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Comment by yid | Hacker News Reader

My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral, and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reason for terminating contact, just plain dead silence. I tried emailing her a few times and left her a voicemail, noting very politely that they had contacted me and not vice versa, and asking if they were still interested in setting up an interview, but all I got was stony silence. If that's not broken, I don't know what is. For a company that hires the best engineering talent, they either hire substandard HR people, or perhaps most HR people just operate at a different level of efficacy.

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I had a deadline to give a yes/no to another company, and my recruiter at Google asked me to get my deadline extended so that Google would have time to interview me.

I asked the other company for an extension, which I got, and told my Google recruiter the new deadline.

Then Google never responded and I never did an interview with them.

I felt really put-off by that.

Went through a dozen super generic interviews for a generic engineer role. Got a good feedback but ended up finding out that the role was filled before my case was presented to the hiring committee and that even though the interviews were generic, they try to use the results to fill one chosen position only. I needed to restart the entire process and do more generic interviews to try for another generic role in one particular opening.

Why didn't you just say "yes". You can always change your mind.

I think his point was that he acted in good faith -- with the expectation that Google would reciprocate -- and was essentially let down without courtesy. Even a simple "sorry, we're unable to interview you, our apologies for asking you to get an extension" would have gone a long way, even if just for the word-of-mouth reputation.

Yep.

Re: Google's word-of mouth reputation:

On the one hand, I feel kind of stupid bitching about my experience with Google, even though it really did happen. I don't like bitching.

On the other hand, as we hackers talk about this kind of issue at Google, maybe they'll eventually listen and shape up a bit if there really are systemic problems, and that's a win for everyone.

I actually tried giving Google "suggestions," though I don't think it made an impact (which is to be expected and understandable).

Why would you care? Essentially when you boil it down to eesentials (ie what pays for your paycheck) Google is an advertising company with a terrible track record on human rights and privacy.

I think Google does listen and try to improve in response to feedback. Interviews and hiring can be especially hard, because of the number of resumes, phone screens, and interviews involved. For what it's worth, I think the interview and screening process has gotten better over the years, even if we have a ways to go.

Sorry to hear about your experience though.

Once again, Google's Hacker-PR-Department springs into action to mitigate potential damage and to placate Hackers!

I guess you're saying, why didn't I just tell the other company "yes," and then reneg if Google accepted me?

For one thing, I don't like pulling crap like this.

I might have anyway, except that it would have damaged existing and longstanding relationships in the other (non-Google) company that are worth maintaining to me.

While your intentions are undoubtedly admirable, and you certainly more than likely have very valid reasons for not "pulling crap like this" (not burning bridges, for one), I hope you're not mistaken by some baseless belief that any company would extend you the same courtesy.

Meh.

I think it's pretty rare for a company to tell someone "Yes, you can definitely work for us, here is a contract for you to sign and a start date and how much you're going to make" and then revoke that.

Which is the equivalent to me telling a company I'll work for them and then reneging.

But of course, yes, they could do it, and you're right that people and companies aren't always courteous.

I've had a company retract an offer after I asked for an extension to accept. I guess they felt like a second choice.

I'm glad your experiences have been so plush. In my past as a graphic designer (this doesn't happen anymore in web development, mind you), I've been hired and then let go in the span of a few months, due to cuts and layoffs. Maybe I'm burned and a bit cynical, but the lesson I've taken away is that business is business.

It's not "pulling crap", as you say. For one thing, until you sign the contract, you're not bound in any way. Even then, the first few months are typically defined as a trial period, in which both parties are free to walk away. Better opportunities always crop up, and you can just say "sorry, a better offer has popped up".

I don't think that's unique to Google. I've gotten the silent treatment multiple times at other large companies, after being accosted by a recruiter. At Intel, it even happened after I received a job offer.

I was on a project that was in crunch mode, so I asked if I could start in three or four months (instead of three or four weeks, like they wanted). Apparently, that was such an egregious breach of etiquette on my part that the hiring manager (an engineer) stopped responding to phone calls or email. And it wasn't as if my start date came out of nowhere -- I mentioned the issue during my phone interview, during my onsite interview, and on the form they sent me where they wanted me to list my availability.

unfortunately externalising costs and risks are just fundamentally part of corporations by incentive than the choice of some hiring managers

Same thing happened to me. I contribute to many projects, I even spent my time for some Google projects. A lot of time actually. I had an offer with another great company, and they told me to let them extend it for another week. I did the interview process at Google, and did two phone interviews and one onsite. I thought I did pretty well, but I was waiting for their reply back for a week, and no reply. Then I pinged them, they apologized and said they are waiting for references. I pinged them again for another week, no reply yet. Then I accepted the other job because Google's Hiring process sucks so much, that it tells you right there that they don't care about their employees. I spent time out of my own work life to do interviews, and they can't bother to email us in the recommended timeframe. They said within 4 days, but 14 days ... Working for a company like that would seem disastrous.

There's a consistency in these stories from different people over the years that tells me this is one of the normal processes at Google. It may not be intentional, but it is known and there is no sincere desire to fix the process. That that is so tells me the process is about asserting power and place, and not about looking for talent.

Well, why would they? Even today, they still have a reputation as the dream place to work (even tho' with what, 20,000 engineers now, they are more like HP or IBM than they are a startup). They have zero need to change until their deluge of candidates starts to dry up.

The original article makes a good case about why they need to change. They have had some serious misses lately, and some of that may be attributed to a broken hiring process that emphasizes coding ability above all other considerations.

All of these recruitment horror stories are starting to scare me about Google, but I wonder how much of it is selection bias. Anyone who has a good experience almost definitionally gets sucked into the G-Vortex and basically never gets heard from again, right?

I have a friend who just accepted a position at Google, and she said the process was long and arduous, but it wasn't a horror story.

From my point of view, they or someone inside clearly thought I was "good", and I obviously passed the minimum clearance test from HR. Since I didn't even get a single technical interview, they could not have developed their opinion on my abilities further. I can therefore be possibly valuable to the company in the future, but as a result of this idiocy, am completely put off by them, especially since I've got offers from the other biggies.

A better approach would be to vet me thoroughly before contacting me. In other words, only contact me if you're sure that you can at least put me through a single interview.

A long and arduous process with a job at the end makes it a long fought battle that you were victorious in.

Getting a rejection after that (and all the psychological baggage that comes with a company "rejecting you") makes it a bitter loss.

Same process (just as broken), but the outcome is hugely influential.

I think you're spot on, tho -- the squeaky wheel is the one that complains to internet forums.

Well, I know Googlers pretty well. Even internally, they say their hiring process really sucks. Not one person told me this, 80% of the people I talked to told me the same thing. I personally wont blame the interviewers or the recruiters, they are doing their job. I blame their messed up Hiring Committee. I don't understand why the hiring committee can't collaborate with the interviewers and hiring manager to hire a person. Everything is done through writing, and the hiring committee does everything quietly on their own. I even wonder, is the hiring committee a computer?

> I even wonder, is the hiring committee a computer?

That information is well above your classification level, citizen.

Are you a communist?

That's done to eliminate bias. Remember how a couple days ago, there was a story on HN about how interviewing really sucks, because ultimately, what determines whether you get the job or not whether you happen to have a personal rapport with your interviewer? People end up caring more about how you present yourself socially than what you know.

The hiring committee is Google's answer to that. The idea is to completely divorce the hiring decision from people who have personally known the candidate. Instead, there's a very broad written information channel between interviewers, references, recruiters, and the hiring committee. But it remains written, so that all your unconscious biases about people stay out of the decision, and at least in theory, it's all based on hard data.

But this an overly-academic approach to the problem. Your interviewers will still write in whatever they write, as colored by their perceptions and rapport with you. If they write that you had a bad interview, then that's going to poison the HC. There's no way around this.

The HC appears to serve only as a layer of noise/a random selection filter to determine who is actually offered a job.

It forces you to back up your opinions with data, though.

As long as the decision is made by humans, you will never get a completely unbiased result, because humans have biases. It's the same in every field - people pretend science is objective because it relies on data, but if you read Kuhn, you'll see that a lot of science is personality cults and subjective opinions and schools of thought. People pretend Google's search algorithms are objective because they rely strictly on numbers and data, but they're written by humans, and humans choose which data is important.

But that doesn't make the data useless. The act of being forced to support your opinions with data makes you dig much deeper into them, and surfaces relevant information that'd otherwise be ignored immediately because it doesn't fit your preconceptions.

Think about science vs. polemics. If you're actually doing original research in a scientific field, you'll realize that there's a lot of uncertainty hidden behind "the scientific consensus", and a lot of other ways of interpreting that same data. But that doesn't mean that the scientific consensus is wrong. It may be wrong, but it's probably less wrong than whatever vitriol Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck or Michael Moore is spouting at the moment.

That's done to eliminate bias... But it remains written, so that all your unconscious biases about people stay out of the decision, and at least in theory, it's all based on hard data.

Impossible. The interviewers, just like us, are human. They come with a bunch of built-in biases that will show through in any contact they have with the hiring committee, whether it's verbal or written.

I just don't see your "theory" holding up in reality.

And I don't see this as a bad thing. As someone making a hiring decision, I want the emotion. I want to personally talk to the interviewer and get full impression of what they thought of the candidate. You're not going to get that through an email. Technical competence is only one part of the equation. If one of this person's potential teammates doesn't feel good about the prospect of working with the candidate, I want to know that.

Of course, Google has this ridiculous idea that they can hire people and only later decide what they'll be working on and which team they'll be working in. So you end up hiring people who don't even meet their team until after they start. I just can't imagine working for a company like that -- from the perspective of the existing employee, even.

Did you read my response to gergles? No, you'll never get a perfectly unbiased process. But having to justify your opinions with written data forces you to delve a little deeper than you otherwise would, and expose facts that might qualify or disqualify a candidate, not just impressions. It's still wrong, but it's less wrong.

Culture fit is one of the dimensions that candidates are evaluated on. But again, feedback needs to have supporting data. If you didn't like a candidate, you have to say "Didn't have a firm handshake" vs. "Appeared combative and arrogant when faced with a problem he couldn't solve; said 'Google's interview process is a bunch of technical trivia bullshit' before stomping out of the room", so that the hiring committee can judge whether this is just a nit specific to the interviewer or an actual problem that will impact the candidate's prospective teammates.

The reason why new hires don't know their teams is because of Google's corporate secrecy policies: most of the time, the projects they're working on haven't launched, and therefore can't be talked about outside the company. Even then, there are exceptions. When I was hired, I was told which department I'd be working in before I signed my offer letter, who my manager and his manager were, and was given the option of working elsewhere in the company if I really disliked that. My teammate actually negotiated the specific project he'd be working on, and they created the project for him. You need to have negotiating leverage to do this, though: they not only have to want you enough for you to get hired, they have to want you more than the vast majority of other hires, enough that they're willing to bend the rules a bit.

The recruiting/interview process at Google has a lot of problems, but I don't think that either the interviewer/HC split or the whole-company teams-later approach are part of them. Both of these were created to solve specific problems that have crept into the hiring practices of other big companies, and by and large, do a better job at it than the alternatives.

What about the bias that comes from having worked with someone for a few years, and knowing without any doubt that they are awesomely gifted, loyal to a fault, and willing to dive into the breach for the common cause? You cannot figure that out with a sterile interviewing process.

A company does not have to guard against 'bias' other than racial, religious and that sort of thing. 'Bias' towards (or against) people you know is called knowledge.

Just to counter the negative bias :)

I had an awesome hiring experience. Extremely responsive recruiter (I understand that's not always the case given the number of temps). Took me two weeks from on site to getting an offer. Everyone I referred so far had a similar experience.

I was hired by Google, but shortly after getting my offer my recruiter, who was in charge of getting me placed with a team, disappeared. Presumably he was fired or quit, but no one ever gave me a reason; he simply stopped responding to my emails, and then a week later his voicemail wouldn't let me leave a message.

At that point, I contacted his boss, who thanked me for "letting her know". A few days later I got a call from my new recruiter, who was going on vacation the following day for two weeks. I didn't end up getting placed with a team until about three weeks later.

It's not exactly a horror story, but it wasn't a great first impression either. Other engineers I talked to had similar stories.

My first day at Google was yesterday. The interview process was a typical full day affair with questions ranging from algorithms to large scale systems design. I had a blast, and definitely stumbled on some questions, but I found it infinitely enjoyable. HR was responsive and helped me find an Android plushie for my girlfriend.

To be fair, I definitely believe all of these horror stories are true and deserved. I think that Google just operates at such a ridiculous scale that it's hard to get everything working together just right. I believe "the system works" in the majority case, but that outliers are particularly bad.

I'm a Googler. I found the hiring process exhausting, but I felt it was thorough and fair. My recruiter did a fantastic job of walking me through the process and letting me know what was going on. I'm sure Google has made lots of mistakes hiring people, but there's always a bias towards complaint. Most people don't have the energy to type up a "everything went fine" reply.

I second that. I'm a future Google SwEng intern, my recruiter was always kind and helpful, even in tasks that wouldn't strictly be her duty, and the whole process (4 phone interviews x 45 min. each) was a bit lenghty (2-3 months) but fair, challenging and enjoyable. Interviewers have also always been kind and helpful.

My hiring process at Google was reasonably long and rigorous, but it certainly wasn't a horror story.

I left about six months ago, and while there were things I didn't like about the hiring and interview process, it was still significantly better than any other place I've worked.

Really? I went through the Google interview process back in 2006, and I had a fantastic time. The level of transparency was a little frustrating, but everyone I was in contact with was polite and responsive, and I never found myself waiting for replies. The on-site interviewers were really fun to talk to, and I left with a great impression.

But I wouldn't call the process significantly better than anywhere else. I've had plenty of other interviews on par with that, some better, some worse.

Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear there.

From the viewpoint of interviewer and hirer rather than interviewee, I thought the process was better than anywhere else I've worked.

I liked the expected level of rigor, I liked the decisions being made by a separate committee, and I liked the salary package being set by yet another group.

The main problems I saw were: * recruiters dropping the contact chain with the candidate * interviewers not preparing enough * not enough of a feedback cycle to interviewers about their performance.

The recruiters are usually contractors, and they have a lot of turnover. Not that you should have gotten silence, but it's possible that's why.

That doesn't excuse them. These days we have databases. There's no reason that an entry can't be made for each applicant which is handed off to other recruiters when one leaves. That the process seems so tied to individuals is surprising to me.

despite the very high tech and unique looking appearance of their hiring process, it's actually very typical. It's different rather by its scalability and the extend to which it is industrialised than by its cleverness to find people's creativity and potential. It's a very well oiled machine to weed out people with a bad grasp of the fundamentals en mass rather than a tuned process to find a few shock trooper geniuses it needs.

I had the same experience. It's unlikely I'll take one of their HR people seriously ever again. A Google engineer or PM would have to speak with me directly for me to bother.

Good point, their HR department has lost all credibility with me too.

Also the "a googler mentioned you" thing doesn't count. I mean direct contact.

A similar thing happened to me. A Google HR staffer sent me an unsolicited offer for a job at YouTube. I accepted, and...

A week later I sent an email asking "how long is the usual turn-around time on this?" Google's HR person said she would let me know by the end of the day, and that was that last I ever heard from her. All further communications were black-holed. I suppose I was unusually lucky to get that last message.

You know who complains about Google's hiring process... people that don't get hired by Google. I've never heard anybody who WAS hired by Google complain about anything.

Maybe you all just weren't good enough. That's OK, not everybody is the creme-a-la-creme. Look at Google's market cap and Android and Chrome's growth (not to mention their dominance in search and advertising)... Google doesn't need you, and that's why they didn't hire you.

You can cry a river about how Google is "failing" because they didn't hire you... but I think their shareholders (who Google makes very rich) would laugh right in your face and be glad that they didn't hire a whiner like you.

Google cannot find people to hire fast enough even by its own admission. I have personally never applied to work at Google but I can understand why someone who never anything heard back from a company with over 20,000 people would be a little pissed.

If they have over 20,000 employees and "they cannot find people to hire fast enough"... then perhaps they should impose even stricter hiring standards so they they don't end up with 10's of thousands of employees who are of such low value that they need to keep hiring more.

Google's main problems are not in hiring more people... it is in putting the (extremely high calibre) employees that they already have to work on concise and appropriate projects that will advance the future of the company in the right direction. Google needs to focus on its management decisions and project creation / execution strategy much more heavily that it needs to focus on the hurt feelings of coders who didn't have what it takes to get in the door.

    Google's main problems are not in hiring more people

There's also some incentive for them to get good people before the competition does. It's not like they can't afford the salaries.

So market cap size legitimizes poor etiquette and borderline anti-social behavior?

No, being a company that is built upon and successful due to its engineering culture does. Engineers are notoriously the most anti-social and lacking in etiquette of almost all professionals. Anti-social behavior is what drives most of us into engineering in the first place.

Google's hiring practices are simply a reflection of the type of people that they have to hire in order to be successful as the organization that they are: By engineers, for engineers, of engineers.

There are plenty of other (GREAT) companies out there to work for if you don't like the way Google does business or hires for that matter. The only reason people are whining is that they know exactly how AMAZING it is if you are lucky enough to work at Google (great pay, benefits, food, massages, etc, etc, etc)... and they are embittered by the fact that Google said they weren't good enough.

Rejection is always painful... but its best to take your dignity with you and move on when it doesn't go your way.

I think if you read the comments here and elsewhere closely, it's not that people are complaining Google said no -- it's that people are complaining that Google said nothing.

Google folks I happened to work with, do exhibit "noticeably higher than average" standards of social behavior. This is in addition to being world-class engineers.

OTOH, there is different spectrum of people in every big company - so maybe there are beasts sitting in the caves somewhere that bite everyone passing by too close :-).

You're right in one thing - one should not put the emotions into the process. A little research of past experiences reveals makes this very obvious.

Treat the whole process like a light cocktail-party flirt, and there's no disappointment afterwards. It's a free tour to the $interview_destination_of_choice, after all :-)

Engineers are notoriously the most anti-social and lacking in etiquette of almost all professionals. Anti-social behavior is what drives most of us into engineering in the first place.

Engineers also prefer data to hokey stereotypes and sweeping generalities. Got some?

You know who complains about slavery? Slaves. I've never heard of a plantation owner who complained about slavery.

Thomas Jefferson complained about slavery at the same time that he owned slaves, and he wasn't the only one. It's easy to condemn them for that now, of course. But we no doubt have our own such contradictions.

"I've never heard anybody who WAS hired by Google complain about anything."

Yeah, I don't badmouth my employer in public either.

It's creme-'de'-la-creme, baller.

Counter-example: I got an offer from Google 10 years ago and I turned it down in part because the hiring process was awful.

That's simply false. Lots of googlers complain about the hiring process they went through (common complaints: way too slow, not enough communication, getting tossed around between groups, too many rounds of interviews, stalled process in hiring committee). That's why the process keeps changing, usually for the better.

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