How to Get a Job at Google
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I interviewed with Google about 2 years ago. First technical phone interview, the guy sounds really grumpy and irritated, and starts off with "I see that you have a Master's in CS. Are you an expert?". I replied something to the effect of "well I think it'd be pretentious for me to call myself an expert, I like to let my work speak for itself.". He responded "well we only hire experts at google".
The interview went downhill from there; several times he told me my solution to his question was incorrect, and I stepped through the code with him and showed him that he was mistaken and my solution was valid. He was just super grumpy the whole time.
Who knows, maybe my name reminded me of his ex wife or something. Regardless, it was a terrible experience.
I don't think that I sucked that hard because 2 weeks later I interviewed with apple, made it all the way to the onsite, and their questions felt harder. Their process was much more pleasant and efficient overall.
And what's the deal with doing code interviews in Google Docs? I don't know if that's how it's done now, but it was extremely high-pressure. Given that he could see every keystroke and was pretty un-cooperative, it made for a super unpleasant interview with the constant feeling that I couldn't think or explore the problem given.
Needless to say, I didn't progress.
Thankfully, the person I dealt with was generally pleasant and made for one of the better interview experiences I've had.
Yahoo used collabedit.com, which was much more pleasant (but still realtime).
Funny. One of the Google recruiters told me that expert at technology X meant you either wrote a book on or invented X.
People in my life think I'm arrogant when I say I'm not interested in working for Google, but it's more just that it's not a "good fit" for either of us.
It might be apocryphal, but at one point candidates filled a "rate yourself from 1 to 10 in technology X, Y, Z" to help guide the interviewers in choosing questions. The general consensus was "if you rate yourself as a 10 in Python, there's a non-zero chance you'll end up with Guido on your interview panel"
That last person I spoke with never introduced himself, asked essentially an open ended question with no real answer. I presented what I thought was reasonable, he said "that's wrong", and never answered what he thought the approach/answer should be. Relayed this to a friend there just after the interview - her response was "that is an idiotic question and actually your answer was correct".
I was declined for the position, but still get calls by google recruiters on a regular basis. I relay the story and politely tell them no thanks.
I had the distinct feeling that the outcome of the hiring process really had nothing to do with the interview so long as I answered competently enough.
One interview I nailed, got to the second round phone interview nailed it and then didn't get a call back...ever.
Out of curiosity I send some emails off, turns out the recruiter had quit or "was no longer with the company" or whatever and they had filled the position, please feel free to apply again.
Regardless, it didn't really matter, I had a good time, it was fun, I didn't get the job, but meh. I didn't have to go through the hassle of relocating either.
The few other SV type company interviews I've been on have been similar. Not terribly hard, a few brain teasers, lots of vocalized processing of my thinking process, but even with the ones I got an offer for, came away with the distinct impression that the interview particulars just didn't matter all that much. They were simply confirming some predisposed hiring assumptions and would probably go with whoever went to the best school or whatever arbitrary metric they were using.
They were looking for X, using a hiring process that looks for Y, and it all ended before a committee that hired for Z anyways.
I think this is the most important factoid that's come out of this all is this realization that Google finally had after crunching years worth of data (which was already common knowledge among the rest of the world):
"G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything."
Well, they do predict that people who are given near term ranking and validation of their work will work their asses off to get that ranking and validation.
A little etymology: valedictorian, from valediction, from Latin valere
validate from Latin validus (see valid) from valere
So it's no wonder that valedictorian and validate have the same root. A high achiever is by definition somebody who's efforts have been validated against the measure of achievement (whatever that measure might be) and confirmed to be valere "well", "strong".
It's too bad that what a company needs is an employee that does their job, not one that needs to be constantly validated in their efforts.
And thus a hiring system, put together by validators, who designed the hiring system to validate and filter for people who focus on validation, forgot to look for people who get shit done and don't need to be thanked for it.
And as a result, Youtube becomes more and more unusable every single day.
I'll walk you through it.
Valedictorian used as a noun in 1832, adj in 1834. American English. From Valedictory adj. and -ian variant of -an, Middle English -ien from French loan words, -an "pertaining to" from Latin -anus.
Valedictory first used in the 1650s, from the Latin valedictum from valedicere and -ory from Latin -orius, -oria, -orium "to have a quality proper to the action accomplished by the agent".
valedicere from vale, imperative of valere "be well" and dicere "to say". See also "Valediction" from 1610s.
Validate v. from 1640s from Latin validatus, from validus, from valere "be well", "be strong" (connoted)
I'll add that the Latin vale can be used to mean "farewell", which is usually how it's translated, but if you dig down the etymology rabbit hole, they come from two different language families and not surprisingly don't mean the same thing.
"farewell" is from somewhere between 1200 and the 14th century middle English, a composite of faren "fare" and wel "well". The phrase used to be "fare thee well" but was contracted later. All have Germanic roots.
"fare" is old-English fær means "to go forth on a journey" and still hangs around in some words like "sea-faring", "wayfarer" and "farewell" ("fare" eventually turned into the more modern meaning "payment for passage or conveyance", but that's a digression).
"well" in the sense of "farewell" these days connotes good health (as in "are you well?") but originates also in Germanic tongues to mean "satisfactory".
"thee" is also proto-Germanic in origin and I won't belabor it.
Swedish speakers may recognize this in the modern form as "farväl" and Dutch as "vaarwel"
A "valedictory" is usually translated as "a farewell address" and the act of the speech the valedictorian gives is called a "valediction" (a farewell). But this isn't strictly correct. "valedictory" means something more like "words for good health".
So it's more like we commonly translate "hope you feel well!" to "have a safe trip!" which isn't really quite right.
It's interesting then that:
a) "well" has come to adopt the Latin meaning "health" in the sense that "valere" means "well" i.e. "health" (similar to "valetudo" or "valetudinis"). "valere" more strictly translates to "health" (which all the other meanings connote e.g. "strength" "well" etc.). Also found in words like "convalescence" with the "strength" connotation ending up in words like "valiant" and "validity". When we "validate" something, we are proving it to be strong, which is a connotation of "healthy". So it really means "to prove to be healthy".
b) We define Latin words in terms of Germanic explanations, but not the other way around. e.g. if you look up "farewell" in the dictionary it's not defined as a "valediction". Which would come as no surprise to those that know that English is a Germanic language.
I had a similar experience as yours - got a guy that seemed uninterested, and who then proceeded to give me interview questions that firstly were totally irrelevant to the position, and totally outside of the area the recruiter had told me I was meant to be asked about. Secondly they made it clear that the guy interviewing me had a very specific idea of what answers he wanted, but didn't have sufficient knowledge of the field to realise that his questions were ambiguous or incomplete.
After the interview, I was just annoyed. I didn't see any point in waiting for feedbackm and fired off an e-mail to the recruiter, telling her I'd lost interest if that was how they managed their tech interviews. I also gave her the details of the questions and answers I had issues with (which was most of them).
She got back to me a few days later, and informed me she'd discussed the interview details with a few people, and everyone agreed with the points I'd made, and she had gotten it set aside and offered me to proceed to the next stage.
But at that point I declined - I'd had interest from a couple of prospects I saw as more interesting, and the (glacial) pace at which the process had been progressing and the issues with the phone interview (conducted by one of the engineers in the group I'd be managing if I'd been offered the position) gave me a fairly negative impression. I've talked to a number of Google recruiters over the years, both people approaching me to get me to interview, and in other situations, and _every one_ of the ones I've talked to have been totally exasperated over the recruitment process they have to deal with.
Second interviewer didn't read feedback from first, repeated one or two questions. Got to third round and withdrew.
Combined with the fact that Google ties roles with geographic location, and doesn't reveal what post people will work on during recruitment, this assertion is quite amusing. I suppose he thought he was an expert too! That interviewer is selecting for hubris with this question at least - often those willing to call themselves experts are anything but.
If the best people in x live happily in Toronto and Bangkok and the team is in Mountain View, Google won't be hiring them or even probably interviewing them because of their opaque and broken interview process, which is a shame for Google I guess. The insistence on relocation and the refusal to recruit for actual roles must put an awful lot of good people off.
I didn't get far in that interview (I excused myself), but the entire process was downright Kafkaesque and I get the same eerie feeling reading this article.
> Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead.
I'm sorry, what? This definition doesn't actually describe anything. It's more useful as an example of begging the question[1] than it is of describing what they mean by leadership. And how do they go about deciding if you step up to the plate at the right time in an interview, anyway?
It seems like their "leadership" criteria wouldn't actually select for people with good leadership skills, it would just select for people with good storytelling. Par for the course for interviews, but let's not kid ourselves.
[1] This phrase is commonly used to mean raising the question but I mean it here in the traditional sense, like the comical observation: "If such actions were not illegal, then they would not be prohibited by the law."
> And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.
Which I think is what the author is trying to focus on. Traditional leadership would be making the decisions and taking risks because it's expected and people are asking you "Hey, what do we do?". Emergent leadership would then be making decisions and taking risks because it needs to happen or equally importantly acknowledging that someone else is more capable of doing so. I would bet that in the interview process they'd focus on the story and trying to determine how you make the decision to either ignore the chain of command or otherwise exert influence on it.
Like you said, that definitely selects more for storytelling skills than leadership skills, but in absence of other more accurate metrics I think that's still better than looking for "President of Chess Club" on a resume.
Unrelated, I'd love to read those narratives. While I can't speak for the community, I feel interviewing is a very hard thing to get right and knowing more about how other people do it AND experience it is important to getting better. Nothing < anecdotes < more anecdotes < data?
> Nothing < anecdotes < more anecdotes < data?
Well, I'm apprehensive about writing about an odd interview it because I don't want people to think ill of Google merely because I had what might be an uncommon interview process.
It seems quite simply they're saying leadership is more about actions that titles. I for one happen to agree strongly with that attitude.
The same could be said for any organization which trends toward a flat structure with little in the way of middle management (ie. Valve).
PLEASE remember that my anecdote may not be indicative of Google's typical recruiting and I am especially not passing judgement about anything they do (except maybe recruit). I like Google and it's probably a great place to work.
Here's what happened:
Back in 2011 a Google recruiter emailed me saying I might be a good fit for a position called:
> 'Performance Engineer' for which we're looking for a candidate with a combination of compiler, high performance software design and computer architecture experience.
Now I'm not certain how he came to the conclusion I might be a good fit, because I'm a simple JavaScript farmer from a backwards asteroid and the only thing remotely close to that job description in my short life were a few articles about JavaScript Canvas performance that I've written. I relayed that there must be some sort of misunderstanding about my skill-set.
He says ah thanks, sorry for the confusion, have you got any friends? Standard recruiter stuff. We part ways.
Fast forward to 2013 and I've just spent a year of my life slogging through writing a book on HTML5. It got published in July and I was busy resting on newly-built laurels when another Google recruiter contacts me, and I entertain.
Now the timing is not particularly weird but this recruiter contacts me a week before a conference I was invited to. You see, one month before the recruiter email I got an invitation to a conference (EdgeConf), which happened to be invite only, even for the audience members, and which was to take place at Google HQ. This is puzzling if only because I'm still a relative nobody, save for perhaps the just-published book, and I couldn't fathom who might invite me to such a thing, but I figured it was someone in Google.
The recruiter email a week before the event made this theory much more plausible, so I figured there may be some hint of who invited me awaiting at the conference.
Alas, during the talks and the after-party nobody approached me or mentioned who invited me. I did meet the ever-recognizable Paul Irish for a second - we exchanged a handshake and I swooned (who wouldn't?), but no more. The puzzle remained.
But how could it be an invite from anyone other than someone in Google? I don't know anyone. I'm from New Hampshire. I have very little in the way of programmer friends. That's a big part of why I love HN so much, it makes me feel like I'm part of a programmer community that I don't get to have offline.
After the conference I talked to the recruiter on the phone, twice, where I relayed that no I was not interested in leaving New Hampshire, I like my slow life among the moose and other friends I have.
Well that leaves Cambridge, he says, I'm not sure what we do there, he says, I'll get back to you. Cue dial tone. I guess that meant remote is out of the question, but that's not hard to imagine.
On the second call, he talks to me about Cambridge and what they do there, but he was oddly uneasy talking about it, like he knew something I didn't (he certainly must). He made it sound like there was little (web?) developer presence there, and he wasn't totally certain what the projects were, but, and this is the part that really blew my mind, it shouldn't matter.
He didn't literally say those words, but he heavily implied them by telling me that I would not know what kind of a spot I would be interviewing for. Not until after I'd been accepted, at any rate. There was no "You'll work on fixing Google Finance, which can't be hard since we haven't changed it in 6 years and it still uses Flash."
There was almost no discussion of what products I might work on, and it was pointless to have, because I'd be interviewing to be a developer, and I'd be placed afterwards.
So I could interview, but what I'd be doing was really up for grabs, and I wouldn't be doing the grabbing, and my options-that-were-apparently-not-mine-to-make were pigeonholed because of location. It sounded like teams only have people on-site, at least It was implied I couldn't work for a team based in Mountain View if my butt sat in Cambridge.
So I asked if I could be sure of the position and team that I'd be working for before I interviewed properly, and he said no. At this point I had to cut things short.
I don't understand the concept of interviewing not for a job but for a slot in a pool of talent to be assigned only after I am accepted. That sounds like an insurmountable amount of work to find out if a job is something I'd want to do or not. What if I don't like the app? Or the team? It seems like a very stressful way to begin at a company.
So there you have it. That's everything I remember at the moment.
To this day I never found out who invited me to that conference.
I'm sure I'm remembering some of the details wrong. For instance, cell phones do not have dial tones to cue. But you get the idea.
That is their standard operating procedure.
This is typical of Google recruitment from what I gather. Of the calls I've had from Google (I clearly match some weird mix of keywords), only one involved a specific position. For the rest getting them to confirm the position was in London (in one case it turned out that, no, in fact, the position involved Trondheim, Norway, and I'd been approached because I'm Norwegian, and they thought not to mention this until I asked for specifics) is about as far as they'd go. [I always push for position because my languages means I frequently get approached by cagey recruiters trying to get me to move to some god-forsaken place in Germany I have no interest in visiting, much less living in.]
Even nailing down whether or not my expected salary range was anywhere near what they could offer seemed a near impossible task (at least one recruiter said she didn't know as it'd be determined by a different team). I started pushing for this and rejecting the ones who couldn't answer, after I managed to get one Google recruiter to admit that my then-current salary was well above what they'd be willing to offer for the type of position he was hiring for (I didn't manage to get a proper job description out of him, though).
> I don't understand the concept of interviewing not for a job but for a slot in a pool of talent to be assigned only after I am accepted.
The hilarious part, to me, is that this is as old school as you get. E.g. the British Civil Service recruits this way. You apply to a department, say the Court Service, and is assessed roughly for a salary band, and interviewed. You're then put in a pool, and the recruiters work to place you in a specific position for the duration of your interview validity (12 months when my ex worked there). But the British Civil Service interview process is far more transparent and efficient for the most part than my experience of Google's.
This doesn't seem very strange to me at all, certainly not Kafkaesque -- for large companies that are very selective, always in need of new candidates, and do a huge variety of things, I imagine most would want to have the chance at anyone who qualifies.
Anything else seems less scalable and less efficient for both recruiters and candidates. The recruiters or candidates need to do all the matching up front, instead of doing it only once the candidates and company are found to be right for each other. It saves everyone's time to go through the effort to match up for a specific team -- as long as there are plenty of options to avoid disappointment at that stage.
Sure, after you've worked for a while you have "your" projects, but we generally don't know which ones those will be in advance.
When I was hired, the recruitment was extremely vague about what kinds of apps I would be working on. During the interview, I asked for more detail, and didn't get it. Similar situation: the apps I'm working on are whatever apps the business customer and I decide are needed to be worked on.
Some candidates do ask during interviews what projects they'll be working on. I'll be frank with them. I'll tell them "these are our current top priorities, but you'll be working on whatever is needed, helping out other developers and teams as needed, and generally filling in all over the place for at least the first six months." I actually like setting it up that way. Have a developer work with different teams, on different apps, before they "settle down" to the maintain and develop "their" apps. (If that ever even happens)
Clearly, given your process, you won't be hiring people who are passionate about certain areas, though they will be happy to work on anything, so the hiring process suits you and finds you generalists who are happy to work on any project (exactly what you want), but it will put off some potential employees.
You have no idea how many big companies are doing this just because they can afford to. I don't understand either. I would never interview for this kind of thing again.
Pretty sure I did, dude. :) Also, while I sometimes offer names of friends recruiters should talk to, I didnt' around this time. So that part's still a mystery. Additionally, it was a pleasure to meet you.
Also, I aspire to attain your stature. I'm a fan.
When I got my offer, I was also told as interview feedback that I didn't do amazing on my coding but they saw potential there once I got up to speed - my last job had really let my talents languish. I was offered a position on a back-end infrastructure team in Mountain View. At that point, I had a call with the director of that group to discuss what my role would be as well as a lunch meeting with three people from the team to sell me on it. I told the recruiter that I appreciated the offer and I would consider it, but there was another team that I was really excited about working for (and with responsibilities that I had some previous experience with) and if they could make that happen I would definitely join. Fortunately, that team had open headcount and wanted me, so I got to take the job I wanted after all.
I'm not saying this will necessarily work for everyone, but given that I don't think I was an A-1 candidate they didn't push back very hard once I asked. I think it's hard enough for them to find candidates they want that once they take you they'll loosen up a bit, but before the interview starts they're less inclined to go through the headache of making sure the specific job you want is waiting for you. I have no opinion on whether that's a good way to handle it.
Explanation: suppose there are only two things Google observes, GPA and coding ability, and that Google uses some correct decision rule to only hire those people where the sum GPA + coding ability > some threshold. Those who have lower GPAs will thus tend to have higher coding ability, otherwise they wouldn't have met the threshold to make it into the pool of hires they're analyzing - and, therefore, comparing "those with low GPAs that Google hired" and "those with high GPAs that Google hired" is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
In order to assess whether GPA should be used at all, they would need to look at how the people they didn't hire because of their existing policy would have performed.
More reading: http://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-subtle-joys-of-s... and http://www.jamesmahoney.org/articles/Insights%20and%20Pitfal...
The most known problem is recruiter quality. Google's recruiters are notoriously non-diligent and screw up in big ways. It's not unheard of for eng candidates to be booked with a non-eng interviewer, and vice versa.
In any case, here is how it works in practicality:
1. You apply for job X and do a phone screen (or two).
2. Random people throughout the company who a) have had interview training and b) are (supposedly) related to X will be tapped to interview you, but nobody from the actual team you are applying to is selected to minimize biases.
3. Each person interviews you and fills out a form giving feedback. Feedback is qualitative, as well as quant (scale ratings with previous entries exposed to make biases clear).
4. Feedback goes to an unbiased committee (again, not related to the hiring team) for a decision. Feedback is permanently saved in case the person applies again.
The problem with (2) and (3) is that it sometimes results in an unrealistic process - depending on the prowess of the recruiting coordinator in setting up interviewers. A front-end dev candidate for Shopping might get interviewed by an deep algos person from Search, and tank the interview because the interviewer had higher expectations for the candidate's theoretical knowledge.
Good interview training alleviates these problems somewhat, but there are still huge gaps.
I was contacted exactly one year ago for a fulltime position and my contact/recruiter was really excellent, very friendly, helpful and informal, we also talked a lot about non-Google related stuff, a definite great guy. Then I was moved to onsite interviews and I failed.
Fast forward to last October, I was contacted for an internship, I said I was interested and the recruiter said my application was forwarded. I never heard from them again (even after pinging the guy again). Then I talked to an engineer at Google and I was told that since I had already done the required interviews with them a year before (I failed for fulltime but they apparently qualified me for internship), I didn't have to do them again so the process should have been faster.
With that in mind I managed to get in touch with another recruiter and explained my situation, she decided to give me a chance and we had a phone screening (although it shouldn't have been necessary, but no big deal). After that she told me I'd have to go through all the interviews again although that's not what I was told. She passed on my application and nobody contacted me again.
That was beginning of January. I pinged her a few weeks ago and luckily I was told that my application had been magically forwarded to another recruiter again (aka she forgot, probably). This time I was told that I qualified to skip the interviews so now I'm at a later stage (project matching for internship) so I can't complain, although I was told there's not much choice because I am "applying late" even though it's been going since October.
Tl;dr - it really depends on the recruiter, it's a shame because that can really reflect negatively on the whole company.
Ps: sorry for the lengthy post, I needed to vent
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
This of course applies only to engineers.
If you master everything in Yegge's article, but yet fail to show you know how to learn, lead, show ownership and humility, you'll still probably not get the job. And I'm sure this fact baffles a lot of technical experts out there who don't pass their Google interview.
Of course Yegge's advice is indispensable on the technical side. But Lazlo's advice is intentionally more broad than that.
Why is that not on the link?
The Steve Yegge, 'Get that job at Google' article is nothing but a 'Game this interview' article. Read this book, practice this X times and you shall get through. For heaven's sake, Do people hire for getting job done everyday or playing some puzzles from some book not even remotely relevant to any thing you will ever do on your job.
Companies like these want the best of the best people. Yet their methods completely revolve around knowledge and fact based questions. And sorry I don't believe asking difficult questions make it any better. There are forums on the net dedicated to train you crack such questions.
How many interviews check if candidates can last tough on the job situations? How many check if the candidate is hard working, How many check the candidates appetite to work on tough challenging time pressing projects? How many check if the candidate is innovative? Or checks a candidates general abilities like gumption, persistence or general appetite for work and delivering.
These companies often speak on how difficult it is to hire good people and then purposefully invent processes to avoid hiring such people.
While you could consider this advice on how to game an interview, I would argue it's also excellent advice on how to become a better software engineer.
I do not understand.
I'd imagine he's saying that they want to assess general cognitive ability in ways traditional tests do not.
(No surprise Friedman doesn't understand this; the NYT article on the Google findings did not explain this.)
The second is that it reduces the information about one's intellect to one number. People have different strenghts in pattern recognition, high-level thinking, creativity, analytical thinking, speed etc.
BTW, my theory is that personality traits have significant influence on intelligence. For example:
1) how pleasurable is it to learn new things
2) how pleasurable is it to think about problems
3) perfectionsim
The cognitive dissonance required to say "general cognitive ability... is not IQ" is astounding.
IQ testing bad! Hiring smart people good! Does not compute!
Intelligence varies, and people differ in which tasks they are good at. They very well might not think that IQ is a good predictor that they are looking for.
Do you have cites for that?
But then...IQ is indeed a reliable, verifiable, and efficient indicator of g, so...indeed.
People generally don't have their IQs "measured", and even when they are, the things they are kind of good at predicting are only a small subset of important qualities, so it would hardly be a good measure by which to compare applicants.
I think the problem you have with this is that you're assuming "high IQ" and "smart" are automatically the same thing. A high IQ is only one slice of the "smart" pie.
The best way to get job at GOOG is to get job at MSFT, AMZN or Apple, pimp your Linkedin and Dice profile, get contacted by GOOG recruiter and then get auto-hired.
Although, as Ballmer is gone - MSFT becomes sexier and smarter bet for new hires than overbloated GOOG. AMZN seems to get obsessed with it's Silk browser project and is desperate to hire anyone who is desperate to get hired.
PS: Here's my recent reply to AMZN recruiter pimping Silk browser project:
======================= Hi ,
Thank you for your email. I think I am a perfect fit for this position:
>>You should have an intimate understanding of how the web works from the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, to web servers, to browsers. http://i.imgur.com/C6nE2.jpg
>>You like thinking “outside the box”, are not afraid of ambiguity, http://i.imgur.com/1dQII.jpg
>>get excited about difficult distributed systems challenges, http://i.imgur.com/Kh7bX.jpg
>>and are a motivated self-starter. http://i.imgur.com/B6vRRMs.jpg
>>You are a strong team player http://i.imgur.com/k9NTgH0.jpg
>> and thrive in a startup-like environment where flexibility is essential http://i.imgur.com/3p7rF.jpg
>> and delivering rock solid, customer focused solutions is paramount. http://i.imgur.com/kuDJTmx.gif
>> "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine" http://i.imgur.com/xxotrDe.jpg
There's no such thing. Before you are offered a job at Google you have to go through the interview process and the interviewer's feedback is assessed by a hiring committee.
Yet it is well known that most technically talented people have a common OCD, especially of those with strong ego, is to compete to be who the smartest is, which is not a bad thing, but some went extreme and they do it at all cost. Evidently as often observed, in office the loudest person is perceived the smartest be the mass. Can google avoid that?
In a few hours interview, psychological problems like these are difficult to detect and rule out. If google is serious about their claim that they don't care about expertise but .... They should send candidates to psychiatrist and filter first.
Personally I think this NY times google HR is BS marketing. There is better way to recruit top talent, and this is not it.
They may even say these things internally as part of the "official" plan, but as you point out, there's reason to be skeptical it's how they actually operate in practice.
I'd have been more interested in hearing how they select for interviews and not how they hire. If someone from an average school with a below average GPA, he/she could impress and get hired on these attributes (which the candidate certainly can possess), but the real trick for these candidate types is getting in the door.
Top level problems are where the solution involves days, weeks or months of study and contemplation where the solution possibly involves a large amount of refactoring of existing code. Architectural level stuff. There is no way to test for this in an hour long interview.
When I mention refactoring, I often get a blank stare from the interviewer. I had a coworker recently who insisted on calling it "refuctoring", having no concept of it or any desire to investigate.
I don't have any hard proof, but it's clear to me that at least for new hires, GPA is a big requirement for Google.
This means, unless you were fed up with the educational system like I was and you purposely did a mediocre performance, you probably aced them.
"More anecdotally, everyone I know who made it to the interview process had a stellar GPA. Most were members of the CS honor society on campus."
As a student you should probably understand correlation and causative factors better :p
To be let go you have to do quite poorly, by the way. Once you get in the door it would be possible to coast, assuming you did have some productivity. You just won't get the fun stuff.
Some comments posted before this comment mentioned the confusing way that "general cognitive ability" is said not to be the same thing as IQ. No psychologist, and especially no psychologist specializing in industrial and organizational psychology, would speak that way. The universal statement in that branch of psychology is that IQ scores are a very good indicator of "general cognitive ability" indeed, the least expensive and most efficient indicator possible for most hiring situations. I think the Google executive interviewed in today's article and in last summer's article is just trying to be legally correct while eating his cake and having it. In the United States, there are tricky legal issues surrounding using IQ tests as a hiring criterion that grow out of the Griggs v. Duke Power case decision by the United States Supreme Court.[2] IQ tests are disfavored as a hiring criterion by that decisions (but the little known fact is that so are educational credentials disfavored as a hiring criterion[3] by the same case), so companies tend to try to use more expensive, less reliable proxies of IQ tests to get the results that IQ tests would give them more reliably and less expensively.
[1] "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal" 19 June 2013 by Adam Bryant
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
[2] http://www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-co
[3] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/iq_and_hiring_d....
I wonder what the legal defense would look like if an employee was turned down on the basis of a test that wasn't an IQ test, but had a near perfect correlation with the results of an IQ test.
Recent reports suggest a causal relationship between education and IQ, which has implications for cognitive development and aging—education may improve cognitive reserve. In two longitudinal cohorts, we tested the association between education and lifetime cognitive change. We then tested whether education is linked to improved scores on processing-speed variables such as reaction time, which are associated with both IQ and longevity. Controlling for childhood IQ score, we found that education was positively associated with IQ at ages 79 (Sample 1) and 70 (Sample 2), and more strongly for participants with lower initial IQ scores. Education, however, showed no significant association with processing speed, measured at ages 83 and 70. Increased education may enhance important later life cognitive capacities, but does not appear to improve more fundamental aspects of cognitive processing.[1]
What you can improve is your test scores. Which is just as good for getting hired. They won't know the difference.
Or even taking tests in general. Yes, that's what I meant.
Which makes sense to me. That's the people at work I value, those that solve their own damn problems, don't just stall and say "I hit a roadblock" in standup and stare at you like its your problem.
Don't worry about the courage, just apply. If you fail... well, many many people (and many many Googlers) also failed their first Google interview, it's not much of a reflection on you.
If you want to know the best thing about working for Google (I work for Google), it's the peer group. Sure, the interview process misses a lot of great candidate, but it's really hard for a poor candidate to get through the doors. There's no one I work with who I think is dumb, or who I think couldn't handle anything I needed them to handle.
I think eventually you stop feeling impostor syndrome but it hasn't happened yet for me :)
Which means that the other half are not technical roles.
It's especially bewildering when a company seeks a software engineer with expertise in a highly technical domain and populates the interview primarily with programming questions. If they can find the subject matter expert who also happens to be a master software craftsman, congrats to them, but I'm guessing that person doesn't come along very often.
(Maybe I'm bitter, but with the level of skill in computer vision I can demonstrate, don't you think you can teach me your programming nits in short order?)
What other non-soft skills are you discussing?
This approach demonstrates an ability to collaborate. If a person can't debate a straightforward problem without either backing down immediately, or getting angry or defensive, how will they be able to deal with protracted disputes about the design of complex projects?
Interviews can sometimes make me nervous, but I have a history of having zero problem defending an opinion against someone 7 or 8 layers above me.
The NFL is high stress, but there are home games and away games. And playing local rivals you know well, and distant teams you know less well. Much BigCo work is done "on the inside", amid familiar faces; or with cultural reference points you have in common {etc}. Interviewing with a new company can be a hit-or-miss affair because it requirese the establishment of common ground. That's in part why many people short-list resume's with applicants who went to the same or similar schools, or who have worked with common colleagues/products/platforms etc. It all becaus the over-head to process and place context around the applicant is much cheaper (efficient) in the sense of less mantally taxing for the Inverviewer (and if lucky, the interviewee). So in short, that's why new contexts themselves can be more stressful than what might otherwise appear to be "higher" stress from the outside.
Some interviewers just come in with their own preconceptions and outdated/incomplete information, and I very rarely encounter interviewers that actually appreciate learning something new from a candidate. They do exist, but in practice you're better off just shutting up and waiting for them to move on. Pretending to agree doesn't help anyone, of course.
How is this even a useful comparison? Wouldn't it entirely depend on context? They are two different data structures and are both useful. Arguing that one is superior seems nonsensical.
Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.”
No, that's not what Google is able to determine. The blanket claim is too broad. Predict anything? I don't think GPAs are worthless, but that's another discussion for another time. Regardless of whether they're useful, the only thing Google has is its own performance ("perf") data which represents political factors more than anything else.
If you find a zero correlation in junk data, you know... absolutely nothing more than you did beforehand. That's the thing about junk data. You can't trust it, so you can't use it to infer anything.