
Why Google's hiring process is broken - michokest
http://blog.teambox.com/google-hiring-process
======
yid
My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral,
and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an
offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The
recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of
interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from
the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reason for terminating contact, just
plain dead silence. I tried emailing her a few times and left her a voicemail,
noting very politely that they had contacted me and not vice versa, and asking
if they were still interested in setting up an interview, but all I got was
stony silence. If that's not broken, I don't know what is. For a company that
hires the best engineering talent, they either hire substandard HR people, or
perhaps most HR people just operate at a different level of efficacy.

~~~
joebadmo
All of these recruitment horror stories are starting to scare me about Google,
but I wonder how much of it is selection bias. Anyone who has a good
experience almost definitionally gets sucked into the G-Vortex and basically
never gets heard from again, right?

I have a friend who just accepted a position at Google, and she said the
process was long and arduous, but it wasn't a horror story.

~~~
noctorne
Well, I know Googlers pretty well. Even internally, they say their hiring
process really sucks. Not one person told me this, 80% of the people I talked
to told me the same thing. I personally wont blame the interviewers or the
recruiters, they are doing their job. I blame their messed up Hiring
Committee. I don't understand why the hiring committee can't collaborate with
the interviewers and hiring manager to hire a person. Everything is done
through writing, and the hiring committee does everything quietly on their
own. I even wonder, is the hiring committee a computer?

~~~
nostrademons
That's done to eliminate bias. Remember how a couple days ago, there was a
story on HN about how interviewing really sucks, because ultimately, what
determines whether you get the job or not whether you happen to have a
personal rapport with your interviewer? People end up caring more about how
you present yourself socially than what you know.

The hiring committee is Google's answer to that. The idea is to completely
divorce the hiring decision from people who have personally known the
candidate. Instead, there's a very broad written information channel between
interviewers, references, recruiters, and the hiring committee. But it remains
_written_ , so that all your unconscious biases about people stay out of the
decision, and at least in theory, it's all based on hard data.

~~~
gergles
But this an overly-academic approach to the problem. Your interviewers will
still write in whatever they write, as colored by their perceptions and
rapport with you. If they write that you had a bad interview, then that's
going to poison the HC. There's no way around this.

The HC appears to serve only as a layer of noise/a random selection filter to
determine who is actually offered a job.

~~~
nostrademons
It forces you to back up your opinions with data, though.

As long as the decision is made by humans, you will never get a completely
unbiased result, because humans have biases. It's the same in every field -
people pretend science is objective because it relies on data, but if you read
Kuhn, you'll see that a lot of science is personality cults and subjective
opinions and schools of thought. People pretend Google's search algorithms are
objective because they rely strictly on numbers and data, but they're written
by humans, and humans choose which data is important.

But that doesn't make the data useless. The act of being forced to support
your opinions with data makes you dig much deeper into them, and surfaces
relevant information that'd otherwise be ignored immediately because it
doesn't fit your preconceptions.

Think about science vs. polemics. If you're actually doing original research
in a scientific field, you'll realize that there's _a lot_ of uncertainty
hidden behind "the scientific consensus", and a lot of other ways of
interpreting that same data. But that doesn't mean that the scientific
consensus is wrong. It may be wrong, but it's probably _less wrong_ than
whatever vitriol Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck or Michael Moore is spouting at the
moment.

------
alienfluid
I haven't had an interview in over 6 years, but I have been approached by
multiple recruiters in the same time span.

I actually dread the day I choose to switch jobs and have to face another
technical interview - considering that my knowledge of college-level CS has
declined over time. It's not because I am less skilled now than I was before,
it's because you don't have to constantly create fantastically fast algorithms
on a daily basis (at least in my job!).

The skills that I have developed over the past 6 years - designing complex
components that interact with other complex components in a hugely complex
product, making improvements in the design of a 20 year old codebase, deciding
between fixing a bug and compatibility etc., intuition about design choices
and how they fit in the product, and yes, debugging (!) - none of these are
covered in technical interviews these days.

Sure, I could explain how a b-tree works - but that's not going to help me
resolve my next bug.

~~~
yid
I'm sure you would do fine based on your experience and boyishly good looks.

~~~
alienfluid
Um ... thanks!?

~~~
yid
FYI, my comment has 4 upvotes.

EDIT: now 8 upvotes...??

~~~
MrMan
this is how HN should work - reddit your post to keep people updated on your
upvote count.

------
pgroves
I disagree with article's conclusion that they are selecting for "backend"
engineers. They are selecting for people that think over-engineering every
little data structure is the way to build good programs. The skill software
companies need is the ability to get a hundred subsystems tested and working
together, which is totally different.

I know someone who recently interviewed with Google and he told me about the
algorithms question he "got wrong." After he came up with a simple solution to
a simple problem, the interviewer told him the better, googley-er algorithm,
which was: a) far more complex and difficult to implement, b) had far more
corner cases that would need unit tests, c) had more overhead in the expected
case, but d) technically had a better big-O in the (extreme) worst case.

In other words, the interview was screening for people who have been to school
but haven't ever built anything.

~~~
bnoordhuis
That was the impression I walked away with too: much CS ivory tower thinking,
little real-world relevance. But they're only interviews, everyday life at
Google is probably (hopefully!) different.

As a counterpoint to the HR horror stories: my recruiter was a friendly woman
who always responded quickly and politely. No complaints here.

------
larsberg
Google is considered (or at least was, by other tech companies) to have a very
poor sourcing and general recruiting experience. It was assumed to be because
they contract out the work.

As a contrast to that, at MSFT, we had full-time recruiting staff generally
split into college and experienced recruiting (there are some extra bits not
important to this). The experienced recruiting staff was assigned to divisions
and worked for usually a couple of years at a time sourcing candidates
specially suited to their area. The college recruiters carefully handle and
ensure that only one person is in charge of each candidate, they're marshalled
through all the steps, know when they'll hear what piece of info back, and are
absolutely brutal with us hiring managers about making timely decisions (not
that we ever drag our feet <grin>).

While working at MSFT, I was contacted several times by different Google
recruiters. Each time, I was left sort of half-indifferent e-mails or
voicemails, which I was informed was the desired style of contact. I'd fire
them off to my sourcing manager to forward around the recruiting org for a
good laugh and jokes about where these people had been before (it's a small
industry, and they often would point out ex-Cisco recruiting washouts, etc.).

That said, you can certainly go far on name alone for your recruiting,
especially when your options are expected to pay out well. But it's
unfortunate to have to try to build teams _despite_ your recruiting efforts.
I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.

~~~
cletus
Your information is incorrect. Google does all its own recruiting. It is not
outsourced.

~~~
larsberg
Thank you for this clarification! That was not the case in 2002-2004 (when I
was a hiring manager at MSFT).

------
danielha
Every few weeks or so I'm contacted by the same Google recruiter asking if I'm
interested in an engineering opportunity.

After a while, I responded by asking who had referred me. He answered:
"Referrals are confidential, but this person knows you from your days at
<proceeds to list out my LinkedIn>."

Awful. Plus I'm a shitty programmer.

~~~
acgourley
Pretty ridiculous to try and hire a founder fresh off a VC round for an
engineering position. That's enough of a tip off right there.

------
jrockway
I had a similar experience. Same letter from the recruiter, back-and-forth
with rate-your-skills, but then nothing. It's strange because the position
they had in mind seemed directly aligned with my proven interests and
abilities. Hell, my cover letter was pretty much describing the job they
wanted before they even told me about it.

I really see it as strange that I never got a call back. (Maybe it's not over
yet, it's only been a few weeks.)

~~~
danssig
You applied at google? I remember a few months ago you asking why anyone would
want a lower paying job at google when they could work in finance. Have the
rates changed that much?

~~~
jrockway
I doubt those were my exact words. I said _if_ you can get more in finance,
then do it.

------
jquery
My own personal "horror" story.

Google reached out to me, unsolicited, for a web developer position. I wasn't
looking, but I thought cool, I'll at least talk to them. The recruiter kept
asking me about how good my Java was. I repeated what it said on my resume,
that I only used it in college, but that my OO skills were strong and
transferable. Afterwards the recruiter emailed me, and said I wasn't a good
fit because I didn't have enough Java experience. I didn't even get a
technical phone screen.

Java experience is serious business.

~~~
noarchy
I don't know anything about their recruiters, but in my own experience with
other companies, the recruiters know eff-all about what is really required for
the job.

------
veyron
I actually ended up turning down a google offer for this precise reason -- the
questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person.

Having been through a real interview (where the interviewer went through my
resume before the interview and prepared real thoughtful questions that would
only be known if you actually worked on the language), I took that offer and
now interview others more intelligently.

~~~
paganel
> the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice`
> person.

Reminds me of a phone-interview I had with Adobe for a Python job. The guy at
the other end of the line asks me to sort of implement an algorithm, on the
phone, I ended up solving his problem using a dictionary, getting its keys and
then sorting it. That of course wasn't what the guy wanted, but it solved the
problem.

------
gabeiscoding
My Google offer experience: I turned down a offer from Google last spring.
Long story, but my reasons can be summed up as having a more challenging
opportunity in a leadership position at a small company versus having to enter
the "engineer" lotto where you don't know what team and project you get placed
on.

Funny thing is, I had a call from one of their recruiters today. A couple
times previously somebody contacted me by email and I said "sure, call me",
and didn't hear from them. But this guy was out of the blue and from a
different office and had a different approach to it.

The message was that things are different at Google and they at least from his
office's perspective, they treat each recruitment uniquely.

My take away is that Google is a big company and you'll get different
experiences depending on how you enter the HR process (college grad applicant,
versus sought after name). The OP in this case is doing a lot of
generalization.

------
kenjackson
_Asked me to rate my skills in a list of 14 programming languages._

Really? I'd love to know what they did with that data. It seems almost
completely useless except to say "Tim does not know any Javascript, indicated
by his zero score on that."

~~~
jimbokun
Also, doesn't this fly in the face of Google's heavy reliance on internally
developed tools?

In my Google interviews, they made it clear I should just name a language I
know to solve the problems on the white board, not because they particularly
cared about the language, but because they wanted to see my thought process
solving a problem in a real programming language. Of course, it had to be one
of Google's "approved" languages, but I just thought that was so they could
assign an interviewer who could assess the quality of the solution.

When did they start caring about "X years experience in language Y" just like
all the ignorant technology recruiters out there?

~~~
mdwrigh2
Its not X years of experience in language Y, but rather rate your self from
1-10 on these 14 languages. They'll then pair you up with someone who knows
the language you're working with well enough to understand the code in your
interview. Also, I've always been told that for the people who rate themselves
a 10 in a given language they'll occasionally pull out the big guns to
interview (Gosling interviewing a Java developer?).

------
yesimahuman
It doesn't take a designer or user experience expert to note that google
products lack consistency and don't interopt with each other very well. I
think this stems from larger issues that are much harder to fix, or through
20% projects and acquisitions that were developed independently of a common
set of standards. I doubt they are ignoring it.

Perhaps the lack of a "Google standard" enables eager developers to create
amazing new products, like Gmail.

~~~
enriclluelles
I don't think that having a hiring system that's not fucked up and actually
researches the guy would set a "Google standard".

You can also keep launching amazing products with a recruiting process that
makes sense, and doesn't analyze the guy with semi-random stupid questions.

~~~
yesimahuman
The lack of google standard was my alternative reason for some google products
hurting in experience and consistency.

------
currywurst
This "Google can't do design" meme is really getting old, imho. At best, this
is a story about one recruiter in a giant company not doing his job well in
matching the requirements with the skill set of the candidate.

It is easy to conclude preconceived notions.

~~~
wiredfool
It's not that, it's that Google's candidate referral or search is really
poorly targeted when they contact a candidate. They've talked me twice, about
the same job that's really not a good fit for me. They talked to him, and
totally missed the designer thing and went straight into CS101.

------
fogus
Sometimes I feel like the only person who was not hired by Google that didn't
become bitter. I was treated with respect, was put up in a nice hotel, met
very smart people, answered (and didn't ;) very tough questions. In the end it
didn't work out. I had a blast nonetheless.

~~~
briancurtin
Same here. I had two solid phone interviews, then they flew me out, put me up
in a cool hotel, rented me a car, and put me through a good day on campus. Of
the five interviews, I think I nailed four and blew one of them. Oh well,
heard back around a week later that I didn't make the cut.

~~~
nl
I've done 2 set of interviews, and I'm not bitter.

I wasn't impressed with their process the first time, but the second time (2
years later) was a lot better.

------
ziadbc
Google manages not to hire someone who didn't want to work there in the first
place. Sounds like the process is working just fine to me.

In all seriousness, there may be some issues with their hiring process, but I
think the Google hiring practices would best be analyzed by using the
aggregated data, rather than the trickle of anecdotes we tend to hear about in
public. Even if Google got their hiring right 99.9 percent of the time, there
would be hundreds of people, if not thousands, who were perfect for the job,
and still didn't get hired.

~~~
javert
Except that the anecdotes that are being heard suggest that their HR practices
are broken, through and through, rather than fitting the pattern you
described.

For example, people just being dropped from contact with Google for no given
reason (not as in, "We don't want you," but as in... they just never heard
from them again).

~~~
shin_lao
If she doesn't call back, it means she's not interested...

------
rkischuk
I recently talked to a colleague who was hired as a developer by Google.

He went through 3 rounds of "hiring committees".

3 different committees to make a developer hire is obviously broken. The
ability to evaluate culture and skill fit should be possible with a hiring
manager and a few prospective peers.

~~~
esrauch
While there are 3 levels of approval, it's not exactly as crazy as it sounds
at first glance.

After your phone interview with an engineer, you go in for your on site
interview and talk to at least 4 people, both managers and engineers. They
each write up their impressions of you without discussion between them. They
pass their impressions on to a hiring board that reviews those, your resume,
and what positions are open.

That board passes the recommendation onto a final board who I suspect is
largely a financial gatekeeper, just to approve stock grants and controls
company-wide hiring rates and company wide strategy.

------
ChuckMcM
Lots of interesting stories.

Disclaimer, I worked at Google for 4 years ('06 - '10) and interviewed a lot
of folks (it was always a part of the job) and did a number of phone
interviews too.

The process then (as perhaps now) was broken and some folks within Google
understood that. The process and goals were pretty simple, hire smart people
that get things done.

The process was aimed at finding smart people who get things done. That, like
the phrase "largest integer" is easy to say and rolls off the lips but when
you need to actually write out what it means gets a bit squirrely.

The first challenge is what does "get things done" mean? Well for college
students it means you got your diploma and at the same time you contributed to
some FOSS project. For people with 0 - 5 years experience it means you shipped
a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 5 - 15 years
experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding.
For people with 15 to 25 years experience it means you shipped a product where
you did most of the coding.

Did you see what I did there? Google wanted smart people but the definition of
smart was "you write a lot of code" and "get things done" was "that code
shipped in the product/project." Fundamentally they didn't have any way to
judge or evaluate the 'goodness' of what someone did if it wasn't writing
code. Designers don't write a lot of code and they don't generally have a good
metric for what constitutes good which can be empirically tested. The process
has a hard time accomodating that. And if you're "good" at spotting problems
in a process or getting folks organized around some better way of doing
things? That's not measurable either.

There was a company, BASF, a chemical company which had an advertising
campaign around the fact that they were part of the process and materials that
made quality products, their tag line was "We don't make the products you buy,
we make them better." [1] And I noted that Google was exceptionally bad at
hiring "BASF" people, which is to say people who bring the quality of other
work up, or products up, or processes up.

The people who did those roles in Google all started out as coders and that is
how they got hired. It was only after they were working there that they (and
Google) discovered they had this leveraging effect.

In order to keep bias out of the process, Google isolates the steps where bias
can creep in; separated the folks who decided hire / no-hire from the folks
who decided on compensation; the folks who decide to hire and the folks who
decide which project they work for. For all my time there, you could not
interview for a specific job, you interviewed to get 'in' and then your name
showed up on a list and the allocation process would determine which project
got you.

Often a candidate would ask during the interview "What would I be working on?"
the only truthful answer was "That is impossible to say."

Before you even get to that point though you get into "the system." Since
Google keeps a record of everyone they have interviewed or has shown up as a
lead and not interviewed. There is a long, long list of people (I once joked
that it was everyone in the market). If you are an employee and you might know
that person, common employer, common university, etc. The system could
automatically send you an email asking for your opinion on the candidate.

This isn't really any different than any other company, person X shows up in
the candidate list, people who work at the company who worked at person X's
company are asked if they knew this person when they were there. But it can
have unintended consequences.

Lets say there is a person X, who gets hired, from company Y, and person X
really didn't fit in at Y and felt really abused by the company. Now new
candidates from Y generate an email to X with the standard "You worked at Y
when candidate Z did etc etc." Now person X is still pissed off about how Y
treated them and so they respond to all of those emails with "Yeah, candidate
Z was a crappy engineer, everyone had to carry for them they never did
anything useful." Maybe someone else from Y says "candidate Z was great,
everyone turned to them for advice." The process of separating the
interviewers from the decisions means that this feedback bubbles up all
equally weighted. Hard to know that employee X has said the same thing about
every candidate that has come from Y, and if the committee sees two comments
one positive and one negative and there isn't anyone on the committee who
knows any different then how do you evaluate?

The simplest solution if either has an equal probability of being the
'correct' assesment is that you pass on them _because you can't know if you
have bad data._ And that was a part of the process that was fundamentally
broken.

Because Google gets a metric crap load of resumes and candidates all the time,
passing on someone who is +1/-1 like that makes sense because you can't know
which of the two feedback comments more accurately reflects the real candidate
behavior. The result is that hiring someone with a grudge can poision the
feedback pool for a bunch of possible hires. If you weren't Google and didn't
have this huge backlog of candidates, you might dig deeper to find out which
one was the more accurate representation, but if you are Google you just move
on. Externally that sometimes appears that you just stop answering the phone.

It also means that you miss out on quality people who would be good for the
company and ultimately Google will have to find a way to address that issue
(if they haven't already) because they are running out of people to interview.

As with most things Google, you combine a data-driven, automata friendly
process with fuzzy data and alternate agenda actors, at the scale Google runs
at, and you get lots of weird artifacts.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE>

~~~
bluelu
I applied once in 2008. My recruiter was very friendly and did a great job. (I
met him and another one at a presentation, and only 3 days later I had 2
onsite interviews). However, one interviewer didn't like me. When we had the
open questions, he directly asked me, if the only reason I would like to work
at google was because of the money. He clearly had already judged me. Then
after 12 days, I got a call from someone from google from Ireland, which I
didn't know, telling me that it was a very difficult decision but they
wouldn't offer me a job, but I could reapply in 2 months! Naturally, I didn't
do that. I still occasionaly get emails from google recruiters, but I decline.

I joined another compnay after that and did quit the job 3 months later to
start my own company. If I would have joined google, I might have never done
this if I would be for google. Who knows. I couldn't be happier today. And I'm
probably as biased in the interviews today ("get things done"), as google was
when they were interviewing me.

~~~
rakkhi
Had a similar experience. Google recruiter contacted me about security role on
Android team, NFC and mobile payments stuff, sounded good up my alley. Sent
programming skills email, I honestly said I suck at coding I work on security
design and architecture. I do some coding on my own time but not upto
enterprise grade. Quick chat with the next level recruiter, we don't really
hire for a specific role but we will put you forward for an interview, iterate
I don't code. Interview, guy is quite nice, what do you enjoy, I say what I
enjoy, you didn't mention coding in that. That's right. You were put forward
for a software engineering role. #facepalm. I'll see if I can get you
interviewed by a security guy. Cool. About a month later email, no role for
you. Lol.

------
ruethewhirled
It does seem like Google is more focused on the programing side of things and
design is an afterthought for them. Which is a pity because I feel overall
look and design dramatically changes my perceptions of how good something is.

Another beef I have with Google is the sorta half-assedness of some of their
products. They seem to release things early to get them out there, which isn't
necessary a bad thing but now I've started to realize this it's soured me to
using some of their api's and products

------
javert
I've also had a bad recruiting experience with Google, but for very different
reasons. Personally, from what I can see (i.e. outside looking in), I think
they have major systemic problems in how they do recruiting.

~~~
rhizome
Care to provide some insight into those different reasons?

~~~
javert
I just posted a comment about it elsewhere in this thread, but let me list my
gripes here, in order of decreasing annoyance. This was actually for an
internship, but for a PhD-seeking grad student who can code (me).

(1) I had a deadline to accept/deny with another company, and I told Google
the deadline. Google asked me to get an extension, so they'd have more time to
interview me. I got the extension (the other company wasn't delighted to give
it to me, and I was embarassed to ask, but I did it anyway). I told Google.
Then, Google never scheduled the interview for me, and I ended up just having
to accept with the other company. I wrote Google to tell them I had accepted
with the other company on that company's deadline, and they acknowledged my
email, but did not offer an apology or explanation for making me get an
extension and then not actually scheduling an interview.

(2) The process they used for me and my colleagues (grad students) was to have
PhD engineers interview us as an initial filter, then to have HR people
actually place us in groups. This placement process seemed pretty abysmal, for
me and for everyone else. Which isn't surprising. The HR people aren't
qualified to understand a student's area of research, expertise, and interest,
and match them to groups. I would imagine their level of insight, as non-
hackers, is basically "This student like Python, this group needs Python." In
order to do this right, they need people who can actually _understand_ the
students' research and skills and the groups' needs at a much more fine-
grained level.

(3) The sort-of-rudeness I experienced with HR described in #1 happened to
more of my colleagues than not (in various forms). Honestly, I wonder if the
HR people are just super over-worked.

Anyway, not long after this Google very publicly announced that Sergey was
taking over as CEO and shaking things up to try to return the company to its
roots. I was surprised by how "un-Googly" the whole recruiting process was,
and I guess the company has really been struggling to maintain its culture
across the board. I consider the experiences I described above to be one
likely symptom/manifestation of this.

Overall I'd say I saw a combination of big company bureaucracy problems, with
a "holier-than-thou" pretentious attitude that seems to allow rudeness to
creep in. Their attitude is, "We know you'd die to work for us," which is just
so untrue, and it'll be very hard for them to ever recruit me in the future
after this experience.

Maybe Google has gone from "Don't be evil" to "Evil, but unlike other
companies, we still act like can can do no wrong."

------
googInterviewee
(Posting anonymously because I'm in the middle of interviewing with Google)

My experience so far has been very different. I was contacted by a recruiter a
few weeks ago. I had a phone interview within a week of the initial contact.
Within three days, they got back to me to schedule an onsite interview.

The one negative I've encountered so far: Google has an office near where I
live, but will not interview me there. This will require significant travel on
my part.

~~~
briancurtin
I'm going to guess you probably work near a Google office which does different
things than your target role. I live in Chicago, where Google has an office,
but they flew me out to Mountain View to interview for a software engineering
spot.

------
k_shehadeh
I couldn't agree more with this one. I have trouble talking to people about
this because I failed their interview so I come across as bitter (which I am).
But this problem is not just Google's problem. It's systemic. Someone a long
time ago decided to turn interviewing into a formula - a bad one - and it
stuck. Drives me crazy.

------
rbanffy
I need no evidence beyond the fact they didn't hire me when they had the
opportunity ;-)

~~~
michokest
Please share more about your story!

~~~
rbanffy
I was half joking. I was interviewed once, a couple years ago, and I wasn't
really a good match to what they were looking for (they wanted a C programmer,
my C is very rusty, I am much more an evangelist than anything else). There
are very few technical positions where I live and I was not willing to move to
Belo Horizonte (which is where most of Google's tech staff are in Brazil) for
personal reasons.

Not a lot of drama in this story.

------
brown9-2
What position was the author interviewing for? Google (and most big companies)
seem to pigeonhole candidates into a certain slot, even when it is obvious
they'd be better off in a different title.

The real way in which their process seems broken is the wildly different
experiences people have seemingly at random, depending on who their
arbitrarily assigned recruiter is. When I interviewed I had none of this weird
"rate yourself" questions, and a mostly positive experience. But it seems like
if I had randomly been assigned a different recruiter, or someone tried to fit
me into a different bucket, I would have had a wildly different experience.
How can you compare candidates evenly when their experiences seem so randomly
different?

------
spraveen80
Google probably expects that all designers/product management folks that they
are interviewing to be good at programming too. There are good programmers,
good designers and some people who are really good at both. Since a lot of
people want to work at Google, they are using that to their advantage and
hiring good designers who are also good programmers.

------
jnhnum1
I've interviewed for a summer internship at Google twice: this summer and
last. The first time I interviewed with them, they emailed me the same day to
tell me that my interview went really well and they'd like to proceed to host
matching. Unsure of the way the process worked, I emailed the recruiter a week
later to ask what the next steps were. She called me back half an hour later
to ask if I had any deadlines, which I didn't. The reason for the delay, she
said, was that Google tried to first match returning interns with hosts before
new interns. A couple weeks later, I had a phone interview with a host, it
went well, and I was assigned to work with him over the summer. That was that.

This summer, I decided I wanted to return to work at Google again, but I had a
specific project in mind I wanted to work on. I filled out a form stating my
project interests (which were very specific this time around), but no
recruiter reached out to me. I talked to one of my colleagues at Google from
the previous summer, he talked to HR or something, and I got a new recruiter.
Then I went through five host interviews in three days, picked my favorite,
and that was that.

So in my experience, the hiring process at Google isn't that bad. It's just
that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up.

~~~
yid
> It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up.

Please read some of the comments and anecdotes here a little more closely. A
lot of people (including myself) followed up on the silence, often in multiple
ways, and still got absolutely no response.

~~~
jnhnum1
Yes, and I was just sharing my own personal experience to try to counter some
selection bias.

------
crux_
I think an underlying reason for so many anecdotes of the sort in the comment
threads here is the sheer number of hires the Goog is trying to make right now
-- according to <http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html>, they've
grown headcount by close to 10% in Q1 alone so far.

Life for their recruitment folks is probably fairly interesting these days.

------
tomkarlo
The OP is doing a lot of generalization and extrapolation to make the
judgement contained in the title, considering he doesn't even seem to have
made it through stage one of the process he's attempting to judge. I'm pretty
sure there's some folks who get rejected at the preliminary screening stage of
my company's hiring process (some, I'm sure, for the wrong reasons) but I
hardly think that would justify condemning our entire recruiting strategy and
process.

This seems mostly like a standard recipe for baiting traffic from HN to a
blog: make up a sweeping generalization about a company people are deeply
interested in (e.g. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter) based on a
very limited data set, put that in your headline, then have your article talk
about how much better your company is at XYZ by comparison. It's the HN
version of the humblebrag tweet.

------
latch
I'd like to work at Google, but I have no interest in going through the
embarrassment of their [seeminly] stuck up interview process. No doubt this is
my loss, and not Google's.

------
peter_severin
I had a relatively good interview experience with Google. I wasn't hired but I
felt that the process was fair. True, it was long and I had to invest some
significant time to freshen up my algorithm skills. But overall I was left
with a good impression.

I do think that Google puts too much accent on algorithms and college-level
CS. I consider myself a good programmer. I created two moderately successful
Micro ISVs in my free time. I contributed a huge chunk to the product at my
corporate job. I get things done. However I felt that this is not what Google
looks for even if the say they do.

------
jinushaun
"User are not As and Bs."

Reminds me of working at MS as a designer. It's challenging for an
engineering-focused company to suddenly try to integrate design into their
products--especially one so focused on metrics. This often leads to "duct-tape
design" instead of a clear unified design. User testing no longer validates
design, but completely drives it. E.g., because our study found that users
clicked more buttons when they are bright red and blinking in their faces,
let's make all buttons blink red! Brilliant? No.

------
geebee
I haven't interviewed at Google, but I've interviewed at a few other companies
that seem to follow a similar style.

I'd agree that the hiring process may be broken, but that these companies
don't completely realize it. I have no problem with the intensely rigorous
emphasis on CS (and math, sometimes), but I've been on these interviews and
realized that (after seven hours of interviewing) we still haven't discussed
what the company actually _does_.

Here's the thing - when you're interviewing a very experienced candidate, the
candidate may know more than you do about how to write the software. They may
know things you haven't even thought to ask about. This isn't a reason to skip
the technical grilling, that's a critical background. My problem is that these
companies heap it on and on and on, and then they make an offer based on
compensation for someone who can survive a technical grilling.

What if this candidate has experience writing software in your domain? What if
the candidate has a deep understanding of the business space and knows a lot
about what those customers are looking for? What it there's a completely
different approach that you haven't even considered?

A candidate like that is, quite frankly, probably worth much more than someone
with a strong theory background but no real domain knowledge (though I would
still hire that guy). So I suspect that these interviews are good at
establishing a high bar, but aren't so good at identifying certain types of
developers who could be absolute game changers for the company.

Ironically, the only time a company did do this for me, I didn't get the offer
;) It was at netflix, and (after the obligatory data structures grilling),
they talked to me about all their data mining needs. I told them I didn't have
much of a data mining background, but discussed how they might approach these
problems a completely different way.

A few days later: thanks but no thanks, they wanted a data miner. Oh well ;)
Still, it was one of the best interviews I've been on, actually _fun_ and
energetic. And I felt that if they'd made me an offer, they'd know _why_.

This is what may be missing from a lot of these interview processes, which is
why they may be "broken" in the sense that they don't really get at why you'd
want to hire a specific person, beyond the fact that he cleared a high
technical bar.

------
namank
Hahaha, today morning I was thinking about why startups manage to leech
millions of $$s selling services that Google actually offers for free.

And I reached the same conclusion - Google doesn't focus on users and thus
completely misses the mark. They focus on engineers but not designers or
market researchers.

This is why, I think, App Engine will be a huge success and why Wave failed.
It was an excellent product, IMO, but it wasn't built with a particular user
in mind.

------
nostrademons
It sounds like you were going through the software engineer interview process,
when what you wanted to do is product management. This is a recruiter-fail:
when someone expresses an interest in product decisions, it makes sense to
send them through the PM interview process. But it's not really representative
of what it's like to interview for all the different job families that one
might apply to.

------
16s
They asked me how to rm a file named -f. Seriously. I thought to myself what a
silly question. That's like 20 year old Unix trivia. I was dumb-founded. This
was the second phone interview. I knew then I did not want to work for them
and I told the recruiter I was not interested. They called me and they
initiated the contact.

------
T_S_
Easier to get bought than hired?

------
j_baker
_Design decisions powered by A/B testing are a great way of incrementally
improving your product, but trying to use them to drive the overall product
direction can lead you to decisions that fly in the face of common sense._

Good lord do I agree. At a certain level, you just have to trust your gut.

------
iam
I submitted my resume to Google and filled out their top X language survey,
but never even so much got back an email from them after waiting for over a
month.

Oh well, there's plenty of other companies who were happy to talk to me.

------
suprgeek
This reminds me of the saying: To a man with a Hammer, everything looks like a
nail.

Google's Hammer is its (admittedly great) expertise at Algorithmically solving
Hard Webscale Data Problems. Unfortunately some problems cannot be solved by
the Hammer of Algorithms - Social Products is one of them and Great UI is
another. Think about any Google Product (Search, Maps, Youtube, Groups,..)
that is the very best in either of these two areas.

------
DJFK
I was contacted by a recruiter for a security test engineer after some crazy
stuff I did which got out into the international press. I meet up all their
requirments besides strong coding in c++, java, python. My main is PHP, JS and
python at the level of exploit development. I have a lot and strong
experiences described in the CV. No response from the recruiter yet ...

------
ved
Another interesting view on why Google's hiring process will bring it down
sooner or later - [http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-
eve...](http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-everyone-
else-will-eventually-fail)

------
VBprogrammer
Call me old fashioned but I think Google keeps having slightly embarrassing
failures because it tries to copy ideas, without significantly improving on
them, where the dominant player has already gained a critical mass of users.

~~~
itswindy
Instant search - copied Background image - copied Search display - copied

Panda? Still a freaking mess

Oh, 7 years after FB Google wants to get in the action.

------
bane
Related question, how easy/hard is it to move around internally once you are
"in"?

------
pabilla
If you google "google job interview", my nightmare story is #2 or #3 - read
shmula.

I eventually received a job offer, but by that point, I wasn't interested.

Anyways, the details of my story are in that blog post.

------
citizenkeys
Google's process is broken because it generally presumes job candidates know
what specific job they want, and they don't. To put it in contrast, I also
applied to Microsoft and they immediately assigned me a specific recruiter
that I could email directly. Google needs to give job candidates a person to
contact rather than expecting talent to go online and do that weird "job
shopping cart" thing they have on their website.

The other reason the hiring process is broken is because it's totally
backwards. The hiring process doesn't indicate any appreciation of talent.
Talent in this industry consists of wanna-be rockstars. Talent wants the
company to say "Hey, you're great. We want you. What's it going to take to get
you here?" Google's approach, like many other companies, is "Go online, email
us a resume, and we'll get back to you whenever we feel like it." Most people
with talent are going to say "Forget that. You got it backwards. You need me
more than I need you."

To put it in perspective, think of how professional sports teams recruit
college athletes. The professional teams do every damn thing they can to get
college athletes to agree to join the team. They send out recruiters that pay
for meals, make the candidates feel special, and everything else to make the
talent feel appreciated. That's how you recruit talent. Taking the approach of
"Go online, do our rinky-dink job shopping cart thing, email us a resume, and
we'll get back to you when we feel like it" doesn't attract talent and never
will.

~~~
bane
Google's counter to that is that since they tend to target only people from
top companies and top schools (by their particular perception of what is
"top"), so they'll tend to sweep up talented people anyway.

~~~
citizenkeys
I re-read my comment. The flaw in my reasoning seems to be that Google still
needs a way to know the talent exists. So you still gotta get Google's
attention somehow before they can recruit you.

Still, though, that "job shopping cart" thing is lame. As somebody that's
actually tried it, having to look all around the site and find a specific job
just doesn't work. In simple terms, it would be better for Google to have a
form that says "Tell us everything you know", let people just write everything
they know and submit it, and then let Google match the skills up with a set of
jobs that might be a good fit for the candidate.

~~~
relaia
This 'job shopping cart' thing is interesting to me, as is your desire to 'let
Google match the skills up with a set of jobs', because basically I had the
complete opposite experience when (successfully) applying for an internship
with Google (Europe Middle East Asia (EMEA), btw, not American).

I was essentially unable to reply for anything other than "Software Engineer
Intern". They took my resume, and a cover letter (which I am fairly sure was
never read.) I then had two telephone interviews, after which I received an
email asking me to choose two interests from a list of about two dozen (which
was _not_ an easy task!). From there, I was placed in a "pool" of possible
candidates, and I believe that teams from within Google would browse through
the pool and find a candidate they liked. Myself, I was in the pool for _two
and a half months_ , and had pretty much given up on getting anything when I
suddenly heard back that I had a place.

So, it might be different for "real" jobs with them, but in the case of my
internship they did exactly a skill-set matching (in a way), and there was no
"job cart".

------
sabat
In a nutshell: Google has developed a reputation for interviewing skill sets,
as opposed to interviewing people. Sadly, that's common practice industry-
wide.

------
locopati
They are self-selecting for a certain type of person and that will likely hurt
them in the long-run (may even be hurting them in the short-run).

~~~
rhizome
Microsoft had the same problem in the late 90s, though I wouldn't want to
attribute causation to that for how MS has wound up. However, I do think it
provides an object lesson that the use of abstract interviewing might indicate
a company that is very popular to work for but has possibly jumped the shark
(or hit a plateau) businesswise.

