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Comment by DanAtC | Hacker News Reader

Nice, make your problem the interviewee's problem and waste more of everyone's time.

Google gets away with this because they pay so well. An hour of extra interviewing gets you an extra $400,000 a year. Show up to a 1 hour zoom meeting instead of having a long lunch, then put the money in your savings account (or in the stock market when savings accounts stop being so good) and retire at 35.

I left Google for a startup and got basically half the total compensation. 6 years after leaving, I am making about what I did at Google 5 years ago and 2 "levels" lower. If I stayed at Google, I'd be making about $800,000 a year.

You should really really ignore the distasteful feeling about being grilled by a bunch of strangers and just do it. (I actually really enjoyed my Google interviews. Problems I hadn't seen before that I came up with interesting solutions to.)

But you left?

My project got canceled, so I went somewhere else doing a similar project. Everyone phrases it like they avoid FAANG because of the interviews, and not what they'll be working on. If you don't like your project, fine, leave the money on the table. If you do like the project but are mad that they ask algorithms questions, I don't think that's a good enough reason to give up millions of dollars over the period of your career.

The arrogance of these companies makes me never want to work there. I did go through the Apple process once though and it was pretty much as described.

People that need jobs really shouldn't view this kind of approach as advice or relevant to them. I feel like that's often left out of these kind of takes.

For anybody that needs reminding:

Companies' abrasive or uncoordinated interview processes likely has nothing to do with your experience in your team on the company.

Your manager's uncollaborative behavior may have nothing to do with your day to day, or mental health on the job.

Ignoring or leaving any of these companies because you considered any one behavior a red flag is a privileged take for people that have trust funds, masquarading their version of life as normal.

If you really need a job why would go go through these processes? They’re long and complicated and it’s basically a crapshoot anyway because they do it so badly. Even if you get it you’ll have no negotiating power so you’ll get screwed on comp.

Take a contract position or something else less hard to get, get more financially secure and then go for the faang role.

ideally things go perfectly all the time, but people sometimes make mistakes. what would you rather they do? pass on the candidate because they didn’t get enough data to support a hire? or give them more chances to demonstrate their capabilities?

I think the candidate should pass on the company. It's always good to provide a cost for their mistake. There is no job worth getting jerked around before they even start paying you.

They should do the right thing and if the candidate hit the bar on what was asked, however repetitive, they should get the offer.

As to "not enough data"... how exactly? If there is a list of things to check off that is to be distributed amongst the interviewing team, there should never be an issue. If people are winging it and just happen to ask repetitive questions then everyone asked what they needed to know and signal should be there.

It sounds like Google's process is fundamentally buggy. They should fix that.

The problem is that a bad hire is really expensive to correct, and so traditionally Google's hiring process has erred on the side of being overly conservative. We've rejected some excellent engineers (or driven them away with the process overhead / delays) to instead pick up people who grinded leetcode for weeks on end or got lucky with an easy interview slate.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to quantify exactly what's broken about the interview process in a way that justifies (to the appropriate individuals!) upending the status quo. You and I can both complain about how this is terrible for candidate experience and for hiring the best talent, but that's not going to change anything.

Now you know, and you don't have to ever apply/interview there!

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