Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People | Hacker News Reader

Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People

thecooperreview.com

200 pointsAJAlabs100 comments

I like telling my AWS interviewing story. They forgot to call the first time. Then they were "impressed" and invited me for an onsite. All seemed well, except they forgot about me coming that day or just people who were supposed to interview me were gone. Everyone asked pretty much the same "leadership principles" questions, which I refused to parrot back through my "life experiences" -- I guess it went against my own personal "principles".

Oh and they forgot about me during lunch. Not that I was hungry, but it just added to the "oh it can't be as bad as the blogs say, surely..." factor. So sat in the office looking around. After a while started wondering around the hallways, hoping someone would say "Are you allowed to be here? Can I help you?". So that was fun. And that's not all though, also said they'd call within 2 days to let me know the results, which of course ended up being 3 weeks.

It was worth it though -- it made for a great story!

You covered Situation, Task, Action, Resolution; you're hired!

So true. I had an Amazon interview where I wanted to hang up. There were moments where I would get questioned or berated for not using such great AWS tech like Opsworks and Cloudformation. Instead of being impressed with my completely valid approach they fixated on the fact I didn't use their stuff and it became a bit combative/snarky. So Amazon certainly isn't for me. Thanks for EC2 and two day shipping though.

I had a phone screen from Google I wanted to hang up on because I knew where it was going. They reached out to me for an SRE role in Australia. After a few unscheduled calls at poor times (at the DC doing work) we setup an "interview". It was just a screen where they ask you to rate your self on a bunch of random technologies; between never heard of it and wrote the book. Rated myself 4-6 on most haha. The " interviewer" seemed completely thrown off by this. Expected not to hear back and didn't.

I never understood the rate yourself bit. Is it designed to fuck with your head? "So you think you are good? We'll show you. How about this obscure trick question from C++17 spec -- see not as good as you thought"

Meh, I ask it on a couple technologies now and again but only for broad tech. It does two things for me. One is that for some of my positions, I need a candidate to be good at some but not all things my team does, like windows, linux or net ops. So it helps me focus my questions on what the candidate feels comfortable with. It's not a trick.

The other thing that you can often see with it is how much a person doesn't know that they don't know. I don't often get someone telling me that they are a 9/10 in linux but generally when they do, they can't set an ip from the CLI, or use top. I do want to see people who understand what they know and what they don't. I realize the question is pretty arbitrary so it's one data point in a set but it can be useful to understand how someone sees their own competency.

> I do want to see people who understand what they know and what they don't

Ok that's fair, I can see that point.

I usually just probe by asking details about the projects they've done etc.

Also found there is sometimes an inverse corellation between those who rate themselves high and their abilities and vice verse rate themselves low and their abilities (there is a name for this phenomenon, but I don't recall it). The idea is those who really know a lot, also know how much they don't know.

If someone asked me "how well you know the Linux kernel", I would say not at all. Because I had to read the source to some parts of it, had to tune it for realtime charactestics and have seen the depth of the rabbit hole so to speak, and realized I don't know anything compared to how much there is to know about it.

Yes so the ranking is arbitrary but I know that you've made it to the top of the rabbit hole and looked down it once. Some people are at the edge of the forest and don't even know there is a rabbit hole. That's what the question is for.

> I usually just probe by asking details about the projects they've done etc.

I do this too, but that tells you if the person has a matching view of their abilities with their actual skills.

When you ask them to configure something, do you let them sit in front of a laptop with man pages, google and stack exchange? Or do you expect them to memorize all your most used command line tools?

Do you expect them to remember the parameters to ifconfig, or do you ask them to craft a script/command line to print only the MTU for each interface?

When you ask them about top, do you expect them to remember what top is? or do you allow them to google for top, and ask them to craft a command line (or shell script) that finds which user is using the most memory on the system?

Genesis10, recruiting on behalf of Bloomberg, did that shit to me several years ago. The interviewer decided to gauge my knowledge of Unix/Linux and POSIX programming by essentially quizzing me on POSIX manpages over the phone.

I don't really ask people to configure things. I ask if you understand how DHCP works, and how TCP works, how top works (ie info is in proc . . . I volunteer laptop at the start of interviews but most people never use it. I try to stray away from asking for a list of facts.

Often I will ask a question about making a big change and I want to know how they go about it, is there error checking, is the a list of failures that can be worked later, if it's big scale are things run in parallel, are parallel processes run in a way that would max out the boxes resources? I don't need all of those because everyone answers those questions differently but I want to know how you think and assume you can look up arguments later. Or that I can teach you how to use a man page depending on the level of hire.

A huge majority of our stack is proprietary so you won't know how to use it anyway. So if you know how to think and you know how to learn then you should be fine.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straightforward: you tell us what your strongest areas are, we'll give you interviews that line up with those areas. There's no strict guarantees and you should expect a spread of different questions, but whatever it is that you're good at, expect us to offer you a chance to show us that you're good at it.

It's probably only a useful technique at companies which are big enough and flexible enough to find a use for you, whatever your skill set happens to be. For a company that only has one job opening and needs a specific sort of person to fill it, this sort of pick-your-interview-subject approach doesn't help them.

(Trick questions are useless: they primarily serve to make the interviewer feel clever, not to demonstrate the abilities of the candidate)

Ok makes sense. I should also apologize, Google didn't really give me trick questions when I talked to them 4 years ago or so (but other companies did), so didn't mean to imply they did as well.

Google had a list of technoliges as you described, and I was asked to rate myself on each one. I think it would have been slightly better if they explain why or how it is used.

> I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straightforward: you tell us what your strongest areas are, we'll give you interviews that line up with those areas. There's no strict guarantees and you should expect a spread of different questions, but whatever it is that you're good at, expect us to offer you a chance to show us that you're good at it.

My one experience with getting to a Google onsite is that, despite repeatedly telling various recruiters my strongest areas, they ended up interviewing me for what they wanted me to do rather than what I was good at. In fact, one of my interviewers literally had to throw out all his prearranged questions and make shit up as he went because my background and experience were so misaligned with what he had been added to my loop to ask me about.

Sorry that happened, it's not perfect and sometimes things go wrong. If this was several years ago, things have improved a lot since then.

Having a lot of confidence in your abilities is arguably a pretty important quality in an employee. I've encountered a lot of engineers who were way less effective than they could have been, mainly because they were too timid to speak up, to take initiative, to lead.

So maybe they were right to reject someone who answered 4-6 in most categories. Either that person isn't a good fit skill-wise, or they are a good fit skill-wise, but not personality-wise.

> Having a lot of confidence in your abilities is arguably a pretty important quality in an employee.

Realistic assessment of your abilities matters as an employee.

Humility is far rarer and more valuable.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

You did not have a phone screen. What you are describing is the initial contact with a recruiter, to establish what roles you're interested in, explain how the process works, and arrange dates. Had you proceeded past this, you would probably have had a phone screen next, which would be with an engineer giving you a technical problem to solve.

I also rated myself 4-6 on most categories, and was hired; that's an entirely reasonable score on the scale they give. I don't know what happened in your conversation with the recruiter, but it sounds like you made it clear you weren't interested and that was the end of it.

You are probably correct. It's been a few years but I do recall not being super impressed with the questions after the hassal of a bit of phone tag and a scheduled call. He likely picked up on my disinterest. I could have sworn though that there was this ackwardness based on my responses. Like he couldn't reconcile my answers with my profile.

My not be considered a "phone screen" in the process but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.. :)

For those not in the know, the Cooper Review is witty blog written by a former Googler... Expect satire not facts.

FWIW this is exactly how my last Google interview went down. So expect facts, even if wrapped in a satire? :)

yeah, this article is basically stuff that actually happens that seems absurd even while you're going through it. I love the multiple rooms one, happens all the time!

It should have had two more:

Interview the person while they're eating lunch, but tell them "it doesn't matter, unless you really do something bad."

Or the converse, put them in an interview from 9-5, but don't offer them lunch "because this one guy is only available at noon."

Both have happened to me while interviewing. :)

Hahahaha. I always laugh when I read headlines like this. A few years back a guy we were dying to get rid of finally left... and went to Google.

I would recommend reading the article!

I read it. I'm just talking about the headline - it's something you see attached to serious articles.

So I actually interviewed at a company where I didn't have clear instructions, had to switch rooms, ect. and it was a real turn off. First, I felt flustered, and I bombed the interview. But I didn't care because it left me with a bad impression about the company. It is funny because going into the interview I thought it would be the coolest place, and about halfway through I had already decided there was no way I would take a job there.

Would love to know which company this was with?

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:61DmBRy...

I see 502. I guess I am entitled to the secret sauce because I am trying to get into FB lol.

Anyway, here is the cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:61DmBRy...

Basically, this interview process allows you to weed out candidates who

1) disapprove open floor plan work environment, sitting next than six feet away from co-worker (yeah let's cramp twenty people together around so we can hear each other yelling at the headphone)

2) markers are either missing or used up and no one replaces them. oh you want to project your screen? good luck find a working remote or HDMI cable.

east coast version: order the wrong breakfast, hit 'em right in the grits (http://www.businessinsider.com/charles-schwab-ceo-takes-job-...) (not satire, but should be)

Someone get her a job writing for Silicon Valley (HBO). Seems like a great addition.

I've seen dozens of articles about how Google, Amazon and other large tech companies hire the best. It's a terrible assumption that these tech giants hire the best, they simply can't be picky with their hiring, they need to grow teams to keep up with progress, and replace the members who are leaving. They need to hire quickly, so they refine their hiring process to get qualified candidates, but not the best candidates out there. Sure, they might eventually hire some really good people, but the majority can't be held to a hire standard.

I think a better way to see is that they must be really "efficient" on hiring, even though these companies need a lot of people hired quickly they try to hire the "best possible" with those constraints. So not the best but the best possible for a given timeframe and position.

I don't know how much sense this make outside of my head but that's how I see it, they had to "scale" the process and it kinda works.

Hilarious and anecdotally true in my one experience.

Quite true for google. Less (but still kinda) for Facebook IME.

Yup, ran into most of these when I interviewed at many of the large tech companies...

Any basis to this?

Every single article on the site has titles that would give Buzzfeed run for its money.

http://thecooperreview.com/

This is clearly a satire website

You know something is wrong with HR when people can't tell the difference.

Their slogan is "Funny because it's true". So, while I didn't quite get the humor, it must be both funny and true.

The "10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings" is a 10/10, or 100% brilliant. http://thecooperreview.com/10-tricks-appear-smart-meetings/

Thanks for highlighting that one.. Pure gold.

That's a brilliant venn diagram. Laugh so hard when I see it.

That venn diagram was epic!

The percentage to fraction made me laugh because it's totally one of my moves.

I think the last suggestion gives that away :)

Whoosh.

Did you honestly read the article, then read the homepage, and then come back here and still not realize this was a satire website?

"3 months later, call and offer the candidate a job she didn’t apply for" Even if they accept, you don't need to pay the referral bonus. win, win!

Is this satire? I would like to believe it, but not sure.

Are you sure those aren't the reasons such company misses great talents?

That might happen to lesser companies, but not these companies, who are crushing it because they're so full of awesome talent because they only hire the best that hiring methods that wouldn't work for other companies will work for them.

I honestly thought this was satire.

But why three months? They don't explain this part very well. Everything else was spot on.

i....laughed so very hard during this article, oh my. and it had very little to do with the beers meeting i had at 4:30 today in a Seattle building named after an Austrian physicist. seriously big laughs here, thank you, from a tech (my wife says 'retail') company worker. huge laughs, #5 was the best, dying over here.

laugh or cry i guess, consider this data point: my team had 23 loops for a particular role, all shot down because candidate clearly had not seen this article yet. Do RSU's factor into the hours spent by 8+ team members trying to fill 8 open out of 50 total headcount? Because on base salary alone we have already paid for like 3 headcount or something.

The sad truth is many startups and wannabe hot tech companies are going to read this article not realizing it's satire, and try these methods out and unintentionally alienate their entire pool of qualified candidates in the process.

Came here expecting many commenters to not get that it was satire. Was not disappointed.

It's getting really hard to tell satire from real life, man.

Call it satire but I've had 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 happen to me at one time or another. Regarding 10 (getting called 3 months later), they were smug and cocky about it and resented when I turned them down.

"It's funny because it's true" applies here pretty well

Please don't post comments to put others down. That's lame.

If you know more than others, don't lord it over them; teach us.

#startuplivesmatter

This perfectly describes a recent interview I had with a company in the Bay Area... Spoiler alert: I didn't get the job.

The illustrations are just...magnificent.

Barely satire, the only difference from reality is that they meant to do it.

That's a joke, right?

You can't go wrong with probing questions on the toilet

This post is really helpful to Job seekers.

Uh, and if the company is not a known behemoth of talent using these tactics will give a very strong signal of incompetence.

I hire people at one of these companies, I thought this was sarcasm because this seems like a long list of what not to do.

It is totally serious. Apparently you haven't taken the elite interview training. ;)

This is my new favorite website.

This seems pretty pointless.

does this site have an RSS feed?

Yes, it seems like it's a standard WordPress blog - for future reference with WordPress just add /feed/ to the end :)

thecooperreview.com/feed/

thanks

As someone who is going through a lot of interviews right now, this really made me laugh. Though it also frustrates me.

Before I was in technology, I was a musician. I hate auditions. Every classical musician hates auditioning for an orchestra gig. It's an awful situation that is totally unrealistic and isn't a good measure of how you perform in reality, in an orchestra.

You're standing behind a blind curtain with a handful of people on the other side, and you are playing a violin part from some of the most difficult literature out there with none of the rest of the orchestra for context.

The people on the other side of the screen are waiting for you to make a mistake or just to play something in a style that they don't particularly like so that they can cut you off and say, "Thank you. Next!"

It's fucking brutal. The stress is insane, and the disappointment when you play 10 notes and get sent out is crazy.

When you actually win your job that will pay you a grand total of maybe 20k/year and you realize that you just beat 1,100 people who all went to better music schools than you did, it's pretty euphoric. Until you realize that you now need to go win another 3 of these jobs to make a decent living and travel around to each of them wherever they are.

But as nuts as that experience is, it's still better than the experience of interviewing for tech jobs. I know what I'm up against with an audition. I know what excerpts I'll be playing for as much as a year in advance. Some of the hardest are so standard that I've been practicing them for more than 10 years. It's brutal, but it's known territory. If you keep at it long enough, it is possible to win reliably.

Tech interviews are wildly unpredictable. The range of experiences I've had in the last couple of months is seriously dysfunctional.

Is it a one-person show where you are going to spend the entire time answering questions about the interviewer's PhD project with machine learning (for a Python web developer role) and get tossed out because you are not an ML expert?

Maybe.

Is it a team of 8 developers asking you about Linux kernel internals?

Maybe.

Is it 3 guys in shorts who actually point and laugh at you for wearing a suit and tie to an interview? Because who does that?

Maybe.

Does the director of the dept. actually give you a real idea of what the process is during the phone screen and tell you what to prepare for and what to expect and how to be successful?

That happens sometimes as well, thank goodness.

I probably sound more frustrated than I really am. But I'm starting to judge companies based on their hiring process as harshly or possibly more so than they judge me--starting with the phone screen.

It's mostly a complete shitshow out there right now.

If you can't respect my time enough to call within 5 minutes of when we agreed to talk, and you also can't be bothered to send a quick email letting me know that you are running late, what does that tell me about how you are going to treat me if you do decide to hire me? Nothing good.

If you advertise a job that covers a certain topic and then spend all of our interview time on a completely different topic, what does that tell me about you as a manager or your ability to stay focused on a problem I can help with after you do hire me? Nothing good.

If you show up to my in-person completely unprepared, distracted, and acting like you would rather be doing anything but interviewing me, what does that tell me about what it would be like to work for you and need to have a meeting? Nothing good.

Looking at my calendar since January, I've had more than 50 phone screens, about thirty in-persons, 10 follow-ups/code reviews, and turned down 3 offers because of bullshittery mentioned above. I'm not looking for a quick gig or a paycheck for now. I'm looking for a career and an opportunity to settle down for the next 10-15 years.

The music life was brutal for me. It's a lot of hard work, a lot of travel, no benefits, and very low pay. But you always knew that when you didn't win the job, it was because you just weren't good enough.

The tech life feels more like a lottery than anything related to actual skills, knowledge, or abilities.

We should be doing better than that.

I didn't even read the article because I know there is no secret.

We don't hire the best people. We hire average people, some good people, some great people, some mediocre people, and some people who aren't very good at their jobs. Some of those mediocre and average people turn out to be great people after all. There's no secret to it. We like telling ourselves there is a secret because everyone likes to feel special and we think if we can mirror other companies that we think are successful then we can be successful just like they were.

In the end, you have people working with people. If you're fortunate, you get the right people interviewing the right person at the right time, and you get a great hire. At best, you can filter out the obviously bad ones. The rest, you'll find out about as you go. Some will surprise you, some will meet your expectations, and some will be disasters. Fire the bad ones; coach and mentor the average ones; keep track of the great ones.

Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't.

FYI, the article is satire. Not reading it will miss the point :-)

The article is satire, but I have no doubt that there are interviewers who intentionally use some of these techniques.

Incredible to me that someone would write such a lengthy comment based on a headline alone.

It's because so many posts on HN are cookie cutter - usually you don't need to read the post to know what the (same old) message is.

You know:

"Why my startup failed" (cause I built something no-one wants)

"Why we switched from this technology to that technology" (because the old one sucked but the new one will solve all our problems)

"How we built a startup that fixed hiring" (they didn't)

"How to hire great people" (no-one knows)

"Why we were rejected from YC" (can an idea be that bad?)

"Our experience of interviewing at YC" (we were scared, it didn't take long, we got accepted!)

etc etc

Yeah, except this one is satire, and it's pretty good.

The truth is stranger than fiction.

^^^ This post is awesome

I'd like to believe that both paxunix and andrewsteward wrote those comments after having read the article, but pretended like they didn't for the Internet points. Actually makes the comments a bit funnier.

If everyone is talking and no one is listening what is the point?

to generate a lot of data to sell microprocessors to people who make internet bots

Good hires don't need to read the whole article

And by doing that, completely missed the point of the article.

You probably should've read the article.

> Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't.

Yes you can. It's quite easy, make people build something small to get hired, that eliminates 99% of submissions who are just lying about their skills and posing and with code in hand, it's quite easy to decide who's full of shit and who isn't. Resume's are useless, demand code, real programmers program.

This is a good summary "Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't."

LOL! good one!

This is hilariously genius!

This is satire btw.

"These top tech companies each receive over one billion resumes per year (source needed). So it’s safe to say they have a good process for choosing the best job candidates. "

nope -- its not safe to say that.

"Make the interview schedule as confusing and unpredictable as possible"

No thanks, I'll go work somewhere else.

I didn't read the article neither, I don't believe those companies have the best people, that's silly

Sorry I am still a newbie but are these fking ways get the 'best' out of a candidate or the 'worst' ever? Come on!

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