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Comment by happyopossum | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen so many of these jokes and complaints about modern SV interviews that I was blown away when I recently interviewed at a FAANG… I was assigned a recruiter who communicated clearly and often with me, told exactly how many interviews I was doing (3), what each was about, and all 3 were scheduled on the same day, and were handled by extremely smart and supportive people. Offer came through by the end of the week.

Not at all what I was expecting!

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I found it funny that a week ago I got an email from a Google recruiter, offering me to enter their interviewing machinery.

I bluntly told him that I rejected the offer because of the horror stories regarding 5-7 interviews in Google.

The recruiter's reply was that it was ok of this was not an appropriate time for me , and that we would stay in touch.

How can they be so dense? Of course it may be that they are also just a cog in the machine and there is nothing they can do.

Google is one of the few companies that has enough talent applying to be able to turn away perfectly good candidates. All those hoops you jump through ensure you're willing to go above and beyond a healthy level to "serve" the company.

The multi-round interview process should be renamed "The Severance procedure."

Any Severance fans?

Google is not some special company, its a big company and it has shitshows to fit their big company status. Just because they can keep throwing money at their recruitment department doesn't mean this is something worth replicating or that they get the absolute best talent (if that was the case their messaging apps would not get deprecated after a year)

They're special in one specific aspect: they have their pick of qualified applications. It's not like your typical mid-sized company with a limited budget that has to spend months to find a good quality candidate and can't afford arbitrary reasons to turn those candidates away.

They don't need you - they have tons of very talented people applying.

And I'm perfectly fine with that and agree with it. Maybe they should stop paying for outbound recruiting and save everyone time, given the tons of talented people that apply.

I guess they have so much money and need that much more talent that they'd rather just spend to sift through the talent pool faster. They also probably want to be sifting continuously - it can be a competitive strategy.

What about this view. They keep the talented people on hold to the job interview, wasting the precious time that might be used to improve their competitors.

Google interviews sound awful if I'm being honest. The last recruiter I spoke with said it involved a technical test and phone interview, after which they'd see what teams had openings and that it would be 3-4 2+ hour interviews per team before an offer was made if I was a fit. Who has the time for this?

> after which they'd see what teams had openings and that it would be 3-4 2+ hour interviews per team before an offer was made if I was a fit. Who has the time for this?

This is really not how the Google interview process works. At least not as far as I know.

1) Each interview is only 1 hour

2) Usually it's 5 technical interviews (after you pass phone screening and the 2 initial remote interviews)

3) The team matching (unless you're applying for a specific position or under special circumstances) happens after you've passed all interviews and the hiring committee has approved you for hire

That's right, for SWE positions there's only one set of interviews and each interview lasts 45 minutes. The composition of an interview slate varies by level and role applied for (e.g. some roles require domain knowledge and it's not uncommon for one interview to focus on that). There are no per-team interviews.

Source: hiring manager & hiring committee member.

That's pretty much standard for almost every startup and non faang company I interviewed in Canada / US

I had a bunch of onsites and Google was the one only one which caused me angst. The fastest that the recruiter ever responded to me was in two days and the scheduler was based in India which meant 1+ day response time.

So during my onsite, one of my interviewers turned up around 5+ minutes late and I realized a) I had no idea what to do about this as recruiter is not responsive b). There is nothing stopping the interviewer from just saying "the candidate is a no show. Rejected!"

One of the differences is resources. FAANG can effort recruiting departments which treat candidates as customers whom they're trying to sell a job to.

Many fine employers are more disorganized in hiring, but that doesn't translate over to work.

Meanwhile my 3rd round at amazon was like a 7 hour virtual loop.

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