I’ve been stuck in the final SVP approval part of their hiring process for a week. At this point I think I’m just going to keep my current job. Too bad — seemed like a good time to get equity at a good “strike” price
I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.
Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.
Having an internal reference may have helped, as did the fact that I told them I was actively interviewing and had offers.
So you can absolutely get hired in engineering without internal references. (I'm also on a hiring committee myself.)
At worst you pose a massive threat to the company/codebase. LOL i accidentally leaked all our secrets to china/apple/MS whoops.
I've been on development teams which had contractors as 20% or more members. We had just couple of interviews and next-day offers for contractors while full timers went through multi-month process. Both worked on same code, often similarly complex tasks and used same on-boarding docs etc. One difference was that full timers were given more longer term tasks although, looking back, I feel many longer tasks simply became longer term because of tribal knowledge full timers developed and kept to themselves. The contractors were required to extensively document everything all the time :).
> hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa
Places where this happens are normally considered very high stress and competitive.
You're arguing in favour of high turnover - that can't be good neither for the company nor for the employees.
A congenial but mediocre developer can stick around forever in most places once they're in.
This performance management weakness also makes me suspicious of various companies claiming to have nailed the interview process.
But that congenial/mediocre developer is still taking up a headcount that could hold a congenial/high-performing developer instead. There is also a separate issue where mediocrity discourages high-performers.
But it'll give you a reputation that makes it difficult to entice the sort of people whose current employers don't want them to leave.
We got a few folks who were in the final stage at Google, and we contacted them, interviewed them, made the offer, and got them in the door before Google ever got back to them.
If you so lack in trust that the people on your team can make good hiring decisions, even to the point of rejecting somebody you haven’t actually met...well... that’s just nuts.
I wonder whether their approach has been alienating entire large categories of people, and what diversity of ideas and influences they're missing as a result.
You know, I work in tech but I have never attempted to have a Career in Tech. I definitely don't own a whiteboard and I'm sure I'd never get past the resume stage. (I've only actively applied for a couple of jobs in my life and all in the past year, purely because I thought I should REALLY get some experience with applying for jobs. I actually just had an interview and bombed it so much, omg, at one point I claimed not to know JavaScript! :D I don't think it's for me.)
But out of the rareified circles of HN, I've not found any of the career stuff talked up on here to be necessary anyway. There's more code that needs writing than coders to write it and so long as that's true there'll be work going. I work a few days a week for a company and the rest for myself. I have fun and write code and invent things and people generally give me enough money to pay my bills so I'm happy with that. It's a pretty sweet deal! Before I was a coder I was an unpaid family caregiver (hence no school or credentials or career) so compared to that I can't really imagine a programming job that could really genuinely be BAD. They are all simply gradations of sweet.
My brother (who did massively go to school) works at Google and loves it. I drop in and hang out with him there sometimes and it does seem great for a certain kind of person. And they have so many resources and work on loads of fun games and obviously it would be great to be rich as well. I think it's really clear why it's so attractive. If you think you have a shot then go for it!
But if you know you don't have a shot, why break your heart over it, is my view. It's not a bad thing to be clear eyed about your prospects in life.
Note: I don't represent Google.
Guess who got to tell me I didn't get it (again)?
Note to recruiters: don't say that stuff.
Fortunately, I'm still happy in my current job.
Another thing to note about Google hiring is that it's very different for different role types. Specifically, for SWEs, Sales, and other roles that are expected to function in a largely boilerplate manner, it's fairly cut & dried how things work, but for roles that are less clearly defined (for example, "program manager" or "solutions consultant") the actual responsibilities can be so highly variable (or so niche) that interviewing for them is a specialization in itself. These kind of one-off situations is where Google's "automate all the things" general mentality falls apart.