by splap on 10/8/21, 5:59 PM with 96 comments
by dolni on 10/8/21, 6:39 PM
I remember feeling like I had done fairly well, sans one interview. The interview in question was around development experience in C. The interviewer, very early on, asked how to redirect stdout. I suggested using freopen, and he said that wasn't allowed.
Well why the hell not?
The answer he was actually looking for depended on the knowledge that open() returns the smallest possible file descriptor number -- so close stdout, and simply call open() again.
I didn't happen to know that particular detail at the time. It derailed the entire interview. He was fixated on this one very specific piece of knowledge. And the worst part is not only does his approach make your code less clear, there are also contexts under which it wouldn't work.
I don't know if that particular interview was the reason for my not being offered a job.
I did end up hearing later on about hiring from a couple of Google engineers at a tech conference. They said that it is quite common that Google makes you interview two or three times.
I suspect the reason is to make you feel a sense of gratitude for being hired. And so you don't quit.
by paxys on 10/8/21, 6:59 PM
This keeps coming up but is worth repeating – the goal of any large company's recruiting process isn't necessarily to hire the best possible candidates 100% of the time. There are always trade-offs. Every interview takes time away from employees. There is no way to predict 5+ years of performance from a 1 hour interview slot. Education, credentials, experience are all valid data points but again not a great predictor of success. Hiring is ultimately an exercise in balancing many different priorities and hoping for the best result. Some able candidates miss out, which sucks, but that's factored in. It's also much more important to keep a bad candidate out than ensure every possible good candidate is hired.
Every single one of these articles/tweets/anecdotes boils down to "Google didn't hire me and I'm very smart so their system is totally broken".
by lordnacho on 10/8/21, 7:05 PM
Beyond that, there's no point. You won't discover whether the guy who passes is the kind who writes undocumented spaghetti, or if he doesn't know how git works, or if he doesn't know how to assess an OSS library.
What seems to always work for me, having hired dozens of people over the years, is a technical chat. Tell me what's interesting. What's the difference between this language and that one? Why did you make the choices that you did? You talk, not me.
Someone who can say substantive things about different techs has spent the time. Someone who has formed opinions has spent the time. Someone who's spent the time won't run out of opinions.
I will concede that while this has worked for me, a hiring manager in small financial teams, there's a fair chance it won't work for Google. For one, nothing I've just recommended can be measured. It also can't be taught to junior interviewers, and thus relies a fair bit on the reputations of the firms on the CV for filtering. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there's a big difference between the decision maker doing the interview and someone who is just an advisor (ie an agent) for them, in that the agent needs to have something concrete to say to his boss as well.
by johnwheeler on 10/8/21, 6:43 PM
I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.
by belval on 10/8/21, 6:53 PM
- Google Foobar to get someone to notice my resume
- First form that asked for general information
- Second form that asked weird behaviour questions like "Do you think people can change"
- First interview with regular leetcode questions
- Second interview was waved because of foobar
- Third form to write your interests/motivation for matchup with a team (No guarantee of having an internship at that point)
- Dropped the whole process because I got an offer somewhere else
The whole process spanned maybe 3 months.
The year after that I re-did the whole process and was ghosted by the recruiter after the first interview, I assume that was because I did not rank high enough and they were waiting to see if I'd make the cut or not.
This process (and the big version for FTE) works to weed-out candidates that aren't motivated to work at Google and I just don't see how else they could be doing it. People have to understand that recruitment at FANG is painful because you will get thousands of SDE applications and you can't really take the time to treat everyone "right".
It does suck.
by tablespoon on 10/8/21, 6:41 PM
> "It just never seemed to get through. They were so focused on whatever categorization they had chosen and it was fixed," he said. "I think something in their processes meant they weren't really looking for a fit between a person and a job. It felt to me that they probably had a recruiter who was looking for a certain role. Once they put you in the pipeline, that's the role you're in."
Didn't Google at some point decide a guy who developed a VM or interpreter or something that they were using in-house was only good enough to be a sysadmin for them?
by cosmotic on 10/8/21, 6:58 PM
The kind of folks that can plow through hacker rank etc want to show everyone how good they are, even candidates. Google's process may result in selecting good SWEs, but it also selects for bad interviewers.
by kevingadd on 10/8/21, 6:53 PM
Each time until my last interview cycle, they seemingly assigned me interviewers at random and they were usually a terrible fit. I'm a games/systems programmer, so think C, C++, C#, etc. Console games (PS4), PC games, etc. Never shipped a mobile app, don't have much Linux expertise, don't list them on my resume. Haven't written Java since the J2ME era.
So naturally, I kept getting assigned to interview with people who worked on the Android Play Music app, or people who wrote Linux cloud storage infrastructure (think talking to storage hardware directly, etc) in Python and C. Inevitably, it was impossible for us to have an in-depth technical conversation without a lot of overhead because the disconnect was too big. Sometimes they'd ask me to whiteboard and there was no appropriate language for me to use that we both understood. At the end of each day I came away having had interesting conversations with people but it was consistently a failure of an interview process, so it wasn't a surprise that they never made me an offer. You could tell that this messed up interview process was also an issue for interviewers - I had a couple different interviewers get really combative or frustrated because of the disconnect, in one case borderline abusive.
Then finally a team that really wanted me (the NaCL/WebAssembly team) looked at my interview history and just stacked the deck so that everyone interviewing me was actually qualified to interview me. It was a breeze. Sure, it was challenging like any good interview, but not a complete waste of anyone's time.
While I can't speak to this personally, I also have heard from current/former Googlers that in the past it was extremely hard to hire Linux experts (kernel devs, etc) because they kept giving those people the same garbage screen (let's talk about Java!) and then rejecting them in the same way. Apparently the fix was a special interviewing process for people like that, presumably that's the treatment I got eventually.
by obzidi4n on 10/8/21, 11:25 PM
Cool, man. Now I work for a major global agency pulling about the same compensation, and we won't recommend Amazon Ads for our clients b/c the product is well-known to be shit.
Works out.
by vichu on 10/8/21, 6:36 PM
by Traubenfuchs on 10/8/21, 6:35 PM
Light grey text on white background with the menu constantly open and half transparent.
by armchairhacker on 10/8/21, 6:53 PM
Google gets tons of applicants. The point isn't to prevent qualified applicants from being rejected, it's to prevent unqualified applicants from being hired.
They can do whatever arbitrary, unfair filters they want as long as they still have at least some applicants left, and as long as those people are adequate.
