

A note to Google recruiters (and on Google hiring practices) (2011) - AndrewDucker
http://infotrope.net/2011/07/21/a-note-to-google-recruiters/#

======
tptacek
_(True story: in my interview I was asked how I would extract entities from an
HTML page. I suggested using OpenCalais (a free-as-in-beer API that does just
that, and returns Freebase identifiers). If someone in the Freebase community
wanted to do something like that, that’s exactly what I would have
recommended. But the interviewer wanted to know how I would implement it
myself. I told him I wouldn’t — that that’s why I was leaving the Search group
for Developer Relations! Wrong answer, apparently.)_

No opinion on the rest of the article; never worked for Google, never
interviewed for a job there. But I wanted to respond to this graf.

This seems to be a trope in job interview postmortems: the "technical problem
that the candidate responds to with the name of a library because why would
you reinvent the wheel". I doubt that this approach will come in handy. The
interviewer isn't simply asking how you'd extract entities from an HTML page.
They're using entity extraction as a model problem, a stand-in for the kinds
of problems they expect you might deal with at that company, most of which
won't have library solutions. Answering with the name of a library is about as
productive as saying "I'd post on Craigslist to find someone to write the
solution for me".

Meanwhile, coming up with a solution for extracting entities from a page isn't
that hard; it's a weird place to stick to your guns on needing a library. And
Calais is a lot of machinery to involve just to extract entities from a page
of text.

~~~
PaulHoule
Uh, it is easy to make an entity extraction program that will get you a
passing grade for a CS course.

It's not easy to make one that is good enough for commercial use unless
somebody is hand curating the results. For the record, OpenCalais isn't good
enough for commercial use (I've tried), and like most text analysis vendors,
the people there blame their customers for the lack of adoption, not their
product.

If you look at the leading entity extraction products they tend to be by huge
companies like BBN and IBM; the state of the art open source product is UIMA,
which out of the box does precisely nothing. What it does do is make it
possible to coordinate the work of 100+ developers, linguists, scientists and
other people in a bunch of different timezones so you can run a sweat shop
that piles up a pyramid of heuristics at a price that can only be afforded by
large organizations that expect to pay a lot and get very little for it.

Now the question of how you can cheaply build a knowledge base that can do the
same is an interesting one that I've thought about a lot.

You can answer 90% of the questions that show up in a data science interview
with "look it up in a hash table" or "look it up the literature". Off the top
of my head I'd have a hard time explaining how to make a bloom filter or how
to turn text into a suffix tree, although I probably could derive an algorithm
to train an HMM. I can look up all this stuff in the literature so why bother?

~~~
tptacek
What's your point? Are you suggesting that an interviewer expects you to write
a production quality DOM parser in the course of a one-hour interview on a
blackboard? No, they don't. So, move on: citing a library is an inadequate
answer. You need to write code.

~~~
PaulHoule
What's my point is that I'm an expert on the above problem, working on stuff
that is beyond state-of-the-art.

If somebody hires me to work on that I can produce exceptional results.

If somebody hires me to fill in for the last guy who burned out on a project
that is two years behind schedule, my performance is average.

Asking a question like that from an average person will give you an average
answer and average, at best, results in real life.

------
leokun
The thing that bothers me is the complete disconnect between the recruiters
and the interviewer. The recruiter's job is to funnel as many developers as
possible into the gaping maw of Google's human resource hiring system. So they
use all the tricks any recruiter does by sending you insincere emails that
vaunt your background, skills and experience. Very positive, uplifting full of
the sky is the limit at Google marketing.

Then when you get into the process after talking to the recruiter for a few
minutes it turns into a completely other kind of experience, somehow suddenly
you're supposed to feel grateful for this opportunity to interview at Google,
and it's time to go through the attrition gauntlet, try not to feel self-
entitled like you deserve to work at Google.

Like maybe just be upfront about the expectations, because the disconnect from
recruiter first contacts "you are the best please let us talk to you" to "oh
shit you want work here? Yeah good luck with that." is really annoying and I
stopped the whole process before ever talking to anyone.

And I like technical interviews, because I like the challenge. But not with
Google.

------
gesman
My last week's interaction with Google's recruiter (I have to admit she is
very nice person and genuinly wanted to help, but she was forced to put
everyone through Google grinding machine).

\-----------------------------------------------------

[She:]

I have scheduled your phone [coding tests] interview for the following:

DATE: .....

TIME: .....

PHONE: .....

\-----------------------------------------------------

[Me:]

Hi,

I think I already passed technical interview process with Google a few times
in the past and gained quite a bit of an extra experience since then.

As I mentioned I'd be happy to connect with the team in person to see how my
experience can be of benefit to Google enterprise, but considering my current
situation - going through new rounds of pre-screening coding tests to prove my
worth is not something I have interest in.

\-----------------------------------------------------

[She:]

I completely understand. As I mentioned this is the first step of the process.
If you do decide to reengage in the process I would love to work with you. The
prescreen call will take about 45-minutes and focus on your most recent coding
experience, and the experience that you've gained since your last interview.
This phone call isn't just a skill assessment, it will help further narrow the
team that might be a match for you. I know the process can be a bit lengthy,
but it's designed to have a low standard deviation and really hone in on your
skill-set, and area of expertise.

Let me know if you change your mind.

\-----------------------------------------------------

[Me:]

[http://i.imgur.com/YKp9cX8.gif](http://i.imgur.com/YKp9cX8.gif)

\-----------------------------------------------------

------
etler
It this automatically scrolling to the bottom of the page every 10 or so
seconds for anyone else? Use scrollTo responsibly.

~~~
glenra
You need to remove the "#" at the end of the url in order to read the article.

------
michaelhoffman
(2011)

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