Google Adjusts Hiring Processes 355
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Google is attempting to fine tune its hiring process as it ramps up recruiting to keep pace with its success, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'In Google's early years, [Sergey] Brin or co-founder Larry Page interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion, Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume complete with rubber udders around Halloween. Even today, at least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications.' While the interview process can remain 'glacial,' Google's new head of human resources notes that the average number of in-person interviews for each candidate offered a job has declined to 5.1 from 6.2. The company continues to seek overqualified employees who can be promoted quickly."
Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "[Google] has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools"
Nice to know that the new hotness is still the same old and busted.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Nuh uh! We don't get preferential treatment! It's an even playing field for everyone!"
That said, you can't blame Google. They're running a business built on smarts, and to find the smartest poeople, they need to go to the places with the highest concentration of talented people, which in turn implies that they need to recruit at some of the more... er... prestigious educational institutions.
Nothing wrong with that.
What is wrong is if t
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Interesting)
They're doing worse than discriminating against those without wealthy parents that can afford the expensive out of state top schools. They're interviewing people with degrees from lesser schools with no intent on hiring them. My undergrad degree is in electrical engineering and my masters is in computer engineering both from Clemson. At the time, Clemson was less than $500/semester which was all I could possibly afford. When I interviewed with Google I got the impression that they had zero intent on hiring me no matter what happened. I was asked several times why I didn't go to a "better" school. For the job they contacted me about I wrote the top textbook on the subject, currently used at Stanford, Univ of Colorado, and GA Tech among others, so I thought I would have been treated more respectfully. They called me. I wasted over $3k in expenses out of pocket to interview with them. And no I didn't get to meet Larry Page.
Officially they said I didn't have the experience they needed. That's a load of crap. I did distributed systems over the Internet for over a decade before Google was even started. I founded the first commercial ISP in this state. I was CTO of three Internet start-ups between 1994 and 2003. All three are still in business. They're not doing great and I didn't make much money but they have survived which is more than you can say about most Internet start-ups.
They hired someone that wasn't qualified and has no experience but had a degree from Stanford. After that bad experience I sold all of my Google stock. I don't think a company can survive long-term making those type of brain-dead decisions. Thank you Google for wasting my time.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Informative)
1) You paid for your own interview. Never do that. They've made no commitment to you beyond a bit of time.
2) During the interview, they're asking totally irrelevant questions.
The days when an interview were completely controlled by the employer left over a decade ago. Irrelevant questions should be answered shortly, and the questions should be dragged back to topic, or ask back directly if they have a prejudice for particular classes of schools and such.
The "Not qualified" might have simply been "won't survive in this corporate culture".
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Insightful)
exactly i don't see why anyone would ever spend 3K to interview for a job. If you really are that good make them pick up the tab, if they aren't willing to do so then it's a good bet they aren't interested in you.
My current job told me early on they wouldn't pay to fly me up for an interview so i told them no thanks... 2 months later they had not found anyone as qualified as me and changed their mind.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Interesting)
In my case, the first interview was great. It was with the guy who wrote the Borland C++ Compiler, and it lasted about an hour and a half on the phone. At the end, he seemed happy, I was happy, and he even said he hoped to be able to meet me when I got there.
The second interview was with a guy on the billing team. It was strange - he kept trying to twist the answers ("Well, what happens if your database doesn't support joins?"). It was also fairly short - the questions I asked him at the end was almost longer than the intereview.
I got a call back about 4 days later saying they didn't like the way I "think". Which turns out was better than the reaction my coworker got in his 3rd interview when the guy, who was asking him to discuss proofs, asked if he was "dense".
No matter, both of us are now working for a competitor about 15 hours north and I couldn't be happier.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Informative)
During one interview, every time I gave a response, the interviewer responded with "No, that doesn't work - the product won't do X" so I had to come up with another option. Finally, after about 4 go-rounds of this, I said "Well, at that point I'd go find the person who was responsible for us using this product, explain how it didn't remotely meet our needs, and rather than waste 10x more time trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole, we should start from scratch and consider it a lesson learned." The guy said "I see."
He then got up, walked out of the room, and 5 minutes later came back with someone from HR and a written job offer. "Everyone else kept going on and on and on and on and on trying to solve the problem by trying to work around something that was obviously broken - you're the only one who knew when to cut your losses and move on."
The point of an interview is to figure out how well the person will fit and how well they'll do the job. Clever hacks and workarounds are nice, but only when they are more efficient and effective than something not as clever would be. It seems like a lot of geek types forget that - it isn't about showing off.
I eventually became a hiring manager at that same company, and I would go out of my way to throw the candidates I interviewed off balance. My favorite technique was to ask them what their favorite tool was, then say "That's stupid" and see how they'd react. The worst response I ever got was "Well, I guess it is, sorry" and the best I ever got was "No, your dismissal without providing a counter argument is stupid. This tool is great for this task because x, y, z. Now tell me why using a tool that can do all that is stupid, and I'll see if you make any sense." People who can think on their feet and come up with practical solutions rather than get flustered or go into some kind of "best practices" parrot mode aren't worth a lot.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Unless your employees' days are filled with intense pressure from random jerks, how is this at all relevant to their jobs?
I could see this for someone in sales or marketing. However, if your engineers are continually having to make snap decisions under intense pressure like this, perhaps you should take a good look at making your working conditions more humane.
I happen to be a very good engineer, who is also very easily flustered by this kind of obstinate behaviour from other human beings. Does that make me a bad fit for your company? Well then, I guess you're glad I don't work there. I know I am!
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Half of that is the interviewer's fault, for not setting expectations. Sometimes you want to see how they'd solve something in the real-world way, and sometimes you want to see how smart/resourceful t
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Surely their ability to work within the team is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to work with "cranky" clients is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to come up with a novel solution to an intractable problem is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to handle hiccups or other inevitable quirks in the work-flow is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to communicate clearly and ask for clarification of objectives
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Maybe they just didn't think your personality would fit in?
Honestly, I don't either.
A lot of questions are asked to see if you can answer them without taking them personally (IE 'why didn't you go to a better school'), as people who take things personally tend not to be good at things like, say, having their code reviewed by a lot of people.
You also seem pretty impressed with yourself and your resume. A lot of Googler's have done great things to, they just don't talk about them as
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Early this year I was finishing up my degree and looking for a graduate job. Since I was specialising in Information Retrieval, I was especially interested in getting my foot in the door at google and then hopefully one day getting to work on something relating to my degree.
I applied for any IT related job I could find on their site. Eventually I got a reply and they made me fill out some worksheet. I was a l
It's their hiring model (Score:4, Insightful)
So how does this relate to you? I think you are over qualified and expensive and Google is looking for young engineers who aren't old dogs with their own bag of tricks. While that might not be smart from your point of view, it seems to be their hiring model, as it is with many companies. You're best off forging your own path, creating your own companies, and recruiting those Google guys when they become old and tired themselves.
Now I am a contractor making 6 figures and will quickly recoup that $60K I lost working at an underpaying company, which, by the way, greatly built my resume.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:4, Interesting)
I graduated from a tiny little religous college in Texas that few have probably ever heard of... My degree was not even in Computer science, it was Business administration. Yet, according to my recruiter I received very high scores going through the hiring process and received a great job offer. I have been at Google for longer than 2 years now.
Google demands smart people. The will hire them wherever they can find them, regardless of school or location around the world.
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I worked at a company with a VP of engineering enamored with degrees from "top" institutions. We ended up hiring this girl with no experience, but a Masters from Stanford. NONE of the engineering managers wanted to hire her, but my boss was ordered to make her an offer (the first manager said he'd quit first).
In the 90 days before we let her go, she spend two weeks learning how to find and edit files; asked m
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps a Stanford PhD is guaranteed to be smart, but a BA/BS/MBA is a different issue. Yale gave Mr. C-average (aka, G.W. Bush) a bachelor's degree, and Harvard gave him an MBA. He did become President, so they certainly picked a winner, but that doesn't mean he is smart rather that he is very well-connected.
>Clemson is a nationally recognized research university.
Hence a PhD from there should be a good researcher. However, Clemson is a public university with 12,000 undergrads and as such the quality of a BA/BS is going to be extremely varied (don't know if the Clemson poster had a BS, MS or PhD). Even Berkeley has sub-par students, and that is despite being the top public university in a state of over 30 million people (vs. only 4 million in South Carolina). I previously taught at Georgia Tech (another big public nationally recognized research university) and found that the top undergrads there were as good as anyone I taught while a grad student at Yale, but on average (although certainly not always) the Yale undergrads were better students.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Informative)
I know three employees of Google. The interview process is strictly standardized. One introductory phone interview from an HR person, followed by another, more technical, phone interview. If you make it past those two, they either fly you out to Mountain View (all expenses paid) for a tough in-person final interview. After that, you still may or may not have the job. I have also spoken to a Google recruiter out here Boston. She told me the exact same thing.
I'm not calling this guy a liar... but his story sounds odd. Seriously, even if he flew out to CA for a week to do interviews, how could it add up to $3000? A flight from NY to CA can be had for about $500 round trip... and that is coast-to-coast. Say $100/night for a decent hotel for a week. Plus $500 in food would make it $1500.
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Even so, there are a lot of cases where it's difficult to get the money together to go to a very good school. My best friend from high school got into the same school I did, but because his family earned more than mine, didn't get a very good financial aid package. The problem was that they didn'
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Also, consider that a kid's parents didn't necessarily prepare to send their child to school. Others simply don't want to or don't feel it's important. It doesn't matter though, if your parents made too much money, you don't get much help.
Fortunately, I've only had to watch this happen with other people. Me... I'm the one who went to college right out of HS even though I clearly wasn't mature enough for it. Now I pay for it cash out-of-pocket. It's remarkable how much more effort
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If you want someone who can take directions, work in adverse conditions, do with little pay, and improvise with what's available, hire someone from the military.
You get what you pay ofr, more often than not. An expensive school is basically a training pedigree; I'm not going to hire someone for a job paying (
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:4, Interesting)
No, you don't. In Australia the last decade or so, there has been a HUGE backlash against private (high) schools and universities. Why? Because to protect their reputation, and be able to justify raising their fees, they spoonfeed the kids.
Did you know that after first semester in Australian universities, nearly /eighty/ per cent of dropouts are from private schools, when the kids find out that they're expected to study and research for themselves, and that study and research required as a result of lectures does not mean "go to TA / tutor and ask him the answers to the questions".
Likewise, some of the private universities are risking their reputation by becoming in danger of being degree factories. Several investigations show that "international" and "full fee paying" students have passed and been graduated with lower results than other students who have been failed.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Insightful)
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*ducks*
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Informative)
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Stanford and Berkeley are in their back yard, and the founders are Stanford grads. Personally, I think it sounds like a reasonable idea. I disagree with it, but it seems reasonable enough.
No, I'm not an "elite school" grad. I have a B.S.E.E. from the University of Arkansas.
They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:5, Insightful)
I may be wrong but in all my readings about great commanders, none of the articles featured front chair legs being sawn off.
What a dick.
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Uhh.. How about the Cold War? His accomplishments are difficult to argue with; the guy pretty much by himself twisted the Navy's arm into building a nuclear submarine, and got it don
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Re:They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:5, Interesting)
But if you want to hear "whacky".... he drank a glass of primary coolant in front of Congress to make a point about nuclear power not being as dangerous as the uninformed might think.
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>he pulled during recruitment interviews ever enabled him to recruit smarter or
>better personnel.
Well, you're wrong. I experienced the program he created (long after he personally was not there), and it worked.
He created the Navy's nuclear program basically from scratch. He decided it had to be done *right* - we couldn't just have all this egalitarian time serving mediocrity form and run the thing. A *combination*
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There are critics of Rickover's program, particularly submariners in the Royal (UK) Navy, who recognize that good engineers don't necessarily make good naval commanders.
Th
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Also gone? Brin's hiring catchphrase (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Also gone? Brin's hiring catchphrase (Score:5, Funny)
Just a few things to consider (Score:5, Funny)
Either you'll be learning it to get in, or you'll be learning it to speak to your future boss.
Have a nice day.
Re:Just a few things to consider (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just a few things to consider (Score:4, Insightful)
right now corperations are panicking that the increasing number of spanish speaking only customers is exploding.
So they are putting everyone to the top of the pile that can speak spanish or other languages.
Personally hiring based on education is a stupid thing to do, hire based on experience and capabilities and then education if they are not experienced enough. A guy with 20 years of IT behind him is far better than some kid with a masters in EE and CS to run the IT department.
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Newsflash: it's not your job, it's someone elses job you are being payed to do. A functional spec means that others can understand and use your stuff if you get hit by the proverbial truck. And what is so fucking hard about writing down the instruction set, ports, adresses and so on, a little effort on your part and ANY programmer can write software for your christmas lights or whatever the hell your plugging into
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Thanks for telling me what I've already known for 20 years. You jumped to an incorrect conclusion - I'm *not* the person that designed the hardware, I'm not an electrical engineer, and I wasn't a project manager. I'm a software engineer just like this other guy was, but unlike the guy with the impeccable pedigree, I had a good understanding of how computers actually work. I fail to see why he
Innnnteresting... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in HR for a while, and the boss there - someone I regard highly - had a saying: "Problems aren't encountered, they're recruited". By that token, the converse is also true. If you actively seek people who expect to do better things (not just want to), they probably will, and so will your company.
Word to the wise.
Re:Innnnteresting... (Score:5, Insightful)
That sedate vegetable who's too lazy to tie his own shoelace if you don't make him, on the other hand,...
Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
The results? Zero persons hired. And we are all card-carrying, Linux-using, OpenBSD-loving, certified nerds. Heck, just check my Journal if you don't believe me (Last entry: "How to compile gcc-4.1.1 on Solaris 8").
(All the names have been changed to protect the guilty, of course)
The moral of the story: it's tough kids. It's even worse than that. It's double-extra tough, with a heaping plate of steaming geekiness on the side. Is it worth it? Hey, don't ask me, I don't know. What I know is that we all now have great jobs, that are well paid, and did not take all this insanity to get. But these jobs are not 'cool' Google jobs, of course. YMMV.
Ask me again in a couple of years, when I try to get another job at the Googleplex...
Re:Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience was the exact opposite. Google saw my blog, phoned me, and asked if I'd be interested in working for them. They did two phone interviews which were utterly trivial, just chatting about programming. They flew me out to California, and the five in-person interview were almost equally trivial. One of them was "forget this, want to get lunch?". The result was unanimous in my favour, and I was hired with six figures a week later. I got the impression that they had already made up their minds, and were just going through the motions of the interview.
The process really unnerved me. I'm a good programmer, but frankly I'm not THAT good. Heck, I don't even have a university degree.
If your interviewer is a psycho nut!! (Score:3, Interesting)
if they can hack it.
NOTE to google, if you have to go through 8 phone interviews, 5 personal interviews, then either your so bi-polar and anal, or so innefficient, that you
daily work practice is just as slow you never get anything done - 12 meetings to decide one icon perhaps?. Work fast, work elite, like 80s hackers did. Document later
or get a cheap secretary to dictate the docs.
2. I bet the g
Maybe, but I bet... (Score:2)
And I highly doubt they'd keep around someone who tried to get a secretary to document code.
Re:Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
By the end of the second I was in two minds whether to take things any further anyway. I wanted to work for Google, but could I go through fourteen interviews? I was concerned about the money, as no number was on the job spec and big names often offer low and offer options to compensate. I can't pay my mortgage with stock options!
And, most significantly, was the style of interview. They asked brain-teasers, which I tend to think is a lousy way to scope out a candidate. Either you know the trick and can do it instantly, you get lucky or you need a hint. None of these really shows how smart you are, how well you can program a computer, interact with clients or, indeed, any other aspect of the job. The interviewer was also clearly working in the background while I was trying to answer the questions, only half listening, which was just plain rude.
Most communications were friendly and personal, right up to the last. The rejection email started, impersonally, "dear candidate."
So overall I'm not terribly impressed with Google recruitment. Okay, maybe I'm biased against them as they turned me down but as an interviewer I've always considered part of my job as leaving a positive impression of the company even with candidates that are not going to be hired. Google failed in this.
Human Resources Shit (Score:5, Funny)
These people, without knowing any little shit about really what a particular position would require psychologically and technically from an applicant, mess up whole system by putting forth absurd and utterly stupid "psychological evaluation" crapola in front of the candidates. Check this one out :
"You have come back late from work, and suddenly phone rings, and a group of 10 of your friends announce that they are coming to your place for dinner. You check around the cupboards, and find out that there is only one sack of flour and some pepper. What do you do ?"
Stupid bitch (in this case), i pick up the phone and tell the fucking friends to buzz off, of course. Moreover you are so stupid that you are totally incapable of realizing such above shit have the pitiful possibility of happening anywhere in this worldly civilization as :
1 - when you come home from work at 23.00 at night, noone rings and says they are coming to dinner
2 - only in military, and only high level officers can gather up a 10 people strong group at 23.00 in the night instantly.
3 - People after college do not tend to still live in and get around in herds.
4 - EVEN if somehow with great glory of existence such a crapola has happened, the most spectacular thing that anyone can do with a sack of flour, some amount of peppers and tap water is adding some water to flour and pepper, and showing the resulting mixture up his incoming friends' asses.
Furthermore, stupid bitch (in this case), you are SO stupid, SO overly away from realities is that the LEAST thing you would require in a production line supervisor mechanical engineer is extravertness, talkativeness, and high social activity. You are going to put him in front of a 15 m production line that never stops, constantly takes in raw materials and purports out intermediate parts. if you put someone with social wants or aptidude to such a position, chances are high that in 1.5 years time he will show up at work with a shotgun at hand and blow off 5-10 of his colleagues, probably including your bitchy (in this case) ass.
f*ck.
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You're right though, I'd have told my friends I just got back from work, and am going to bed, and to get back to me in the morning if they want to meet up.
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that question is actually a crisis management response question. The want to know what you will do in an emergency.
Unfortunately, that usually means that your department will be horribly underfunded and you had better get used to ordering pizza all the time instead of buying the right things and having the proper amount of time to get it done right.
Too many places run on the "oh crap, how cheap and fast can we do this?" attitude and that is why they all have horribly cra
Re:Human Resources Shit (Score:4, Insightful)
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I mean, if you're going down anyways, why not do humankind a favour in the process?
Damn Right (Score:5, Funny)
In a recent interview whilst the actual hirer and I were discussing their database set up the HR muppet interjected
"What does 'diversity' mean to you ?"
"Er, how do you mean" I asked, "In what context ?"
"D . . I . . V . . E . . R . . S . . I . . T . . Y ? What does it mean, to . . . . . . YOU ?"
"Well it means a wide range of, er, things - different things. A diverse selection of, whatever"
"Yes..."
"Yes ?"
"Diversity, whatdoesitmean, to YOU ?"
"I often make use of a diverse range of techniques in order evalutate them all and select the most appropriate technique for the task I was focusing on."
"Yes but in an office context, come on - in the office ?"
"Offices with a diverse range of facilities are often quite nice, I've worked in a few and enjoyed it..."
( frowning HR Muppet ) "...but how about co-workers in an office environment ?"
"I think it's a good idea to have a wide range of diverse talents and abilities within a particular team in order to maximise the chances of fitting a specific skillset with a particular challenge. In addition an aggressive policy of experience pooling can enable team members to improve their own knowledge in return for sharing their specialist knowledge with the group at large."
"Yeeeessssss, but what other kinds of diversity do you think are important in an office environment ?"
"I don't know. What other kinds ?"
I didn't get that job.
"
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Correct Answer (Score:5, Funny)
Slaughter the first 3 as they step through the door and fry them up with peppers to provide a magnificent feast for the others. After you've eaten they can help you clean up the apartment and learn a salutory lesson about what happens to people who demand they come around to your house and eat your food without being invited.
Re:Correct Answer (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Correct Answer (Score:4, Funny)
Why is this so funny? (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly on Slashdot, it's not enough to slaughter and prepare 3 of your friends to feed the rest. No, first you have to run a sort.
Some more answers (Score:3, Funny)
OR
Of course there is no food in the fridge. There is no food in the fridge because I have guessed all my friends would once again be arriving unannounced ( the jokers ) and have already taken all the food out of the fridge and cooked a delicious 3 course meal for 10. So Mr Interviewer, hah what do you say to that then eh !
OR
My friends are all supermodels, when they say "Coming around to eat" what
Well, they certainly need to change something... (Score:5, Interesting)
The story is as below:
1) So I get the 'thank you for your interest we really want to talk to you blah blah' email from one of the people in HR, requesting a phone interview from the US to my mobile (note: I live in AU), so I give them my full, prefixed international mobile number: +614XXXXXXXX, and we arrange a time. I was to be interviewed by their head honcho of Open Source Chris DiBona.
So, I wait patiently for a call a few days later, the phone never rings.
Turns our they couldn't get the number right, or at least, didn't know how to call an Australian international mobile number.
They said they left messages on my phone, but I don't have voicemail on, the mobile phone isn't an answering machine, and it's on and in full coverage all the time...
I only find this out later that day when I emailed them requesting what happened...
2) So, we re-organised the interview (over email with their HR people), again with Chris DiBona.
There's a mess up again, and nobody calls. Again, I waited patiently with the phone, awaiting for the call, nothing happened.
3) So, we reschedule the interview AGAIN (this time, not with Chris, but another person high up the chain who will remain unnamed). They forget to call.
4) So, it's a week and a bit later, as due to the time difference, the turn-around on sorting out these stuffups takes about 2.5 days each time.
I re-schedule again, but I don't pause my life for it anymore (decided to go to work anyway). Guess what, he forgets to call, and the HR girl who tries to contact me, forgot to press the '+' in '+61' to call my international phone number, so she couldn't get to me.
5) It's almost two weeks later now, and we re-schedule again, with a lady. I finally get a call in the morning.
40 minutes of questions on B+ trees and Index tables, and I'm done.
6) I get an email a week after that saying 'thank you for your interest blah blah, but you don't fit the profile for' - This being for a different job to that of what I actually applied for.
So, understandably, by the end of this all, I really didn't give a shit if I didn't get the job, well, at least the job I applied for.
My skill set is great, my academic record 'alright', but to be honest, if a company can't pull its shit together like that, then I'm really not that interested in working for them, regardless of the inherit 'coolness' factor.
In any case, I'm doing better now that I envisage I would be if I were simply a Software Engineer at Google in any case, but that's how things in life pan out don't they
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Re:Well, they certainly need to change something.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh, no thanks I'm not that desperate, thank you very much. Hint: if you want to recruit me consider that A) I have a nice job B) You practically need to beg me to work for you rather than the other way around.
If Google wants to get the best they need to treat people a little differently. Coming in with this arrogant attitude practically guarantees that they offend people like me long before a concrete job offer is on the table. Putting dump HR processes in front of me is pretty much guaranteed to piss me off in minutes. Don't waste my time with that!
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I've worked in telecommunications for over twenty years, and I have yet to see a phone in North America with a "+" button on it. With all due respect, WTF are you talking about?
Re:Well, they certainly need to change something.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, I know which one this was. I apologize for the mixup. I did route you to someone else after that because I was heading out of town and honestly I thought I wasn't the right person to interview you.
Chris
So no one over 40 with real experience then (Score:4, Interesting)
Good job Google. Good to know that we greybeards are at least as disposable to you as your Indian help desk.
And if you are from Google please ignore this posting as I have nothing to offer someone as young and brash as you are.
Is this news that matters? (Score:4, Insightful)
And again, it's not like Google's methods and philosophies can be adopted by other firms. Totally useless article, waste of time, IMO.
Google needs to grow up (Score:5, Interesting)
When I visited Google in August, I spent the entire day inside a 10'x10' room answering questions. When I asked questions of my interviewers, the response was always either "I don't know anything about that, you should ask someone else", or "I'd love to talk about that, but I've got a time limit and lots of questions I need you to answer". I don't blame my interviewers for this; they did the best they could. I blame HR for setting up the process the way they did. In the end, Google was absolutely certain that they wanted to hire me, but they hadn't done anything to convince me that I wanted the job they were offering. None of my interviewers took me to their corner of the building and showed me what it was like to work at Google; none of my interviewers talked about the interesting problems they had worked on recently; in fact, none of them told me even remotely as much about Google as I had learned in 15 minutes of looking at the Google jobs website.
Was the hiring process unusually bungled in my case? Probably -- Google HR had trouble figuring out what I do (which is a separate issue for Google to fix. Note to recruiters: If you can't understand something on someone's CV, ask someone with a technical background to explain it to you. The question "do you have a Master's degree?" should never be asked of someone who has a doctorate). But even if they had decided what job I was being considered for before starting to interview me, I doubt it would have made any difference.
If you want to hire good people, be prepared to spend at least as much time showing them why they should accept your offer as you do deciding if you want to make them an offer. "We're cool" may be enough to convince some people; but the smarter people are, the less likely they are to drink Kool-Aid.
Re: (Score:2)
> but they hadn't done anything to convince me that I
> wanted the job they were offering.
They probably have some kind of "WTF, who the hell *doesn't* want to work here - even Bill Gates would want to work here"-attitude.
I've never applied to Google, but the way various online-sources describe it, they'd like to keep everything confidential.
Might be one reason why you weren't shown around - Google seems to like to cultivate this aura of sec
Re:Google needs to grow up (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't need to give people my life story, 2 litres of blood, play puzzle pirates for 8 hours, and then good cop/bad cop. My experience speaks for itself - if you and I have the same hopes and strive for success and honesty - then we can probably work together.
Google really worries me - hiring smart people doesn't mean diddly. I know hundreds of smart people. Phd's, MA's, CIO's, CEO's. They're just like regular people, only smarter - which is to say there are hard workers, slackers, the ambitious, and the bums too. Some are ethical and honest, some aren't. Actual genius smart people tend to have more problems than others, in my limited experience anyway.
In other words - hiring smart people just because they're smart is no better than hiring from the general population in terms of success - what drives success isn't smartness but what employees are motivated (through various means, both personally and as a group) to accomplish. I'm not saying motivation alone drives people - only those that can be motivated.
I've actually taken hiring classes - from the former Director of HR at Southwest Air. They studied the problem for a decade. They tracked thousands of employees histories and finally came to a very simple solution.
There are people that just want a job, and there are people that want to suceed. For most jobs, skills are secondary and can be learned or classes taken for those that have the aptitude.
What matters most is "Hire success-driven people and you get a successful company."
"Overqualified?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, boys and girls: "overqualified" is simply HR's way of saying "can be underpaid."
Building Bad Practices (Score:5, Interesting)
However, this position in the marketplace to shall pass and the bad habits of today will linger. There talking about now "standardizing" the interview process. What a novel concept. It only took this company five years to figure that one out. We did that in an afternoon in my own team at my former employer. I can't think why having 5000 engineers asking all different questions might not be a good thing.
Apparently nobody at Google has ever looked for a job before also from the TFA, taking two months to get back to someone after an "onsite" and to ask them for a "2nd round" interview. If I haven't heard from someone in two weeks after coming to there office, I am moving on at that point.
Finally, why are the co-founders still approving people to hire? Yes, I understand that the culture and the people you hire are important aspects of the firm. But were not talking about the first 100 employees anymore, were talking about employee 6,000 to 7,000. All this does is frustrate people inside the firm and job seekers.
This stupidity will cost and its going to cost Google shareholders about $1 billion. This is a small field and the number of talented people that Google is looking for are few. Someone is going to go through this process, get pissed off, and pull a YouTube, which Google will purchase. At that point, you will be able to put an actual value to how idiotic this process really is.
Disclaimer: No I have never interviewed with Google, nor do I plan to, but had many friends go through the process.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I thought that was working as ahem "an actor" for Playboy Productions? I've always fancied a job in penetration testing?
Reminds me of IBM's hiring 20 years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, it took 3 attempts to connect for a phone interview, and there was a significant degree of consternation at IBM that I would not permit such a call during the day (while I was working at a client's office). Then followed in person interviews at their Canadian head office, during which it became obvious in a hurry that they had not read my resume or confused it with another (my degree is NOT in Engineering from U of T, and I have NEVER worked as a mainframe systems programmer). Five different people, 4 hours. The only part that was really interesting was the lunch in the IBM cafeteria, where I quickly grew to understand where the "Big" in "Big Blue" came from.
Another phone interview followed, and then, despite two follow up letters from me, I heard nothing, so I just assumed that they were not interested and did not have the courtesy to contact me to tell me so. Fine. I took another contract I was interviewing for, and forgot about them.
Four months later, I got a phone call from IBM asking me when I can start. Huh? You think I'm going to wait around for 4 months while you decide? What planet did you say you were from?
What I took away from that experience was this: when HR and the company hiring process gets seriously confused and out of control, the company suffers big time. IBM had to take a major kick in the pants before they smartened up. Until they did, they were heading for irrelevance very quickly. I'm guessing that Google might have to go through the same thing. Not for a while, because they have a strong core and strong growth. But sooner or later it will happen. Every week that passes by, they take one more step away from upstart towards mature. And in IT, mature = complacent = stagnant = doomed.
People who turned Google down? (Score:5, Interesting)
Kudos to the geek who puts OSS before a cushy job at Google and untold wealth in stock options.
Re:People who turned Google down? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google hiring process still has serious problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Recently I was interviewing for a SRE position at Google and everything was going allright, until an interviewer asked me how to implement a singleton in Java. Then I explained the standard pattern using a static initializer and told him the so-called "double check" pattern a lot of developers use doesn't work in Java (this is well documented here [umd.edu]). Since the interviewer didn't have a clue about that problem, he spent some 15 minutes fighting my point, and in the end of the interview he even said the correct way of implementing it is to use a double check, although I have explained him 10 times the Java memory model makes that construct break. I even told him to search for "java singleton problem" in Google to understand what I told him, but maybe this was a bad idea, he seemed to be already in a bad mood in the beggining of the interview, this made him even more poignant. Guess what? They sent me the "raw dismiss letter" after that interview...
Then here goes my advice for you if you're going to apply for google: pray for luck! If you get a *single* dumb interviewer in your way, you'll be out. It's not a fair process, they don't care about giving feedback for you promptly (expect at least 1 week to have feedback after any iteration with them), and sometimes the interviewers don't know exactly what they are talking about. Be warned.
Arrogance of Google Recruiters (Score:3, Interesting)
Come back to the 5 & Dime, Brian Reid, Brian R (Score:3, Informative)
of personnel for whom they have been alleged to treat shabbily,
such as Brian Reid, whose age discrimination case is on appeal:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5283653.html [zdnet.com]
As part of the suggested settlement for the Reid v. Google suit,
Google was admonished to bring about a drastic overhaul
of hiring practices biased toward creating disparate impact.
Reid's eye-opening comments are in the public Santa Clara
County case documents, as well as in John Battelle's "The Search".
(At Amazon, one would do well to "search inside the book"
[using A9 technology, not Google's!] to land on pages
223 and 233 or thereabouts.)
google sux (Score:3, Interesting)
Page = University of Michigan graduate
These fools working at Google need to learn a thing or two about probability. The Intelligence distribution relative to the mean (measured by I.Q.) at Ivy League schools is nearly identical to that of state schools. Key phrase: relative to the mean. The only difference between the population in an Ivy and the population of (insert state school) is that the ivy's population has a higher average intelligence. What does this mean? There is a huge population of very bright individuals within the state university population that are just as smart or smarter than the average ivy leaguer. Brin and Page are an obvious example of this!
Why do Brin and Page play it up as if they're hot-shot Stanford grads? Do they not remember their roots in STATE UNIVERSITY? I've interviewed there myself and let me tell you: there is a subset of people working at Google that graduated from top schools and think they're the smartest and that nobody from a lesser school is worthy of working with them. If you interview with one of these people be very careful and be on your best.
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
3 things are certain (Score:3, Funny)
My google hiring experience (Score:4, Informative)
I was pretty surprised at the abruptness of the dismissal, but if there would have been another 10 interviews before reaching "2nd round," as some say, then I'm glad I dropped out at the fourth interview. It's a bit of a shame, I think my skill set, background, and technical approach would have been very well suited to google, and helped them.
But the opportunities in this industry are endless, so life goes on :)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Every job I've ever seen them post has been for a guru. Who manages their hiring process for low-level tech support?
Too old. (Score:4, Interesting)
Eliminated in round 0 : no degree, no interview (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, I do have 10 years professional experience as a programmer in the USA [madbrain.com] at such high-profile companies as Computer Associates, Netscape Communications, America-Online, and Sun Microsystems, where I have been extremely successful, always one of the top-rated employees everywhere. I have actually been programming for 18 years, and turned 30 last june. I don't actually feel young anymore, but I would think I would still fit well with the corporate culture of Google. I bought a house in Silicon Valley at 21, I have been making 6 figures since 2000, and my career continued to flourish even during the dot-com bust.
However, my lack of degree made me a complete non-starter at Google. They wouldn't even schedule me for an interview. At least they didn't waste much of my time !
But the emails and calls from Google recruiters keep coming. This very morning, I got an email from another one about a possible 3 months temporary position as a software QA. I really went off on them about how mismatched that was for me, and told them to delete my resume from their database, since I just accepted a new job, at conditions sufficiently advantageous to guarantee a comfortable early retirement.
Google's stupidity in hiring practices was their loss, IMNSHO.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Their hiring practices may have resulted in a good product. On the other hand, they may have just been lucky.
Re:How many ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How many ? (Score:4, Funny)
It's anti-Google. Other possible troll topics include suggesting that the GPL is viral, suggersting the PS3 might succeed, being positive about Microsoft, and any opinion on hot button topics such as gun control or immigration.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I guess we know one person that isn't qualified for Google.
Re: (Score:2)