -- as long as there are plenty of options to avoid disappointment at that stage.
>There was almost no discussion of what products I might work on, and it was pointless to have, because I'd be interviewing to be a developer, and I'd be placed afterwards.
I joined a little over a year ago. Although they do still have the policy about "you're going to be a developer and we'll tell you what to develop when you get here", there is a small window where you can negotiate that. However, that window is after you get the offer, so I suspect a lot of people either don't get to that point or by then are too shell-shocked to argue.
When I got my offer, I was also told as interview feedback that I didn't do amazing on my coding but they saw potential there once I got up to speed - my last job had really let my talents languish. I was offered a position on a back-end infrastructure team in Mountain View. At that point, I had a call with the director of that group to discuss what my role would be as well as a lunch meeting with three people from the team to sell me on it. I told the recruiter that I appreciated the offer and I would consider it, but there was another team that I was really excited about working for (and with responsibilities that I had some previous experience with) and if they could make that happen I would definitely join. Fortunately, that team had open headcount and wanted me, so I got to take the job I wanted after all.
I'm not saying this will necessarily work for everyone, but given that I don't think I was an A-1 candidate they didn't push back very hard once I asked. I think it's hard enough for them to find candidates they want that once they take you they'll loosen up a bit, but before the interview starts they're less inclined to go through the headache of making sure the specific job you want is waiting for you. I have no opinion on whether that's a good way to handle it.
> I don't understand the concept of interviewing not for a job but for a slot in a pool of talent to be assigned only after I am accepted.
You have no idea how many big companies are doing this just because they can afford to. I don't understand either. I would never interview for this kind of thing again.
Are there companies other than Google that do this? I haven't heard of any, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I always thought the practice was unique to them.
There's a big (and common) error in statistical reasoning Google is making with the decision to down-weight GPA based on their data: That GPAs do not predict performance among those it hired does not imply that Google should not use GPA when hiring any more. Rather, it means that Google used GPA to exactly the right extent among those it hired under its old policy - there was no information left in GPA they didn't use, and therefore they should leave whatever policy they have in place as is.
Explanation: suppose there are only two things Google observes, GPA and coding ability, and that Google uses some correct decision rule to only hire those people where the sum GPA + coding ability > some threshold. Those who have lower GPAs will thus tend to have higher coding ability, otherwise they wouldn't have met the threshold to make it into the pool of hires they're analyzing - and, therefore, comparing "those with low GPAs that Google hired" and "those with high GPAs that Google hired" is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
In order to assess whether GPA should be used at all, they would need to look at how the people they didn't hire because of their existing policy would have performed.
These are great ideals. But there are a lot of problems with how Google does an interview process.
The most known problem is recruiter quality. Google's recruiters are notoriously non-diligent and screw up in big ways. It's not unheard of for eng candidates to be booked with a non-eng interviewer, and vice versa.
In any case, here is how it works in practicality:
1. You apply for job X and do a phone screen (or two).
2. Random people throughout the company who a) have had interview training and b) are (supposedly) related to X will be tapped to interview you, but nobody from the actual team you are applying to is selected to minimize biases.
3. Each person interviews you and fills out a form giving feedback. Feedback is qualitative, as well as quant (scale ratings with previous entries exposed to make biases clear).
4. Feedback goes to an unbiased committee (again, not related to the hiring team) for a decision. Feedback is permanently saved in case the person applies again.
The problem with (2) and (3) is that it sometimes results in an unrealistic process - depending on the prowess of the recruiting coordinator in setting up interviewers. A front-end dev candidate for Shopping might get interviewed by an deep algos person from Search, and tank the interview because the interviewer had higher expectations for the candidate's theoretical knowledge.
Good interview training alleviates these problems somewhat, but there are still huge gaps.
I have interviewed with Google before and I'm currently going through the process of getting an internship with them. Let me tell you I've had very disparate and different experiences in these months.
I was contacted exactly one year ago for a fulltime position and my contact/recruiter was really excellent, very friendly, helpful and informal, we also talked a lot about non-Google related stuff, a definite great guy. Then I was moved to onsite interviews and I failed.
Fast forward to last October, I was contacted for an internship, I said I was interested and the recruiter said my application was forwarded. I never heard from them again (even after pinging the guy again). Then I talked to an engineer at Google and I was told that since I had already done the required interviews with them a year before (I failed for fulltime but they apparently qualified me for internship), I didn't have to do them again so the process should have been faster.
With that in mind I managed to get in touch with another recruiter and explained my situation, she decided to give me a chance and we had a phone screening (although it shouldn't have been necessary, but no big deal). After that she told me I'd have to go through all the interviews again although that's not what I was told. She passed on my application and nobody contacted me again.
That was beginning of January. I pinged her a few weeks ago and luckily I was told that my application had been magically forwarded to another recruiter again (aka she forgot, probably). This time I was told that I qualified to skip the interviews so now I'm at a later stage (project matching for internship) so I can't complain, although I was told there's not much choice because I am "applying late" even though it's been going since October.
Tl;dr - it really depends on the recruiter, it's a shame because that can really reflect negatively on the whole company.
That article isn't "better", they serve completely different purposes.
If you master everything in Yegge's article, but yet fail to show you know how to learn, lead, show ownership and humility, you'll still probably not get the job. And I'm sure this fact baffles a lot of technical experts out there who don't pass their Google interview.
Of course Yegge's advice is indispensable on the technical side. But Lazlo's advice is intentionally more broad than that.
I don't want to do what Yegge says. I can get a job in a few phone calls. Why should I go study a book for a month to be tested on a bunch of algorithms not pertinent to my field, to almost certainly be rejected even if I am (and I honestly think I am) a great fit? Why should I interview for a job, take all that time, experience that stress, when they won't even tell me what the position might be? No thanks.
Programmers are classically engineers — “One who contrives, designs, or invents” in the primary sense in the OED. Some are also Engineers™, while others object to the intrusion of the Engineering™ cartel into their field. I've never noticed among my colleagues any particular difference between those who are Software Engineers™ and those who are not, and have come to like the term ‘technologist’ to avoid the issue.
Despite the fact that Laszlo is the head of HR, engineering is in charge of its own hiring procedures. I would take all of this with a giant grain of salt.
+1 I don't think I have ever heard of anything about leadership being asked of IC engineering candidates, and this is the first I've heard that intellectual humility is important either. I mean, it's a good thing, but nobody ever directed me to look for it.
Candidates always optimize for what is being interviewed, never ever forget that. The moment you put down a interview 'process' its all over. Doesn't matter what that process is, doesn't matter how difficult that is. Once you do it, its only a matter of recognizing patterns. Then all you have to do is develop a elaborate process to game it. A couple of months of practice is all it takes to do that.
The Steve Yegge, 'Get that job at Google' article is nothing but a 'Game this interview' article. Read this book, practice this X times and you shall get through. For heaven's sake, Do people hire for getting job done everyday or playing some puzzles from some book not even remotely relevant to any thing you will ever do on your job.
Companies like these want the best of the best people. Yet their methods completely revolve around knowledge and fact based questions. And sorry I don't believe asking difficult questions make it any better. There are forums on the net dedicated to train you crack such questions.
How many interviews check if candidates can last tough on the job situations? How many check if the candidate is hard working, How many check the candidates appetite to work on tough challenging time pressing projects? How many check if the candidate is innovative? Or checks a candidates general abilities like gumption, persistence or general appetite for work and delivering.
These companies often speak on how difficult it is to hire good people and then purposefully invent processes to avoid hiring such people.
Much of the technical advice in Steve Yegge's article boils down to this: "Study a data-structures and algorithms book. Focus on complexity, graphs, discrete math, operating systems, and algorithms."
While you could consider this advice on how to game an interview, I would argue it's also excellent advice on how to become a better software engineer.
In addition, Yegge's article is not pitched at the layman. It is for working programmers who want to "level up" before tackling a Google interview. I brushed up on my algorithms and data structures before my Google interview, and it certainly helped.
I think may be you missed the important point in the article. Everybody these days knows algorithms and data structures. It's much more about being fast at arbitrary problem solving on the spot and attitude.
+1000 to this. I relate you comment to Neil deGrasse Tyson's quote: "There are people who say “I'll never need this math -- these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade.” Or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before, and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver."
'Restriction of range'. When you look at the general population, from janitor to tenured professor, one of the single best predictors of job performance is IQ; but when you look at, say, 'MIT physicist grad students', well, they're all very smart, so when you look at the minor differences in intelligence between them, the scores barely correlate with their future success even though no one becomes a MIT grad student in physics without being terrifyingly smart. Because they have been selected on that trait already. Hence the apparent paradox.
(No surprise Friedman doesn't understand this; the NYT article on the Google findings did not explain this.)
I dislike Friedman a fair bit, but I can't hold this one against him: restriction of range is a subtlety that pretty much no one understands in interpreting correlations, and I only know about it myself because I happened to read a paper torpedoing a previous famous paper as having fallen prey to restriction of range (and then did some more reading on range restriction).
I was surprised by that, too. I work in a lab that studies intelligence, and IQ tests are generally designed to measure G (general cognitive ability). It's like saying, "we're interested in measuring height, and I'm not talking about inches".
I'd imagine he's saying that they want to assess general cognitive ability in ways traditional tests do not.
Easy. Think of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. He may have a high IQ, but he lacks the ability to be able to connect different ideas and/or come up with solutions which require more than just processing mathematical computations.
What kind of fictional characters should I allow to influence my world view? Those from books written in the 20th century? Shakespeare? The Illiad? Any advice appreciated.
Can you give an example of someone in the real world who has "a high IQ, but lacks the ability to be able to connect different ideas and/or come up with solutions which require more than just processing mathematical computations"? IQ is not a measure of arithmetic processing capability.
The first problem with IQ is that especially for high IQ persons, let's say 125+, it doesn't measure well what most people understand as general intelligence.
The second is that it reduces the information about one's intellect to one number. People have different strenghts in pattern recognition, high-level thinking, creativity, analytical thinking, speed etc.
BTW, my theory is that personality traits have significant influence on intelligence. For example:
IQ is a dirty word now. But even apart from it's "racist" connotations, it is still bad PR to use that term. Compare "I got to where I am because I am really smart" with "I got to where I am because I was able to develop good learning skills".
"For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information."
The cognitive dissonance required to say "general cognitive ability... is not IQ" is astounding.
IQ testing bad! Hiring smart people good! Does not compute!
He specifically said that he defined general cognitive ability as the ability to learn, process on the fly, and pull together disparate information. Which is indeed distinct from IQ.
Intelligence varies, and people differ in which tasks they are good at. They very well might not think that IQ is a good predictor that they are looking for.
To be fair, "ability to learn, process on the fly, and pull together disparate information" is indeed "indeed distinct from IQ", but only in the pedantic sense that it'd be more accurate to say such capacities refer to g.
But then...IQ is indeed a reliable, verifiable, and efficient indicator of g, so...indeed.
IQ is not "cognitive ability", it's a fallible (and arguably biased) quantification/quotient of a (not exhaustive) set of measures of (some form of) cognitive ability.
People generally don't have their IQs "measured", and even when they are, the things they are kind of good at predicting are only a small subset of important qualities, so it would hardly be a good measure by which to compare applicants.
I think the problem you have with this is that you're assuming "high IQ" and "smart" are automatically the same thing. A high IQ is only one slice of the "smart" pie.
IQ is defined as a point estimate of the value of a general factor of intelligence, which is in turn defined as the statistical construct that most strongly correlates with performance on disparate cognitively-loaded tasks. To the extent that there can be such a thing as "general cognitive ability", which they are apparently looking for, the only question is whether whatever specific test they're using correlates strongly with that g-factor. To the extent that it does, it is axiomatically an IQ test.
While you're correct, the fact that someone can define an IQ test as the test that most strongly correlates with the g-factor (itself merely a composite factor from a number of different measures) doesn't mean that IQ, or the g-factor, or "general cognitive ability", corresponds to any physical causative factor: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.htm...
Could it be that it's something he is (if he brings up the subject at all) politically or legally required to say irrespective of its truth value? (Not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know the answer.)
The best way to get job at GOOG is to get job at MSFT, AMZN or Apple, pimp your Linkedin and Dice profile, get contacted by GOOG recruiter and then get auto-hired.
Although, as Ballmer is gone - MSFT becomes sexier and smarter bet for new hires than overbloated GOOG.
AMZN seems to get obsessed with it's Silk browser project and is desperate to hire anyone who is desperate to get hired.
PS:
Here's my recent reply to AMZN recruiter pimping Silk browser project:
=======================
Hi ,
Thank you for your email. I think I am a perfect fit for this position:
>>You should have an intimate understanding of how the web works from the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, to web servers, to browsers.
http://i.imgur.com/C6nE2.jpg
There's no such thing. Before you are offered a job at Google you have to go through the interview process and the interviewer's feedback is assessed by a hiring committee.
This is not ad hominem but I should note that anyone reading this article should take care more that it is written by Thomas Friedman and maybe one should take care before wasting too much time reading it.
Generally, a technical interview is meant for you to beat their best technical person in the team, either for the knowledge of cleverness, so everyone adore you in order to pass the interview.
Yet it is well known that most technically talented people have a common OCD, especially of those with strong ego, is to compete to be who the smartest is, which is not a bad thing, but some went extreme and they do it at all cost. Evidently as often observed, in office the loudest person is perceived the smartest be the mass. Can google avoid that?
In a few hours interview, psychological problems like these are difficult to detect and rule out. If google is serious about their claim that they don't care about expertise but .... They should send candidates to psychiatrist and filter first.
Personally I think this NY times google HR is BS marketing. There is better way to recruit top talent, and this is not it.
One potential issue is that it appears the coding is the only criterion listed that can be fairly assessed before meeting someone and having a dialogue or giving some test. If they truly don't care about your past traditional leadership, grades, and are most concerned with being good on the fly, what criteria are used to make a decision on bringing someone in for an interview? One's list of accomplishments, transcripts, and past job titles won't typically provide the answers. If these are the hiring criteria that is one thing, but it's a bit of a reach to say that those are the interview selection criteria. I feel that is a key factor here (perspective - I'm a recruiter of developers).
I suspect this article is what they say they do as opposed to what they actually do.
They may even say these things internally as part of the "official" plan, but as you point out, there's reason to be skeptical it's how they actually operate in practice.
You can hire on these things once in the interview process, and I think most companies probably like to think they do the same thing. But they aren't interviewing everyone we can assume. So how do you pick people for interviews? This is where all the GPA and good schools stuff comes in usually, or something unique about the candidate. Perhaps certain experience that serves as an indicator that the person will have the required attributes.
I'd have been more interested in hearing how they select for interviews and not how they hire. If someone from an average school with a below average GPA, he/she could impress and get hired on these attributes (which the candidate certainly can possess), but the real trick for these candidate types is getting in the door.
My experience with interviewing is that what I think of as level two or three problems are presented, where you have to solve some recursive problem and give the O() notation for the implementation. This happens in each of the multiple interviews over the three to six hour interview session. If you're not extremely good at this you are going to be false negatived tf out of there right quick.
Top level problems are where the solution involves days, weeks or months of study and contemplation where the solution possibly involves a large amount of refactoring of existing code. Architectural level stuff. There is no way to test for this in an hour long interview.
When I mention refactoring, I often get a blank stare from the interviewer. I had a coworker recently who insisted on calling it "refuctoring", having no concept of it or any desire to investigate.
Shameless plug warning. I'm preparing for my Google interview and I've collected some resources for a fairly quick but thorough preparation for the interview (well, except for CLRS, I just like it).
As a current student, I don't buy what they're saying one bit. If this is the case, why do they ask for your GPA when you apply online for a programming role? More anecdotally, everyone I know who made it to the interview process had a stellar GPA. Most were members of the CS honor society on campus.
I don't have any hard proof, but it's clear to me that at least for new hires, GPA is a big requirement for Google.
Granted that I've been in the industry a while, but although I did get asked for my GPA, it wasn't until after I was about to receive the offer letter and they were checking references. My guess is that it's just a spot on the form that they still have to fill out.
I like Friedman's summary. If it is accurate, Google has a pretty forward-looking hiring philosophy; definitely better than the view espoused by Marissa Mayer sometime back about only hiring good students (or something along these lines). Working there sounds like it could be quite nice. It's too bad about the stacked ranking, which is a huge liability for a company in my view.
Unlike some stack ranking horror stories I've heard, at Google the engineers are stack-ranked against everyone else at the same tech level. That's thousands of people. If you're in the bottom 10% of thousands of people, then "needs improvement" is probably a pretty accurate assessment.
To be let go you have to do quite poorly, by the way. Once you get in the door it would be possible to coast, assuming you did have some productivity. You just won't get the fun stuff.
If it's any consolation, the stack ranking is done with the institutional knowledge that performance isn't evenly distributed between teams – i.e. some teams will have zero people who are underperforming. (in fact, this has been the typical experience for me in my three years at Google at least; most of the time everyone on the team is doing well both from a performance perspective and a career development perspective).
I had just submitted the OLD link summarizing last summer's interview to HN today (to answer a question that came up overnight about Google's hiring practices), and I see that the author here was just as struck by the statement from last summer, "G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything." In more complete context, from last summer's interview by another New York Times writer,[1] that statement was "One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything." So, yes, if you have little work experience and were in full-time school recently, Google will ask you about your G.P.A. But if you have substantial industry experience, Google will ask you about that, or at least such is the claim here about current Google practice.
Some comments posted before this comment mentioned the confusing way that "general cognitive ability" is said not to be the same thing as IQ. No psychologist, and especially no psychologist specializing in industrial and organizational psychology, would speak that way. The universal statement in that branch of psychology is that IQ scores are a very good indicator of "general cognitive ability" indeed, the least expensive and most efficient indicator possible for most hiring situations. I think the Google executive interviewed in today's article and in last summer's article is just trying to be legally correct while eating his cake and having it. In the United States, there are tricky legal issues surrounding using IQ tests as a hiring criterion that grow out of the Griggs v. Duke Power case decision by the United States Supreme Court.[2] IQ tests are disfavored as a hiring criterion by that decisions (but the little known fact is that so are educational credentials disfavored as a hiring criterion[3] by the same case), so companies tend to try to use more expensive, less reliable proxies of IQ tests to get the results that IQ tests would give them more reliably and less expensively.
[1] "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal" 19 June 2013 by Adam Bryant
> so companies tend to try to use more expensive, less reliable proxies of IQ tests to get the results that IQ tests would give them more reliably and less expensively
I wonder what the legal defense would look like if an employee was turned down on the basis of a test that wasn't an IQ test, but had a near perfect correlation with the results of an IQ test.
I remember a UofIowa business school survey, correlating employee testing with 1st-year review. The only correlation they found was with 'conscientiousness'. That is, if you stuck to a problem until you finally got it solved, you were reviewed well. Regardless of IQ, education, ambition, socialization, anything.
Which makes sense to me. That's the people at work I value, those that solve their own damn problems, don't just stall and say "I hit a roadblock" in standup and stare at you like its your problem.
Hard to say, obviously. Not unlikely though the answer is no. See for education for example.
Recent reports suggest a causal relationship between education and IQ, which has implications for cognitive development and aging—education may improve cognitive reserve. In two longitudinal cohorts, we tested the association between education and lifetime cognitive change. We then tested whether education is linked to improved scores on processing-speed variables such as reaction time, which are associated with both IQ and longevity. Controlling for childhood IQ score, we found that education was positively associated with IQ at ages 79 (Sample 1) and 70 (Sample 2), and more strongly for participants with lower initial IQ scores. Education, however, showed no significant association with processing speed, measured at ages 83 and 70. Increased education may enhance important later life cognitive capacities, but does not appear to improve more fundamental aspects of cognitive processing.[1]
What you can improve is your test scores. Which is just as good for getting hired. They won't know the difference.
How about: Education makes you better at intelligence tests. I took the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) before going to Stanford. I got 99%, even though the test covered Engineering areas I had never studied. I did that by noticing, in the areas I did know, that the questions were all about fundamental principles. I could guess at the answers then for fluid mechanics, deformable bodies etc, and apparently got them all right. Am I intelligent? Sure, but not THAT intelligent.
Here's the thing, I believe I have all those qualities. What I lack is the courage to apply. I am a Google fanboy, to be honest, and working there is a dream for me. I also know that i am not the only one.
Many people panic on their first interview and fail, and if you show any potential they'll let you interview again. I bombed my first one and they told me that I'd be eligible to interview again in 18 months and I should call them then, and they actually called me in 12 months and set up another interview.
Don't worry about the courage, just apply. If you fail... well, many many people (and many many Googlers) also failed their first Google interview, it's not much of a reflection on you.
Does google pay significantly more than, say, any old rails job? Perks don't really impress me. 20% time sounds interesting, but I hear it's gone. Why would I want to deal with the interview process?
20% is certainly not gone. However, you will have to claim it on your own.
If you want to know the best thing about working for Google (I work for Google), it's the peer group. Sure, the interview process misses a lot of great candidate, but it's really hard for a poor candidate to get through the doors. There's no one I work with who I think is dumb, or who I think couldn't handle anything I needed them to handle.
absolutely agree with skj. The pay is decent+, the perks are very good, but the most impressive thing has been how intelligent and competent everyone is. Going from my previous job to Google was about the same experience as going from my decent high school where I was nearly valedictorian to a top-tier university where I couldn't even keep up with honors physics - that moment of "oh, wow, I thought I was amazing but there are a ton of people here who take that level of ability for granted."
I think eventually you stop feeling impostor syndrome but it hasn't happened yet for me :)
It's unfortunate that the skills they claim to value are ones that can't be measured, especially in the limited time of an interview: "leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn." While these are great qualities, I wonder what they actually base their decisions on in lieu of the above information.
This has always baffled me. Is coding the only technical skill?
It's especially bewildering when a company seeks a software engineer with expertise in a highly technical domain and populates the interview primarily with programming questions. If they can find the subject matter expert who also happens to be a master software craftsman, congrats to them, but I'm guessing that person doesn't come along very often.
(Maybe I'm bitter, but with the level of skill in computer vision I can demonstrate, don't you think you can teach me your programming nits in short order?)
The alternative (deluding yourself into thinking you can somehow quantify how well someone will work in a company through some metrics) seems a lot more dangerous in the long term.
You can tell some of these things from an interview. For example, when I interview, I never pretend to agree with something the interviewer says. If the interviewer doesn't agree that my algorithm is O(N), I will keep arguing that it is, unless we decide to move on. I can be quite convincing, so I have even convinced interviewers of things that are wrong during interviews.
This approach demonstrates an ability to collaborate. If a person can't debate a straightforward problem without either backing down immediately, or getting angry or defensive, how will they be able to deal with protracted disputes about the design of complex projects?
The problem with this approach is most interviewers are not willing to be convinced that they are wrong. I've had a high-level engineer from Apple argue fervently in an interview that the Boyer-Moore string search algorithm 'can't possibly work' and a high-level engineer from Google argue fervently that linked lists are superior to arrays (despite me clearly explaining the problems with pointer-chasing and locality).
Some interviewers just come in with their own preconceptions and outdated/incomplete information, and I very rarely encounter interviewers that actually appreciate learning something new from a candidate. They do exist, but in practice you're better off just shutting up and waiting for them to move on. Pretending to agree doesn't help anyone, of course.
How is this even a useful comparison? Wouldn't it entirely depend on context? They are two different data structures and are both useful. Arguing that one is superior seems nonsensical.
I had same experience with Apple. An interviewer insisted that frequency can never be negative. (He was clueless about something called the Fourier transform where the integral for frequency runs from -infinity to +infinity.)
Perhaps, but in most cases the person simply cannot follow your reasoning. That might not be your fault. The interviewer might not be as smart as you, or might not have a very theoretical background. I've never heard of the Boyer-Moore string algorithm, so when presented with it for the first time I might not understand it.
Working in a big company is inherently "high stress". Dealing with an interviewer isn't scarier than dealing with someone way higher than you in the reporting chain.
Working in a big company is inherently "high stress"
The NFL is high stress, but there are home games and away games. And playing local rivals you know well, and distant teams you know less well. Much BigCo work is done "on the inside", amid familiar faces; or with cultural reference points you have in common {etc}. Interviewing with a new company can be a hit-or-miss affair because it requirese the establishment of common ground. That's in part why many people short-list resume's with applicants who went to the same or similar schools, or who have worked with common colleagues/products/platforms etc. It all becaus the over-head to process and place context around the applicant is much cheaper (efficient) in the sense of less mantally taxing for the Inverviewer (and if lucky, the interviewee). So in short, that's why new contexts themselves can be more stressful than what might otherwise appear to be "higher" stress from the outside.
Despite all the bashing of Google's hiring process, I think Google's hiring process is very good. My experience was completely positive.
Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.”
No, that's not what Google is able to determine. The blanket claim is too broad. Predict anything? I don't think GPAs are worthless, but that's another discussion for another time. Regardless of whether they're useful, the only thing Google has is its own performance ("perf") data which represents political factors more than anything else.
If you find a zero correlation in junk data, you know... absolutely nothing more than you did beforehand. That's the thing about junk data. You can't trust it, so you can't use it to infer anything.
One thing Google will never do is explain how they measure employee productivity. We hear lots about their discoveries about predictors, but for all we know this is coming from a google VP with no tech background that counts lines of code as a measure of productivity.
Google by itself is much worse than NSA. At least, NSA does not screw up the industry and does not try to destroy local economies. I'm surprised there's not a lot of public backslash against Google and their employees.
I too dislike these NSA jokes, and the accompanying conspiracy theories, mine included. Too bad the actions of the NSA and those of the Five Fingers have created this mistrust and uncertainty. So instead of calling them all out on behalf of the OP, and belittling them, you can recognize that at some level his point is valid and just leave it at that.
I interviewed with Google about 2 years ago. First technical phone interview, the guy sounds really grumpy and irritated, and starts off with "I see that you have a Master's in CS. Are you an expert?". I replied something to the effect of "well I think it'd be pretentious for me to call myself an expert, I like to let my work speak for itself.". He responded "well we only hire experts at google".
The interview went downhill from there; several times he told me my solution to his question was incorrect, and I stepped through the code with him and showed him that he was mistaken and my solution was valid. He was just super grumpy the whole time.
Who knows, maybe my name reminded me of his ex wife or something. Regardless, it was a terrible experience.
I don't think that I sucked that hard because 2 weeks later I interviewed with apple, made it all the way to the onsite, and their questions felt harder. Their process was much more pleasant and efficient overall.