
How to Get a Job at Google - dannynemer
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-job-at-google.html
======
GuiA
Ok I'll bite.

I interviewed with Google about 2 years ago. First technical phone interview,
the guy sounds really grumpy and irritated, and starts off with "I see that
you have a Master's in CS. Are you an expert?". I replied something to the
effect of "well I think it'd be pretentious for me to call myself an expert, I
like to let my work speak for itself.". He responded "well we only hire
experts at google".

The interview went downhill from there; several times he told me my solution
to his question was incorrect, and I stepped through the code with him and
showed him that he was mistaken and my solution was valid. He was just super
grumpy the whole time.

Who knows, maybe my name reminded me of his ex wife or something. Regardless,
it was a terrible experience.

I don't think that I sucked that hard because 2 weeks later I interviewed with
apple, made it all the way to the onsite, and their questions felt harder.
Their process was much more pleasant and efficient overall.

~~~
jeremymcanally
Yeah, same experience. I interviewed a long time ago (something like 5-6 years
ago), and the interviewer sounded bored and grumpy the whole time. I told them
before I interviewed that I didn't know of any of their core languages well
enough to interview in them (Python being the only one I could possibly
perform well enough with), but they said doing it in Ruby was fine since I was
going for a testing position where they used Selenium and Ruby (no clue if
that was true since the guy who interviewed me said it wasn't). The
interviewer was just severely adversarial the whole time, constantly pointing
out "you can't do that" syntactically or "that won't work" even though I'd
step through and show them links or irb runs that proved otherwise.

And what's the deal with doing code interviews in Google Docs? I don't know if
that's how it's done now, but it was extremely high-pressure. Given that he
could see every keystroke and was pretty un-cooperative, it made for a super
unpleasant interview with the constant feeling that I couldn't think or
explore the problem given.

Needless to say, I didn't progress.

~~~
incision
Yes, Google Docs was still the whiteboard for screening less than a year ago.

Thankfully, the person I dealt with was generally pleasant and made for one of
the better interview experiences I've had.

~~~
davidjnelson
Google docs here too the last time. Very pleasant, kind and helpful
interviewer.

------
simonsarris
I somewhat enjoy interviewing, and I thought about writing up my narrative of
the _best_ interview I ever had (it was very exceptional), and at the same
time I thought about writing about the _strangest_ interview I ever had, a
distinction that belongs to Google. I decided not to because I didn't want to
be unfair to them based on my experience which may well be out of the ordinary
(I could recount it solely for this crowd if someone is interested).

I didn't get far in that interview (I excused myself), but the entire process
was _downright Kafkaesque_ and I get the same eerie feeling reading this
article.

> Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you
> vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What
> we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team,
> do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead.

I'm sorry, _what?_ This definition doesn't actually describe anything. It's
more useful as an example of _begging the question_ [1] than it is of
describing what they mean by leadership. And how do they go about deciding if
you step up to the plate at the right time in an interview, anyway?

It seems like their "leadership" criteria wouldn't actually select for people
with good leadership skills, it would just select for people with good
storytelling. Par for the course for interviews, but let's not kid ourselves.

[1] This phrase is commonly used to mean _raising the question_ but I mean it
here in the traditional sense, like the comical observation: "If such actions
were not illegal, then they would not be prohibited by the law."

~~~
scotth
I would love to hear the story.

~~~
simonsarris
Sorry! I dozed off.

PLEASE remember that my anecdote may not be indicative of Google's typical
recruiting and I am especially not passing judgement about anything they do
(except maybe recruit). I like Google and it's probably a great place to work.

Here's what happened:

Back in 2011 a Google recruiter emailed me saying I might be a good fit for a
position called:

> 'Performance Engineer' for which we're looking for a candidate with a
> combination of compiler, high performance software design and computer
> architecture experience.

Now I'm not certain how he came to the conclusion I might be a good fit,
because I'm a simple JavaScript farmer from a backwards asteroid and the only
thing remotely close to that job description in my short life were a few
articles about JavaScript Canvas performance that I've written. I relayed that
there must be some sort of misunderstanding about my skill-set.

He says ah thanks, sorry for the confusion, have you got any friends? Standard
recruiter stuff. We part ways.

Fast forward to 2013 and I've just spent a year of my life slogging through
writing a book on HTML5. It got published in July and I was busy resting on
newly-built laurels when another Google recruiter contacts me, and I
entertain.

Now the timing is not particularly weird but this recruiter contacts me a week
before a conference I was invited to. You see, one month before the recruiter
email I got an invitation to a conference (EdgeConf), which happened to be
invite only, even for the audience members, and which was to take place at
Google HQ. This is puzzling if only because I'm still a relative nobody, save
for perhaps the just-published book, and I couldn't fathom who might _invite
me_ to such a thing, but I figured it was someone in Google.

The recruiter email a week before the event made this theory much more
plausible, so I figured there may be some hint of who invited me awaiting at
the conference.

Alas, during the talks and the after-party nobody approached me or mentioned
who invited me. I did meet the ever-recognizable Paul Irish for a second - we
exchanged a handshake and I swooned (who wouldn't?), but no more. The puzzle
remained.

But how could it be an invite from anyone other than someone in Google? I
don't know anyone. I'm from New Hampshire. I have very little in the way of
programmer friends. That's a big part of why I love HN so much, it makes me
feel like I'm part of a programmer community that I don't get to have offline.

After the conference I talked to the recruiter on the phone, twice, where I
relayed that no I was not interested in leaving New Hampshire, I like my slow
life among the moose and other friends I have.

Well that leaves Cambridge, he says, I'm not sure what we do there, he says,
I'll get back to you. Cue dial tone. I guess that meant remote is out of the
question, but that's not hard to imagine.

On the second call, he talks to me about Cambridge and what they do there, but
he was oddly uneasy talking about it, like he knew something I didn't (he
certainly must). He made it sound like there was little (web?) developer
presence there, and he wasn't totally certain what the projects were, but, and
this is the part that really blew my mind, _it shouldn 't matter._

He didn't literally say those words, but he heavily implied them by telling me
that _I would not know what kind of a spot I would be interviewing for._ Not
until after I'd been accepted, at any rate. There was no "You'll work on
fixing Google Finance, which can't be hard since we haven't changed it in 6
years and it still uses Flash."

There was almost no discussion of what products I might work on, and it was
pointless to have, because I'd be interviewing to be a _developer_ , and I'd
be placed afterwards.

So I could interview, but what I'd be doing was really up for grabs, and I
wouldn't be doing the grabbing, and my options-that-were-apparently-not-mine-
to-make were pigeonholed because of location. It sounded like teams only have
people on-site, at least It was implied I couldn't work for a team based in
Mountain View if my butt sat in Cambridge.

So I asked if I could be sure of the position and team that I'd be working for
before I interviewed properly, and he said no. At this point I had to cut
things short.

I don't understand the concept of interviewing not for a job but for a slot in
a pool of talent to be assigned only after I am accepted. That sounds like an
insurmountable amount of work to find out if a job is something I'd want to do
or not. What if I don't like the app? Or the team? It seems like a very
stressful way to begin at a company.

So there you have it. That's everything I remember at the moment.

To this day I never found out who invited me to that conference.

I'm sure I'm remembering some of the details wrong. For instance, cell phones
do not have dial tones to cue. But you get the idea.

~~~
paulirish
> To this day I never found out who invited me to that conference.

Pretty sure I did, dude. :) Also, while I sometimes offer names of friends
recruiters should talk to, I didnt' around this time. So that part's still a
mystery. Additionally, it was a pleasure to meet you.

~~~
mitochondrion
This might just be one of the greatest replies I've ever read.

Also, I aspire to attain your stature. I'm a fan.

------
dbroockman
There's a big (and common) error in statistical reasoning Google is making
with the decision to down-weight GPA based on their data: That GPAs do not
predict performance among those it hired does _not_ imply that Google should
not use GPA when hiring any more. Rather, it means that Google used GPA to
exactly the right extent among those it hired under its old policy - there was
no information left in GPA they didn't use, and therefore they should leave
whatever policy they have in place as is.

Explanation: suppose there are only two things Google observes, GPA and coding
ability, and that Google uses some correct decision rule to only hire those
people where the sum GPA + coding ability > some threshold. Those who have
lower GPAs will thus tend to have higher coding ability, otherwise they
wouldn't have met the threshold to make it into the pool of hires they're
analyzing - and, therefore, comparing "those with low GPAs that Google hired"
and "those with high GPAs that Google hired" is not an apples-to-apples
comparison.

In order to assess whether GPA should be used at all, they would need to look
at how the people they didn't hire because of their existing policy would have
performed.

More reading: [http://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-subtle-joys-
of-s...](http://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-subtle-joys-of-selecting-
on.html) and
[http://www.jamesmahoney.org/articles/Insights%20and%20Pitfal...](http://www.jamesmahoney.org/articles/Insights%20and%20Pitfalls.pdf)

------
anonapplicant1
These are great ideals. But there are a lot of problems with how Google does
an interview process.

The most known problem is recruiter quality. Google's recruiters are
notoriously non-diligent and screw up in big ways. It's not unheard of for eng
candidates to be booked with a non-eng interviewer, and vice versa.

In any case, here is how it works in practicality:

1\. You apply for job X and do a phone screen (or two).

2\. Random people throughout the company who a) have had interview training
and b) are (supposedly) related to X will be tapped to interview you, but
nobody from the actual team you are applying to is selected to minimize
biases.

3\. Each person interviews you and fills out a form giving feedback. Feedback
is qualitative, as well as quant (scale ratings with previous entries exposed
to make biases clear).

4\. Feedback goes to an unbiased committee (again, not related to the hiring
team) for a decision. Feedback is permanently saved in case the person applies
again.

The problem with (2) and (3) is that it sometimes results in an unrealistic
process - depending on the prowess of the recruiting coordinator in setting up
interviewers. A front-end dev candidate for Shopping might get interviewed by
an deep algos person from Search, and tank the interview because the
interviewer had higher expectations for the candidate's theoretical knowledge.

Good interview training alleviates these problems somewhat, but there are
still huge gaps.

~~~
Morgawr
I have interviewed with Google before and I'm currently going through the
process of getting an internship with them. Let me tell you I've had very
disparate and different experiences in these months.

I was contacted exactly one year ago for a fulltime position and my
contact/recruiter was really excellent, very friendly, helpful and informal,
we also talked a lot about non-Google related stuff, a definite great guy.
Then I was moved to onsite interviews and I failed.

Fast forward to last October, I was contacted for an internship, I said I was
interested and the recruiter said my application was forwarded. I never heard
from them again (even after pinging the guy again). Then I talked to an
engineer at Google and I was told that since I had already done the required
interviews with them a year before (I failed for fulltime but they apparently
qualified me for internship), I didn't have to do them again so the process
should have been faster.

With that in mind I managed to get in touch with another recruiter and
explained my situation, she decided to give me a chance and we had a phone
screening (although it shouldn't have been necessary, but no big deal). After
that she told me I'd have to go through all the interviews again although
that's not what I was told. She passed on my application and nobody contacted
me again.

That was beginning of January. I pinged her a few weeks ago and luckily I was
told that my application had been magically forwarded to another recruiter
again (aka she forgot, probably). This time I was told that I qualified to
skip the interviews so now I'm at a later stage (project matching for
internship) so I can't complain, although I was told there's not much choice
because I am "applying late" even though it's been going since October.

Tl;dr - it really depends on the recruiter, it's a shame because that can
really reflect negatively on the whole company.

Ps: sorry for the lengthy post, I needed to vent

------
amaks
Here is a much better and quite popular (in engineering circles) post by Steve
Yegge:

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-
goog...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html)

This of course applies only to engineers.

~~~
Chronic26
You mean developers. Programmers are not engineers.

~~~
amaks
Of course I meant software engineers (SWE). There is no job title 'Programmer'
at Google.

------
aaronbrethorst
Oh great, Thomas Friedman.

[http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/the_value_of_tom_friedman/](http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/the_value_of_tom_friedman/)

[http://nypress.com/flathead/](http://nypress.com/flathead/)

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/no-
kiddi...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/no-kidding-the-
most-incoherent-tom-friedman-column-ever-20120725)

[http://jilliancyork.com/2011/12/14/the-definitive-
collection...](http://jilliancyork.com/2011/12/14/the-definitive-collection-
of-thomas-friedman-takedowns/)

~~~
illuminate
Obviously an expert on meritocracy.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Thomas Friedman is a billionaire by marriage. Or were you being sarcastic?

~~~
illuminate
I take my sarcasm bone-dry.

------
joesmo
It's unfortunate that the skills they claim to value are ones that can't be
measured, especially in the limited time of an interview: "leadership,
humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn." While
these are great qualities, I wonder what they actually base their decisions on
in lieu of the above information.

~~~
blazespin
They measure that over time. Coding skills they can measure quite well.

~~~
josu
>If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles
in the company are technical roles.

Which means that the other half are not technical roles.

~~~
fatman
This has always baffled me. Is coding the only technical skill?

It's especially bewildering when a company seeks a software engineer with
expertise in a highly technical domain and populates the interview primarily
with programming questions. If they can find the subject matter expert who
also happens to be a master software craftsman, congrats to them, but I'm
guessing that person doesn't come along very often.

(Maybe I'm bitter, but with the level of skill in computer vision I can
demonstrate, don't you think you can teach me your programming nits in short
order?)

~~~
illuminate
"This has always baffled me. Is coding the only technical skill?"

What other non-soft skills are you discussing?

------
ender7
Despite the fact that Laszlo is the head of HR, engineering is in charge of
its own hiring procedures. I would take all of this with a giant grain of
salt.

~~~
jamesaguilar
+1 I don't think I have ever heard of anything about leadership being asked of
IC engineering candidates, and this is the first I've heard that intellectual
humility is important either. I mean, it's a good thing, but nobody ever
directed me to look for it.

------
mulligan
WARNING: TOM FRIEDMAN.

Why is that not on the link?

~~~
ndr
Why is that important?

~~~
smacktoward
Because Tom Friedman is a cluster of bad ideas masquerading as a newspaper
columnist.

------
kamaal
Candidates always optimize for what is being interviewed, never ever forget
that. The moment you put down a interview 'process' its all over. Doesn't
matter what that process is, doesn't matter how difficult that is. Once you do
it, its only a matter of recognizing patterns. Then all you have to do is
develop a elaborate process to game it. A couple of months of practice is all
it takes to do that.

The Steve Yegge, 'Get that job at Google' article is nothing but a 'Game this
interview' article. Read this book, practice this X times and you shall get
through. For heaven's sake, Do people hire for getting job done everyday or
playing some puzzles from some book not even remotely relevant to any thing
you will ever do on your job.

Companies like these want the best of the best people. Yet their methods
completely revolve around knowledge and fact based questions. And sorry I
don't believe asking difficult questions make it any better. There are forums
on the net dedicated to train you crack such questions.

How many interviews check if candidates can last tough on the job situations?
How many check if the candidate is hard working, How many check the candidates
appetite to work on tough challenging time pressing projects? How many check
if the candidate is innovative? Or checks a candidates general abilities like
gumption, persistence or general appetite for work and delivering.

These companies often speak on how difficult it is to hire good people and
then purposefully invent processes to avoid hiring such people.

~~~
BrandonY
Much of the technical advice in Steve Yegge's article boils down to this:
"Study a data-structures and algorithms book. Focus on complexity, graphs,
discrete math, operating systems, and algorithms."

While you could consider this advice on how to game an interview, I would
argue it's also excellent advice on how to become a better software engineer.

~~~
vladimirralev
I think may be you missed the important point in the article. Everybody these
days knows algorithms and data structures. It's much more about being fast at
arbitrary problem solving on the spot and attitude.

~~~
opinali
+1000 to this. I relate you comment to Neil deGrasse Tyson's quote: "There are
people who say “I'll never need this math -- these trig identities from 10th
grade or 11th grade.” Or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch:
whether or not you ever use the math that you learned in school, the act of
having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist
before, and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver."

~~~
kamaal
I have an even better of 'wiring' your brain. Work on projects, that forces
your brain to wire and you also get work done along the way.

------
ekm2
"The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q.
It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly."

I do not understand.

~~~
gwern
'Restriction of range'. When you look at the general population, from janitor
to tenured professor, one of the single best predictors of job performance is
IQ; but when you look at, say, 'MIT physicist grad students', well, they're
_all_ very smart, so when you look at the minor differences in intelligence
between them, the scores barely correlate with their future success _even
though_ no one becomes a MIT grad student in physics without being
terrifyingly smart. Because they have been selected on that trait already.
Hence the apparent paradox.

(No surprise Friedman doesn't understand this; the NYT article on the Google
findings did not explain this.)

~~~
jfb
The limits of Friedman's understanding should come as a surprise to no man.

~~~
gwern
I dislike Friedman a fair bit, but I can't hold this one against him:
restriction of range is a subtlety that pretty much no one understands in
interpreting correlations, and I only know about it myself because I happened
to read a paper torpedoing a previous famous paper as having fallen prey to
restriction of range (and then did some more reading on range restriction).

------
gesman
100% BS.

The best way to get job at GOOG is to get job at MSFT, AMZN or Apple, pimp
your Linkedin and Dice profile, get contacted by GOOG recruiter and then get
auto-hired.

Although, as Ballmer is gone - MSFT becomes sexier and smarter bet for new
hires than overbloated GOOG. AMZN seems to get obsessed with it's Silk browser
project and is desperate to hire anyone who is desperate to get hired.

PS: Here's my recent reply to AMZN recruiter pimping Silk browser project:

======================= Hi ____,

Thank you for your email. I think I am a perfect fit for this position:

>>You should have an intimate understanding of how the web works from the
underlying infrastructure of the Internet, to web servers, to browsers.
[http://i.imgur.com/C6nE2.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/C6nE2.jpg)

>>You like thinking “outside the box”, are not afraid of ambiguity,
[http://i.imgur.com/1dQII.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/1dQII.jpg)

>>get excited about difficult distributed systems challenges,
[http://i.imgur.com/Kh7bX.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Kh7bX.jpg)

>>and are a motivated self-starter.
[http://i.imgur.com/B6vRRMs.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/B6vRRMs.jpg)

>>You are a strong team player
[http://i.imgur.com/k9NTgH0.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/k9NTgH0.jpg)

>> and thrive in a startup-like environment where flexibility is essential
[http://i.imgur.com/3p7rF.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/3p7rF.jpg)

>> and delivering rock solid, customer focused solutions is paramount.
[http://i.imgur.com/kuDJTmx.gif](http://i.imgur.com/kuDJTmx.gif)

>> "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
determine whether or not they are genuine"
[http://i.imgur.com/xxotrDe.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/xxotrDe.jpg)

~~~
enneff
> get auto-hired

There's no such thing. Before you are offered a job at Google you have to go
through the interview process and the interviewer's feedback is assessed by a
hiring committee.

------
fiatmoney
"For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive
ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process
on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information."

The cognitive dissonance required to say "general cognitive ability... is not
IQ" is astounding.

IQ testing bad! Hiring smart people good! Does not compute!

~~~
kazagistar
He specifically said that he defined general cognitive ability as the ability
to learn, process on the fly, and pull together disparate information. Which
is indeed distinct from IQ.

Intelligence varies, and people differ in which tasks they are good at. They
very well might not think that IQ is a good predictor that they are looking
for.

~~~
queensnake
> ... the ability to learn, process on the fly, and pull together disparate
> information. Which is indeed distinct from IQ.

Do you have cites for that?

~~~
jmromer
To be fair, "ability to learn, process on the fly, and pull together disparate
information" is indeed "indeed distinct from IQ", but only in the pedantic
sense that it'd be more accurate to say such capacities refer to g.

But then...IQ is indeed a reliable, verifiable, and efficient indicator of g,
so...indeed.

------
dinkumthinkum
This is not ad hominem but I should note that anyone reading this article
should take care more that it is written by Thomas Friedman and maybe one
should take care before wasting too much time reading it.

------
bitcuration
Generally, a technical interview is meant for you to beat their best technical
person in the team, either for the knowledge of cleverness, so everyone adore
you in order to pass the interview.

Yet it is well known that most technically talented people have a common OCD,
especially of those with strong ego, is to compete to be who the smartest is,
which is not a bad thing, but some went extreme and they do it at all cost.
Evidently as often observed, in office the loudest person is perceived the
smartest be the mass. Can google avoid that?

In a few hours interview, psychological problems like these are difficult to
detect and rule out. If google is serious about their claim that they don't
care about expertise but .... They should send candidates to psychiatrist and
filter first.

Personally I think this NY times google HR is BS marketing. There is better
way to recruit top talent, and this is not it.

------
fecak
One potential issue is that it appears the coding is the only criterion listed
that can be fairly assessed before meeting someone and having a dialogue or
giving some test. If they truly don't care about your past traditional
leadership, grades, and are most concerned with being good on the fly, what
criteria are used to make a decision on bringing someone in for an interview?
One's list of accomplishments, transcripts, and past job titles won't
typically provide the answers. If these are the hiring criteria that is one
thing, but it's a bit of a reach to say that those are the interview selection
criteria. I feel that is a key factor here (perspective - I'm a recruiter of
developers).

~~~
waterlesscloud
I suspect this article is what they say they do as opposed to what they
actually do.

They may even say these things internally as part of the "official" plan, but
as you point out, there's reason to be skeptical it's how they actually
operate in practice.

~~~
fecak
You can hire on these things once in the interview process, and I think most
companies probably like to think they do the same thing. But they aren't
interviewing everyone we can assume. So how do you pick people for interviews?
This is where all the GPA and good schools stuff comes in usually, or
something unique about the candidate. Perhaps certain experience that serves
as an indicator that the person will have the required attributes.

I'd have been more interested in hearing how they select for interviews and
not how they hire. If someone from an average school with a below average GPA,
he/she could impress and get hired on these attributes (which the candidate
certainly can possess), but the real trick for these candidate types is
getting in the door.

------
gschorno
My experience with interviewing is that what I think of as level two or three
problems are presented, where you have to solve some recursive problem and
give the O() notation for the implementation. This happens in each of the
multiple interviews over the three to six hour interview session. If you're
not extremely good at this you are going to be false negatived tf out of there
right quick.

Top level problems are where the solution involves days, weeks or months of
study and contemplation where the solution possibly involves a large amount of
refactoring of existing code. Architectural level stuff. There is no way to
test for this in an hour long interview.

When I mention refactoring, I often get a blank stare from the interviewer. I
had a coworker recently who insisted on calling it "refuctoring", having no
concept of it or any desire to investigate.

------
ansimionescu
Shameless plug warning. I'm preparing for my Google interview and I've
collected some resources for a fairly quick but thorough preparation for the
interview (well, except for CLRS, I just like it).

[https://github.com/andreis/interview](https://github.com/andreis/interview)

------
sbuccini
As a current student, I don't buy what they're saying one bit. If this is the
case, why do they ask for your GPA when you apply online for a programming
role? More anecdotally, everyone I know who made it to the interview process
had a stellar GPA. Most were members of the CS honor society on campus.

I don't have any hard proof, but it's clear to me that at least for new hires,
GPA is a big requirement for Google.

~~~
datphp
Well, GPA shouldn't be tricky at all if you have what it takes to work at
Google.

This means, unless you were fed up with the educational system like I was and
you purposely did a mediocre performance, you probably aced them.

------
devanti
too bad their hiring practices are flawed

------
allochthon
I like Friedman's summary. If it is accurate, Google has a pretty forward-
looking hiring philosophy; definitely better than the view espoused by Marissa
Mayer sometime back about only hiring good students (or something along these
lines). Working there sounds like it could be quite nice. It's too bad about
the stacked ranking, which is a huge liability for a company in my view.

~~~
skj
Unlike some stack ranking horror stories I've heard, at Google the engineers
are stack-ranked against everyone else at the same tech level. That's
thousands of people. If you're in the bottom 10% of thousands of people, then
"needs improvement" is probably a pretty accurate assessment.

To be let go you have to do quite poorly, by the way. Once you get in the door
it would be possible to coast, assuming you did have some productivity. You
just won't get the fun stuff.

------
tokenadult
I had just submitted the OLD link summarizing last summer's interview to HN
today (to answer a question that came up overnight about Google's hiring
practices), and I see that the author here was just as struck by the statement
from last summer, "G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test
scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything." In more
complete context, from last summer's interview by another New York Times
writer,[1] that statement was "One of the things we’ve seen from all our data
crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test
scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college
grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask
everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore,
unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict
anything." So, yes, if you have little work experience and were in full-time
school recently, Google will ask you about your G.P.A. But if you have
substantial industry experience, Google will ask you about that, or at least
such is the claim here about _current_ Google practice.

Some comments posted before this comment mentioned the confusing way that
"general cognitive ability" is said not to be the same thing as IQ. No
psychologist, and especially no psychologist specializing in industrial and
organizational psychology, would speak that way. The universal statement in
that branch of psychology is that IQ scores are a very good indicator of
"general cognitive ability" indeed, the least expensive and most efficient
indicator possible for most hiring situations. I think the Google executive
interviewed in today's article and in last summer's article is just trying to
be legally correct while eating his cake and having it. In the United States,
there are tricky legal issues surrounding using IQ tests as a hiring criterion
that grow out of the Griggs v. Duke Power case decision by the United States
Supreme Court.[2] IQ tests are disfavored as a hiring criterion by that
decisions (but the little known fact is that so are educational credentials
disfavored as a hiring criterion[3] by the same case), so companies tend to
try to use more expensive, less reliable proxies of IQ tests to get the
results that IQ tests would give them more reliably and less expensively.

[1] "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal" 19 June 2013 by
Adam Bryant

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-
hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-
data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html)

[2] [http://www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-
co](http://www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-co)

[3]
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/iq_and_hiring_d....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/iq_and_hiring_d.html)

~~~
thewarrior
Since companies increasingly look for it , is there any way to improve
"general cognitive ability" ?

~~~
spindritf
Hard to say, obviously. Not unlikely though the answer is no. See for
education for example.

 _Recent reports suggest a causal relationship between education and IQ, which
has implications for cognitive development and aging—education may improve
cognitive reserve. In two longitudinal cohorts, we tested the association
between education and lifetime cognitive change. We then tested whether
education is linked to improved scores on processing-speed variables such as
reaction time, which are associated with both IQ and longevity. Controlling
for childhood IQ score, we found that education was positively associated with
IQ at ages 79 (Sample 1) and 70 (Sample 2), and more strongly for participants
with lower initial IQ scores. Education, however, showed no significant
association with processing speed, measured at ages 83 and 70. Increased
education may enhance important later life cognitive capacities, but does not
appear to improve more fundamental aspects of cognitive processing._ [1]

What you can improve is your test scores. Which is just as good for getting
hired. They won't know the difference.

[1]
[http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2012-34906-001/](http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2012-34906-001/)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
How about: Education makes you better at intelligence tests. I took the GRE
(Graduate Record Exam) before going to Stanford. I got 99%, even though the
test covered Engineering areas I had never studied. I did that by noticing, in
the areas I did know, that the questions were all about fundamental
principles. I could guess at the answers then for fluid mechanics, deformable
bodies etc, and apparently got them all right. Am I intelligent? Sure, but not
THAT intelligent.

~~~
spindritf
_Education makes you better at intelligence tests._

Or even taking tests in general. Yes, that's what I meant.

------
codeonfire
One thing Google will never do is explain how they measure employee
productivity. We hear lots about their discoveries about predictors, but for
all we know this is coming from a google VP with no tech background that
counts lines of code as a measure of productivity.

------
sidcool
Here's the thing, I believe I have all those qualities. What I lack is the
courage to apply. I am a Google fanboy, to be honest, and working there is a
dream for me. I also know that i am not the only one.

~~~
wilykat
Many people panic on their first interview and fail, and if you show any
potential they'll let you interview again. I bombed my first one and they told
me that I'd be eligible to interview again in 18 months and I should call them
then, and they actually called me in 12 months and set up another interview.

Don't worry about the courage, just apply. If you fail... well, many many
people (and many many Googlers) also failed their first Google interview, it's
not much of a reflection on you.

------
phazmatis
Does google pay significantly more than, say, any old rails job? Perks don't
really impress me. 20% time sounds interesting, but I hear it's gone. Why
would I want to deal with the interview process?

~~~
amaks
[http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/google-salary-
SRCH_KE0,6.h...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/google-salary-
SRCH_KE0,6.htm)

~~~
phazmatis
Thanks. I think that speaks for itself.

------
michaelochurch
Despite all the bashing of Google's hiring process, I think Google's hiring
process is very good. My experience was completely positive.

 _Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring,
and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict
anything.”_

No, that's not what Google is able to determine. The blanket claim is too
broad. Predict _anything_? I don't think GPAs are worthless, but that's
another discussion for another time. Regardless of whether they're useful, the
only thing Google has is its own performance ("perf") data which represents
political factors more than anything else.

If you find a zero correlation in junk data, you know... absolutely nothing
more than you did beforehand. That's the thing about junk data. You can't
trust it, so you can't use it to infer anything.

------
BrainInAJar
why not cut out the middle man and just apply straight to the NSA?

~~~
stass
Google by itself is much worse than NSA. At least, NSA does not screw up the
industry and does not try to destroy local economies. I'm surprised there's
not a lot of public backslash against Google and their employees.

