My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral, and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reason for terminating contact, just plain dead silence. I tried emailing her a few times and left her a voicemail, noting very politely that they had contacted me and not vice versa, and asking if they were still interested in setting up an interview, but all I got was stony silence. If that's not broken, I don't know what is. For a company that hires the best engineering talent, they either hire substandard HR people, or perhaps most HR people just operate at a different level of efficacy.
I had a deadline to give a yes/no to another company, and my recruiter at Google asked me to get my deadline extended so that Google would have time to interview me.
I asked the other company for an extension, which I got, and told my Google recruiter the new deadline.
Then Google never responded and I never did an interview with them.
I don't think that's unique to Google. I've gotten the silent treatment multiple times at other large companies, after being accosted by a recruiter. At Intel, it even happened after I received a job offer.
I was on a project that was in crunch mode, so I asked if I could start in three or four months (instead of three or four weeks, like they wanted). Apparently, that was such an egregious breach of etiquette on my part that the hiring manager (an engineer) stopped responding to phone calls or email. And it wasn't as if my start date came out of nowhere -- I mentioned the issue during my phone interview, during my onsite interview, and on the form they sent me where they wanted me to list my availability.
Same thing happened to me. I contribute to many projects, I even spent my time for some Google projects. A lot of time actually. I had an offer with another great company, and they told me to let them extend it for another week. I did the interview process at Google, and did two phone interviews and one onsite. I thought I did pretty well, but I was waiting for their reply back for a week, and no reply. Then I pinged them, they apologized and said they are waiting for references. I pinged them again for another week, no reply yet. Then I accepted the other job because Google's Hiring process sucks so much, that it tells you right there that they don't care about their employees. I spent time out of my own work life to do interviews, and they can't bother to email us in the recommended timeframe. They said within 4 days, but 14 days ... Working for a company like that would seem disastrous.
All of these recruitment horror stories are starting to scare me about Google, but I wonder how much of it is selection bias. Anyone who has a good experience almost definitionally gets sucked into the G-Vortex and basically never gets heard from again, right?
I have a friend who just accepted a position at Google, and she said the process was long and arduous, but it wasn't a horror story.
despite the very high tech and unique looking appearance of their hiring process, it's actually very typical. It's different rather by its scalability and the extend to which it is industrialised than by its cleverness to find people's creativity and potential. It's a very well oiled machine to weed out people with a bad grasp of the fundamentals en mass rather than a tuned process to find a few shock trooper geniuses it needs.
I had the same experience. It's unlikely I'll take one of their HR people seriously ever again. A Google engineer or PM would have to speak with me directly for me to bother.
A similar thing happened to me. A Google HR staffer sent me an unsolicited offer for a job at YouTube. I accepted, and...
A week later I sent an email asking "how long is the usual turn-around time on this?" Google's HR person said she would let me know by the end of the day, and that was that last I ever heard from her. All further communications were black-holed. I suppose I was unusually lucky to get that last message.
You know who complains about Google's hiring process... people that don't get hired by Google. I've never heard anybody who WAS hired by Google complain about anything.
Maybe you all just weren't good enough. That's OK, not everybody is the creme-a-la-creme. Look at Google's market cap and Android and Chrome's growth (not to mention their dominance in search and advertising)... Google doesn't need you, and that's why they didn't hire you.
You can cry a river about how Google is "failing" because they didn't hire you... but I think their shareholders (who Google makes very rich) would laugh right in your face and be glad that they didn't hire a whiner like you.
I haven't had an interview in over 6 years, but I have been approached by multiple recruiters in the same time span.
I actually dread the day I choose to switch jobs and have to face another technical interview - considering that my knowledge of college-level CS has declined over time. It's not because I am less skilled now than I was before, it's because you don't have to constantly create fantastically fast algorithms on a daily basis (at least in my job!).
The skills that I have developed over the past 6 years - designing complex components that interact with other complex components in a hugely complex product, making improvements in the design of a 20 year old codebase, deciding between fixing a bug and compatibility etc., intuition about design choices and how they fit in the product, and yes, debugging (!) - none of these are covered in technical interviews these days.
Sure, I could explain how a b-tree works - but that's not going to help me resolve my next bug.
Same here. I would have to study up for the interview and that seems pretty silly considering I spend every day writing code and have for years. There's a lot of irony in that too considering that when I need a b-tree, I Google it.
It would be funny to bring an Android phone to a Google interview and then proceed to Google answers for questions they ask like this to point out how outdated the question is.
If it's anything like interviews at my company, we just aren't really trained on how to interview, so these questions come up because the interviewer may not know what to ask aside from things like this, and their last interview experience may have been when looking for a job straight out of college when this was all they really knew about, so this is what interviewers asked them about. In a way those questions may just be "what you're supposed to ask someone in a CS related interview".
You could always get a "back door" hire -- build a product that Google acquires and simply become part of the staff that way. Oddly, that kind of hiring selects for people who see the entire product and can build something that works and is successful vs. somebody who keeps flash cards with complexity stats for oddball algorithms in their back pocket.
I went back into tech interviews recently after a 4 year break. It only took two weekends of skimming my old books to get enough up to speed to pass some whiteboard tech interviews, although I don't think I was quite ready for Google level challenges, I'd have probably wanted another week of brushing up for that. If you don't have a few weekends, the quick course is give yourself a graph problem and code it in 30 minutes, critique yourself for 30 minutes, repeat 4 times, go interview. You won't find anything harder on a whiteboard than a graph search, and the practice will be good for you on easier problems.
I disagree with article's conclusion that they are selecting for "backend" engineers. They are selecting for people that think over-engineering every little data structure is the way to build good programs. The skill software companies need is the ability to get a hundred subsystems tested and working together, which is totally different.
I know someone who recently interviewed with Google and he told me about the algorithms question he "got wrong." After he came up with a simple solution to a simple problem, the interviewer told him the better, googley-er algorithm, which was: a) far more complex and difficult to implement, b) had far more corner cases that would need unit tests, c) had more overhead in the expected case, but d) technically had a better big-O in the (extreme) worst case.
In other words, the interview was screening for people who have been to school but haven't ever built anything.
That was the impression I walked away with too: much CS ivory tower thinking, little real-world relevance. But they're only interviews, everyday life at Google is probably (hopefully!) different.
As a counterpoint to the HR horror stories: my recruiter was a friendly woman who always responded quickly and politely. No complaints here.
Google is considered (or at least was, by other tech companies) to have a very poor sourcing and general recruiting experience. It was assumed to be because they contract out the work.
As a contrast to that, at MSFT, we had full-time recruiting staff generally split into college and experienced recruiting (there are some extra bits not important to this). The experienced recruiting staff was assigned to divisions and worked for usually a couple of years at a time sourcing candidates specially suited to their area. The college recruiters carefully handle and ensure that only one person is in charge of each candidate, they're marshalled through all the steps, know when they'll hear what piece of info back, and are absolutely brutal with us hiring managers about making timely decisions (not that we ever drag our feet <grin>).
While working at MSFT, I was contacted several times by different Google recruiters. Each time, I was left sort of half-indifferent e-mails or voicemails, which I was informed was the desired style of contact. I'd fire them off to my sourcing manager to forward around the recruiting org for a good laugh and jokes about where these people had been before (it's a small industry, and they often would point out ex-Cisco recruiting washouts, etc.).
That said, you can certainly go far on name alone for your recruiting, especially when your options are expected to pay out well. But it's unfortunate to have to try to build teams despite your recruiting efforts. I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.
Every few weeks or so I'm contacted by the same Google recruiter asking if I'm interested in an engineering opportunity.
After a while, I responded by asking who had referred me. He answered: "Referrals are confidential, but this person knows you from your days at <proceeds to list out my LinkedIn>."
I had a similar experience. Same letter from the recruiter, back-and-forth with rate-your-skills, but then nothing. It's strange because the position they had in mind seemed directly aligned with my proven interests and abilities. Hell, my cover letter was pretty much describing the job they wanted before they even told me about it.
I really see it as strange that I never got a call back. (Maybe it's not over yet, it's only been a few weeks.)
You applied at google? I remember a few months ago you asking why anyone would want a lower paying job at google when they could work in finance. Have the rates changed that much?
Google reached out to me, unsolicited, for a web developer position. I wasn't looking, but I thought cool, I'll at least talk to them. The recruiter kept asking me about how good my Java was. I repeated what it said on my resume, that I only used it in college, but that my OO skills were strong and transferable. Afterwards the recruiter emailed me, and said I wasn't a good fit because I didn't have enough Java experience. I didn't even get a technical phone screen.
I don't know anything about their recruiters, but in my own experience with other companies, the recruiters know eff-all about what is really required for the job.
I actually ended up turning down a google offer for this precise reason -- the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person.
Having been through a real interview (where the interviewer went through my resume before the interview and prepared real thoughtful questions that would only be known if you actually worked on the language), I took that offer and now interview others more intelligently.
> the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person.
Reminds me of a phone-interview I had with Adobe for a Python job. The guy at the other end of the line asks me to sort of implement an algorithm, on the phone, I ended up solving his problem using a dictionary, getting its keys and then sorting it. That of course wasn't what the guy wanted, but it solved the problem.
My Google offer experience: I turned down a offer from Google last spring. Long story, but my reasons can be summed up as having a more challenging opportunity in a leadership position at a small company versus having to enter the "engineer" lotto where you don't know what team and project you get placed on.
Funny thing is, I had a call from one of their recruiters today. A couple times previously somebody contacted me by email and I said "sure, call me", and didn't hear from them. But this guy was out of the blue and from a different office and had a different approach to it.
The message was that things are different at Google and they at least from his office's perspective, they treat each recruitment uniquely.
My take away is that Google is a big company and you'll get different experiences depending on how you enter the HR process (college grad applicant, versus sought after name). The OP in this case is doing a lot of generalization.
Asked me to rate my skills in a list of 14 programming languages.
Really? I'd love to know what they did with that data. It seems almost completely useless except to say "Tim does not know any Javascript, indicated by his zero score on that."
It doesn't take a designer or user experience expert to note that google products lack consistency and don't interopt with each other very well. I think this stems from larger issues that are much harder to fix, or through 20% projects and acquisitions that were developed independently of a common set of standards. I doubt they are ignoring it.
Perhaps the lack of a "Google standard" enables eager developers to create amazing new products, like Gmail.
I don't think that having a hiring system that's not fucked up and actually researches the guy would set a "Google standard".
You can also keep launching amazing products with a recruiting process that makes sense, and doesn't analyze the guy with semi-random stupid questions.
This "Google can't do design" meme is really getting old, imho. At best, this is a story about one recruiter in a giant company not doing his job well in matching the requirements with the skill set of the candidate.
It's not that, it's that Google's candidate referral or search is really poorly targeted when they contact a candidate. They've talked me twice, about the same job that's really not a good fit for me. They talked to him, and totally missed the designer thing and went straight into CS101.
Sometimes I feel like the only person who was not hired by Google that didn't become bitter. I was treated with respect, was put up in a nice hotel, met very smart people, answered (and didn't ;) very tough questions. In the end it didn't work out. I had a blast nonetheless.
Google manages not to hire someone who didn't want to work there in the first place. Sounds like the process is working just fine to me.
In all seriousness, there may be some issues with their hiring process, but I think the Google hiring practices would best be analyzed by using the aggregated data, rather than the trickle of anecdotes we tend to hear about in public. Even if Google got their hiring right 99.9 percent of the time, there would be hundreds of people, if not thousands, who were perfect for the job, and still didn't get hired.
I recently talked to a colleague who was hired as a developer by Google.
He went through 3 rounds of "hiring committees".
3 different committees to make a developer hire is obviously broken. The ability to evaluate culture and skill fit should be possible with a hiring manager and a few prospective peers.
While there are 3 levels of approval, it's not exactly as crazy as it sounds at first glance.
After your phone interview with an engineer, you go in for your on site interview and talk to at least 4 people, both managers and engineers. They each write up their impressions of you without discussion between them. They pass their impressions on to a hiring board that reviews those, your resume, and what positions are open.
That board passes the recommendation onto a final board who I suspect is largely a financial gatekeeper, just to approve stock grants and controls company-wide hiring rates and company wide strategy.
Disclaimer, I worked at Google for 4 years ('06 - '10) and interviewed a lot of folks (it was always a part of the job) and did a number of phone interviews too.
The process then (as perhaps now) was broken and some folks within Google understood that. The process and goals were pretty simple, hire smart people that get things done.
The process was aimed at finding smart people who get things done. That, like the phrase "largest integer" is easy to say and rolls off the lips but when you need to actually write out what it means gets a bit squirrely.
The first challenge is what does "get things done" mean? Well for college students it means you got your diploma and at the same time you contributed to some FOSS project. For people with 0 - 5 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 5 - 15 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 15 to 25 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding.
Did you see what I did there? Google wanted smart people but the definition of smart was "you write a lot of code" and "get things done" was "that code shipped in the product/project." Fundamentally they didn't have any way to judge or evaluate the 'goodness' of what someone did if it wasn't writing code. Designers don't write a lot of code and they don't generally have a good metric for what constitutes good which can be empirically tested. The process has a hard time accomodating that. And if you're "good" at spotting problems in a process or getting folks organized around some better way of doing things? That's not measurable either.
There was a company, BASF, a chemical company which had an advertising campaign around the fact that they were part of the process and materials that made quality products, their tag line was "We don't make the products you buy, we make them better." [1] And I noted that Google was exceptionally bad at hiring "BASF" people, which is to say people who bring the quality of other work up, or products up, or processes up.
The people who did those roles in Google all started out as coders and that is how they got hired. It was only after they were working there that they (and Google) discovered they had this leveraging effect.
In order to keep bias out of the process, Google isolates the steps where bias can creep in; separated the folks who decided hire / no-hire from the folks who decided on compensation; the folks who decide to hire and the folks who decide which project they work for. For all my time there, you could not interview for a specific job, you interviewed to get 'in' and then your name showed up on a list and the allocation process would determine which project got you.
Often a candidate would ask during the interview "What would I be working on?" the only truthful answer was "That is impossible to say."
Before you even get to that point though you get into "the system." Since Google keeps a record of everyone they have interviewed or has shown up as a lead and not interviewed. There is a long, long list of people (I once joked that it was everyone in the market). If you are an employee and you might know that person, common employer, common university, etc. The system could automatically send you an email asking for your opinion on the candidate.
This isn't really any different than any other company, person X shows up in the candidate list, people who work at the company who worked at person X's company are asked if they knew this person when they were there. But it can have unintended consequences.
Lets say there is a person X, who gets hired, from company Y, and person X really didn't fit in at Y and felt really abused by the company. Now new candidates from Y generate an email to X with the standard "You worked at Y when candidate Z did etc etc." Now person X is still pissed off about how Y treated them and so they respond to all of those emails with "Yeah, candidate Z was a crappy engineer, everyone had to carry for them they never did anything useful." Maybe someone else from Y says "candidate Z was great, everyone turned to them for advice." The process of separating the interviewers from the decisions means that this feedback bubbles up all equally weighted. Hard to know that employee X has said the same thing about every candidate that has come from Y, and if the committee sees two comments one positive and one negative and there isn't anyone on the committee who knows any different then how do you evaluate?
The simplest solution if either has an equal probability of being the 'correct' assesment is that you pass on them because you can't know if you have bad data. And that was a part of the process that was fundamentally broken.
Because Google gets a metric crap load of resumes and candidates all the time, passing on someone who is +1/-1 like that makes sense because you can't know which of the two feedback comments more accurately reflects the real candidate behavior. The result is that hiring someone with a grudge can poision the feedback pool for a bunch of possible hires. If you weren't Google and didn't have this huge backlog of candidates, you might dig deeper to find out which one was the more accurate representation, but if you are Google you just move on. Externally that sometimes appears that you just stop answering the phone.
It also means that you miss out on quality people who would be good for the company and ultimately Google will have to find a way to address that issue (if they haven't already) because they are running out of people to interview.
As with most things Google, you combine a data-driven, automata friendly process with fuzzy data and alternate agenda actors, at the scale Google runs at, and you get lots of weird artifacts.
It does seem like Google is more focused on the programing side of things and design is an afterthought for them. Which is a pity because I feel overall look and design dramatically changes my perceptions of how good something is.
Another beef I have with Google is the sorta half-assedness of some of their products. They seem to release things early to get them out there, which isn't necessary a bad thing but now I've started to realize this it's soured me to using some of their api's and products
I've also had a bad recruiting experience with Google, but for very different reasons. Personally, from what I can see (i.e. outside looking in), I think they have major systemic problems in how they do recruiting.
(Posting anonymously because I'm in the middle of interviewing with Google)
My experience so far has been very different. I was contacted by a recruiter a few weeks ago. I had a phone interview within a week of the initial contact. Within three days, they got back to me to schedule an onsite interview.
The one negative I've encountered so far: Google has an office near where I live, but will not interview me there. This will require significant travel on my part.
I couldn't agree more with this one. I have trouble talking to people about this because I failed their interview so I come across as bitter (which I am). But this problem is not just Google's problem. It's systemic. Someone a long time ago decided to turn interviewing into a formula - a bad one - and it stuck. Drives me crazy.
[+] [-] yid|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javert|15 years ago|reply
I asked the other company for an extension, which I got, and told my Google recruiter the new deadline.
Then Google never responded and I never did an interview with them.
I felt really put-off by that.
[+] [-] luu|15 years ago|reply
I was on a project that was in crunch mode, so I asked if I could start in three or four months (instead of three or four weeks, like they wanted). Apparently, that was such an egregious breach of etiquette on my part that the hiring manager (an engineer) stopped responding to phone calls or email. And it wasn't as if my start date came out of nowhere -- I mentioned the issue during my phone interview, during my onsite interview, and on the form they sent me where they wanted me to list my availability.
[+] [-] noctorne|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joebadmo|15 years ago|reply
I have a friend who just accepted a position at Google, and she said the process was long and arduous, but it wasn't a horror story.
[+] [-] totalforge|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xster|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alnayyir|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tangaroa|15 years ago|reply
A week later I sent an email asking "how long is the usual turn-around time on this?" Google's HR person said she would let me know by the end of the day, and that was that last I ever heard from her. All further communications were black-holed. I suppose I was unusually lucky to get that last message.
[+] [-] ballgoogler|15 years ago|reply
Maybe you all just weren't good enough. That's OK, not everybody is the creme-a-la-creme. Look at Google's market cap and Android and Chrome's growth (not to mention their dominance in search and advertising)... Google doesn't need you, and that's why they didn't hire you.
You can cry a river about how Google is "failing" because they didn't hire you... but I think their shareholders (who Google makes very rich) would laugh right in your face and be glad that they didn't hire a whiner like you.
[+] [-] alienfluid|15 years ago|reply
I actually dread the day I choose to switch jobs and have to face another technical interview - considering that my knowledge of college-level CS has declined over time. It's not because I am less skilled now than I was before, it's because you don't have to constantly create fantastically fast algorithms on a daily basis (at least in my job!).
The skills that I have developed over the past 6 years - designing complex components that interact with other complex components in a hugely complex product, making improvements in the design of a 20 year old codebase, deciding between fixing a bug and compatibility etc., intuition about design choices and how they fit in the product, and yes, debugging (!) - none of these are covered in technical interviews these days.
Sure, I could explain how a b-tree works - but that's not going to help me resolve my next bug.
[+] [-] dangero|15 years ago|reply
It would be funny to bring an Android phone to a Google interview and then proceed to Google answers for questions they ask like this to point out how outdated the question is.
If it's anything like interviews at my company, we just aren't really trained on how to interview, so these questions come up because the interviewer may not know what to ask aside from things like this, and their last interview experience may have been when looking for a job straight out of college when this was all they really knew about, so this is what interviewers asked them about. In a way those questions may just be "what you're supposed to ask someone in a CS related interview".
[+] [-] yid|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkteison|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgroves|15 years ago|reply
I know someone who recently interviewed with Google and he told me about the algorithms question he "got wrong." After he came up with a simple solution to a simple problem, the interviewer told him the better, googley-er algorithm, which was: a) far more complex and difficult to implement, b) had far more corner cases that would need unit tests, c) had more overhead in the expected case, but d) technically had a better big-O in the (extreme) worst case.
In other words, the interview was screening for people who have been to school but haven't ever built anything.
[+] [-] bnoordhuis|15 years ago|reply
As a counterpoint to the HR horror stories: my recruiter was a friendly woman who always responded quickly and politely. No complaints here.
[+] [-] larsberg|15 years ago|reply
As a contrast to that, at MSFT, we had full-time recruiting staff generally split into college and experienced recruiting (there are some extra bits not important to this). The experienced recruiting staff was assigned to divisions and worked for usually a couple of years at a time sourcing candidates specially suited to their area. The college recruiters carefully handle and ensure that only one person is in charge of each candidate, they're marshalled through all the steps, know when they'll hear what piece of info back, and are absolutely brutal with us hiring managers about making timely decisions (not that we ever drag our feet <grin>).
While working at MSFT, I was contacted several times by different Google recruiters. Each time, I was left sort of half-indifferent e-mails or voicemails, which I was informed was the desired style of contact. I'd fire them off to my sourcing manager to forward around the recruiting org for a good laugh and jokes about where these people had been before (it's a small industry, and they often would point out ex-Cisco recruiting washouts, etc.).
That said, you can certainly go far on name alone for your recruiting, especially when your options are expected to pay out well. But it's unfortunate to have to try to build teams despite your recruiting efforts. I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.
[+] [-] cletus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielha|15 years ago|reply
After a while, I responded by asking who had referred me. He answered: "Referrals are confidential, but this person knows you from your days at <proceeds to list out my LinkedIn>."
Awful. Plus I'm a shitty programmer.
[+] [-] acgourley|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|15 years ago|reply
I really see it as strange that I never got a call back. (Maybe it's not over yet, it's only been a few weeks.)
[+] [-] danssig|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jquery|15 years ago|reply
Google reached out to me, unsolicited, for a web developer position. I wasn't looking, but I thought cool, I'll at least talk to them. The recruiter kept asking me about how good my Java was. I repeated what it said on my resume, that I only used it in college, but that my OO skills were strong and transferable. Afterwards the recruiter emailed me, and said I wasn't a good fit because I didn't have enough Java experience. I didn't even get a technical phone screen.
Java experience is serious business.
[+] [-] noarchy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veyron|15 years ago|reply
Having been through a real interview (where the interviewer went through my resume before the interview and prepared real thoughtful questions that would only be known if you actually worked on the language), I took that offer and now interview others more intelligently.
[+] [-] paganel|15 years ago|reply
Reminds me of a phone-interview I had with Adobe for a Python job. The guy at the other end of the line asks me to sort of implement an algorithm, on the phone, I ended up solving his problem using a dictionary, getting its keys and then sorting it. That of course wasn't what the guy wanted, but it solved the problem.
[+] [-] gabeiscoding|15 years ago|reply
Funny thing is, I had a call from one of their recruiters today. A couple times previously somebody contacted me by email and I said "sure, call me", and didn't hear from them. But this guy was out of the blue and from a different office and had a different approach to it.
The message was that things are different at Google and they at least from his office's perspective, they treat each recruitment uniquely.
My take away is that Google is a big company and you'll get different experiences depending on how you enter the HR process (college grad applicant, versus sought after name). The OP in this case is doing a lot of generalization.
[+] [-] kenjackson|15 years ago|reply
Really? I'd love to know what they did with that data. It seems almost completely useless except to say "Tim does not know any Javascript, indicated by his zero score on that."
[+] [-] yesimahuman|15 years ago|reply
Perhaps the lack of a "Google standard" enables eager developers to create amazing new products, like Gmail.
[+] [-] enriclluelles|15 years ago|reply
You can also keep launching amazing products with a recruiting process that makes sense, and doesn't analyze the guy with semi-random stupid questions.
[+] [-] currywurst|15 years ago|reply
It is easy to conclude preconceived notions.
[+] [-] wiredfool|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fogus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziadbc|15 years ago|reply
In all seriousness, there may be some issues with their hiring process, but I think the Google hiring practices would best be analyzed by using the aggregated data, rather than the trickle of anecdotes we tend to hear about in public. Even if Google got their hiring right 99.9 percent of the time, there would be hundreds of people, if not thousands, who were perfect for the job, and still didn't get hired.
[+] [-] rkischuk|15 years ago|reply
He went through 3 rounds of "hiring committees".
3 different committees to make a developer hire is obviously broken. The ability to evaluate culture and skill fit should be possible with a hiring manager and a few prospective peers.
[+] [-] esrauch|15 years ago|reply
After your phone interview with an engineer, you go in for your on site interview and talk to at least 4 people, both managers and engineers. They each write up their impressions of you without discussion between them. They pass their impressions on to a hiring board that reviews those, your resume, and what positions are open.
That board passes the recommendation onto a final board who I suspect is largely a financial gatekeeper, just to approve stock grants and controls company-wide hiring rates and company wide strategy.
[+] [-] stewiecat|15 years ago|reply
Local hiring committee, regional hiring committee, HQ hiring committee then final sign-off by Larry himself.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|15 years ago|reply
Disclaimer, I worked at Google for 4 years ('06 - '10) and interviewed a lot of folks (it was always a part of the job) and did a number of phone interviews too.
The process then (as perhaps now) was broken and some folks within Google understood that. The process and goals were pretty simple, hire smart people that get things done.
The process was aimed at finding smart people who get things done. That, like the phrase "largest integer" is easy to say and rolls off the lips but when you need to actually write out what it means gets a bit squirrely.
The first challenge is what does "get things done" mean? Well for college students it means you got your diploma and at the same time you contributed to some FOSS project. For people with 0 - 5 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 5 - 15 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 15 to 25 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding.
Did you see what I did there? Google wanted smart people but the definition of smart was "you write a lot of code" and "get things done" was "that code shipped in the product/project." Fundamentally they didn't have any way to judge or evaluate the 'goodness' of what someone did if it wasn't writing code. Designers don't write a lot of code and they don't generally have a good metric for what constitutes good which can be empirically tested. The process has a hard time accomodating that. And if you're "good" at spotting problems in a process or getting folks organized around some better way of doing things? That's not measurable either.
There was a company, BASF, a chemical company which had an advertising campaign around the fact that they were part of the process and materials that made quality products, their tag line was "We don't make the products you buy, we make them better." [1] And I noted that Google was exceptionally bad at hiring "BASF" people, which is to say people who bring the quality of other work up, or products up, or processes up.
The people who did those roles in Google all started out as coders and that is how they got hired. It was only after they were working there that they (and Google) discovered they had this leveraging effect.
In order to keep bias out of the process, Google isolates the steps where bias can creep in; separated the folks who decided hire / no-hire from the folks who decided on compensation; the folks who decide to hire and the folks who decide which project they work for. For all my time there, you could not interview for a specific job, you interviewed to get 'in' and then your name showed up on a list and the allocation process would determine which project got you.
Often a candidate would ask during the interview "What would I be working on?" the only truthful answer was "That is impossible to say."
Before you even get to that point though you get into "the system." Since Google keeps a record of everyone they have interviewed or has shown up as a lead and not interviewed. There is a long, long list of people (I once joked that it was everyone in the market). If you are an employee and you might know that person, common employer, common university, etc. The system could automatically send you an email asking for your opinion on the candidate.
This isn't really any different than any other company, person X shows up in the candidate list, people who work at the company who worked at person X's company are asked if they knew this person when they were there. But it can have unintended consequences.
Lets say there is a person X, who gets hired, from company Y, and person X really didn't fit in at Y and felt really abused by the company. Now new candidates from Y generate an email to X with the standard "You worked at Y when candidate Z did etc etc." Now person X is still pissed off about how Y treated them and so they respond to all of those emails with "Yeah, candidate Z was a crappy engineer, everyone had to carry for them they never did anything useful." Maybe someone else from Y says "candidate Z was great, everyone turned to them for advice." The process of separating the interviewers from the decisions means that this feedback bubbles up all equally weighted. Hard to know that employee X has said the same thing about every candidate that has come from Y, and if the committee sees two comments one positive and one negative and there isn't anyone on the committee who knows any different then how do you evaluate?
The simplest solution if either has an equal probability of being the 'correct' assesment is that you pass on them because you can't know if you have bad data. And that was a part of the process that was fundamentally broken.
Because Google gets a metric crap load of resumes and candidates all the time, passing on someone who is +1/-1 like that makes sense because you can't know which of the two feedback comments more accurately reflects the real candidate behavior. The result is that hiring someone with a grudge can poision the feedback pool for a bunch of possible hires. If you weren't Google and didn't have this huge backlog of candidates, you might dig deeper to find out which one was the more accurate representation, but if you are Google you just move on. Externally that sometimes appears that you just stop answering the phone.
It also means that you miss out on quality people who would be good for the company and ultimately Google will have to find a way to address that issue (if they haven't already) because they are running out of people to interview.
As with most things Google, you combine a data-driven, automata friendly process with fuzzy data and alternate agenda actors, at the scale Google runs at, and you get lots of weird artifacts.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE
[+] [-] ruethewhirled|15 years ago|reply
Another beef I have with Google is the sorta half-assedness of some of their products. They seem to release things early to get them out there, which isn't necessary a bad thing but now I've started to realize this it's soured me to using some of their api's and products
[+] [-] javert|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] googInterviewee|15 years ago|reply
My experience so far has been very different. I was contacted by a recruiter a few weeks ago. I had a phone interview within a week of the initial contact. Within three days, they got back to me to schedule an onsite interview.
The one negative I've encountered so far: Google has an office near where I live, but will not interview me there. This will require significant travel on my part.
[+] [-] k_shehadeh|15 years ago|reply