Hacker News Reader

Comment by baskethead | Hacker News Reader

If Google re-interviewed all their current programmers, what percentage of them would pass the phone screen and onsites and get another job offer?

View on HN

This is a very good question.

I work in a Wall Street trading company. Up til about 6 years ago, I was actively involved in recruiting tech staff and defining our tech recruitment process.

I’ve since changed roles, but was recently asked to sit in on an interview.

Wow, how things have changed. I seriously doubt I would be successful going through the current recruitment process.

Any why? Focus on whiteboard programming with questions that far exceed the requirements for the day-to-day job.

Somewhere along the line, egos took over and we have a bunch of devs on an ego trip to prove how smart they are.

I thought about this a lot at my former job. When I first applied, we were 30 people strong, but 4 years later we were 150 people and had hired veterans from the NSA/FBI/NASA/FB/Google etc. I often thought, I definitely would not be hired if I re-applied right now.

Amazon explicitly engineers this into the interview process via “bar raising”. You have to be better than the bottom half of people who hold the position to get hired. If Google is implicitly doing the same thing, I’d guess the same 40-60% that was mentioned in the thread.

I think most (entry to 5 years of experience at least) people who work at FAANG companies spend dedicated time studying for interviews. They also know exactly what their company is looking for - leadership principles for Amazon, for example. If you gave current FAANG engineers a month to prepare, I think 80% of them would reclaim their jobs. If you gave them no time to prepare, I think less 30% of them would reclaim their jobs.

The ability to solve contrived coding problems is a muscle that needs to be exercised, even when one does actual programming for their job every day. I'm guessing most people don't practice interviews when they aren't expecting to interview, so only a small percentage would retain enough to pass a loop.

I think almost all would pass the phone screen and maybe less than 90% would pass the interview again.

It would be actually great if they did exactly that, as an anonymized experiment somehow. My guess would be 40-60%.

What percentage would pass the interviews but knowing what they know now about working at Google, would take an offer at another company?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com