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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

I think this is very unfortunate. I've seen a lot of good candidates get rejected for no obvious reasons. The lack of communication seems driven I think by the sheer deluge of the number of resumes/interviews going on at Google, and what appears to be, a reliance on temps and contractors as part of the process.

I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule.

Given the sheer size of Google however, I'd expect lots of false positives and negatives in their filters.

Also recognize that regular Googlers are selected to do these interviews, and some of them have little training in giving interviews. If you're unlucky, you might get a bad interviewer. I consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc)

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This happened to me! I'm a software engineer. Someone at Google thought I'd make a good security engineer and called me in to interview for it. Why not, right? Sure, I'll give it a try.

When I got there, I was greeted by my first interviewer who started asking me questions about SONET. I stumbled for a moment then commented that I could try to guess a few answers, but I didn't have any experience with optics. The interviewer looked back and forth between me and his paperwork a few times, got flustered, then asked if I was interviewing to be a network architect.

No, I didn't expect to be.

Well, that's what they had me scheduled for. He asked me a few more questions about things I'd never heard of, then we sat back and chatted about valley life for the rest of the hour.

The trip to MTV was fun, but it would've been more interesting if I'd gotten to interview for a job I actually knew about.

"I had a friend who interviewed at Google, who is an excellent software engineer I've worked with for years, but who got rejected with extreme prejudice because he was interviewed for the wrong position. He was going for software engineer, they interviewed him for networking/systems reliability, and asked him all of these sysadmin/network-admin style questions. Even after he told them they had set him up with the wrong set of interviewers, they still kept the schedule."

Unfortunately, I've read similar anecdotes on HN. Pretty disrespectful of the candidates time.

Why don't more people walk out of interviews? Especially if someone set you up to fail, quite literally: interviewing for the wrong job. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of your time as a company.

On top of that, if you're going to throw out dickish comments like the article states (paraphrase: "ask your friend, he'll know the answer"), I wouldn't stick around. Is that the atmosphere at the company? Agree or disagree with the interview style, comments like that would piss me off to no end. Start a game of needling and insults? You know what, I've had enough.

I am not a programmer. The OP mentioned that in a number of the scheduled interviews that he had face to face, the interview finished quickly, and the interviewer talked about working at Google. Does this strike anyone else as 'palliative interview'?

Nice catch.

I was actually going to bring this up. I have a lot of friends who are interview pros. They say if an interviewer decides earlier on you're not going to get hired, they basically fold up their sheets and ask non-related general questions to pass the rest of the time.

Guilty as charged :-)

As an interviewee, I have, more than once, thanked my hosts for their tea and cake and left early when I detected that the interview was turning into a chat.

Would a collegiate interviewing model not work better for an intellectually driven organisation like Google? Each team interviewing for their own positions, but with some form of 'tenure track' process for the longer term?

It would certainly make more sense. Sure, have one or two screening calls, but the main interviews should really be done by the team you're going to be on. Not some expert in algorithms who deems your solution to a question not good enough. I mean, how many times have you heard an engineer say, "It's not pretty, but it gets the job done." ??

The 'tenure track' is a great idea. How would you implement it though? Just curious.

"The 'tenure track' is a great idea. How would you implement it though? Just curious."

As I said a few levels above, I am not a programmer. I'd imagine it might work like academic departments, a series of short contracts (well paid!) leading if successful to a more permanent place with some ability to direct own work.

I get the impression people are dealing with firehoses rather than trickles (talk of 'recruitment pipelines' like in a tyre factory) so perhaps the collegiate model just won't work.

Amazon does things this way (the hiring team does the interviewing) but there are some major drawbacks to it as well. If your team is grossly shorthanded (say, 30% of seats open), you have your team doing a ton of interviews rather than covering for the headcount shortage, which means you're even more underwater or behind schedule. (And you might have to screen dozens of candidates to fill a seat.) Also, there's a strong incentive to just "fill the seat" so they can stop interviewing people, which Amazon does try to avoid by having at least one "bar raiser" on the interview circuit who is from another team.

At a broader level, the problem with this is that the delays inherent in doing a lot of hiring and relocating people means that you can't have teams doing their own hiring and then waiting for people to arrive and come on-line - there need to be candidates in the pipeline before the exact seats open up. Otherwise you're talking about a 3-6 month delay from when a seat opens to when there's an engineer sitting in it, which sucks.

Okay, that just makes a ton of sense. I've never worked for a big company like that, and hadn't considered the latency issue that can be worked around by general interviewing.

With that said, it doesn't change my opinion of it being a time waste for me. I have a career, I know, more or less, what I want to work on next, and I have no interest in devoting a month (seriously, Google recommended taking that long to come up to speed on interview questions) of study to interview for who knows what position, especially when the whole system is gamed towards rejecting false negatives.

> Otherwise you're talking about a 3-6 month delay from when a seat opens to when there's an engineer sitting in it, which sucks.

Welcome to reality in most of large corporate america. I've seen insane 6-9 month interview processes at places like Cisco and that's not even a successful hire. Likewise at other large SV companies.

If you can get it down to 3 months, it's below par and better than the competition.

I'm really surprised that's not how it works at Google, both from their perspective, from the perspective of the candidate. I would be extremely hesitant to interview or accept a job at Google if didn't know what I'd be working on, and it seems like you only find that out when you show up the first day.

You are correct. Your mentor from your new team comes to collect you after orientation, and you find out then.

You are also going nowhere for a long, long time.

This is true only if you are hired for a generic role. Most people are, but for sufficient specific jobs (like mine), you will know exactly what team you are joining.

Also, with decent performance you can transfer after a year, occasionally even earlier if another team really wants you.

"Software Engineer" and "Site Reliability Engineer" are generic roles.

My experience has been the opposite. I've received offers based on interviews where we talked about: the local radio landscape, the best local lunch spots, the most ridiculous internet-bubble perks we'd seen, or color choice in 1950's suburban housing. I get the feeling that it's the idle chatting at the beginnning and end of the interview that matters most when the interviewer is asking him/herself, "Will this person fit?"

"Why don't more people walk out of interviews?"

They freak out. I got blacklisted at a cellphone company for doing that a couple decades ago. I found that out via a friend on the inside. Basically I was looking for, and applied to get a lab bench job (basically a spectrum analyzer / communication analyzer jockey, beneath my ability, but it was an exciting growing company etc) and they wanted me to be a junior roving field tech, basically I'd help the real field techs carry heavy stuff into the building and then (literally) mow the lawn while the real tech worked. And I went to school for X years to run a lawnmower... uh huh...

If you think its mortifying for the candidate, imagine how the HR rep looks when you walk out, thus making a fool out of them. Note that I wasn't sarcastic or caustic or anything when I left, after all, I had lots of friends / acquaintances on the inside and telecom is a very small world. Lots of hand shaking and "you have a nice facility here but I'm not interested in the position" and so on. I got word from my inside contacts that the HR girl was fuming with rage and swore after I made a fool of her by walking out, that my resume would never pass her desk again in any capacity, etc.

Companies are always doing stupid stuff, just hopefully not too often, and they're at least partially interested in how you'll respond. So imagine you work there and someone in upper management makes the worlds dumbest presentation to the division, they're terrified you're going to laugh at them and walk out.

When I was younger and (even more) stupider, stuck at an interview I decided I didn't really want, I started flirting with the attractive HR staffer, which didn't work out, but it was fun at the time. Times were different back then, now a days politely asking a woman out at work would probably get you fired or arrested.

Asking someone out to a date the first time is perfectly legal. The moment you ask again when they say no is considered harassment and then you could get fired, but I doubt you would have any real issue the first time you ask.

Because then your interviewer does a hatchet-job on you in a feedback form and you get shitlisted from interviewing at Google forever.

That's the problem with large companies. There are companies where I would just walk out of an abusive interview, because the brokenness represents their whole company. Then you have massive, mega, ultra-sized companies like Google where even though this particular team is beating you with the interview bat, you may still want to work for other teams.

This is probably confirmation bias speaking, but by far I hear the most "primadonna interviewer" stories come out of Google. I'm not sure if that's just my impression or if there's really something going on there.

That's definitely a fair point, especially about bigger companies. Personally, I value my reputation (real-life, not with whatever HN points says) very, very highly, so I'd imagine doing something like I described would be an excellent way to really leave a stain on your resume.

I've walked out of interviews before. I told them, politely, that I was not a fit for the organization and I didn't want to waste anyone elses time.

Funny that there seems to be a consensus that Google can effectively black-list people, and yet it seems they can't even keep track of who they are supposed to actually interview or who they have previously contacted about interviewing.

If you are blacklisted, then someone needs to check the blacklist just once for your process to get terminated.

If you are scheduled, many people must refrain from screwing up.

It even took them months to figure out that they hired an ex convict, after he personally disclosed the fact multiple times.

I had great hopes for Google to innovate in sense of culture. I saw Larry Page and Sergey Brin as intellectuals. Turns out they just went and built a high school elite club, for geeks. Another bloated company ran by a corps of smug geeks that like to claim how they are holier than thou.

I am really sad about it.

Sourcers are under a lot of pressure, and I've noticed it not limited to Google. Rackspace set up a flight to San Antonio for me then cancelled it the evening before after their lawyers waved them off me due to my background (discussed above).

A couple months later Rackspace cold called me to work there. It's a usual thing, I think, and I don't hold it against them.

I get that, from your perspective, this is a forgivable thing.

But if I'm Google or Rackspace, and I'm reading about this process from your side, I have to be asking myself "why am I paying these clowns?"

Hiring is one of the most important things companies do. If they are this disorganized, and if their cultural commitment to hiring is so poor that people are regularly brought in and interviewers are not present or available or confused about why either of you are there, then there is a huge amount of waste going on and there's a huge amount of missed opportunities.

I don't know you, but let's assume you are really good at what you do (and going by the number of people you had recommending you, you're probably pretty good at what you do). The fact of the matter is that Google totally missed the boat here and burned a lot of extra money in the process. Beyond that, for the two years or so that they were jerking around, you could have been a part of the team, making solid contributions. Instead, you were elsewhere making solid contributions that they may have had to defend against. So, the real waste is in the opportunity cost.

What I'm getting at is, if I'm a senior executive at one of these companies, I have to be looking at my hiring process and going "WTF?". Because that's what it deserves. Something is seriously broken and it is potentially a strategic threat.

As someone who's had to conduct some interviews, that's the opposite of my reaction.

If I show up to an interview slot (for which I'm spending my 15-30m), and the candidate speaks up about a mis-scheduling or whatever, and convinces me it's not worth our time to meet, I'll be happy to regain my time and complain to the HRbot/hiring manager about scheduling issues (aka please don't waste the my/company's time by messing up the scheduling).

Ah, but you don't have to just walk out telling them they wasted your time. It only talkes a moment to check you muted phone and'OMG - there is an emergency at home/with my child/spouse etc. So very sorry but you have to leave right now to take care of it. Hopefully they understand and can reschedule after the emergency is taken care of."

End of story and if you catch them early enough in the interview you can be back at work happily coding the latest story in current sprint.

You should do what's best for you but understand why the folks on here are defending google; it's a big place and they are mostly powerless when it comes to direct influence or manipulation. Understand that and it will give you insight into how to hack their system for your benefit both before you are hired there AND after multiple interviews when you find that right team when but need to deal with ingrained systems; which rules must be followed and which rules everyone ignores, when to ask for forgiveness later and when and how to cover your ass from the start.

I almost did once. The interview was at Ebay and the entire process was disastrous from the very first contact. Terrible management during the entire time. During my final interview with some manager, I was ready to just get up and walk out. My frustration was showing and undoubtedly contributed to me not getting an offer. The only thing that kept me from walking was my professional and the fact that they paid for my flight. The organization was so poor, I would not put it past them to cancel my flight if I walked out.

The people interviewing you are real people too and sometimes very interesting people. They don't choose what job you are interviewing for, they just get told to show up at a time/place and get a resume/job spec.

> Given the sheer size of Google

Microsoft has more employees and the three times I interviewed with them (and got accepted) it was a great experience, with perfect communication from their recruiters and interviewers. The one time I interviewed with Google (and got accepted, but I rejected them for MS) I pretty much went through a similar experience as the blog post, although the interviews themselves weren't bad, just the recruiting process.

So yea, size isn't an excuse.

I'll second this; Microsoft, for all the flak they get re: corporate culture, their products etc, have a great, smooth interview process.

When I was at Google, I was told over and over again that blind allocation was necessary because no other method of placing employees would scale to Google's size.

Whenever I pointed out that the bigger the company, the more teams there would be to absorb and place incoming employees, the googlers in question would just ignore the response and emphasize that blind allocation was necessary because no other method of placing employees would scale to Google's size.

Sigh...

I always love it when people make appeals to scale when they just don't apply. For it to work, there has to be some kind of non-linearity at play. In any circumstance where the total cost rises in proportion to the total size, it's just nonsensical.

I interviewed at Microsoft quite a while ago, and the process was fairly pleasant. My only complaint was that eight hours of straight interviews is a little long.

Really?

Microsoft's HR departments are completely siloed by business unit, and they don't share notes. If the rec you're applying for dries up, they do F-all to guide you into a new one. Each time you engage with a different BU you're completely back to square one.

It might be because each time I interviewed was for a new hire position or internship position...and their university recruiting is pretty solid. Google's on the other hand...

My recruiter failed to call me at the scheduled time. Twice. I wasn't too terribly dismayed, as I was already home at the time anyway, but that put me in a pretty bad mood to begin with.

I failed the first phone interview spectacularly because he asked about data structures and estimating powers of two, and I haven't done any of that after 4 years in the industry. I guess fair enough; if that's what they expect of their employees, I'm not their man.

Overall, a disappointing experience.

Google and other major SV companies are known for heavily theoretical interview processes. IMO, your recruiter should have made this clear and suggested you brush up.

There were a lot of things my recruiter should have done, but didn't. Call me on time, for example ;)

This is typical for all of the big "A-tier" tech companies I think. I used to do a lot of interviewing when I was at Amazon, and invariably the interviews leaned very heavily on CS fundamentals.

I'm all for CS fundamentals, but in many places it's clearly being used as an approximation of good-code-shipping-ability.

I think part of the problem is that you're not really allowed to interview people in a way that holistically assesses their ability, so you end up doing cargo cult-y things that sort of, kind of sounds like they're relevant. For example, when I was at Amazon, we specifically were disallowed from using real-time typing/sharing tools to conduct coding questions.

Nowadays I find that pairing with someone on a limited-scope coding problem, as well as talking deeply about software design and architectural decisions, is the best way to assess. But then again, I'm also no longer interviewing complete newbies - which I think Amazon/Google/Microsoft's recruiting systems are heavily optimized for.

When faced with a candidate who has a dearth of real-world things to dig into, of course you fall back on data structures and algorithms. When you apply this to experienced professionals, who have a long track record that they can talk in depth about, it becomes silly.

> My recruiter failed to call me at the scheduled time. Twice.

Out of curiosity, was there a reason you decided to continue the interview process after this?

Low cost, high reward. Like I said, I was always home from work anyway (different time zone from Google), so I was just sitting in my room when the call didn't come. If an opportunity to work at a company like Google comes along, I'm willing to put up with some minor annoyances.

They have a post-interview review process, and I gave the recruiter an appropriately negative review.

My interviewer called me an hour after the scheduled time to ask if I would be able to call me back in a half hour because he was busy.

When he eventually called back and started the interview, he did not even seem to respond my answers to his questions - it honestly sounded like he was playing a computer game on the other end of the line...

It was blatant disrespect towards me and my time. I'm glad I found an opportunity elsewhere.

In my experience, my Google recruiter simply did not respond to emails. The only way to get in touch with him was to email HR. Scheduling the first round of interviews? Email HR, wait for the recruiter to email me. Scheduling the second round? HR. Finding out results - you guessed it, emailing HR to get the recruiter to call me. This stretched my process to two whole months.

Just two months? I've been doing the interview 'process' for at least three months, and i'm expecting another month if things go "right".

I was head-hunted by them initially. Had a casual phone interview within the week. Then scheduled and re-scheduled a technical interview (their fault, three more weeks). Then two weeks later I had another casual phone interview. Then waited two weeks for the on-site six-interview bonanza. I finished those 4th thru 9th interview two weeks ago, and recruiter just told me yesterday to wait for the hiring committee to give a decision in another week.

My experience of those interviews that ask CS or “puzzle” questions is that they are sincerely trying to determine that you are capable of dealing with inherently novel/theoretic problems or problems you've never seen before. Unfortunately this notion is misguided because the problems aren't real problems, and the context in which the problems are solved is entirely different to what it would be in the actual workplace. As someone who cripples under observation (sort of like how hearing a siren takes up 50% of your brain power, the pressure of being observed does similar to me), I am simply incapable of performing in those types of interviews, despite being competent for the job. I once crumbled so badly that I couldn't do simple arithmetic, and the interviewers tried to “break things down” for me and continue despite my obvious state of stress. I resent those interviews sorely, and will avoid interviews in the future if I find out ahead of time that they involve approaches like this.

"inherently novel/theoretic problems or problems you've never seen before"

Some companies have a mythology that every job in their company is like that, even if the actual job being interviewed for is the opposite.

Hardly limited to megacorp CA tech companies. No different than a boring old bank requiring janitor interview candidates to wear a suit and tie.

You're not alone. Although it's never been as bad as not being able to do arithmetic, I can't seem to get a job doing those kinds of interviews. I was close once at Microsoft, after having done 8 hours of coding and linear algebra and other math (that I wasn't expecting) without a slip up, and what I thought was pretty great performance, but alas that wasn't enough either. Most of the time I freeze up and can't think in those situations though, I don't know how I pulled the strength to get through that interview. In the process, due to stress, I developed a huge canker sore in my mouth where there's still a scar. Interviewers dropping hints just makes it worse, it's not that I need hints, it's that I can't THINK when you're sitting there judging my performance, while having to keep explaining my thought process out aloud. Some people are just not built for that.

It's great to see comments like this. I thought I was alone. The jobs I have gotten so far is either behavioural only, talk about past projects, or written technical (they give you some questions on paper and then leave you alone for an hour.)

> capable of dealing with inherently novel/theoretic problems or problems you've never seen before

To be fair, these were "Data Structures 101" type questions. One was literally design a graph structure and write a deep-copy procedure, and that's it. Not exactly "novel." Since I haven't done these in ages, and didn't even pay that much attention when I had the class, I did badly.

Another was a simple string manipulation question that I bombed because I was already stressed out from failing the first so badly, similar to your situation.

> consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc)

First, given you understand your limitations as an interview, you're probably a better interviewer than most -- including myself :-)

An employer I worked for made it very difficult (but certainly not impossible, implausible, or even socially unaccepted) to stop interviewing altogether. Instead, they'd take a different approach: in addition to trying to match interviewers with candidates, they would also perform analysis on interviewer's previous feedback (e.g., are they constantly voting down candidates that go on to receive an offer after additional review, or vice-versa?) and weigh the feedback accordingly.

I'd be highly surprised if Google doesn't do this.

I do agree that usual "watch an experienced candidate do the interviews" approach to training is insufficient: this is much like expecting one to become a better candidate by watching a strong quickly "get" an algorithmic question with an a-ha insight, it looks easy when you already know the answer. I love the anagrams example from Programming Pearls -- it appears as "aha" problem, seems obvious to those who already know the answer -- but the book describes in detail on how it represents an entire class of problems and how to achieve that seeming insight using a more structured approach.

As an aside I actually finding interviewing others to be much harder than being interviewed myself -- if I screw up as a candidate worst thing that can happen is I don't get an offer, if I screw up as an interviewer people other than myself (the candidate, the company) will be affected. There's plenty of sites that talk about how to prepare for being interviewed, candidates spend dozens of hours before going for an interview, but there's less material out there for individual engineers who want to become better interviewers. Joel and Yegge are prominent exceptions, but most other pundits say only the obvious, e.g., "ask questions that can tell you if the candidate can do the job?"

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