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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
'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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[+] [-] GuiA|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jeremymcanally|12 years ago|reply
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.
Needless to say, I didn't progress.
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jmspring|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grey-area|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matwood|12 years ago|reply
Funny. One of the Google recruiters told me that expert at technology X meant you either wrote a book on or invented X.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simonsarris|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] MetricMike|12 years ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] scotth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbroockman|12 years ago|reply
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.
More reading: http://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-subtle-joys-of-s... and http://www.jamesmahoney.org/articles/Insights%20and%20Pitfal...
[+] [-] anonapplicant1|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Morgawr|12 years ago|reply
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.
Ps: sorry for the lengthy post, I needed to vent
[+] [-] amaks|12 years ago|reply
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
This of course applies only to engineers.
[+] [-] chavesn|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Chronic26|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|12 years ago|reply
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/the_value_of_tom_friedman/
http://nypress.com/flathead/
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/no-kiddi...
http://jilliancyork.com/2011/12/14/the-definitive-collection...
[+] [-] illuminate|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ender7|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mulligan|12 years ago|reply
Why is that not on the link?
[+] [-] ndr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ekm2|12 years ago|reply
I do not understand.
[+] [-] gwern|12 years ago|reply
(No surprise Friedman doesn't understand this; the NYT article on the Google findings did not explain this.)
[+] [-] Machow|12 years ago|reply
I'd imagine he's saying that they want to assess general cognitive ability in ways traditional tests do not.
[+] [-] RivieraKid|12 years ago|reply
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:
1) how pleasurable is it to learn new things
2) how pleasurable is it to think about problems
3) perfectionsim
[+] [-] yetanotherphd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatmoney|12 years ago|reply
The cognitive dissonance required to say "general cognitive ability... is not IQ" is astounding.
IQ testing bad! Hiring smart people good! Does not compute!
[+] [-] kazagistar|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] caitp|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rwallace|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChristianMarks|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gesman|12 years ago|reply
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
>>You like thinking “outside the box”, are not afraid of ambiguity, http://i.imgur.com/1dQII.jpg
>>get excited about difficult distributed systems challenges, http://i.imgur.com/Kh7bX.jpg
>>and are a motivated self-starter. http://i.imgur.com/B6vRRMs.jpg
>>You are a strong team player http://i.imgur.com/k9NTgH0.jpg
>> and thrive in a startup-like environment where flexibility is essential http://i.imgur.com/3p7rF.jpg
>> and delivering rock solid, customer focused solutions is paramount. http://i.imgur.com/kuDJTmx.gif
>> "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine" http://i.imgur.com/xxotrDe.jpg
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitcuration|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fecak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gschorno|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ansimionescu|12 years ago|reply
https://github.com/andreis/interview
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sbuccini|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] devanti|12 years ago|reply