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Comment by _Marak_ | Hacker News Reader

Google hiring has been fubar for years now.

I think many of us here have been contacted ( unsolicited ) by Google for job interviews in the past.

My Google interview story ends with me stopping the 8th interview ( 4th technical interview ) half-way in due to the frustration of listening to my interviewer loudly reply to text messages on his phone while I'm trying to write very complex source code into a shared Google Text Document using no other development tools.

At one point the 8th interviewer asked me if I had ever used Github before. Considering Google cold-contacted me on my public Github email address and half my resume was Github projects it was obvious this guy didn't even look at my resume...

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So who at Google is using Google Docs to write their code, day-to-day? No one, right?

And 8 interviews? Was it even the last potential interview? That is indeed fubar. They do this because they can. Hiring is an expensive process, and not everyone can afford to dump this much effort into a single hire.

>>And 8 interviews?

Pretty standard across these AmaGoogFaceSoft like companies. They basically have too much money and time to spend on these things, and they inevitable hire people like them who have lot of free time on their hands to prepare for their textbook puzzle questions.

In other words they wish to hire candidates who do bare minimum work but spend hours preparing for interviews to move to next jobs.

15-20 yrs back general app s/w hiring was not about solving algos and puzzles but more about object oriented software and threading etc.

15-20 years ago the market wasn't flooded with viable candidates and people claiming to be viable candidates

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

Is this sarcasm? You just make your entire hiring call on talking to the person without looking at their career, academics and skills?

If you’re one person out of many in the hiring process, and your role is to evaluate some specific skills, then yes, it may well be the case that knowing more about the candidate’s background will hurt more than it helps.

Exactly

I doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my next opportunity.

> I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt.

I have had a pleasure of interviewing a 'veteran' who listed both Emacs and vim on his resume, among dozens of other keywords and many, many years of professional experience. I asked him, how do you exit these text editors? "As any other program", he answered, perplexed - "you click on the cross in the upper-right corner".

This was not an unique and ever especially outstanding event in my interviewing experience.

Is that answer wrong? Does using GVIM or Aquamacs mean you don’t know vim and emacs?

When I asked if he was using a console version or some wrapper that supported window manager, he didn't understand the question. When I asked if there's some another way to close it, he, just as surprised, told about the main program menu, just below the window title.

Any person who actually used either of these editors even once would have a pretty solid idea of what I was going for. It was a very simple, quick test to determine that he just assembled his CV from semi-relevant keywords at random.

the right answer would be to google stackoverflow for how to kill vim after saving your work (pressing ctrl+s) :)

I don't know if I believe that. Lots of people (in particular folks using Windows or Mac) use the GUI version of those editors because they're preinstalled on machines at school and work. They may not even know there is a console version of those programs. (Also "window manager" is pretty *nix-specific jargon.)

I get that someone might use the default text editor. But where would a vim/emacs variant be installed that way? And if it were, why would it last for a novice any longer than "um, this is weird and doesn't do anything". Vim and emacs are only tolerable if you put the effort to learn how they work. And if you did, how would you get to the end of a tutorial without learning how to quit?

You're right, it's technically possible, but the parent is justified in being really suspicious that someone is citing familiarity with both emacs and vim and is confused that there's a non-mouse way to do something.

Graphical Emacs/VIM were installed on the CS lab machines when I was in college. I’m pretty sure they were part of the default programming environment setup at my first workplace. GUI versions of these apps behave a lot like regular Windows or Mac apps. You can save with CTRL-S, etc. I can totally see how someone could be very experienced in using it and never know there is a keyboard shortcut to quit apart from the ‘x’ on the title bar.

The question would have been better if it was directed to an Emacs feature for which graphical versions didn’t obey ordinary Windows conventions.

The whole point of vim and emacs is that you can do everything from the keyboard and not have to switch your hands to/from it. Fancier versions (like Macvim, which I use) support the same basic premise.

Now, certainly, with the fancier GUIs you can absolutely use mouse inputs. But it's quite a bizarre scenario where someone would be using an interface narrowly optimized to use the keyboard for everything, and yet still consistently use the mouse to exit "like every other application". The reason you use emacs/vim is to keep your hands from having to leave the keyboard! Why would you do that and yet not use the standard command for quitting? Not even ctrl/cmd-Q?

The parent is right to be suspicious of someone claiming extensive emacs/vim experience while using the mouse as a default option for a frequent, required command.

FWIW: I'm a Macvim user that has never quit it by clicking an X even though I know it's possible (at least for the individual windows). Although also FWIW I don't use the vim window feature and would fail questions about that.

That you believe you can judge any developer by how they use their text editor is one of the most pitiful things I've heard on this topic yet. Every time I begin a new job, I pray I'm spared crossing paths with people who think like this.

I certainly can judge them for lying on their CV. As I explained in another thread, from my further conversation with him, this developer obviously had no clue about either of these text editors and clearly included them in his CV just as random keywords.

How do you interview someone more experienced than yourself?

In the last set of interviews I had to do, I've ended up doing the role of talking to people about the technologies listed on their CV and asking them detailed questions to find out just how well they really know them. This just because I happened to be the person in our company who knew a little bit about most of the things that the people we were interviewing claimed to be good at.

Sometimes you have a really nice technical conversation with them and discover that they're clever and knowledgable. Sometimes you uncover a blagger trying their luck. Sometimes a bit of both. So, it's a useful part of the interview I think.

So very recently we interviewed someone with 30+ years of experience, more than any programmer at our company (only 3 developers), and much more than myself (8 years).

So I went away and did a little bit of research about the technologies he'd talked about: COM and Corba and JBoss and other artefacts 80s and 90s, and tried to ask some questions in as respectful a way as I good, and I hope he wasn't too annoyed. In the end he was great (actually I found his enthusiasm and attention to detail pretty inspiring) and we hired him.

I can definitely see how a person would be annoyed by that sort of probing though, especially when the interviewer doesn't know what they're talking about.

But, what's the alternative?

It doesn't sound to me like you did anything wrong. I think what I have in mind is more subtle than just asking questions. I don't have any objection to being asked questions in general. I would prefer you ask questions appropriate to the claims I'm making about myself - that is, I'll feel more insulted if you ask more than a couple of remedial questions. You may suspect I'm a fraud, but beware of communicating to me that you suspect I'm a fraud.

The alternative is for our field to have a strong organization that vets it's members, like any other professional field such as lawyers and other engineering disciplines. That way, before you even meet the person, you can assume a level of competence and can get into much deeper questions faster.

And then all the high-paying jobs will go to people who went to MIT and Stanford, and if you're great but couldn't afford more than community college, tough luck, because your credential is the same as other people who barely finished high school.

I think that would probably already happen if it weren't for the fact that there are more high paying jobs then there are MIT/Stanford/etc grads.

I guess the irony is that most of the interview tactics now focus simply on comparing candidate A to candidate B, in contrast to learning about candidate A or learning about candidate B and evaluating their suitability based on their skills and experience.

If you ask both candidates a question like "Johnny climbed up to the top of the hill, where was Johnny when he stopped climbing?" and then get a blank stare from both candidates then you are going to conclude that you can't find any 'qualified' candidates because they can't answer a dead-simple question.

The vetting of candidates used to be contributions to software product releases and publications (in addition to degrees and GPA). A motivated hiring manager could also search mail archives of popular open-source projects.

For an engineer who is doing an interview it is hard to judge those things written there. There are other stages (i.e. before an techbical interview is setup) where those are checked in depth.

For the technical interviewer knowing a bit about the candidate can help to start in an area where the candidate should have experience and then move into the direction you are interviewing for, of you have a clear set of requirements for the job however can also directly start there.

I'm not making a hiring decision, I'm just an interviewer.

Uh, what? Every time I've done an interview, the first thing I looked at was the candidate's resume. Even ignoring the fact that everyone is different, has different experiences, and is strong/weak in different areas (which is very important to know as an interviewer), I'm not sure what kind of bias you're trying to avoid.

FWIW, I’ve seen the same practice advised in “unconscious bias training”. The idea being that if you notice that someone went to the same university you did, or a prestigious university, or worked for a prestigious company or a company you worked for, you’ll be unconsciously biased in their favor. The antidote to unconscious bias is to have a standardized interview and a standardized rubric for evaluating the candidate’s answers and to disregard any other information.

I’m very deliberately not sharing my personal opinions on this.

I am skeptical that standardized rubrics can help but my approach is more effective and easier anyway, at least for things you can avoid knowing. Doesn't help with race or gender bias though unfortunately.

The recruiters tell you if they want you to ask questions about specific topics and realistically I'm only going to get to ask one question anyway. The main bias that I'm trying to avoid is knowing what school the candidate went to.

And most resumes are full of lies anyway.

You really think the best way to start a new business relationship is with the assumption that the guy across the table is a lying scumbag?

I am not sure I understand your position. So you would not get a lawyer to review a business contract because doing so would imply that your business partner is a lying scumbag, a morally unacceptable position when starting a new business relationship?

No, and that's called due diligence. Same with hiring. I have come across enough candidates where there was a huge gap between claims written on the CV and what the candidate actually did or knew to blindly trust any CV.

And the best candidates are often not the best CV writers.

You start by assuming they may be a lying scumbag. Hopefully by the time you make an offer, you're reasonably certain they aren't.

And somebody putting only lies in a resume will turn super honest on the phone?

No but he wouldn't be able to answer questions that go a bit deeper into what they claim they did or know but didn't/don't.

Yes. And that this kind of discovery - especially detecting if they lied at you in written text, which for me is an exclusion criterion - requires having read the text...

To avoid bias? As in to be completely unprepared? Wouldn't reading the résumé give you a better idea of the interviewee's background, and allow you to better assess him?

At Google there are two layers of the hiring process. Interviewers provide information for the hiring committee. The hiring committee has the resume. They don't need people to read it to them.

> They don't need people to read it to them.

I'm not following. Why would someone read the resume to someone else?

So, when I interview someone, I ask them some technical questions and maybe some questions about their work, and provide structured feedback to a seperate group of people who make final hiring decisions.

There's actually not a whole lot of reason for me to look at their resume. The group who makes hiring decisions has it, so my interpretation of it won't be that valuable. Potentially I could ask them to elaborate on some of their prior work or projects, but that's usually less meaningful than just asking technical questions.

I'm not there to figure out how good the candidate is at the things they claim to be good at. I'm there to figure out how good they are at the things the company wants them to be good at.

(Not trying to claim that I'm actually able to figure out much of anything in a technical interview, but that's the goal.)

Or her/them.

In standard American English, masculine is the default gender when the subject is unknown. So using "him" is proper. Using "them" as a singular pronoun is jarring to the ears.

Third-person singular they has a long tradition in English. It may not be as familiar to you, but it's nothing new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

I was not aware of this, I've mostly heard "they"/"them". I take "he" to be an awareness or assumption of the gender, and find it quite uncomfortable to hear with regards to an industry with such a strong gender imbalance.

No. It's actually a fading usage. The current pronouns when not assuming gender are they/them.

I'm happy to see i'm no the only one who has adopted this practice[1]. Sure enough, reading resumes filled me with bias about a person's assumed design skills, communication skills, organizational skills and attention to detail, none of which a resume is adequately capable of determining.

When i interview candidates today, i check a resume for 3 things: years they have been coding professionally, has their average tenure with companies been > 6-9 months, what languages do they list? It has yet to be a practice that has bitten me in any way i can identify. In fact, i feel i give candidates a better chance when im not criticizing their resume before meeting them.

1. https://blog.benroux.me/resumes-make-hiring-harder-ignore-th...

So in the realm of infinite knowledge and experience candidates may have, the signal you want is based purely on the specific contrived questions of your choice.

You should be aware this is not unbiased, it's just biased towards those who happen to have worked on similar problems to what you think is important.

Google can probably get away with this due to the size of applicant pool, but when I see other companies cargo-culting this approach I can't help but see a huge talent arbitrage opportunity.

It's biased toward people who have taken a few weeks to prep on the standard Google interview curriculum that has been widely advertised for a decade.

It's hiring committee's job to read the resume, not the interviewer's.

What is the interviewer's job?

Ask a technical question or two and assess the candidate based on their reply.

How can you assess this when divorced from the resume, or is this technical Q&A purely "people skills" and how is that possible?

The interviewer's job should be to determine whether, and how, the candidate would succeed in the organization.

No, that's the job of whoever is making the hiring decision. The interviewer is providing signal for that person / people.

in my opinion that disenfranchises the rank and file who should, and usually do, have as much interest and voice in the organization's future as the hiring managers

You seem to be getting beaten up over this point, so I'd like to un-lurk and support it.

A screener's job is to read the resume and match static facts to company needs. A recruiter's job is to gauge subjective fit and mutual interest.

An interviewer's job is to assess analytical ability, communication skills, personality, and culture fit, as well as to be an advertisement for the company/team/project/position if both sides want to close the deal. None of that depends on a re-evaluation of the static facts on the resume.

If I interviewed with a CEO or VP of Engineering, and that person asked me questions about my resume, I'd run away as quickly as possible from that company. I'd do the same depending on the circumstances if an engineer referenced my resume during an interview.

I think that reading the resume is probably appropriate for the person making the hiring decision but for the interviewer, it's clearly a bad idea.

I'm less concerned about bias than you are. For me it's more that your resume is what you used to do, and I'm interested in what you will do.

I also found history the most boring subject in high school. Probably not a coincidence.

>> If I interviewed with a CEO or VP of Engineering, and that person asked me questions about my resume, I'd run away

What else are they going to ask you about? If my resume highlights my notable accomplishments in XYZ and the VP of E asks me if I have any interest in doing XYZ then I am going to consider the VP of E to be a total idiot or incredibly distracted.

I don't care about XYZ. The company you came from already did that. The world doesn't need another XYZ. But we do care about XYZ', and we think someone with experience in X, Y, XY, YZ, XZ, XYZ, WXY, etc. will help us build the first XYZ' in the industry. That's why the screener picked your resume among the 500 we received.

So I'll ask about XYZ', because that's what we're going to build.

(We're actually building ZYX''', but that's a secret we'll reveal once you join the team.)

good luck with that

I think that approach is misguided. The resume has background information and my opinion is that interviews do not correctly capture the capabilities of a person.

Yeah but I'm not the person making the hiring decision, I'm just the interviewer. The way this works at companies like Google is that the interviewers submit feedback to the hiring committee and the hiring committee decides.

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