I think plenty of people tend to vastly overestimate Google's (or Facebook's, ...) hiring bar. I know quite a few people who would be happy to work there and (I believe) can easily beat the hiring process, but they self-eliminate themselves from the game, so I definitely recommend to folks not to make a prejudice about whether they can get into, because they generally don't have many data points, and go interview anyway. Let them figure out whether you are smart enough or not; don't self-eliminate. Never let the widespread propaganda lead you to believe that everyone hired by a successful company in the valley is a genius. They collectively hire many thousands of people; it's hard to believe they are all geniuses.
Don't think that the fact of recruiter getting in touch mean anything -- they are playing their own numbers game.
Exactly. In some conversations I've had with fellow dev's they seem to equate a message from a recruiter with a job offer. I never understood this. Sure, I get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn but it's prob. the same generic letter blasted to hundreds or even thousands of candidates. The quality of your online profiles (SEO?) as a programmer is directly related to the volume of messages you get from recruiters.
It is literally the job of the recruiters to keep the pipeline as full as possible.
I'm just trying to offer a point of data regarding what Google by proxy of their recruiters, looks for. The recruiter himself has been working for Google for quite a while, so either he really knows how to game the system, is currently desperate, or Google doesn't have as extreme standards as one would think.
Did you tell him that you're a psychopath? My point is that if a recruiter reaches out to you, it probably means your online identity matches their criteria for potential candidate. Now this criteria can be as simple as oh neat he uses haskell to I'm impressed by his contributions to project X, Y, Z. So unless you tell him something that is completely contradictory to his superficial impression of you there's no reason he should tell you NOT to interview with the company.
Also, I feel like whatever reason the recruiter decided to contact you (Github / nice linkedin profile) has very little to do with the companies hiring bar. It's a terrible proxy for measuring how a company hires. It's at best an indication of the technologies you'll potentially be working with. For example, if you only have java listed chances are you prob. would have never gotten that phone call. You should try it as an experiment.
Want to know where the bar actually is? Go for an interview. Of course, what they mean by interview is usually 1-2 rounds of phone interviews. So in essence you're still pretty far from being seriously considered as a candidate.
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Corme...
There is a lot of social pressure to attribute one's success to hard work (except of you're a White male ;-) ), luck, good mentorship, experience, meta-skills etc. rather than intelligence.
Recruiter reaching out to him is nowhere near the actual job offer, so this guy publicly flatters himself big time.
Such a ignorance towards ethics is like debt: initially you grow, keep doing it, and soon enough you take a nosedive.
But as long as the hiring process keeps the same as of it is now, it can be hacked not that difficultly by keep practicing on coding exercises (e.g. http://oj.leetcode.com/). All of my friends spent several weeks working on the coding exercises got into Google (for those cared to apply). Several of them are really not that "smart" and they are below-average in project-coding & general computer science understanding (sorry my friends), but repeatedly working on coding exercises and even memorize some common problems' solution just works for Google or Facebook's hiring process.
That process of cracking the coding exercises can be boring, though. I would be immediately returning to do my side-project even after I do one or two coding exercise. Not worth of the time at least for me; there are tons of great companies packed with people smarter than the average Googlers and they don't emphasize on algorithm in hiring process that much, why not work for them?
From http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht... :
"As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, the giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools. In the suit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising."
"A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Education Week that the company “scans and indexes” the emails of all Apps for Education users for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising, via automated processes that cannot be turned off—even for Apps for Education customers who elect not to receive ads. The company would not say whether those email scans are used to help build profiles of students or other Apps for Education users, but said the results of its data mining are not used to actually target ads to Apps for Education users unless they choose to receive them."
...
"Student-data-privacy experts contend that the latter claim is contradicted by Google’s own court filings in the California suit. They describe the case as highly troubling and likely to further inflame rising national concern that protection of children’s private educational information is too lax."
"Mr. Thiele said his district has used Google Apps for Education since 2008. Officials there have always been aware that the company does “back-end processing” of students’ email messages, he said, but the district’s agreement with Google precludes such data from being used to serve ads to students or staff members. As long as the company abides by those terms, Mr. Thiele said, “I don’t have any problem with it.” In an emailed statement provided to Education Week, Bram Bout, the director of Google Apps for Education, said that “ads in Gmail are turned off by default for Google Apps for Education and we have no plans to change that in the future.”"
...
"Those plaintiffs in the California lawsuit allege that Google treats Google Apps for Education email users virtually the same as it treats consumer Gmail users. That means not only mining students’ email messages for key words and other information, but also using resulting data—including newly created derivative information, or “metadata”—for “secret user profiling” that could serve as the basis for such activities as delivering targeted ads in Google products other than Apps for Education, such as Google Search, Google+, and YouTube."
"The plaintiffs allege that Google has employed such practices since around 2010, when it began using a new technology, known as Content Onebox, that allows the company to intercept and scan emails before they reach their intended recipients, rather than after messages are delivered to users’ inboxes, regardless of whether ads are turned off."
"While the allegations by the plaintiffs are explosive, it’s the sworn declarations of Google representatives in response to their claims that have truly raised the eyebrows of observers and privacy experts. Contrary to the company’s earlier public statements, Google representatives acknowledged in a September motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ request for class certification that the company’s consumer-privacy policy applies to Apps for Education users. Thus, Google argues, it has students’ (and other Apps for Education users’) consent to scan and process their emails."
"In November, Kyle C. Wong, a lawyer representing Google, also argued in a formal declaration submitted to the court in opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification that the company’s data-mining practices are widely known, and that the plaintiffs’ complaints that the scanning and processing of their emails was done secretly are thus invalid. Mr. Wong cited extensive media coverage about Google’s data mining of Gmail consumer users’ messages, as well as the disclosures made by numerous universities to their students about how Google Apps for Education functions."
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.de/2014/04/protecting-stude...
There's an awful lot of very slippery language in this post:
"So, if you’re a student logging in to your Apps for Education account at school or at home, when you navigate to Google.com, you will not see ads." Great -- but does anyone see ads on the google.com homepage? Seeing ads is not the issue; the issue is how Google is collecting and processing data. So:
"We’ve permanently removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Apps for Education, which means Google cannot collect or use student data in Apps for Education services for advertising purposes." I was with you until that last qualifier, "for advertising purposes." That just makes me wonder what sort of "collection" and "use" purposes Google is reserving for itself. What's really off the table here? Even if "ads scanning" is turned off, what protections are in place to make sure that no one, including Google itself, has the ability to use the data associated with Apps for Education accounts in privacy-violating or nefarious ways? The technology the post actually mentions, like HTTPS, is all about the channel between users' computers and Google's servers. But are there any protections to keep student data from being abused by Google employees?
This last possibility is an important one, as many of my students may one day be applying for jobs at Google. What assurance do they have that the person who hires them or their future manager will not, in a moment of weakness, troll through their email from their undergrad days? see the photos they sent to friends? read the papers they wrote and stored on Google Drive?
I understand that much of the language here is probably slippery for legal reasons, and to keep the explanations simple, not because it is hiding some bad intent on Google's part. But good intentions are not enough when you are asking to be trusted with other people's data, especially student data.
There are lots of professions that the average Googler couldn't get into which makes more $ (e.g. finance, doing a profitable startup). If you ask an average Google, they would give similar ethics-based reasons like OP (e.g. Wall street is bad.)
Get off your high horse, you are not smart, you just gamed the interview process. If you are smart, quit and start a company.