I had plenty of interviewers end my interview half an hour early because they thought I was dumb. "I want to give you some time to ask questions about {insert company name}." I don't have excellent social skills but I can spot that line from a mile away.
Reading this reddit thread also lowered my expectation of the average google interviewer.
While at Google, only one person cut my interview short. I thought it was weird because I had answered her question correctly. But apparently they often write off a candidate for not using the right terminology or some other picky constraint.
> "I want to give you some time to ask questions about {insert company name}." I don't have excellent social skills but I can spot that line from a mile away.
Actually, that's standard protocol at a lot of places and doesn't reflect how your interview is going. We specifically make a note of what candidates ask, because sometimes it can demonstrate real interest and passion.
I did a bunch of interviews at my previous job, and now am tasked with doing pretty much all of the phone screens as we grow.
I note down every single question the candidate asks me. I try to jot down something about the context, and I also try to pick up on their tone of voice whenever possible.
By far the best interviews are those where we have had some time left over and ended up chatting about things that the candidate finds interesting. On those times I have learned two things, both of which have been valuable. One - what really makes the candidate tick. Job experience is one thing, knowledge of what they can not help learning about more is another. And two - every time the candidate is passionate about something I don't know about, I learn new stuff.
And for some reason, I actually like doing interviews. Strange.
> "I want to give you some time to ask questions about {insert company name}." I don't have excellent social skills but I can spot that line from a mile away.
I'd agree that's often the case, but I actually also often ask this question up front, and then close out an interview by asking it again. By asking it up front, I'm taking some pressure of the candidate by taking 5-10 minutes to present information to them before I put them on the spot. Candidates are generally nervous and/or trying to quickly figure out the situation, and this gives them some warm up time as they learn more about their interviewer, the team, the product, the company, etc. Helps set the tone of a dialog rather than a grilling. Then I ask again at the end just to make sure they feel like they have enough information to make a decision. Disclaimer: I don't work for Google / perhaps some companies have a set interview format where this wouldn't work. I recall an interview I did at one name-brand tech company where the interviews were scheduled for 40 minutes, so there was no time for any kind of chit-chat.
Hmm -- when I interview candidates, I always ask that question and am very happy to answer any question they want about the company. In fact, I give out my personal email address and offer to answer any questions they have as honestly as I can. It's no good for either side to have buyer's remorse, and if I can help a candidate make a good decision, even if that decision isn't to work for me/us, it saves me time in the end.
(Gonna try to do the best I can here using only info that's been made public before)
"While at Google, only one person cut my interview short. I thought it was weird because I had answered her question correctly. But apparently they often write off a candidate for not using the right terminology or some other picky constraint."
I see the other side of the interviews (i sit on a large number of Google hiring committees, and have for about 7 years), and I certainly don't see this happen often. Mostly among newer interviewers. HC gives feedback when we see it, and that puts a stop to it. We either ignore or adjust our thoughts on the interview score to account for it.
Without knowing your exact case, i'll point out there is rarely a "correct" answer to the interview question. It's usually more about thought process and whether you can reason about how to improve upon solutions, etc. Hiring committees hate interview questions that rely on tricks or whatever in order to get good solution, and usually either ban the questions or at the very least, ask interviewers to change questions (and again, adjust our thinking to ignore or whatever the interview score)[1]
Hiring Committees certainly try to make sense of interviews, and we are, after all, people. It's not like we look at interview scores, go "welp, they are 0.1 points below the average hiring score, so that's a no". We are also very good about spotting inconsistencies between interviews, etc.
I'm not going to claim it's perfect, but it's definitely not what reddit claims, where
"They look at it for 3-5 minutes and decide whether you are hired or not. In exceptional cases, they decided that they don’t have enough information, and ask you to do more interviews. "
I spend a large number of hours a week at night reading candidate interview packets, writing up what i thought of each interview and how it affected my thoughts on hiring the candidate, etc. I then spend an hour in each committee discussing candidates.
It may be that in committee, it takes 3-5 minutes to make a decision, but that is because committees tend to end up with very consistent decisions between members (and we don't see each others initial decision or reasoning until the meeting starts). If the decision from everyone was "no, we shouldn't hire", or "yes, we should hire", then there is nothing really to discuss.
If there is dissent one way or the other, long discussions over candidates often break out, and we keep going till we come to a consensus about hiring or not hiring.
Usually we don't need to ask for more interviews, there are rare cases where we just don't have enough signal in the interviews.
[1]
I believe it was Rob Pike who said that it is very easy to come up with questions where if the person does badly, you don't want to hire them, but very hard to come up with questions where if they do well, you do want to hire them. Questions that have "tricks" in them basically never fall into the latter category.
>> 'Questions that have "tricks" in them basically never fall into the latter category.'
They also leave a bad impression for the candidates: You feel bad for not getting the answer, or you feel the interviewer was trying to trick you, or that he's trying to show off.
I'm firmly with the original post - I have been jerked around by the Google interview process twice now, and I'm just not interested any more. Your process sucks.
Not as the person who prompted you to ask this, but let me (rudely) interject and give my own answer, if you'll forgive me;
1. CLARITY is very important. Your workflow and process aside, it's the person on the phone who we interact with and get any barometer into, and this is something I've found very painful in my own experiences with Google interviews, either...
A. They ask a question, or respond to a question in a way that is very difficult to not get thrown by. In my own experience, this was being asked to implement an RB tree on the fly (when I've told my friends inside the big G that I was asked this they always go "wait what", but my hand to god, this happened.), and when I responded with "I'm sorry, that datastructure relies very heavily on getting some very precise rotations right that I simply don't have memorized. Can I look them up and try going from there?" I was met with "Hm, no, let's move on, I would normally just expect my interviewee to just know the answer", a response which, to put it VERY lightly, added insult to injury. Or...
B: Accent. I realize this is probably a sensitive subject, and I don't mean this in a "everyone should speak English flawlessly", but if you're communicating over a more lossy medium like phone, you have to be aware that a heavy accent only contributes to the difficulty in shared understanding, which contributes to feeling stressed and confused, which... etc, back and forth. Multiple Google interviews I was a part of occurred with interviewers I could barely understand, and regularly had to ask to repeat themselves, which I'm sure on some level to the interviewer didn't help impress me to them.
2. Feedback and culture. Despite the above, I had the opportunity to intern at Google. I was always somewhat proud (I promise I'm not trying to dick-wave in this, bear with me :) ) that my feedback from my manager reported me as at or above expectations, however, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not a good culture fit (Admittedly, I was 'young', and needed a good smack on the head, but it really bites that perception is valued more than contribution, especially when you're not given actionable ways to improve), and never received a single atom of feedback, either in my tenure there or during the interviews ("you could have perhaps solved that like X", sort of things) to put me at ease or give me any sense that there was room for personal improvement. I realize the potential legal ramifications in this, but, it's a problem, it needs to be improved, I refuse to accept that with all the smart people at G a solution can't be found :)
Sorry for the rant, this has been a subject that's been itching at me for a few years now, and the chance to braindump at someone who might actually have visibility into the why/how of all of this is very welcome.
Hi Danny, thank you for providing more insight into the hiring committee and for correcting inconsistent behavior.
I absolutely agree with you there is no correct solution. Maybe I missed an obvious edge case or didn't articulate my thoughts, but I thought I was doing well enough to at least make it to the second question.
Google was my 5th-7th onsite that month and I had gotten decent at interacting with and reading my interviewers. Usually when a interviewer decides to reject me I can see it coming. But with her...it happened suddenly and I was very confused.
I'm curious -- does Google ever circle back on no-offer candidates to discuss the interview process?
ITT I see a lot of people who sound like they fell through the cracks of the process. Google has surely lost talent because their interview process hurt the candidate who otherwise would have been an asset.
Then there's the indirect effects -- I probably will never apply to Google because of the long interview (initiation) process. And there are lots of people, I think, who are soured on the idea of not getting a notice one way or another in a timely manner.
Remember that not everybody does a tech-quiz heavy interview. When I interview people I tend to end the programming questions part about halfway through regardless of how well they do.
Reading this reddit thread also lowered my expectation of the average google interviewer.
http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1z97rx/fr...
While at Google, only one person cut my interview short. I thought it was weird because I had answered her question correctly. But apparently they often write off a candidate for not using the right terminology or some other picky constraint.