
Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem - mariedm
https://threader.app/thread/1058433116002381824
======
periferral
I interviewed for a Product Manager role at Google and my experience was
awful. Put this things in perspective, I was a Director of PM managing a team
at my current role and working a lot with customers, presenting in speaking
engagements etc as part of my day to day.

I get into the interview and the person on the other side seems to know very
little of my background. He says he is a PM and starts with how much is
google's spend on storage for youtube on an annual basis. Knowing very well, I
walk through assumptions like the average youtube video size, no of formats
based on screen res and video quality etc etc and give him the logic. He
pauses and says give me a dollar value. He doesnt want to understand the logic
behind the calculations. Anyway, next few questions are more of the same..
code optimizations etc etc. After 3 or so questions, we were done. No, do you
have any questions for me. No customer related discussions. No what I have
done in the past and how I've been successful.

I feel like these kind of interviews are not judging what the person brings to
the table, rather do you know what I'm gong to ask you and that's all that
matters.

I always look for 2 things in any interview. Are you smart and motivated
because nothing we do is rocket science. If you are smart and motivated, you
will succeed. The other is, will I (and the rest of the team) get along with
you. Teams need to work together and people who lack tact in personal skills
end up being very difficult to work with.

~~~
rlpb
> He pauses and says give me a dollar value.

He asked you for "how much is google's spend" and you finished your
estimations without giving him a dollar value? Did you forget his question?

> He doesnt want to understand the logic behind the calculations.

From your description that sounds like a false assumption to me. It sounds
like despite your estimations you didn't give him an answer to his actual
question, and so he had to prompt you.

~~~
C1sc0cat
And how would an outsider have any idea of the cost do you just mean the plant
costs how much does google pay per MW in each locale how much does labour
costs what allowance for accrued pension rights.

~~~
dpark
Costs to Google are not magically different. You can make estimates without
insider knowledge, but as in the window cleaner example, your estimates will
be as bad as your assumptions.

You can also make estimates for compute, network, and storage costs based on
the prices Google charged its Cloud customers for the same.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Ah and exactly where in a CS course do you get into the economics of large
scale telecoms / networking infrastructure pray?

Let alone the economics of personnel costs or the non standard way google
builds its infrastructure.

~~~
dpark
You don't. The exercise is in estimation. This is specifically not a case of
the interviewer looking for you to get the "right" answer. The interviewer
likely doesn't even know what the right answer is. They want to see if you can
make back-of-the-envelope calculations and if you're capable of making sane
(if inaccurate) assumptions.

Make a guess at total cost for an hour of compute time and how long it might
take to transcode the average video. Guess at how many videos are uploaded on
a typical day. Guess at how much the typical SRE costs Google and how many
SREs YouTube employs. Do the same for software engineers, or explicitly
exclude R&D. Guess at networking, storage, etc. Then roll all that together
with some hours of video * (cost to transcode + cost to storage + cost to
upload + cost to playback * average viewers) + sre cost +.... Bonus points if
you can account for elasticity and peak load instead of just averages.

The point is to show that you can think through the problem. If all you can
say is "I don't know what your networking costs are", then you come across as
useless.

------
rademacher
All anecdotal evidence points to arriving at the correct, optimal solution as
being key to passing the interview. It also seems like often times the
interviewers are not even going to be working with the candidate so their
opinion on a 'working relationship' is mostly irrelevant.

The objective of asking these leetcode style questions is to find candidates
who are willing to put in the time to study. Success signals that this person
is willing to commit to performing well at something that is reasonably
challenging. The end result is that they are trying to hire worker bees. This
makes sense as the bulk of work at any large company is largely mundane and
relatively routine. I'm willing to bet that when a company wants to hire a two
sigma candidate they don't go through all this nonsense, although at that
point the candidate is already well known in the industry most likely.

~~~
rvn1045
Didnt the creator of home-brew not end up getting a job at google?

~~~
umanwizard
I always see this trotted out as proof of how bad Google’s interview process
is, and I always wonder: what makes people think creating homebrew was
particularly difficult or impressive? Package managers are a dime a dozen.

It has also never been conclusively explained what “invert a binary tree”
means (see the tweet a sibling comment linked to — that’s what the Homebrew
guy claimed he wasn’t hired for not being able to do).

~~~
albedoa
I realize you asked about people in general and not Howell himself, but he
said[1] almost exactly that about his product:

 _Well, no I didn 't [write something worthy of Google]. I wrote a simple
package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It
doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case
behavior well. It isn’t well tested. It’s shit frankly._

But he goes on:

 _On the other hand, my software was insanely successful. Why is that? Well
the answer is not in the realm of computer science. I have always had a user-
experience focus to my software. Homebrew cares about the user. When things go
wrong with Homebrew it tries as hard as it can to tell you why, it searches
GitHub for similar issues and points you to them. It cares about you._

1\. [https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-
rejectin...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-
Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-
tree/answer/Max-Howell?guest=1&amp;share=1) (Quora link, sorry)

~~~
ummonk
That sounds like he would make a mediocre software engineer but an excellent
product manager.

~~~
derangedHorse
I think the fact that he was able to recognize all the faults (and can
therefore correct) in his package manager shows a great level of competency.
The fact that he was able to productize his learning experience in the form of
homebrew makes him all the more impressive.

------
Someone1234
> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a
> daily basis.

If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles,
google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is?

I'd actually argue that for many companies this post is true (i.e. that
getting it "right" is less important than the journey) but I still won't
forgive companies that design the most hostile interview questions possible,
and are then surprised when interviewees complain.

You can read the types of questions Google asks here:

[https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-
Engineer...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer-
Interview-Questions-EI_IE9079.0,6_KO7,24.htm)

I'd never interview at Google or any other company that operates this way. If
the very first interaction I'm going to have is off-topic trivia, we're done,
the company failed MY interview. The questions Google asks are disrespectful
and unprofessional.

But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole
covers round?") has become the new normal in this field.

~~~
akudha
5-6 years ago, I went for an interview in a real estate company. The
introductions lasted all of 2 mins. Then they took me to a computer, showed me
a bug in the code base that I would be working on, if I got hired. Then they
said "please fix this". Took me about half hour or so to hunt the bug down and
fix (it wasn't hard, but it wasn't a cosmetic bug either). Then they asked me
how I found the bug. I explained, they told me I'm hired, and the paperwork
will follow in a day or two. No other questions were asked, they didn't look
at the resume at all.

The entire experience lasted less than an hour - from the time I walked into
the reception till I walked out. Best job interview ever!

This codebase was probably 0.0000001% as complex compared to Google's (I can
only imagine). Still, there is no reason more companies can't follow this
style, at least for one of the several "rounds" of interviews, instead of
whiteboard, trivia etc.

~~~
kaidax
Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by
interview candidates and then reject them.

~~~
kasey_junk
People claim this all the time but is there any actual evidence? It would be
one of the worst possible grifts of all time.

~~~
hpcjoe
I gave 4 examples of this in an above comment. Yes, it happens. Yes, its
wrong. No, people and companies don't care.

At the end of the day, this is what sucked the optimism out of me at my
previous company. We had lots of people trying to steal from us. Even after I
closed it down, I had two people in particular, ask me to help them design
something, or give them detail domain/design knowledge, for free.

Yes, it happens. Far too often. Makes people like me jaded.

~~~
mixmastamyk
"Fire your worst customers," and don't look back.

------
esoterica
Anyone who interviews at a "prestigious" company and then complains about how
difficult the interview is kind of hypocritical. Google, and other
FAANGs/unicorns, make you solve hard algorithms questions because they believe
- correctly or wrongly - that in order to succeed as a company they have to
filter out the vast majority of candidates who have poor algorithmic skills.
They also pay a lot of money because that's the only way to attract enough
candidates who can pass their hiring bar. If they stopped asking hard
interview questions and increased their candidate acceptance rate they
wouldn't need to pay people 300k/year to fill their open positions.

But the only reason people apply to Google and Facebook and Netflix in the
first place is because they pay a lot of money. There are plenty of crappy
CRUD shops that won't ask you to enumerate palindromic primes. As long as you
can do Fizzbuzz they'll hire you and pay you 80k/year to glue libraries
together. But people still try to interview at Google instead because they
want to make 300k/year and not 80k/year. You can't have your cake and eat it.

~~~
vonmoltke
> They also pay a lot of money because that's the only way to attract enough
> candidates who can pass their hiring bar. If they stopped asking hard
> interview questions and increased their candidate acceptance rate they
> wouldn't need to pay people 300k/year to fill their open positions.

I have 16 years of total experience. Their initial offer to me indicated they
thought I would take $231k/year for the privilege of working there. I got them
up to $253k/year. Both numbers are less than I make now (though the latter is
close).

As far as I am concerned, and based on my direct experience, Google pay is not
the hit shit everyone claims it is. Maybe it would be if I played the
competing offer game, but I shouldn't have to do that.

~~~
bradlys
Maybe you just got a low offer and didn't perform to the standard they
expected. Sometimes the companies give a lower offer because you didn't
perform at the level they were expecting. (e.g. Performing at senior instead
of staff)

Check out levels.fyi.

------
residentfoam
I have recently interviewed at most of these companies, eventually managed to
get some good offers at some of them, but let's be honest, I had to invest
_months_ in getting prep for the tech screening, whiteboard coding exercise
and the whole non-sense jazz. I am sick of reading this blog posts because
everyone knows, that is not how the _majority_ of these interviews are
conducted. I have more than 10 years of experience on the field, I earned my
degree in computer science years ago, but I had to go back and brush up on
trie, tree, etc to convince the interviewers that I was worth working at
company XYZ. The interview process is pretty much broken and very much biased
towards fresh out of college eng. Unfortunately, if you really want to work at
any of these companies you need to play their game and make them happy. Once
you get the job, you will discover that most of your teammates are not as
smart as they want you to believe they are and often you will be wondering how
the hell did they manage to get a job at company XYZ. Well, they simply
invested months prepping for the interview, plus they come from some well
known university. Unfortunately when it comes to real work, they have no idea
on how to get things done. What make things even worse is that often the tech
screening is done by junior eng that have no idea and experience on how to
conduct an interview and they expect the answers by the book. A positive note:
I also noticed that some companies are now giving take home exercise that are
much closer to the day-to-day job. So maybe there is still hope.

~~~
Kurtz79
As much as I agree that the process is bullshit, it is no different than
studying for an exam, something we took for granted during school, just as a
mean to an end (a degree), except that in this case there is arguably a much
higher ratio of payoff/effort.

There is no mystery involved, one of the more known books on the subject is
"Cracking the Coding Interview", but really there is no mystery to crack.

There is a ton of literature, tools, examples freely available on the
Internet, all that is missing is time and effort to go through them and learn
them as if it were for an exam.

One of the main objection is "Why I should spend more time in doing something
I already do full-time at my job, where I'm perfectly qualified?", but to me
it's pointless: if you think getting hired by another company will improve
your life significantly (or even marginally), it is something you should
definitely put effort into.

At the very least, this process (aside from those lucking out) proves that the
candidate is able to understand a non-trivial problem (getting hired) and have
the ability and put the effort necessary to solve it (going through the
bullshit excercise and questions), as it was in your case.

~~~
mixmastamyk
> it is no different than studying for an exam

From subject matter taken from multiple 4 year degree fields. Science,
engineering, theory, implementation, data XYZ, project management, sys admin…

Never happens at Uni, because it would be impossible. 99% of folks would fail,
like they _do_ in tech interviews.

------
kstenerud
Google believes, as so many before them have, that the ideal candidate can be
found through numbers: pure, unbiased, beautiful numbers. Because once you
reach a certain size, your biggest threat is no longer your competitors, but
rather your regulators, and that means that you must not expose yourself to
regulatory (at the core, social) risk.

Bias is bad. Discrimination is bad. And if you're big AND bad, you get fined,
and have obstacles put in your path.

So what does a rational BigCorp do? They make everything "fair". So everyone
has the same opportunities, everyone is colorblind about cultural fairness-
obsessions x, y, and z, and the hiring process becomes as effective as
cardboard cake. Tick the boxes and you're in. Otherwise, there's the door.

Of course, the irony of all of this is that they end up discriminating against
the very people they need: The different, the strange, the quirky, the
innovative - everyone who doesn't perfectly fit the criteria of a safe hire
where nobody can criticize the hiring decision (and impact your promotion
prospects).

This is the social process by which BigCorp stagnation works, and it's always
how it worked.

~~~
guelo
Weird to me how a certain type of mind sees "Political Correctness" in
everything they don't like. It's a very conspiratorial mindset.

~~~
mrfredward
Attack the idea, not the "type of mind" that posted it.

My point of disagreement would be that BigCos making "safe" hiring choices and
having overbearing, one-size fits all HR policies is a phenomenon that
predates modern political correctness. Having a policy of making interviews
into arbitrary objective tests isn't just to prevent twitter mobs and hold off
political rhetoric, it's a way of making hiring more predictable, combat
nepotism, and select for people who aren't too individualistic to succeed in
the corporate environment. The downside, of course, is you throw away and turn
off a lot of good candidates who don't fit the mold.

------
starpilot
Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables
the system. Similar:

\- Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative.

\- Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself,
and we'll earnestly try to help you.

The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality
the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is cooperative. On
Blind, you know the real way to getting through the Google interview is
LeetCoding like hell and not admitting you've seen the questions before.

~~~
ender7
Some perspective from the interviewer's side may help here:

\- A Google interviewer's (and I would assume any interviewer's) primary goal
is to come out of the interview with enough confidence to give a positive or
negative score. If they sit down to write feedback and have to give a neutral
score, the interview wasn't productive. This means that the interviewer is
just as eager to find evidence for a positive score as a negative one -- there
isn't an incentive to "getcha" with cheap or tricky questions.

\- Doing interviews at Google is volunteer work. You are not interacting with
a professional interviewer, you're interacting with someone whose day job is
being an engineer. They don't have an evil agenda; they are doing this because
they want to help Google hire the best candidates, and by inference make sure
their future coworkers are good people to work with.

\- Interviewers overwhelmingly _want_ their candidates to succeed. It's a true
joy when I have a candidate who glides through a question (or finds a solution
that was even better than mine). When candidates struggle, it's not a pleasant
experience for the interviewer either.

\- In the end, the point of technical interviews is to avoid the terrible
experience that is working with an incompetent or uncooperative teammate.
Interviewers are trying to find people that (a) can work well with others and
(b) can get the work done.

\- The system is _highly_ prejudiced towards suppressing false positives. This
is the right decision, but it comes at the cost of a high rate of false
negatives. Were myself or any of my colleagues to re-interview for our jobs, I
would expect about a 60% hire rate. This is not even taking into account the
constant ebb and flow of hiring demand. Sometimes there just isn't any
headcount. And sometimes you just happen to get questions that you don't click
with. This is also the reason that recruiters are so eager to bring you back
to interview 6 months later.

\- Recruiters and interviewers have very different incentives. Recruiters want
to maximize the number of people they get hired; interviewers want to hire
people they want to work with. This can lead to behavior that seems
schizophrenic from the outside: the recruitment side of the pipeline
constantly pestering people to interview, but once the candidate enters the
interviewing pipeline the process is slow, deliberate, and careful.

~~~
onion2k
_This means that the interviewer is just as eager to find evidence for a
positive score as a negative one -- there isn 't an incentive to "getcha" with
cheap or tricky questions._

This is only true if the interviewer is uninterested in what happens after the
hiring process. If they want to make sure they're winning a reputation doing
great interviews for more good hires than bad hires then there's an incentive
to be cautious, and that caution could well manifest as trying to catch out
anyone who might be 'gaming' the interview process. Those false positives
reflect badly on the interviewer; the false negatives don't because they might
have been real negatives.

~~~
ender7
Such a feedback loop -- of identifying which interviewers give the "most
accurate" scores -- doesn't exist. Nor is it clear how you would build such a
system (how do you quantify a "bad hire" or "good hire" in such a way that
isn't lost in the noise?). Interviewers are trusted to do the best job they
can.

Remember, interviewing is volunteer work, not something that will advance your
career. The results of the interviews and committee deliberation are
confidential, so there's no way to gain a reputation for being a "great
interviewer".

~~~
hueving
Ah, but you are woefully naive if you think some interviewers don't slip in
who enjoy having people struggle with problems so they can stroke their own
ego. There are also the ones that have seen the quality of engineers
significantly decline over the last 6 years of massive expansion and just want
to gatekeep.

One of the major flaws in Google's process is assuming that the engineers are
incentivized to find good hires.

------
plesner
I conducted many interviews while I worked at google and I wouldn't trust
anyone who tells you the interview situation as one particular, well-defined,
thing. Individual interviewers have their own style, approach, goals. Even if
people start from the same place because they go through the same interview
training they inevitably drift in goals and interpretation of what the
guidelines mean over the years. What your interview experience is going to be
like depends on the particular people interviewing you.

By all means write a blog post telling what you yourself is like as an
interviewer at google. But if you want to say something broader really ask
yourself, what's your evidence that you understand how other people at google,
on other teams and in other offices, do it.

~~~
auiya
This is exactly correct. I conducted dozens of interviews for Google myself,
and while most went okay, some did not. Those were failings on my part, and I
did my best to learn from those mistakes. That the interview process isn't
more streamlined is a failing on the company's part however. Good interviewing
techniques aren't formally taught there, and only learned via shadowing and
sitting in on other interviews. This isn't just the case at Google either, but
most large companies are generally bad at training employees how to conduct
interviews intended to draw out sufficient hiring information on candidates.
And yeah, interview quality there varied wildly from office to office, and
especially across the remote sites.

------
hydroreadsstuff
I've interviewed three times in the last five or so years there, and I don't
get the feeling the depth is as claimed in the article. Perhaps, it's also the
interviewers not implementing it as intended.

If these points were indeed important, I'd expect feedback addressing them.
All feedback I received was about doing well or not well on certain questions.
No meta whatsoever.

I didn't make it for good reasons, but I feel there is a big chance part. I
had one onsite interviewer in the first round who was difficult to deal with.
He presented a problem I've never seen in my life, nothing close. He
interrupted and gave hints in directions that didn't make sense to me, and
didn't give me 5 minutes to think without him talking. The second attempt was
fair. In the third, the first phone screen's interviewer was constantly typing
on his keyboard while I talked, and it was so loud. No real conversation
happening. He was just staring in his screen clacking away. I addressed it,
but he kept typing loudly while I was talking. So annoying.

On the other hand, the recruiters were always very good.

At another company recruiting was a mess, and only knowing someone inside
helped dealing with that, but the interviews were all great.

~~~
liveoneggs
the typing thing is a killer- they practically have to transcribe the entire
thing so there is 0% chance of making any kind of human connection with your
potential coworker.

~~~
PretzelFisch
the typing kind of defeats the whole "understand what it feels like to work
with you on a daily basis" goal.

------
daenz
I've had Google recruiters reach out to me multiple times over the years and
I've never taken them up on an interview. This last time, I told the recruiter
I just wasn't interested in going through the process, and his response was a
shocked "but why??" Is it so shocking that I don't want to subject myself to
grueling demoralizing interviews to likely be rejected? I can get good work,
with people I know, making good money, without going through any of that. I'm
not interested in the Google Hazing.

~~~
lowercased
I had a google recruiter reach out a couple years back, and I asked for just
some ballpark idea of salary range. No dice - they wouldn't discuss even a
ballpark range until I'd flown and and given up a couple of days or my time
for travel and interviews. I didn't followup.

~~~
dyu
If you are in California, the employer is now required by law to disclose
salary range.

~~~
bgirard
Great. So if you have ~6 years experience they will quote you a range of
150k-220k for say L4-L6 when your TC (base+bonus+rsu) might be anywhere
between 200K-575K[1].

That doesn't sound like a particularly useful answer.

[1] [https://www.teamblind.com/article/google-engineer---total-
co...](https://www.teamblind.com/article/google-engineer---total-compensation-
in-us---ultimate-post-jYcrij5X)

~~~
joshuamorton
You'll almost always be quoted for a single, perhaps 2 levels.

No one is going to be considered for both an L6 and L4 role.

~~~
bgirard
Before an onsite? That's a reasonable range.

~~~
chaosite
At Google? L5 is a reasonable terminal level there, as in you can have a
successful career and never go beyond L5, and no one will bat an eye.

L6 is a senior position, and not just in terms of title.

~~~
vkou
L4 is now a reasonable terminal level as well, if you, for whatever reason
don't want to, or can't push to L5.

------
01100011
I just interviewed for an embedded position a few weeks ago. Got a rejection -
need to work on my coding and design skills apparently - so take this with a
grain of salt.

I felt like there was tremendous variability in the interviewers. Some were
disinterested, some were engaging. Some asked relevant questions, some clearly
had no idea what my background was or what position I was interviewing for.
Some asked canned questions and wanted canned responses. Some explored my
experience and knowledge with open-ended questions.

It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based
educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated answers.
Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid
interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled).

I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of
smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-
benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing)
so maybe they just want effective robots?

I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their
organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me
on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers
during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and
brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience and
accomplishments of the team.

~~~
eecsninja
I'm a Googler who conducts interviews.

> It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning
> based educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated
> answers. Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid
> interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled).

> I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of
> smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-
> benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing)
> so maybe they just want effective robots?

I can't speak for other interviewers directly, but the company really doesn't
provide any incentives to do a good job or put in a lot of thought to doing
interviews.

For example, the coding questions that I ask are not that complex. They mostly
involve translating a process that a non-engineer might have to deal with in
everyday life into code. This minimizes any kind of selection bias -- if
you're giving a general coding interview but the problem involves implementing
something domain-specific, e.g. regex, then your results are biased in favor
of people who have worked with regex.

I don't know if other interviewers at Google have put in that kind of thought
to improving the interview experience.

> I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their
> organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me
> on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers
> during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and
> brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience
> and accomplishments of the team.

Don't feel so bad. The quality of engineers and managers varies a lot. I've
seen some of the best and some of the worst -- there's a huge range.

------
gedy
Yeah right - unless it's changed it was _only_ about solving the problem. Had
an interview with them ~7 years ago, unfriendly, hard to understand
interviewer asking about weighing boxes of pennies in minimum number of steps.
I got it to 2, interviewer said "no, you can do it in 1" then refused to move
forward. I had 10 years experience at that time and that was never discussed
and also would not answer my questions about working at Google. Recruiter
afterward ignored my follow up email.

So yeah, buzz off..

------
truncate
In theory yes, probably that's the intention. Several other companies claim
the same. Interviewers are nice and everything, however this whole process is
flawed, and the post nowhere depicts the reality.

Practically, interviewers more often don't care anything other than solving
the problem. Some are checking their emails while the candidates solve the
problem, some are just trying to give the most obscure problems using exotic
data structures, and some are simply too lazy to pay attention. So, I would
say whatever the procedure is, there is an enforcement problem.

It is what it is with most companies. So we leetcode like hell, and hope for
the best.

EDIT: I've had much better interview experience when the interviewers belong
to the team I will work for. I think there is more clear incentive for
interviewers to be more interested.

------
jakelarkin
"its not about the problem" but if you cant correctly code one of these 200
algorithms on a whiteboard in sub 15 minutes while under extreme stress youre
not getting an offer either.

~~~
esoterica
Clearly some people can do that, since Google hires thousands of people every
year. Why shouldn't they be hired over you?

~~~
adamnemecek
Because it's not a good measure of your programming skill. To be honest, I
legit don't care whomst Google hires, what I hate is that there are all these
other people who start adopting these attitudes and it can have a really
shitty influence on the whole industry.

~~~
tananaev
I don't think you need to worry about it. Google does interviews like this
because they can afford to reject many good developers because they have much
more candidates than they actually need to hire. I guess only most popular
tech companies can do that. I bet it will never become a standard for the
whole industry.

~~~
adamnemecek
> I bet it will never become a standard for the whole industry.

It's going away now but it kinda was not too long ago.

------
tjpnz
I've heard a lot of really positive accounts on their interviews but mine was
nothing like those. My interviewer showed up late and basically spaced out for
the entire 40 minutes. He clearly wasn't listening to a thing I was saying - I
was verbalizing everything and I had to keep prompting him when I wanted to
clarify something. Certainly not a conversation despite everything I had seen
and read about their interviews. The cherry on top was when I asked the
interviewer at the end what he liked most about working at Google. All he had
was that he liked the commuter allowance. Incredible.

Maybe the guy was just having an off day but having spent a month preparing I
felt cheated.

~~~
sigstoat
> I asked the interviewer at the end about what he liked about working at
> Google and all he had was that he liked the commuter allowance. Incredible.

the interviewer i had couldn't even manage to come up with anything he liked
about google, when i asked. then he went on to complain about being forced to
do interviews.

~~~
glenneroo
There are probably laws against it (at least in California) but the variation
in interview experiences in this thread indicates that Google could possibly
benefit from recording (video or at least audio) of interviews for quality
control.

------
fro0116
When searching for jobs, I actually find the interview process of a company to
be an extremely useful filter/signal.

I tend to outright reject companies who have interview processes like
Google's.

At its best, it filters for a set of qualities that have little correlation
with qualities of people whom I tend to enjoy working with professionally, and
at its worst, can be easily gamed by anyone who's willing to play the
interview prep game, which further reduces the quality of candidates that the
process lets through.

This means even if I end up getting the job at a company with an interview
process like Google's, I'm unlikely to be surrounded by people who I enjoy
working with.

Even if I somehow get lucky and everybody at the company turns out to be
amazing at the moment I join, the fact that their interview process is
essentially a crapshoot means that wont stay true for very long as the company
scales up and the law of large numbers kicks in.

------
brobdingnagians
This seems like a highly optimistic, happy path description of a nigh-
impossible process. Testing for leadership in an hour long interview one-on-
one? Yeah right. Sounds like a way of hitting your talking point of "we hire
for great leadership!" Don't get me wrong, what they say they are trying to
hire sounds great, and I think they think they are trying to find those
things, but I'm highly skeptical of both the process and effectiveness. Any
large corporation has a problem with diffused goals. If you are a small
business owner, you interview and have direct skin in the game. You might do a
bad job, but you are close to the metal in terms of what you think you are
hiring for, and you get the results of your choices. If you personally believe
you can spot a leader, then maybe you can, great. But a large company that
puts out talking points about hiring great leaders and team players probably
can't even elucidate what that would mean (especially when the team member
isn't interviewing, so you go for the generic common denominator and average
blandness, with no real idea of what it means in particular), and if they can
then I'm skeptical they are finding it-- there's a limited number of great
leaders around and they typically aren't interested in doing the grunt work of
maintaining an obscure cog in an obscure system in perpetuity, reporting to a
faceless committee so they can make more ad revenue. You usually find great
leaders somewhere more exciting and independent, it's the nature of the beast.

------
gcampos
I think these are great advices that would help to move a candidate from
borderline hire/no hire to a hire, but let's be honest, you WON'T be hired if
you don't solve the problems with a proper answer!

Months of preparation + LeetCode + Multiple interviews are critical to
increase your chances to get an offer.

------
sjg007
I wonder if they have done the experiment where after some basic screening, a
relevant work history and decent personality that if you just randomly admit
them if they do just as well as anyone else. You could still do the algorithm
problem solving style interviews but just don't make a rejection decision
based on them. The idea here would be to randomly approve people who would
normally be rejected and see if they do just as well.

~~~
pmiller2
That’s sounds like a very interesting, expensive, and borderline unethical
experiment. I don’t think it’s fair to play with people’s lives like that, and
firing those who don’t work out sounds like a nightmare, but I’d love to see
the data that would come out of such a study.

~~~
sjg007
Maybe.. the hypothesis is whether these algorithm problem solving whiteboard
interviews test and predict job performance. Plenty of people have argued that
they don't. The anecdotal evidence is that they don't.. because the people who
fail these interviews are still gainfully employed elsewhere in tech jobs.
Google should have some evidence that they do, or else it's a waste of time
(although not necessarily for all jobs). I don't disagree with these
whiteboard problem solving interviews because they test basically whether you
can think like a computer scientist which may be the primary skill they want.
There must be a correlation between thinks like a computer scientist and can
program. But I think there are plenty of folks who can program even though
they don't think like a computer scientist.

~~~
pmiller2
I don't think whiteboard interviews _do_ show one can "think like a computer
scientist." What they might show is that one can recognize that a toy problem
can be solved by some algorithm that was research paper-worthy some years ago.
Do you think the authors of those papers wrote them, or came up with the
fundamental algorithms in 45 minutes?

Regardless, what companies should be looking for is "can this person do the
job." "Can this person think like a computer scientist" is a poor proxy for
most jobs. It would be more appropriate to want to find out "can this person
think like a _software engineer_ ," but, instead, we get "can this person
regurgitate problem 257 from LeetCode."

I would argue that the negative signal is probably pretty high from this style
of interview. That is, you're unlikely to have someone who's capable of
writing down a nontrivial piece of code who can't actually write any code.
But, the positive signal, the "can this person do the job" signal, is very
very low.

I'll give you an example of a question I've been asked multiple times in a
45-60 minute interview: implement a text-based connect 4 game.

This is a totally valid programming task. That's why it's an assignment in
some beginning CS classes. Without such tight time pressure and scrutiny as an
interview implies, I would expect any working software engineer to be able to
come up with working code in a fairly short period of time. Under interview
conditions, where one has to not only come up with working code, but chatter
constantly while doing so, it becomes a lot harder, simply because one has to
multitask a little. Writing code and talking about it simultaneously is hard,
and it's not a skill that's necessary to the vast majority of software
engineer positions. Writing down tricky algorithms on a whiteboard without
notes is not a skill that's necessary to any occupation as far as I can tell.

------
kamalkishor1991
I keep reading about how bad Google's interview process is. But has anyone
done any proper large scale research on what is the best way to hire software
engineers? All the comments here seems like opinions of people based on
themselves and no one provides a proper alternative. Just curious!

~~~
cheez
I've been hiring people for 10 years and far and away the best results (in
order):

    
    
      1. I've worked with them before or they were referred by someone I trust
      2. Test project
    

Never had a good result from a question-based interview. I just don't have the
numbers for it to work.

Think about it, if the probability of a random dev knowing your stupid
questions is 1%, then you would need to interview 100 people to find that 1.

The only companies that can do that at scale are FAANG.

~~~
ajcodez
I like to give short term contracts to promising applicants. It filters both
good and bad for different reasons but it works.

~~~
cheez
I pay $100/hour and give them a week (but time boxed to 8 hours). They can do
it in their off time.

Much cheaper than the alternative which is to waste 2-4 hours per candidate.

------
petters
I have conducted many interviews at Google and this article is not true, at
the very least not generally so.

> If you are not highly senior, you won't get asked system design

This, for example, is not true.

------
resouer
Really? So leetcode is actually helping you work better with your future
colleague in Google？

~~~
komali2
To be fair, the bit of juiced up kick to the brain doing a leet code problem
on the train commuting to work has made me feel much more engaged once I show
up.

------
bootsz
In my experiences as a candidate it is about solving the problem, actually,
despite the fact that we constantly hear interviewers claim the contrary. I'd
be curious to know how long it's been since this individual has went through a
FANG interview process as a candidate themselves. *

To me this feels like a case of unconscious bias: I think many people who
interview genuinely believe they are looking for some set of criteria {A,B,C}
but they're evaluations/recommendations actually reveal a bias towards
{X,Y,Z}. So as a candidate, after you've been interviewed enough times you
realize that X,Y,Z is really the name of the game and posts like these just
seem totally out of touch.

* I wonder if anyone has tried introducing some kind of control group or blind study mechanism where some small % of candidates are actually secretly employees of the company. Probably would be hard for in-person interviews because people might be recognized, but maybe more practical for phone screens. The trained decoy candidate could basically attempt a problem in exactly the same way for many interviewers and then data could be analyzed on the outcomes to detect what biases are present.

------
mrzacarias
It's very clear that the interviewer bias is very important on the process. It
shouldn't be. On my case, I got a relapsed interviewer that was working on his
laptop while I was designing the service he wanted and another that wanted a
very specific and canned solution for the very specific and canned problem he
threw at me, instead of trying to understand my different approach for the
problem.

2 of 5 bad interviewers. I left with a bad taste on my mouth, with the feeling
that I didn't failed because I was not skilled / prepared enough for the
company, but just unlucky for getting a bad set of interviewers. If was just
me with that feeling, I would agree that I was biased for not receiving an
offer, but I see this happening a lot with good engineers and throwing all the
responsibility on the interviewees shoulders with "You are bitter for not
receiving an offer" or "gitgud" arguments is just avoiding the discussion.

Anyway, it's their process and if it's working for them, they have no reason
to change. Just stop advocating as it is a nearly perfect hiring process: it's
very clear that is far from it.

------
kerng
I like how the article tried to portrait these interviews as super
professional and as if they have like a plan or something. My experience is
that most interviewers dont prepare, they probably have been asking the same
question for years. And no, they are not simultaneously interviewing for
multiple skills, the just try to sound professional. If you are a dev, better
leetcode. That's all that matters at Google.

~~~
toast0
I don't work at Google, but I've been doing technical interviews for years and
I almost always ask the same question. The reason is I've given hundreds of
interviews with that question, so I'm prepared for almost all the ways people
can solve it, and especially all of the ways people get stuck or approach it
in ways that would probably be useful if you had more than 45 minutes but
aren't going to work in an interview setting.

When I've worked with interview plans it was around having the right mix of
different technical interview styles and not really technical interviews (like
often someone should run through the resume and validate things claimed)

------
bitL
Alright, so here you finally hear it said out loud - it's all about whether
interviewers like you, not whether you are a top performer. Increase your
likability by any means necessary, don't spend too much time on building your
technical excellence, it's pointless and not rewarded if you want to be at
FAANG.

Or start a new company, get backing outside their VC arms and challenge them
if you want to have fun.

------
wyldfire
I've interviewed at a couple of FAANG companies, some multiple times. I've yet
to get an offer, despite feeling like a (considerably?) better-than-average
candidate. I get the distinct impression that their hiring methods get them
tolerable sensitivity and excellent specificity [1]. But I have a hard time
believing this author's claim that "it's not about solving the problem."

If they reject candidates who don't/can't consider algorithmic complexity of a
particular solution, then they'll likely reject some candidates who would have
performed well at a job there. But they won't extend an offer to a candidate
who wouldn't perform well. Hiring an underperforming employee has several
costs. Obvious costs: time consuming gathering evidence to let them go,
management doesn't like delivering bad news. More subtle reason: opportunity
cost of team morale for a high-performing team. IMO it is exhausting being on
a team where everyone frequently chooses the least challenging design options,
frequently ignores process/follow-through, frequently ignores opportunities to
innovate and improve.

Does the interview process in place actually help achieve this goal? I'm not
sure, but I'd wager that it might actually come closer than any other
interview process.

All that said, being on the receiving end of these rejections is a real
disappointment. But from everything I've read, you may have to buckle down and
commit lots of preparation time in order to get an offer. I haven't done that,
and I suppose I should expect to get rejections until I do.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity)

~~~
endtime
Disclaimer: I work for Google and am an interviewer. I'm speaking for myself
and not my employer, and not citing any internal data, just my own experience.

I don't know what our offer rate is, but I think it is probably well below 50%
even once you make it onsite, so being above average wouldn't be enough.

Our hiring process is also tuned for low false positive rate, at the cost of
high false negative rate. Maybe it's optimal, I don't know, but two of my
referrals ended up going to Facebook after not getting offers at Google, and
doing very well there (one exceptionally so). We definitely should have hired
them and we didn't.

------
akhilcacharya
It's not all about solving the problem, but to be clear if you don't solve the
problem optimally you're not going to get an offer.

------
Kephael
This is ridiculous, you will be given a no hire recommendation by the
interviewer at a FAANG company if you do not provide an optimal solution. This
is very well documented on sites/apps like Blind and accurate from my personal
experience. It's corporate double speak to state otherwise.

Can't give an O(N) solution but come up with a correct O(N^2) solution? Too
bad - go do more Leetcode.

~~~
pmiller2
For most companies, it’s not doublespeak, it’s outright lying. My successful
interviews have been 100% correlated with times I’ve gotten to the optimal
solution.

------
DannyBee
For all the complaining here, Google's system actually works for Google, so
i'm unsure why people expect something to change.

The average interview score from a panel of interviews correlates very highly
with performance at Google, interviewees report high satisfaction, etc.

If those things changed, i'm sure Google would change it. But why would they
change it otherwise?

~~~
oculusthrift
i thought they said average score doesn’t correlate at all with how you do
once you’re in? a lot of high performers only get in 2nd or 3rd time and
barely.

~~~
DannyBee
I can't speak for whether that was true in the past. (If you really care i can
bug people for historical data)

However, as of 2014 average interview score was _very_ well correlated with
job performance (I can't give you further exact details because they are still
marked confidential and i can't find a paper or anything that has disclosed
it).

Note very clearly the word average above ;) Individual interview scores are
definitely not predictive of job performance.

~~~
sdenton4
Those interested in learning more would do well to read Kahneman's "thinking,
fast and slow." Averaging across multiple axes and multiple interviewers gives
good signal.

------
drharby
When I get interview feedback about literally not having a coded complete
solution despite strong communication skills, understanding of the solution
and underlying cs concepts, i really cant help but conclude this as nothing
but PR...

And then I read this >personal opinion

I'd rather take advice from /adv/

~~~
pmiller2
Exactly. What interviewers are really looking for is speed and fluency in
working through the solution. The easiest way to get there is by already
having seen the problem. This leads directly to the “grind hundreds of
leetcode” meme seen on Blind. (“LC and TC or GTFO,” in other words.)

------
an4rchy
I am not sure if this is in the interest of any company but why not provide
feedback, as it can only help the interviewees in the future and the companies
attract better talent.

Even if it's not standardized, a rubrik across X attributes with a scale and a
number. (Which is what I am assuming they are doing anyway -- as it sounds
likes the interviewers are rating them across different dimensions)

Not sure if this is some sort of a thing to do with liability but the
interviewee can get generalized feedback.

Ex: Technical skills (2/5),Communication skills (4/5) etc. and they can
improve on the relevant dimensions or compare notes with other companies /
candidates as well.

~~~
joshuamorton
Experience says that in addition to liability, failed candidates just try to
argue and get upset. People claim they want feedback but then claim that the
interviewer must have misjudged them.

More work for the company, and leads to even more negativity in the process.

~~~
an4rchy
I agree with the possible liability aspect but if they are doing it already,
i.e. taking notes or rubric scoring, then it's just a matter of sending a
summarized version of that and hopefully it's feedback from multiple people
and not just one person's opinion.

The negativity may likely exist from no response/lack of feedback -- which can
be frustrating for ppl that spent time/effort), but at least as the previous
poster mentioned some people do appreciate feedback.

Also, recently noticed that companies have automated questionnaires asking how
the recruiting process was or can be improved -- wondering if there's any
improvements based on feedback.

As a side, it's been kinda interesting to read glassdoor responses for how
people were treated/felt during the whole process (timing, professionalism
etc...)

~~~
joshuamorton
I meant to post this earlier but forgot to, sorry.

Yes, I can't remember where I came across the data, but providing feedback
didn't actually increase interview satisfaction, but decreased it in the
aggregate.

Candidates are prone to arguing and trying to nitpick the feedback to get
reconsidered. It's counter intuitive, but that's what really happened.

------
asaph
> Most candidates don't know what the goal of our interviews are. First rule,
> it is not about finding an optimal solution or any solution at all.

Believe this nonsense at your own peril.

------
projektir
I keep hearing this but it is simply not compatible with my experience.

Often the problems are given without any interviewer at all, for one (the
initial screens).

Even for ones where the interviewer is present, if I solve the problem, all is
well. If I do not, all is not well. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground
where I fail to solve the problem and it's fine.

------
KKKKkkkk1
The key bit of context is at the top of the page:

Engineer. Diagnostics at Google Cloud. Keeping things boring. _Personal
opinions._

Emphasis mine.

~~~
ssambros
That is definitely her personal opinion, as she is not a spokesperson for
Google as far as hiring is concerned. Neither am I.

However, I think if you ask people who conduct software engineer interviews at
Google, a lot of them will agree with her opinion, including myself. One thing
I would add, is that there is unfortunately no strong consensus on what to
expect from the candidate, so variance seems to be high. That is why
candidates are encouraged to try again, if unsuccessful.

------
robertsd247
This article/blog entry says really nothing for the most part. I know two
people personally who interviewed for Google. Neither hired, one got to a
sixth interview, the other only fourth. Both told me two exact things:

How do you solve a problem? How do you solve someone else's problem?

I counter with "who cares?". CAN YOU SOLVE the problem is the winning answer.
I think Google is really guilty of wasting their time and the time of the
candidates with that many number of interviews without any payoff. I know
within 15 minutes if a person is going to a) fit in the culture and b) able do
the job. If Google needs more than one interview to figure that out, then they
are doing it wrong.

What Google is really doing is providing someone with the privilege of having
google on their resume. I doubt it's worth all that.

------
neilwilson
I suspect all large company interview systems are about ensuring you have a
large sunk cost of effort in the ‘debit’ column so that you’ll be pleased to
accept substandard terms if you get to the end point.

Much the same as the student degree systems with its non-defaultable loans
designed to keep you firmly in the rat race with no time to question whether
three hour commutes and twelve hour days are a sensible way to organise a
society.

The singular most useful skill anybody can master in IT or any other
profession is the ability to write off a loss and not let it worry you.

~~~
cableshaft
> I suspect all large company interview systems are about ensuring you have a
> large sunk cost of effort in the ‘debit’ column so that you’ll be pleased to
> accept substandard terms if you get to the end point.

I believe this is part of why the technical interview gauntlet has slowly
become the norm and persists, is it's usefulness for that, although I don't
think it's consciously happening, just a side benefit that those that hire are
picking up on subconsciously.

I know that if I'm unable to answer one of their question in an interview I
have a hard to escape feeling of "They don't think I'm their ideal candidate"
and then even if it does get to the point where they want to extend an offer
my brain doesn't want to fight too hard to negotiate a better offer, because
"what if they think I was just barely adequate and I ask for way too much?"

It's the wrong feeling to have, but I think it's inherent in human psychology.
I think this type of interview process is (intentionally or not) manipulative
and reminds me of pickup artist "culture", where they will 'neg' women to
cause them to feel bad about themselves, weaken their confidence, and lower
their standards.

If you struggled with answering things that you should encounter on a regular
basis at your current job, then it's mostly on you (and I have not prepared
well and done that before as well for some interviews, like not really be able
to talk about projects I worked on when I first started the job because we've
done so much other totally different crap since then and I haven't thought
about it at all for a year or two). But if you're expected to refresh a 4-year
degree + rebecome an expert of every single technology stack you've ever
worked on professionally every time you want to find a new job in the hopes
that whatever random questions they ask you will be the right things you
studied and have fresh in your head, then I think there's mostly bad reasons
why this has become the norm.

I also think that since this process helps select for fresh graduates who
don't have any idea of their worth, have few responsibilities, no
extracurricular hobbies, and are willing to put in an insane amount of time
and effort in order to prove themselves is another big reason why this has
become the norm.

------
autotune
I interviewed for a Technical Solutions Engineer over there, and contrasting
to some of the other comments in this thread the interview was surprisingly
reasonable. Nothing too tricky just standard basic log parsing stuff with
Python. Didn’t get it but at least the questions were clear, interviewer spoke
English clearly, and was friendly overall. Compare this to Facebook where
English was clearly not my interviewer’s first language and didn’t explain the
questions clearly. I’d gladly interview with Google again.

------
rv-de
> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a
> daily basis.

I conducted dozens of interviews at my last place. If the goal is to identify
jerks then in my experience it is best to create a friendly and comfortable
atmosphere during the interview. Simply because people of such personality
will confuse friendliness for weakness and start to complain and argue about
questions or even mild non-positive feedback. Cool people on the other hand
will be able to open up and show their skills more easily.

------
mixmastamyk
I'm reminded of an amusing rant by Adam Carolla: "I had no idea how… f*ckin
horrible most people are at their jobs."
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6GVt35Eoz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6GVt35Eoz4)

Definitely includes tech-interviewers. As I get older I've started pushing
back on these bad interview decisions, but can't help feel it's a losing
proposition without support from fellow developers.

~~~
pmiller2
Can you give a couple examples of questions you’ve pushed back on? How and why
did you do so?

~~~
mixmastamyk
As a category I now decline any questions at a site like coderpad.io where you
have to code with a gun to your head. They're simply a waste of time for
everyone involved.

On the other hand, I haven't declined any that are given as homework, except
one where the guy said it would take 8-10 hours. <= 4 is a firm rule with me,
unless they want to provide a stipend.

Two years ago was the most recent time someone asked about my "greatest
weakness" and I simply lol'd.

So, while I realize the content of the questions themselves could be
problematic, that's not generally what I push back on. Perhaps if the question
was totally off the wall rather than merely a gotcha.

------
d--b
I have never interviewed for Google so wouldn’t know if that’s actually how it
goes. But that sounds like how I run interviews myself. I think of myself as a
fairly good interviewer, and I’ve accepted people who totally bombed the
actual question, but in the way they behaved and talked and thought seemed to
be a good fit.

Hiring is hard, and I do think asking hard questions (on any subject really)
does show a lot of the candidate...

------
ensiferum
Sounds like horseshit. How many of those who didn't solve (or didn't even get
on the track of solving) their problems actually ever got hired?

------
Tade0
I perform interviews from time to time for the company I work for and my
conclusion is as follows: interviews are hit-or-miss for the most part and the
only way to improve on that is to spend a prohibitive amount of time on them.

Also the Dunning-Kruger effect is strong among interviewers. Especially given
that as a person in this role you're given this tiny bit of power that is
necessary to enable it.

------
pavlov
The Silicon Valley interview system is a major blind point for these
companies: a structural weakness which internal dogma paints as an
unquestionable strength.

It's like the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. You could criticize it, but
it's so internalized in how the place works that there's no way to get rid of
it without blowing up everything.

------
simonebrunozzi
I've been interviewed by Google dozens of times over the past 7-8 or so years,
have received two written offers and one verbal one.

First, I always refused the offer.

Second, the process has always been full of very disappointing flaws.

I know that interviews at big companies can be screwed, but among the top
ones, I doubt any company is as terrible as Google is.

~~~
nappy-doo
why do you keep interviewing then?

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Mostly because I trusted ex-colleagues that "this time will be different".

I stopped interviewing with them, forever.

------
moretosee
A lot of google employees might not pass the interview if he/she is going
through the interview for the 2nd time.

because it all depends on the questions he/she comes across. the interview
process is testing do you know what i am going to ask and that's all that
matters.

------
cletus
Hiring continues to be a favourite whipping boy on HN and honestly I kind of
wish it would die because it's the same arguments every time:

\- Inconsistent interviews

\- Luck of the draw questions

\- "I don't do well coding on a whiteboard" (often framed as "coding on a
whiteboard proves nothing")

\- Bad experience with the process

\- Etc

Personally I don't mind coding on a whiteboard but only if you understand why
you're asking a candidate to do it and what you hope to gain. Unfortunately
many (IMHO) get this part wrong.

Obviously FizzBuzz was influential here. And I honestly think FizzBuzz is the
right way to think about live coding tests because it's simple. It's
deceptively simple such that anyone competent easily falls into the trap of
thinking the question needs to be harder and this is a problem with many FAAMG
interviewers.

On the other side I think there are people who don't realize how many people
are masquerading as programmers who can't program a for loop in their language
of choice. It's actually hard to believe for anyone semi-competent unless
you've witnessed it but it's true.

FizzBuzz is a simple problem aimed at providing an early negative signal on a
candidate. Every word of that was deliberate and important. It's simple so
anyone remotely competent will pass it within minutes and you can move on.

This doesn't mean that if you ace it you're a good engineer ie there is ZERO
positive signal here. The negative signal is if you can't solve this simple
problem in your language of choice because then you almost certainly aren't a
good engineer and you (the interviewer/employer) can stop wasting your time.

This is why it's so important it's a simple problem because a hard problem
adds very little positive signal and greatly reduces the negative signal. Some
people are bad under pressure with hard problems. Some questions are a matter
of knowing the trick. Finding cycles in a graph is trivial if you are familiar
with the tortoise and hare algorithm. If not you may figure it out from first
principles but if you don't it doesn't mean you're a bad programmer or you
shouldn't be hired. That's the problem.

On the other side some like to lambast interview processes if they have a
nonzero false negative rate. These stories usually go "I referred excellent
engineer X and they bombed out on a random coding question" or similar. This
happens but getting a false negative doesn't invalidate the system.

It's important to remember to that the goals of the employer and the candidate
are different. The candidate's goals are to try to get a positive signal to
the employer. The employer's goals are to minimize time spent per candidate
(since this is expensive) while hiring a sufficient number of qualified
candidates with a minimum of false positives.

Again, every word of that is important. False positives are expensive. If you
have a pool of 100 people to fill 10 roles and 20 are will work out then, as
the employer, you don't often care which of those 20 you get, as long as you
get 10 of them. There's an effort-reward curve between getting 10/20 qualified
candidates vs the best 10.

Lastly, this is also why there is an interview slate of 4+ interviews. A
single bad interview does not kill your chances.

I'd say Google's biggest problem is interviewer dead wood. These are people
who have their pet questions, which were banned years ago (as either being too
well known and/or just being a bad question) but they keep asking it anyway.
Or they know <pick your language> and then force the candidate to use it and
then mark them down for not knowing it (when the candidate never claimed to
know it). Part of the delays in Google hiring too are some people will do an
interview and won't submit feedback for 1 or even 2 weeks, a process I
personally found inexcusable and infuriating.

But interviewing is one of those things that everyone is expected to do, which
needs to change as many people are either bad at it or just don't really care.

I would also say, if anything, Google (and this probably applies to most if
not all big tech companies) doesn't filter often and early enough. I saw
candidates who never should've made it passed a phone screen. In some cases I
saw the phone screen feedback (as part of the whole packet) and I honestly
don't know why it didn't end there. My own theory was that recruiters largely
controlled this and they had quotas to meet of phone screens, onsite
interviews and hires and this just ended up wasting a lot of interviewers'
time. But that was just a theory.

Disclaimer: Xoogler

~~~
tytso
The problem with FizzBuzz is that it's too well known. So it's basically
something which has very little signal because people can just google it and
memorize the solution.

Two of my favorite phone screen questions (now unfortunately banned because
the have been identified on various web sites like Glassdoor as being Google
interview questions) were "validate a UTF-8 string" (the interviewee is given
the UTF-8 rules), and "add an integer to a bignum" (the interviewee is told
what a bignum is if they don't know that term).

Both of these are really simple programming problems that the experienced
coder should be able to knock off in 5 minutes. The absolutely terrifying
thing is that there are fresh graduates with a CS degree who couldn't deal
with either of these in the full 45 interview slot. I'm not sure what colleges
are teaching these days, but it's certainly not programming as I know it...

The reason why these were my favorite phone screen questions was if the
candidate couldn't hack a question like that, I could very confidently write
up my interview report and tell the recruiter --- don't bother with the
expense of bringing the candidate on site and asking 4-6 software engineers to
spend 2-3 hours interviewing the candidate and then writing up a comprehensive
set of interview notes/report.

~~~
cletus
The point is "like FizzBuzz" not "actually FizzBuzz". This could just as
easily be:

\- Add all the odd integers in an array

\- Count the number of vowels in a String (bonus points if they ask about
Unicode vs ASCII in the context of what constitutes a vowel). ASCII is the
easy case. Unicode is a little more involved. Handle upper and lower case
(they should figure out this is an issue).

\- Given a set of Strings find all the characters (or words if you prefer)
that are unique to only one of the Strings

\- Given an ordered sequence 1..10 and the operators {+,-,/,*} where you can
put any operator between two numbers but maintain the number order and
operator precedence, find the number of operator combinations that yield 5
digit positive integers. Brute force is totally fine. Pick any category of
answers you like in fact. Writing this one will take longer than FizzBuzz but
the important point here is no specialist algorithmic knowledge other than how
arithmetic works is needed and there is no special trick memorization.

I can come up with a million examples like this.

~~~
xorcist
> Count the number of vowels in a String

Unicode is _a_ _little_ more involved?

I wouldn't even know where to start for the mostly trivial western European
languages, and that's without leaving high bit ASCII territory.

I'd probably end up making a list by hand of every possible vowel. But that's
not doable for Unicode. What does it even mean for things like ideographic
characters?

------
Hysterisis
I enjoyed my interview at Google. They asked some generic questions, but also
some stuff specific to my niche.

No one is expecting perfect code. I ended up saying something along the lines
of “let’s just pretend the method is called isPresent() because I forget” to
every interviewer.

------
paulsutter
Perfect and thank you. Everyone who gets offended by the interview process
needs to read this

------
mychael
I wish someone at Google had the courage to admit how inconsistent and
arbitrary the hiring/interviewing process is at Google.

"Googliness" is just a qualitative lever in hiring that allows Google
interviewers to enforce whatever biases they have.

~~~
DannyBee
[citation needed for any of your view]

The problem is that it isn't inconsistent and arbitrary, so that would simply
be wrong to admit.

There is a tremendous amount of data/studies/etc to back this up, done
repeatedly over time. Both independent of Google and not. Certainly much more
than any other interview system i've seen suggested or used here.

As for the second, general "Googliness" is not used to turn people down -
horrible communication skills/being an asshole/etc are.

Despite your claim, one interviewer noting an issue there will not get you not
hired. Two or three noting it would. One noting it and then followup fit
calls/interviews confirming it would.

So it's not an effective mechanism for single interviewer to enforce biases
anyway.

~~~
mychael
Whether you work there or not, I'm afraid you are misinformed.

Three of my friends (all similar backgrounds) interviewing at Google this year
have had completely different interviewing experiences. One even bypassed the
phone screen and was flown to Mountain View for an IRL technical
screening/interview. These are all for the same role.

How does your data reconcile that?

~~~
DannyBee
Errr, i'm really unsure of the point you are trying to make and thus can't
actually formulate a response.

Is it: You think they should have had exactly the same experience/path?

Regardless, any of the points i can think of don't really seem that relevant
to your original point and my response.

Did you respond to the wrong subthread?

~~~
mychael
I don't see the confusion. I'm saying its inconsistent and arbitrary. You're
saying it is not.

I'm providing an example as to how it is inconsistent (friends experience) as
well as an a priori rationale for why it's arbitrary (e.g Googliness is a
fuzzy criterion that allows interviewers to make any arbitrary call).

~~~
tptacek
I'm deeply unimpressed with Google's hiring process (I think it works for them
because their roles are coveted, not because it's especially good). But you
haven't established that their process is "arbitrary", only that it's
inconsistent. In particular: I don't see any evidence you've provided that
"Googliness" is the reason one of your peers got to skip phone screens.

------
gawkface
If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole
Life Believing that It is Stupid \- that quote that is contentiously
attributed to that person (If u ask me, prolly the fish will become an
amphibian lol)

------
Rainymood
I really dont hope that writing blog posts on twitter with one tweet per
sentence and then threading them together becomes the norm rather than the
exception, but my expectations are low.

------
jorgemf
This information is for outside and inside the company. When you interview
someone you cannot go with a predefined answer that you want the candidate to
achieve.

------
jiveturkey
companies do not care about the quality of their hiring process. which is sad
because they do care about the quality of their employees.

they say they care, but it’s lip service. if companies cared, they would put
in place a candidate feedback mechanism, ie post-interview quality survey. you
could start with only surveying those you extend an offer to.

------
Jpoechill
Currently interviewing. Super excited at first, but now excitement is mostly
dying down. We’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for the heads up. ^^

------
egberts1
Very hostile to deaf and handicapped folks once they’ve passed all four
segments: The interview process

------
moretosee
the original post is totally BS. These days, Google's interview system is more
like getting better/cheaper replaceable labor/commodity. particularly with
huge supply of new fresh graduates.

------
taf2
I have fond memories of my google interview. It was a really fun process.

------
LaserToy
I’m sorry, but this one is BS.

Google interview is dehumanizing and arrogant. It sucks.

------
elcinr
Why does everyone on HN seem to care so much about what Google does in
interviews? We get it, no one likes weird off-topic brainteasers. Be a better
engineer so you don't have to worry about having them on your resume and
you'll be good.

~~~
dominotw
> Why does everyone on HN seem to care so much about what Google does in
> interviews?

Because all other companies just cargo cult what google does in interviews. If
you want to switch jobs then this is interesting.

~~~
elcinr
Fair enough

------
egberts1
Very hostile to deaf and handicapped folks

------
zozbot123
To any hiring managers that might be reading this, please watch this
alternative method of interviewing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI)

~~~
scaryclam
Thanks for posting this! I tend towards the much more conversational interview
to get the candidates talking, though this has some handy examples of going
beyond the candidates CV and drilling down into the technical details that I'd
like to appropriate.

I also have the tendency to take a bunch of whiteboard pens etc into
interviews I'm running in case the candidate explains things better using
visual aids.

------
farcat991
Do people realize that there is no _effective_ solution to this problem of
hazing like interviews?

There are probably millions of High IQ people applying and vying to work at
Google. Tomorrow Google could decide to add juggling competitions in
interviews in addition to algorithm jargon and while it would lead to a lot
more bitching from interviewers, it wouldn't matter to Google as they would
still get their fill of qualified high IQ applicants.

~~~
jdck1326
There aren't millions of high IQ people applying and vying to work at Google.

~~~
farcat991
You decided to latch on to one possible inaccuracy in what I said and
disregard the overall point. Even if we agree that millions is not correct,
100s of thousands or thousands of people? Point is for every 1 _qualified_
person hired at Google there are probably 100s of (at the very least)
_qualified_ people rejected. So Google can be unbelievably picky before any
they see any bad effect from their hazing interviews on themselves.

~~~
jdck1326
I didn't disregard your overall point, I just made a comment that didn't
happen to relate to it.

~~~
farcat991
My bad, I apologize if it was rude, it just came across like that to me.

~~~
jdck1326
Doesn't bother me. I think it's generally safe to assume comments here are
made in good faith.

------
rajasimon
I gone through first round and then I haven't heard any updates from google.
I'm still waiting...

~~~
komali2
Did you try emailing the recruiter? It can take up to 3 weeks to get a
decision from the hiring panel, or more.

------
adamnemecek
I can't handle yet another article about the Google interview. It's not 2005,
people don't care about working there anymore.

------
vfc1
The problem is that there is almost no correlation between how candidates do
in whiteboard interviews, and the ability to perform the job on a day to day
basis.

Also, and the article says it: you are being tested mostly for personality
compatibility with the interviewer, which again has nothing to do with the
ability to perform the job.

This plus the fact that the interviewers are volunteers, creates overtime an
effect where lots of people in the workforce have similar personality traits,
which is not a great thing because it creates an imbalance in the normal
personality balance that a group needs to work properly.

Personality imbalances in groups usually lead to dysfunctional situations over
time: too many sloppy people who just cowboy code until dawn, too many
excessively cautious people that won't touch a line of code any more with fear
of breaking something, etc.

~~~
blauditore
> The problem is that there is almost no correlation between how candidates do
> in whiteboard interviews, and the ability to perform the job on a day to day
> basis.

What else would you use as metric? Talking about technical topics?

In my experience, there are people good at talking about those things, but
miserably failing at the actual job. Introducing simple whiteboard programming
tasks _in addition_ has helped weeding those out and dramatically improved
hiring success.

~~~
vfc1
There are some very solid alternatives to this current system, which lets face
it some of things that they make you do in an interview are borderline
ridiculous and its a matter of lucj more than anything else.

For the technical part, I would as screening value forms of unforgeable proof
of technical competence, such as Github profiles, meaningful open source
contributions, stackoverflow contributions.

Next for the technical part, a homework assignment. Homework is much more
close to the real world experience: get a task and would you have to figure it
out.

Then the technical interview would be to explain the homework. There the only
goal is really to confirm that the person did the homework themselves rather
than anything else.

For the behavioral part, a full battery of psychological tests, to weed out
psychopathic traits mostly.

There are alternatives, the current interviewing system is not a good
solution.

