To be fair, I've interviewed people at previous companies that had patents and 15 years at IBM on their CV and completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. (fizzbuzz style).
There are a lot of people that read great on the CV but then it turns out that they mostly kept a chair warm and organized meetings over the last decade without actually retaining any technical knowledge.
Not saying that was the case here, but it happens and it's probably worth checking people on their stated qualifications.
Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.
This type of coding exercise can potentially answer more questions about the candidate in two minutes than 30 minutes of softball questions about the candidate's past experiences.
I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing or haven't worked on a team with someone who couldn't do much more than copy/paste code from SO.
Absolutely. Last time I went through trying to hire people was about a year ago. Easily 90% of the applicants we saw were completely unqualified. You have to have a way to weed them out.
You want a simple question that isn't common, but that shows how they break down a problem under stress. Example: you have an input with paragraphs at 80 characters. Write a function to return the same paragraphs wrapped to 40 characters. You cannot break a word and must maintain paragraphs.
Great design questions: a word problem (You have an autoshop with, staff and customers. Customers can own multiple cars. A staff member gets assigned to a car with a work order...) .. draw an ER diagram. This is actually a pretty low stress question. It should be straight forward. If someone draws a terrible ER diagram with lists in tables and no normalization, or unnecessary relationships (or you have to keep asking them to label 1-to-n/n-to-1 relationships and they struggle), you know they're not going to be good at designing database schemas.
Another great general knowledge question: "A user types in a web address into a web browser and hits enter. Describe what happens. Go into as much detail as you can." This gives people a change to elaborate as much as they can. People can talk about DNS, HTTP, load balances, HTTP request/response, cookies, load balancers, web apps vs static content...
Questions need to be geared to the job. You don't ask someone to draw an ER diagram if they're being hired to rack servers and setup VMWare. Likewise you don't ask a web developer to write a function to do matrix multiplication.
You're saying this is a bad question because it's too complicated? Am I missing something? It really doesn't seem more complicated than the paragraph question to me, but maybe I'm having a brain lapse.
The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it.
It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can code or not. It shouldn't be the only test, of course.
We do watch them work though so if they just copy and paste from stack overflow and they don't understand the problem, it's pretty obvious.
If you require using real, compiler correct language in a coding exercise, and the problem is not trivial, than allowing search is more than fair.
But the point of Fizzbuzz is being such trivial problem that it really should not require nothing more than an understanding of basic programming logic and constructs.
In my (limited) experience, there were instances where the candidate could not even decide on a programming language to use, I told them to use pseudo-code and they still flunked horribly.
Aside from that, Fizbuzz is rarely a dealbreaking task in itself, it tends to correlate pretty well with the overall performance, I would be surprised seeing someone failing fizzbuzz and excelling in the rest of the interview (once again, in my limited experience).
But really, if an applicant needs to google to solve FizzBuzz, they don't have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. You're required to write one loop, a few if/then/elses and understand how the modulo operator works. Our jobs are much more demanding than that.
It's a (sadly) useful screen. Even more sad when you realize how popular and widespread that particular question is.
I'd expect any technical candidate to be able to do at least a fizzbuzz-type question.
if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?
The problem with this is that a home builder/contractor will have a long list of references, and possibly examples of her work available for examination. Many engineers search for jobs while still employed, so they generally don't include as references co-workers and current managers. Further, if your employer doesn't allow you to open source your work, then you need to do open side projects to have any sort of real resume prospective employers can examine (and this is problematic since your day job may already take more than 40 hours of your time).
So, no, I don't need to ask a contractor if he knows what a brick looks like, but I do need to look at his references, look him on Angie's List, post to local message boards about his work. And, of course, I'm not an expert on home building, so it would be unreasonable to ask him questions about carpentry or framing.
I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing for Software Development Manager, so he got an initial phone screen and then a face-to-face with myself and another dev on the team he'd be managing. I was impressed with how little he knew about programming.
"Name some data structures." "What does MVC stand for?" "Name some design patterns" etc. All of which were unanswerable. Generally when it becomes clear someone was dishonest about their skillset, the ability to get hired for any position becomes impossible.
Hell, someone could be able to define MVC and explain how you would use it, but have no idea how to actually implement something using it for a given programming language.
"Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?"
I'm really surprised at how many people can't do this. If you've spent five years developing web, surely you've had to look at raw requests, either debugging using netcat or with wireshark or just looking at the information in the Chrome/Firefox debugger?
"What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?"
"What is the difference between a statically typed and a dynamically typed language?"
I had one candidate try to tell me Java was dynamically typed and Scala was statically typed. It was for a Scala position. They also said "statistically typed" instead of statically, even after I corrected them.
-_-
And 95% haven't used netcat or wireshark. I wouldn't have either, if it wasn't for some particular work related to messaging.
They're able to develop reasonable line of business websites in spite of that.
I would be extremely worried if they were unable to answer about the difference between GET or POST, or the difference between statically and dynamically typed languages, so I agree with those.
Yeah expecting many people to be able write out a complete http request from memory without a reference to look at. But the general structure of a http request is something so basic to web development that asking what the structure of a http request looks like isn't an unreasonable expectation.
Request line (method, uri), header(s), empty, body...
CGI is also cool to learn about the workings of, since it almost seems too simple.
Sure I did.
Then I forgot most of the details because they didn't matter, and I knew I could look them up quickly if I ever needed to write a HTTP client/server for some reason.
Because you did: after that you have to provide a Host: <hostname>.
You need two newlines to finis the request, plus the HTTP 1.1 standard requires clients to send a Host: header for all requests.
Not saying every interviewer would care about that in an early screening process.
Learning to use wireshark or tcpdump is a power tool that does show whether you got more experience in understanding the lower levels, or stayed at requirements-and-tests. (Not necessarily bad, but a good "fork" to jump off from)
As always, this sort of question is a test of competence by proxy and there are usually outliers, but statistically speaking, I think you'll find a very high correlation between inept programmers and people who don't know the difference.
I have a follow up question, "What are the advantages of a dynamically typed language over a statically typed one?"
This one kinda exposes the "Java-zellot" side of programming. If you love Scala and you're applying for Scala position, you don't often think like this. Being able to think critically about the things that are harder in Scala, that would be easier in a language without strict type checking, is a another good way to gauge if people can think critically.
I actually just sat down in a meeting with a dozen programmers, some of them with decades of experience, and half of them didn't know what functional programming was.
Your example shows that not every programmer has to know that.
A previous employer had a sysadmin wiki. We call it Devops now, but I really liked working with the plain-text files of Dokuwiki there. Confluence is good for some things, but as a notebook of shell snippets and when to use them, it's not great.
Asking "wtf did you just do" is responsible for probably 1/5 to 1/4 of the professional knowledge I have today. It's sad that many people ignore that people will often teach you their little tricks if you ask.
I once aced a geography exam because I happened to read up on the economics of Nigeria just before I took it. By sheer luck, there was a question about Nigeria in the paper.
If I'd read about Zimbabwe instead I'd have been screwed.
Neither possibility provided much insight into my competence as a geographer.
Even if a job spec needs specific knowledge of key facts, you can't generalise from pass/fail memory questions to broad spectrum competence, or lack of it.
If a candidate has no idea what an HTML request is, that's one thing. If they know damn well what a request is but can't list all the elements in a stressful interview while you're staring at them, - because in fact they spent the last year working on database code, and the API stuff was the year before that - that's something else entirely.
Why should anyone remember what an http request or response should look like? Statically typed vs. dynamically typed language?
Fuck.
Are these entry-level positions or for someone with 10 years work-ex? A simple search on Google can tell anyone the answer of these questions, why do you expect people to carry an imprint of it in their memory? If the problem they'll work on mandates knowing these things it'd be pretty easy to solve with just one search. It is exactly questions like these that are worth kicking the host organization back in the butt.
Either your interviewing process is hilariously stupid or you're just spiking it up to boost the ego here.
Compare static with N tests, vs not static with N tests. In what case would the not static be safer?
The claim that "dynamically type language" allows code to more closely follows the business logic has merits. And you could follow from that to claim that type system could be causing more bugs (ie less safe).
The only code you can be sure isn't buggy is code that doesn't exist.
* The object returned no longer has member/property x, it is obtained by other means;
* The endpoint returns list of such objects.
Fun thing: in the second case if your code manages to convert input list to a map and assign one returned object to a key that coincides with the removed property and map access looks syntactically the same as property access (a very specific set of assumptions, though), the bug can butterfly quite deep into the code before manifesting :)
And then your non-engineer phone screener who's expecting the answer to match the scripted sheet will conclude that I don't know this "fundamental" thing and thus am unqualified.
It's a hypothetical no-go! Every person, even the fourth grader knows the number 4. So why ask a question that measures their ability to remember 4, say 4 or show that they know 4.
> I don't see how a programmer could be remotely competent without having been exposed…
Share this link with them:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1517582/what-is-the-diffe...
Invest in people and people will invest back in your business. Interview process that I follow at my workplace has just one goal to assess: whether or not it'd be great to work with this person and spend over ~50 hours per week with them.
Absolutely! This is super super important. Fun to work with, not annoying to waste time with.
> know nothing about computers
It's sad that you think this way of people who couldn't answer your questions at the expected level.
> Or are there actually more criteria than you let on here?
Yes! One way to know if they're any good or not suitable is by giving them a problem statement like so:
'Design X, feel free to choose a language that's suitable for this problem', and then may be proceed to hint with: 'You might want to look at advantages of Static versus dynamic typing'… and then let them ask whatever questions they want to ask or read up or search or start implementing whatever.
Observe what they do -- and how fast can they get to the decision of what language and why. And how to make X (break down of steps) or if they can dive and start making X there itself. Note, if they had theoretical knowledge of what you seek during an interview it will work to their advantage naturally. Or sometimes not.
Of course, this process may not work for you as it does for us -- therefore seeking direct answers about static vs dynamic language may not be such a bad question after all (I get it), but expecting people to accurately remember what an http request or its response looks like may not be fruitful at all. It can throw good people off guard and ruin the rest of the interview for them.
There are a number of basic items that a competent programmer needs to know off the top of his head. If they had to google for every single item, then their productivity goes down the drain and so does the entire team's productivity. You should fix your hiring.
"OK, so you'd like to work here as a mechanic. What's the difference between automatic and manual transmission?"
"It's not fair to expect me to know that off the top of my head. If I need to know, I'll just do a Google search."
You're gonna have a hard time drawing a comparison between a line of work where you build things and one where you fix things.
Nope, more like "can you write out on the board what types of connectors are used in the car cooling system and in what order".
But could they at least tell you why quick sort was the best sorting algorithm?
Of course, a sample of one (anecdota) which is most likely the min of the distribution is always the worst way to judge a distribution, but this is still upsetting.
It's possible that he got frustrated, became condescending towards the recruiter, and the recruiter decided to screen him out.
There are plenty of companies who turn down candidates that are false negatives for various reasons. Author should probably not take that personally and just apply again.
I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim.
Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it)
Second i'm going to point out a few things:
Experience may translate into wisdom, it may not. Plenty of companies promote people just because they last long enough. So 20 years experience managing may translate into a high level manager, it may not!
I hold a bunch of patents too on compilers and other things, it's not indicative of much in terms of skill, because almost anything is patentable.
Lastly, SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means. I"m not even sure where to begin to correct that. I guess i'd start here: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html
Does this mean this person is under/overqualified/exactly right? I literally have no idea. I just don't think it's as obvious one way or the other.
"Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process."
Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly.
If you want to do it, okay.
But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!)
I almost didn't jump into this discussion because it seems so polarized and rash compared to a lot of others
I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.
Now, instead, they generally don't recruit (google is too large to not have exceptions) without some specific hiring managers and headcount in mind.
They will tell you what those groups are and what they do. So for example, the person i interviewed last week was targeted at two teams. I actually specifically asked if he knew what he was being interviewed for, because i like to get some idea what the candidate thinks whatever job they are interviewing for means, and he was able to tell me the two groups and knew what they did.
I did know I was interviewing for a general SWE role, but not anything more than that, and from all appearances the team was completely up in the air until after my interviews.
I don't know how much has changed since 2014. I also didn't get any of these pre-screen testing questions from a non-engineer. Is that normal practice for all interviews now?
It's not just this guy. There have been others: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years.
I've also heard a few stories about friends applying for a position and being shunted by the hiring process into the hiring funnel for other (plainly unsuitable) positions. When I hear a very specific criticism from two separate places it's hard to stay skeptical.
That's a poor metric to evaluate the rampant complaints about a high false negative rate. I don't think that many people are disputing that the people who do get hired are qualified most of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)
From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average.
I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat.
>To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist?
They already exist.
I think Google is pretty good at hiring "qualified" engineers who are very good at maintaining and scaling existing systems, but the process definitely selects against entrepreneurial product-focused engineers. Maybe Google thinks that's fine though: they can always pick them up through an acquisition later, albeit at 100x the price.
It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed.
That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, and this suggests Google's success is not sustainable so long as that continues. They'll be able to hire fresh CS grads out of Stanford forever with this process, but the experienced/unconventional people they flunk out on the early screens are not going to come to them, and when their current crop of experienced/unconventional engineers retire or take jobs elsewhere, Google's finally going to have to fix this problem and stop pretending that it's better to pass on a thousand highly-qualified candidates than to give one unqualified candidate an on-site. That, or tumble back down into mediocrity.
(which, to be fair, is already mostly the case; Google is largely a mediocre company, with only a couple of externally-visible brights spots of talent or innovation clustered in a couple of particular teams, and otherwise Google runs on inertia and the hope that the 0.1% of interesting stuff they come up with will keep the 99.9% of mediocrity afloat)
Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that). They have a credible seat at the top table in the cloud market. And they continued to develop their core ad platform to drive more revenue growth.
I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.
It's also the case that Google is acquiring a reputation for bad interview/hiring processes, and for hiring people who have a Ph.D. in CS and putting them to work on CRUD web apps that any random coding-bootcamp grad could build, since there's just not enough interesting in-house work to keep all those top talents occupied.
Google (vs Alphabet) often acquires companies that have a seed of a useful product. Android for example was apparently not in a usable state when it was acquired. 99% of the creative work is making the thing actually work, not in having the prototype.
To say Google's own engineers didn't create Android because they didn't commit the very first line of code is doing them a disservice.
I don't necessarily blame them for plus (facebook was clearly a marketing success, not a technology success), but maps' decline isn't anybody else's fault. It has declined in quality and that is plainly an engineering failure not a product failure.
>Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that).
Well, yes. Acquisitions underpinned all of that success.
>I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.
All predicated upon outside purchases or the original self-reinforcing search monopoly developed before 2004.
What's worse is that they've often used their search monopoly to try to break into other markets (flights, shopping, etc. - plenty of stuff like this got preferential SERPs treatment) and failed because what they released was crap. That is, they failed even with a huge home ground advantage - the kind of monopoly advantage that let Microsoft make IE6 (IE6!) the industry standard for years and got them slapped by the DoJ couldn't even be put to good use by Google.
I'm not denying that they have some good engineers but the idea that they're the creme de la creme of the industry with the best hiring process is way way off base.
Right?
Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory.
> Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly.
This kind of opinion is not formed in a vacuum. It's formed of the dozens of posts that appear every year about how someone who seems qualified is turned down for spurious reasons like "being unable to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard". It's what makes this particular post so believable - it fits the stereotype. Even your own developers who post here say "yeah, that's more accurate than inaccurate." Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to "undercover boss" your way through the interview process...
Speaking for myself, and only myself... I turn down all Google recruiters because I know I would not pass Google's interview process. Not because I don't have the skills, but because I don't have a college degree. Because I don't see the return on investment for studying for the next 6 weeks just to pass the interview process, especially when I won't even know if I'm getting a job I'll enjoy.
> I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.
How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?
This is one reason why i find it super-strange. It's not a set of "high level employee" questions. It's a standard SRE pre-screening.
"How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?"
My view of unreasonable is not about whether there is a problem or not. It's not about the consensus. I don't actually have an opinion myself on the hiring process. If people i work on recruiting raise problems, i try to solve them. I have not had trouble trying to recruit in general. So i haven't formed a strong opinion, even after 11 years. If folks want to decide the process is horrible, okay. If folks want to decide it's great, that's also okay.
But it's unreasonable because it's both super-quick reaction without time to settle and think, and not aimed at anything other than trying to reinforce one view or the other.
Nobody is actually listening to each other, they are just trying to force whatever their view is, good or bad, on others.
So to answer you directly, i don't think pointing out a problem is unreasonable, but that's not my complaint. My complaint is that the actual discussion is not a discussion, but mostly people just arguing on the internet. IE You shouldn't take me saying "unreasonable" as a proxy for "me saying i think their viewpoint is wrong". I just think the mechanism of discussion here is unlikely to yield fruitful results.
To clarify, I was speaking of your standard SRE hires, whose position you referred to as "not maintenance drones".
> Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory.
AIUI you can get easily 5 or more of the pre-screen questions wrong and still proceed to the next stage, depending on your experience and how wrong you are. The point here is not that you know each and every one of those things, but to show that you are, in general, knowledgeable enough to spend Engineer hours on.
And your judgement of these questions is seriously impaired by the fact that they are written down wrong. I assume, that the author of this post has written down a rough transcript from memory and as such it's colored by their own (mis)understanding of the question and whatever got leaked from memory in the meantime. The questions he wrote down are, at the very least, not verbatim the ones from the checklist given to recruiters (and there is a strong emphasis on reading them out verbatim there, so I consider it relatively unlikely that the recruiter didn't do that).
> It's formed of the dozens of posts that appear every year about how someone who seems qualified is turned down for spurious reasons like "being unable to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard". It's what makes this particular post so believable - it fits the stereotype.
Exactly. You are reading "dozens of posts every year" from disgruntled interviewees who got rejected and are pissed. On the flip side, a quick internet search will tell you that Google gets on the order of millions of applications each year, meaning you don't hear from >99.99% of applicants.
There is also the widely advertised fact, that the Google hiring process accepts a high false-negative rate, if that also means a very low false-positive rate, so it is to be expected that a good percentage of qualified applicants still get rejected. It is thus also to be expected, that you hear from some of them. Meanwhile, again, you are not hearing from the thousands of qualified applicants that do get accepted each year. Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news, even if it was written.
> How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?
Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem.
From reading this post, I'd say a likely reason for the rejection is, that this person wasn't being particularly pleasant. Frankly, he comes of as kind of an arrogant prick. And, as a general rule, engineers at Google, just like everyone else, don't particularly like having unpleasant people on their team. And I also believe this post has gotten enough upvotes, that someone will look into the situation to see what went actually wrong here.
Please, feel free to correct the record, then, with the correct screening questions. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and has gone tearing down the street towards everyone trying to make a buck by "training" hopeful young graduates on how to make it through the Google interview process.
> Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news
No, it won't. Because it's the tech equivalent of a lottery winner saying they think the lottery system is a fair and equitable way to distribute money.
> Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem
Same problem. If you're in, you passed the Google employment lottery, so it's much more interesting (and should be more meaningful to management) when insiders agree that the hiring process has problems.
Now then, of course, so long as directors find that they have plenty of applicants to back fill attrition and grow, they have no reason to think the hiring process is broken; so long as Google is happy hiring not necessarily the best people for the job, but the ones lucky enough to dodge more false negative flags than everyone else. Better to be lucky than good.
All that said, yeah, Google's hiring process works for Google. Coming here, to a conversation started by a crappy screening experience, and expecting respect for a process with so many false negatives is a bit optimistic, though.
No can do. I actually like my job. And I also like my coworkers and don't want to make their life any harder.
> No, it won't. Because it's the tech equivalent of a lottery winner saying they think the lottery system is a fair and equitable way to distribute money.
The same goes for a "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice but sadly I didn't got accepted" post.
The fact remains, that you don't read from >99.99% of people. My interview process was very pleasant. I had a bunch of nice conversations about programming and computers with friendly and humorous people.
> Same problem. If you're in, you passed the Google employment lottery, so it's much more interesting (and should be more meaningful to management) when insiders agree that the hiring process has problems.
There are a lot of insiders. With a lot of opinions.
> so long as Google is happy hiring not necessarily the best people for the job, but the ones lucky enough to dodge more false negative flags than everyone else.
Well, the thinking here isn't really "we want strictly the best". That would be a hopeless idea from the get-go. The thinking is "there is a hiring bar that we want people to pass and we want to hire exclusively from above that. We don't care about the sampling of that, as long as we get that". What they end up with is a pretty broad sample of that population. Some (like me probably, tbh) just barely pass the bar, some are the very top. Some other top-people got unfortunately rejected, some other barely passing people too.
So yes. There is indeed no ambition to actually get just the top 100K engineers in the world.
> All that said, yeah, Google's hiring process works for Google. Coming here, to a conversation started by a crappy screening experience, and expecting respect for a process with so many false negatives is a bit optimistic, though.
Well, mostly I (and DannyBee) are just pointing out obvious flaws in the discussion here. Like the obvious self-selection bias and selective reporting. And the also obvious fact that this particular post was written while angry and only represents one side of the story; and that not even accurately.
Secondarily, in these long-wound comment threads on reddit/hackernews/twitter, people seem to usually not even be aware of the goals of the hiring process and think "look, here, three prominent false negatives" is an actual argument about the process being flawed.
I'm not sure what "nitty gritty details" you're talking about here.
As much as some people here think it's impressive knowledge[1] to be able to give the size of an ethernet MAC address without Googling it, that's something that anyone with experience in computer networking oughts to know. Not at all because it's useful knowledge, but simply because if you actually spend time looking at network traffic dumps or ARP tables or DHCP configuration or SLAAC assignments you'll be seeing MAC addresses so often that it just becomes obvious. Just like knowing that an IPv4 is 4 bytes and an IPv6 16 bytes. Or that a TCP connection starts with a 3-way SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK handshake.
And the same thing applies to the other questions that look like meaningless details: knowing what an inode is and what syscall returns inode data for a path is something that someone with system-level C programming experience should know. stat(2) is far from being something obscure. Knowing what signal is sent by the kill(1) command is maybe slightly more on the trivia side IMO, but it's still a very well known fact.
A candidate is most likely not expected to know the answer to all of these questions. But failing in all of the categories is IMO a fairly strong red flag for someone interviewing for SRE, where in general people are usually expected to be comfortable with at least one of {networking, system administration, Linux internals}. In fact, this domain specific knowledge is the biggest differentiator between "standard" SWE and SRE-SWE, even though the lines get blurrier and blurrier.
This also indirectly answers this:
> things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory
You would have to be out of touch with the field for quite a while to forget such basic things. Which is likely something that you want to test for in such interviews. To go with a metaphor: if you claim to be a fluent English speaker on your resume, you can't be excused of "faulty memory" if you forget how to conjugate "to be" in the present tense. It's not something you forget easily, and if you did forget you most likely can't say you're fluent anymore.
Disclaimer: I was an SRE at Google for 2.5 years, but I'm not familiar with the early phases of the recruiting process.
How about the dozens of other seemingly qualified people who have complained about the google process?
And what's the other side of that? IE the literally tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands who haven't?
Again, i'm not saying there is no problem, i'm just saying this is probably not a great mechanism to evaluate whether there is a problem or not.
If you want actual usable data, this wouldn't be the way to get it, good or bad.
"Standard process" is what actually happens in the real world. Alas, standard process is to not tell him.
>But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!)
Your story is also just one side of the story - actually, you weren't even involved so it's neither side. Still, you spend all your effort on saying why for example this guy's patents mean nothing and he's likely incompetent. I'd call that snap judgement, lack of critical thinking, and biased conjecture,
Inferring what's standard from a sample size of 1 (which is ~0.0001%) is very questionable.
> Still, you spend all your effort on saying why for example this guy's patents mean nothing and he's likely incompetent.
That is not at all what they where saying. They where saying that patents aren't conclusive evidence of competency.
For your second point, DannyBee focuses his efforts on discrediting this seemingly exceptionally qualified candidate, never yielding an inch from his position that Google is exceptional and can make no mistakes.
Infering what is "reality" from a sample size of ~0.0001% is clearly ridiculous. By that logic, it would be "standard" to be born a conjoined twin. Actually, it would be 10x as likely as what "standard" is.
> I'm clearly not talking about statistics.
You might benefit from doing so, though. It might help you realize what nonsense you are saying.
> DannyBee focuses his efforts on discrediting this seemingly exceptionally qualified candidate
No, this is factually incorrect. Repeating something factually incorrect doesn't make it more correct.
> never yielding an inch from his position that Google is exceptional and can make no mistakes.
You either can't or won't read. They very clearly acknowledged the possibility of a mistake several times in each post they made.
Yes, I'm not expecting the conversation to have been exactly that, but it shows problems regardless.
As for customer support, it depends on the product you are talking about. Your free gmail account or $5 purchases through the play store: don't expect a lot of support here (but there is some). If you are using Google Cloud, Apps, AdWords, or other products where you pay, you can expected to get amazing support (this will change with your spend level). For example: on the cloud side, you can pay for support contracts that gets you lots of 1-on-1 time with Google support staff to help you use the services[0]. Or with the new Pixel, there is on-phone support[1].
I also agree with the grandparent, I'd be very sceptical about this transcript being 100% accurate.
I passed several rounds of interviews at Google over a number of years (phone screening, phone interview, on-site). This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions. Remember that interviews are somewhat of a game. Trying to be smart at this stage is the wrong move.
I went through a Google phone screen once. (For full disclosure, I've interviewed on-site twice and failed that both times.)
One problem posed on the phone screen involved finding the last 1 in an infinite array consisting of a finite number of 1s followed by an infinite number of 0s. I described the search strategy "check index 0/1/2, then progressively square the index until a 0 is found, then use binary search to find the first 0". The screener objected to that strategy on the grounds that successive squaring "grew too fast" and successively doubling the index would be faster overall.
Once the call concluded, I looked into it and determined that those two strategies are almost exactly equivalent. This didn't leave me impressed with the phone screen process.
Then again, I apparently passed the screen despite making that "mistake". Still, I think the least courtesy you can extend to interviewees is to not correct them when they're right and you're wrong. :/
Seems you don't know much what Google's SRE job is about.
"That is not how we work. We will evaluate your abilities and then, if you pass, offer you a position on a team that we deem best fitting your skills."
Needless to say I have thanked him for his time and declined. I am not going to fly to another country to be grilled with stupid coding interviews only to be offered an entry level job on a team I am not interested in.
Another such thing was an invitation from Amazon's HR for an "accelerated testing session" where I was expected to go for a full day of coding tests (together with many others) and then they would pick who they invite for real interviews later where you may learn what sort of position they might offer you. Again, no idea what position/job you are interviewing for and wasted entire vacation day - for their convenience. System clearly targeting 20-somethings straight out of school. No, thanks.
The questions from the original article are familiar - but these are often external staffing agencies doing these pre-screens today. Google used to do it in-house with actually technically very competent HR staffers (I have done a few phone calls with someone in their California HQ back in 2002ish), but now if I get contacted by them every now and then it is always an external headhunter.
The staffing agencies employees tend to be very technically incompetent. Basically, they often have no idea whatsoever about the technical requirements for the position they are trying to fill. They only match keywords on the CVs in their database (often LinkedIn profiles, etc.) against the keywords in the job description, then they spam everyone that matches with an excited mail about having a "perfect match job". The matches are usually on the completely generic stuff like "C++", "Python" that everyone has on their CV, so in most cases the "dream job" is anything but - in a field the person knows nothing about or is not interested in.
I have been literally hounded for weeks by a headhunter once for a position that I had zero qualification for (Windows/.NET stuff - I was mostly Unix guy back then). It finally turned out that she wanted me only because I spoke/understood the Czech language. And she fully expected me to move to a "sweatshop" that company had in Czech Republic, trying to do a job I knew nothing about and paying less money that I had as teaching assistant at a university at the time. Some people are just nuts.
The phone screens are the same story - the headhunter has a script provided by their client with a bunch of keywords they are looking for in the answers. They are basically playing bingo with the candidate's answers, ticking off the "correct" keywords. Don't expect them to actually understand what they are asking. They can't - this week they are recruiting a Google engineer and next week they would be trying to fill a civil engineering position and a week later perhaps a chemistry lab technician.
I believe this is exactly what happened here. I have been in a similar situation before myself (not with Google). The hiring managers are complaining about how hard is it to hire talent, but why are they then wasting everyone's time with incompetent HR agencies, pointless phone screens that filter out even good candidates and stupid coding tests. Ask for references (I will be happy to provide), ask to see some code at the interview, check my public code (Github for ex), hire for a trial period. But give me a break with this ridiculous testing/screening nonsense. Nobody else except software engineers seems to have to put up with this type of crap.