Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.
Before joining, I had endless enthusiasm for computer science and programming. Now I feel so unenthusiastic that I question my future in this industry.
(but the comment did seem legit and it is obvious for posting that anonymous)
There is lots of IT folks around posting or just lurking and it would be very cheap to do some postings on Agenda XY here and there. I doubt it does not get tried.
Genuine question - what do you consider to be interesting problems in advertising?
The only problem is that it's hard to command a salary commensurate with how good you are at it unless you're in business for yourself AND the one spending the money.
I thought the answer to that was a rather bland "by gobbling up even more information about everyone"?
Some highly useful data is hard to get directly or requires significant and/or stealthy spend.
Advertising isn't an inherent evil. You find your mechanic, doctor, lawyer, etc because they advertise.
I advertised for one specific company. I worked in an industry that was pretty grey. Some parts of the business were vaguely predatory and others served a great public social need. More importantly, you had to have an actual reason to fill out our forms and follow through with us. We weren't just desperately trying to get any eyeballs. The work that I did very much did help people.
Also you're not going to get much mileage shaming people for what they do for a living. You being reductive doesn't really reflect reality either. I was much more than some marketer and yes, the problems were extremely intellectually stimulating, otherwise I wouldn't have been there.
That's better than I can say for most of the quants I worked with -- they were almost all just in it for the money.
It’s funny you say that, because I found all three literally by looking at reviews and not advertisements. Those 3 categories are perfect examples of industries where referrals are far more reliable than choosing which one had the best ad budget.
Companies pay third parties lots of money to curate their reviews and put them in contact with the reviewer to smooth things over.
I know that because that's the business I work in now.
Companies still have a problem of getting their reviews surfaced to the top of your search. They also have a need to give people the lowest-friction way possible to leave them a positive score when it's the best time in the interaction to do so. There are many large enterprises competing in this space specifically.
The best performing adverts today are ones where you don't even realize you've been marketed to.
That has no relationship to the paid shitstorm of ads on Google.
The overwhelming majority of all other reviews are either the Amazon variety (so a paid endorsement, usually) or from total cranks. People don't really often leave unsolicited reviews.
You mean buying dishonest opinions? Is this supposed to wash "big" advertising innocent? Is this "helping people"?
> The best performing adverts today are ones where you don't even realize you've been marketed to.
And isn't this justifiably what everybody's scared of (and what we should oppose)?
And it's a reasonable question. Thanks for asking.
I'm pretty sure that everything is at scale and so on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that up to that point the stuff I would be working on was not on the table and I could be switching from a place where I like what I'm doing [biotech] to just a highly paid but plainly boring SE job.
This curbed my enthusiasm instantly. Up to that point in my career I always considered available positions based on the actual function I would be doing in the company, never vice-versa.
The afternoon sessions didn't work as well, and although I could still have some extra interviews through phone calls I cancelled them a few days afterwards.
I cannot say for sure what did I miss, but I am certainly totally disillusioned for Big Search as a company today due to it's consumer attitude that I no longer wish for a position there.
Leave. The grass is greener.
What small company is regularly paying over $300k+/yr for senior software engineers and paying over $500k/yr for staff+?
The only people I see leaving the big companies are those who already got their riches and/or bought real estate earlier. The rest of us are either tied to them or trying to get in because the real estate market dictates you must earn that income to stick around the bay.
Well, there's your problem right there.
There are plenty of smaller tech hubs around the world.
Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image.
Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?
Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.
I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.
I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code"
But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?
To be honest the lady taking the interview didn't understand my code, at least that's what I got. The guy with her definitely didn't understand a line I had written.
Maybe that was her way of protecting herself or something else
But I've never come across any real reason to not use dicts
No one is interested in your peak performance, all it matters is consistency, predictability, stability, those robustness metrics. Say interview questions kinda sucks, but you show some competency still, means predictable most of what they have to throw at you will at least partially stick, minimizing factors.
You could argue that a workplace that prefers a trait like that doesn't sound like a place for artists' dream place we all desire, but more towards a "software manufacturing factory" envisioned by electric companies like Hitachi in the '80s, if you do I think maybe it is and maybe they were right to a certain extent.
When most people stop returning Google’s phone calls, so that positions go infilled, then they’ll start talking about change. Right now there’s still enough supply that they don’t have to do anything,
Sounds a lot like google here.
Frankly though, I think there's something more fundamental about large organization as to why this sort of stuff happens (not just at companies). Perhaps it's the iron law of oligarchy, but corruption seems inevitable at scale. Very few innovative people seem able to reap or retain the most value of their work.
Once a company pays you, it's not your work, it's their work. They paid you fair and square.
IMHO a developer need to produce about 10x what's his paid as to cover for the company costs and profits. If one thinks that they can cover those 9 tenths in marketing, office space, infrastructure, admin and legal costs in a more efficient manner, they should quit and start their own company.
And I have no idea where you get your 10X figure from. In fact it's very hard to estimate the specific business value of specific dev work in very large companies, over any time period.
From a high enough level the job becomes "Pay devs to keep the engines running." Unless you're innovating new products/services at a senior level, it's hard to break it down further.
Which is partly why the interview process has become homogenised. Realistically most developers are engine components, not engine designers - although it's easy to be fooled when your component value is process optimisation - and FAANGs have optimised the funnel to select good components.
You need to be senior++ and/or in startup land to be an engine designer - which differs from being a component because it allows independent agency for strategic goal setting, instead of optimisation of tactical implementation.
What boggles my mind is to see the same type of "skill testing" whiteboard coding interviews at smaller companies and startups that pay far less and don't have golden handcuffs to offer.
I've been at Google for 8 years. If I went to one of these smaller companies to interview and they asked me to whiteboard a data structure or algorithm problem I'd just walk out. I'm not the best programmer in the world or particularly shit-hot, but I'm sure there are many that are that would do the same.
Companies copying this process are doing themselves a disservice.
It still may be relevant when you are looking for a specific domain knowledge instead of a generic "programmer". A great example is Amazon Game Studios. They employ the general Amazon hiring process from what I understand yet, as a game studio, it's a complete and utter failure. There are just few thousand experienced game programmers in the whole world and only a fraction of them wants to apply at Amazon at all for different reasons. You cull 99% of them and you are left with inexperienced people who will not be able to learn anything since there is nobody to learn from. Even if few experienced people got through or went around hiring process (e.g. celebrity programmers hired without whiteboarding) they will be in a minority and unable to mentor the rest of the studio. Google and Facebook are spinning up their own game studios and I expect the same result from them.
Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job.
And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.
It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).
Eh, there's a lot of us who haven't done great financially but who have written a lot of open source code being run at bigcos. Being an entrepreneur requires another skill set altogether. One that I seem to lack, although I finally have come up with a solid idea in the last year that might get me somewhere whenever I'm ready to make the move.
I'm sure if I spent significant time preparing, I could do well at Google's interview process, and other FAANG companies have tried multiple times to get me to interview (oddly, never Google), but I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me. I've been much happier working for smaller companies. The one time I worked for a large corporation years ago, I was miserable. People say Google is different, but I'm not convinced.
I would like that sweet compensation, though.
I think the reason is a bit different.
Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm.
That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anything else.
Their code is pretty bad most of the time, they've took beautiful Webkit and turned it into Blink mess. They are all about algorithms, they don't care about code.
And that's a pity that people are copying Google's methodology without understanding why Google is doing so. If you are developing an OS, you'd be better copying Microsoft, which had much of a different approach, nearly without any algorithm questions.
Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems?
I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.
It's like that everywhere. Nobody comes to you with complete requirements. People/customers come with problems they need solved. Sometimes an outline of a specific solution is specified, but there's always a lot of detail missing.
You’re clearly not working on their military-contract Terminator-drone program…
…Unless “better” means “stone cold dead”.
What you get told is What needs to be accomplished, but not How, if that makes sense.
E.G. IF you choose to accept this challenge, this platform is running at XX% availability and we need to run it at YY% availability. HOW you get to do that, it's up to you.
Some folks don't accept these challenges and they go and find and fix their own interesting problems. But that's harder because you have to get buy-in from managers in order to get resources for that.
There is space and need for everyone.
For what it's worth, this doesn't match my experience at all. In the area I work in (SRE in technical infrastructure, but the same seems to be true for our dev partners), I see a lot of expectation for bottom up ownership. I could totally understand if somebody with a different mindset and perspective (I'm a manager, so I can see pretty clearly what's valued at evaluation time) arrived at a different conclusion.
Brian Acton, rejected by Facebook in 2009. Then in 2014 FB acquired his company for $19B...
I'll see if I can find one of the blog posts I've read about the process.
Note: to be clear, I'm describing the process for acquihires, not founders just wanting to sell their company and walk away with some cash (which actually seems to be somewhat unusual).
Edit: this was discussed in a similar thread on HN just last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943500
The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play it safe, follow popular trends, and don’t take any risks on product improvements.
To think about it another way the idea is to create mediocre software with mediocre developers because the software is thought to cost less than finding, hiring, and retaining top quality people.
They don't want to pay anything. They don't deserve best software written by best developers. Take for example GIT, which is extraordinary piece of software, saves a lot of problems and time. If it was not free, most software shops would just keep copies of folders with dates or whatever insane ways they had (SVN is for me insane way as well :) and big paid VCS were popular at big co's. not even one became close to "industry standard" as GIT).
Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.
She said that this is because Google optimizes their interviews for IQ. Not just raw knowledge.
Not only are you incorrect, but you are completely off topic.
I am saying Gayle Lackman, the author of Cracking the coding interview and, in the past, one of the board members who decide on candidates in the google interview literally told me word for word that the interview optimizes for IQ. Meaning that there are tons of engineers who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough.
Understand?
Some of the smartest people work at google for half a million in TC.
>I don't see any data that says it's correlated with standard IQ test scores.
While there's no Data that correlates IQ with algorithm problems. Intuitively the more intelligent you are the better you would be at these algorithm problems.
If IQ measures intelligence and if intelligence determines your ability to perform well on algorithm problems than your performance on these problems correlates with IQ.
To deny the above logic would be to say intelligence has no correlation with IQ and/or algorithms therefore algorithms don't correlate with IQ.
Not every axiom needs to be measured with data. Common sense and intuition also fill the gap where no data exists. Google saying Intelligence correlates with your problem solving abilities and abilities to solve computer science problems is something that absolutely makes sense even if no data to back it exists.
>Leetcode grind for 3 months is not exactly raw ability.
Doesn't matter how long you spend on leetcode. Google will present you with a problem you haven't seen before and there are a huge amount of people who have done leetcode for years and can't pass the interview questions.
If you're a guy who just grinds for 3 months and can suddenly pass the google interview with flying colors than you're the guy that google wants because there are many people who can't do this.
I actually passed the on-site and hiring committee on my third try, but was (apparently) nixed by some executive, for reasons I can only guess at.
I'm estimating prevalence based on my SAT and GRE scores. As supporting evidence, even colleagues with PhDs often seem not to do as well when mathy sorts of puzzles come up in real life. As often noted, however, that and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.
It might be sour grapes, but lately I've come to appreciate the benefits of being the big fish in a tiny pond, rather than the tiny fish in an ocean I'd be at a FAANG. Money's nice, of course, but in the end you do pay for it, one way or another.
Yeah it's like going to an elite university and competing with geniuses. I get it, I think I'm right at that cusp too.
Bit of a tangent, but, for anyone who's interested, I'm guessing the book was Steven Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual [0], as it is well-regarded and has a red cover.
Also, even more tangentially, there are videos of the author's Algorithms course lectures online from 2012 which I went through once and they were pretty good [1].
(There were one or two that had audio issues or issues seeing what he projected on the screen, but there are multiple years' worth of videos, so you can choose an alternate from an earlier year if necessary and the slides are available there too, so you can follow along with them, if need be; audio-only files are are also available if you want them).
[1] https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~algorith/video-lectures/
It matters how long you spent time on leetcode/other practices from popular algorithm books (comen, skiena, sedgewick). Source : friends, ex co-workers, and personal experience. Sometimes they just change the "story" questions but the algo and tricks are the same, sometime they took it verbatim from leetcode (or the other way around: someone leaked them to leetcode).
> who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough.
Cool story, but a test that has some true negatives says nothing about its false positive and false negative rate.
Gayle has to convince you that an entire life’s work impacting hundreds of thousands of people’s careers isn’t deeply flawed (because that would reflect pretty poorly on Gayle).
Gayle is the last person you would want to ask if the Google interview process is good. Understand?
Would you ask Donald Trump if his presidential administration is doing well?
You're absolutely insane if you compare google engineers with the trump administration. Nobody thinks of google engineers like this. Check yourself. Being a google engineer is like getting into stanford or berkeley the prestige is high and I've even asked engineers who've worked in both scrappy startups and google.
The difference to them is night and day; working outside of a google-like company is like dealing with people at a community college... the level of intelligence, work and projects are on a whole different level.
The google interview process is absolutely stellar at creating teams of raw intellectual power. What it is not stellar at is catching all the people who are incredible programmers but bad at whiteboard interviewing... that's it.
whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump. You never ask someone who is responsible for creating a whole process/team/product for honestly critical info about it. Unless they are willfully malicious (which I doubt Gayle is), they are certainly convinced they’ve been doing the right thing (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it).
> working outside of a google-like company is like dealing with people at a community college...
Sorry, but whoever you talked to took you for a ride. Most Google engineers are writing glue code and glorified ETL processes. I used to work there, I left because it got way to big an deteriorated quickly and now work at a startup with several employees I personally know took 50% pay cuts by turning town Google offers.
> The google interview process is absolutely stellar at creating teams of raw intellectual power
Not from what I saw from 2012 going forward. It was filled with mediocre devs that wrote lots of bad code, including ones that would slip in quadratic runtime behavior. The only thing Google had going for it is that early on it did attract some brilliant people that believed in the mission and created the stellar infrastructure supporting the masses today.
Do you have any reasonable way to convince me and everyone reading your responses that your opinions are more valid than other people who offer contrary opinions?
Why would someone take a 50% pay cut and turn down a google offer? There has to be a bigger reason than the one you mentioned.
>whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump.
I assumed your analogy was used to state that people at google are incompetent and that those who are incompetent can't recognize their own incompetence. The later part may be true in the context of google but I disagreed with the former. Your reply indicates to me that you in fact don't think much of google engineers and that your comparison of incompetence is apt.
As far as I know Gayle didn't work to create the interview process, she was just part of the board and now she actively works to help people pass it. Saying that there exists many people who can't pass the google interview will harm sales of her book. I believe it is against her incentive to say it and that she only said it because she believe it's the truth. There is no active lying going on here.
Their strategy is the same across the board: practice makes perfect (a.k.a leetcode). Don't give up, keep trying.
You are well aware that there's a big industry around interview preps for Hi-Tech BigCos and Gayle herself is one of the implicit founding of this industry right?
Pre-Leetcode/HackerRank the kind of people who got accepted to Google are mostly their kind: ACM/TopCoder and most folks who grew up/go to school in Bay Area because well duh... It's what they do everyday: practicing leetcode style problem solving. The Stanford/UC Berkeley folks got in because well... Interview questions are shared among interns because there's no database like today's LeetCode.
It’s far from universal, but the incentives between managers, workers, and shareholders never really align that well.