Google Hiring Committee Stories
piaw.blogspot.com
piaw.blogspot.com
This writer, being a member of such a process and committee, is unsurprisingly very self-congratulatory about how it works, and seems quite enamored of himself and his committee-mates. "And then I told this really clever joke, and we all laughed....".
I'm not learning much here except that Google has achieved a Cult following within its ranks. I say that in congratulation to Google - they're doing it better than M$ did in the 1980s.
I don't think I was particularly harsh. Just wanted to see what it would take to make them cry. Because that's exactly the kind of people we are looking for at Google. Because it mirrors the work environment so well!
High-five to me!
People who have survived all these years on pretty lines of bullshit and puffed up records will find the interview process harrowing. People who are smart, humble & enthusiastic should do fine.
It is the job of the interviewer to make the interviewee to feel at ease, and relaxed as much as possible.
Some people get very nervous in interviews, and panic a bit, and some of them can be very good engineers.
It seems the author's "surgically honing", is more of a "look at me, I know more than you do", ego stroking type of thing.
Since I do interview people often (not google, but another top company on the valley), I make sure to make people at ease.
When I was younger and stupid, my first instinct was to find the interviewee weakness and 'hone' on them.
Looking back, that was plain stupid. It helped me make myself feel good than actually do any good to the process. I gained later on some insight on my behavior once I was on the other side. Since then I made sure to be really really fair and unbiased on the questions I ask. You need to find both strengths and weaknesses of a candidate, but make sure not to trigger a panic induced 'coder's block'. Otherwise you failed as a interviewer.
I agree. No matter how 'nice' someone else claims this guy to be, if he was trying to make someone cry because they didn't know something during the interview, makes him a prick.
That is is plain and simple bullying -- no better than a physically stronger kid beating all the weaker ones on the playground. The playground here is the interview process and he is the bully.
(It is important to weed through people that just know buzzwords and get to the meat, but this kind of interview style is not really acceptable IMO. You should be able to know if somebody actually goes deeper than buzzwords in a 5-10 minute, casual conversation in the cafeteria over a cup of coffee.)
He talks about 5 interviews a week like that's some crazy number, try 5 a day for a while.
Someday, he's going to be interviewed by one of the people he turned away (at least he should approach it like that).
Also, who do you propose might make the decision if not a committee? Managers certainly can't be allowed to, at least not unilaterally, because they have all kinds of conflicts of interest that might encourage them to hire subpar people.
I don't think "committees are universally bad" is a widely held view. For example, almost all companies are led, ultimately, by a committee (a board). They have their uses. Maybe hiring is one of them.
Now, about cult followings. One of the guys in that story, Bogdan, is famous for terse denials of various sorts of requests that might be sent his way (e.g. for more bandwidth, for a certain service in a datacenter, etc.). This was true to the extent that for a long time googlers on the kernel team maintained an extension at /proc/bogdan. When cat'd, it would print things like:
No.
No.
We're already doing that.
No.
Absolutely not.False. The board has the power to fire the CEO. They do not have the power to "lead" the company.
The executive board is led by a single person (the CEO) and that one person makes all the ultimate decisions, except for those which he delegates to his or her executive team.
Committees are pretty much universally bad. Their main purpose is diffusion of responsibility and inflation of work. I'm not saying this specific committee didn't work - there are always exceptions - but most committees are disastrously bad at getting anything done.
Note: Obviously, in some cases risky == good, too
Note 2: Group-think (eg, bay-of-pigs) is a counter example.
I know a lot of smart kids who didn't end up at Google because it took them two or three months to hear back about their interview results and by the time they had already accepted another offer.
I like erring on the side of caution and tough interviews, but there has to be a faster way of doing that. At companies where a manager is hiring for her team, once she has found a good candidate she will want to hire them quickly. There is a sense of urgency. It seems to me that one side effect of not having hiring managers is that this sense of urgency is lost and so no one is really motivated to push for getting back to individual candidates on time.
We do try to expedite the process if we think someone is actively looking, but it is a cumbersome process and can only be expedited so much. :-(
Microsoft: Interviewed with them for an Internship. Very organized, on campus recruiting followed by a fly up and an offer a couple months after the job fair where I submitted my resume.
Amazon: Interviewed for a full time job. I went through two rounds of interviews with one team in under two weeks from submitting my resume; they said my domain-knowledge wasn't a good fit for that team but another team was interested. About two months passed before any follow-up on that, but once that did happen I had three rounds of interviews with that team and an offer within three weeks.
Google: Interviewed with them for an internship. Gave my resume to them. Did not hear anything for about 2 months. Then I got a notification that they wanted to schedule the first round of an interview. Great. Another two months pass, no updates. I get another offer and let them know they have only a few weeks to decide.
Near the end of that few weeks, they call to schedule a phone interview for the following day. Based on one hour-long phonecall with a manager who asked pretty much just basic screener questions, they give me an offer later that day. At that point, for all they knew I could have been someone who could barely code! Granted, this was for an internship so the downside risk to Google was much lower: the internship would have essentially been an expensive three-month interview.
Interestingly, Google and Microsoft did not even consider my resume for full-time positions. The Microsoft recruiter even handed my resume back to me at a recruitment fair, which is the only time I've ever seen that happen! The reason was I did not have a Bachelors degree because I had left to do a startup. When my startup folded, I thought that the experience that had left me would allow me to find something at any of the major big companies (where I could save cash and get ready my next startup), and fortunately Amazon did see this as a positive while Google and MS were hung up on the degree.
One thing I'd like to remind everyone about is that I'm writing about a time long gone. Trying to guess what Google today does based on what Google did 5-6 years ago brings to mind the adage: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
1) From the experience of close friends, it is not an extra week. It is typically at least an extra month. Some times it's even longer.
2) It is not clear to me whether the extra time is being spent on improving the selection or simply being wasted because everyone on the committee has other things to do which introduces delay in reaching quorum+agreement.As an outsider there is no way for me to tell one way or the other, but it's something for Google to think about.
3) Humans hate uncertainty, especially in important life decisions. Many people, given a choice between an uncertain prospect of getting a job at Google and a certain job at a company that is slightly worse than Google, will choose certainty. And there are many companies who are not obviously worse than Google competing for the top talent.
1. Extra interviews required. This has nothing to do with the HC. In many cases, interviewers themselves screwed up here, and told the HC so. The alternative would have been "no-hire." 2. Candidate got redirected to a different department. This resets the hiring clock. This is unfortunate, but the alternative would have been a straight "no-hire." 3. HC too over-committed. I wrote a bit about this in my book and won't go into it here. It's not an easy problem, and Google's scaling problems came into play here.
Reed Hastings makes a case that as a company grows, hiring standards should go up: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. I agree, and if the consequences is that you have a harder time making a quick decision and have to lose some otherwise good candidates, I think the quick decision is the greater of the two evils.
This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait. Bear in mind that many candidates aren't really waiting: they already have a job and an extra month of latency won't reduce their interests. My brother worked at Intel while applying to Google. It took us 3 months to hire him. While it wasn't fun for him, it also wasn't costly either. (And yes, he took the job)
This is the key reason it works for Google. I really like Google's products and hope that y'all continue doing the kind of work that has made this true. If you falter, this will stop working.
This process was slower than the entire interview loop at the company I am currently at.
You're a douchebag. I don't think I'm breaking HN etiquette, because I would have no problem saying it to the guy's face.
I would say that most Googlers would genuinely prefer that the candidate succeed. And Google has interview training that is supposed to help the interviewer put the candidate at ease, and get a fair result.
But as you say, it's human nature.
People who are defensive about their Googlerhood, or just lazy about interviewing, usually ask unfair questions. Ridiculous 'aha' puzzlers, for example. And my personal pet peeve, asking the candidate to solve a problem that you just solved a couple of days ago (perhaps after several days of collaboration and research).
I think these types of questions lead to some of the best discussions between interviewer and interviewee. The interviewee should realize that they aren't expected to just pull a perfect solution right out of thin air -- instead the point is to have a dialogue with the interviewer so that the interviewer can see how you think and communicate. And having a couple of big hard problems that the interviewee doesn't have enough information for an immediate solution is a good approach: you can see what kinds of questions the interviewee asks, how he tries to attack it, and the interviewer can provide information and nudges along the way, having all the background information fresh in his head.
Often too much criticism is feedback is placed on the fact that the candidate went through three or so iterations and too much emphasis is placed upon the fact that the candidate's initial solution was quadratic or worse. This really should reflect strong analytical thinking.
But in my experience, there are two things wrong with the "here's a problem I solved last week" question:
- the scenario is way too specific. Say you have some unusually pathological database that was developed in house, and you need to query it using a proprietary wire format that only your company uses. And you discover some kind of trick that sort of works. This is a TERRIBLE question to ask a candidate, but I've seen it done. The candidate is fighting in the dark, trying to grasp the outlines of the problem, for the full ten minutes.
- asking about stuff you did last week leads to the interviewer comparing themselves with the interviewee. A fair-minded person can see there might be other approaches. Most people are proud of their own solutions though, and won't accept alternative answers. It's better, psychologically, to use a problem you aren't personally invested in.
It does make me a little nervous though, as I'd really like to work there but it seems the chance of rejection is really high and I didn't get the impression that I did exceptionally well on the interviews.
There are a lot of screens prior to a human reading your resume, and without a recommendation, you have a slim chance of a callback.
* Live in the Bay area
* Graduated from Carnegie Mellon
* Specialize in C++
* Have an open source portfolio
* Have mobile development experience
Looks like you're low hanging fruit as far as Google recruiters are concerned - it's surely worth their time to call/email you every so often just in case your situation has changed.
Edit: From their Chromium guys. They might have been dangling a carrot, in retrospect.