On the other hand, when someone expresses an opinion like this, you never know if they were contacted at some point by a Google recruiter and ended up with a case of sour grapes.
I had a phone conversation with a hiring manager once, and obviously I was not the right type or class or caste or something, but it wasn't a technical screen at all, so it's a mystery to me forever what exactly determined the "in group" as you put it.
As such, I know I'm biased towards them, but I can't really assess the overall company.
However, as a University lecturer I know a lot of people Google have employed. In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught, and accepted some idiots who know how to speak well.
While they have employed some good people, I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else, rather than the best programmers/researchers/AI/whatever.
Maybe the ability to get along with people is more important than some people are willing to admit?
I’ve met plenty of “smart people” who couldn’t get things done to save their lives partially because they couldn’t communicate well or play well with others.
Google don't want knowledge of algorithms, Google want fluency in creating algorithms. As a lecturer you likely missed a lot of gems since college testing doesn't test peoples ability to create algorithms and instead mostly test their ability to apply known algorithms. A lot of people who are great at applying known algorithms actually suck at algorithms in practice.
> In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught, and accepted some idiots who know how to speak well.
This has been a source of angst for friends of mine at google for over 15 years, which is almost 3/4 of google’s existence. The hiring process is just random.
Part of it is due to measures put in to avoid certain unconscious biases (hire your friends, regardless of how good they are; hire only people like yourself, etc). So I have some sympathy.
> In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught
There's no question that Google is happy to have false-negatives in interviews.
> I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else
why would they do this? And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? (this is also an amusing comment because the only group I find more critical of Google than HN is Googlers)
> And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful?
When a company has a lot of money coming in, they can be successful despite decision X, rather than because of decision X.
Microsoft can interview people asking about filling airliners with golf balls. Valve can just not bother with Half-Life 3. Google can have zero support and a self-driving car division that keeps avoiding chances to release anything.
That the companies are successful doesn't mean all their actions are smart - sometimes it's that their successes are big enough the occasional bad decision doesn't hurt them.
> And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful?
They have almost complete monopoly on online search, web ads, online video, on phone OS, on browsers. And they are not afraid to abuse those to get more, and are getting away with this.
You don't need to do anything right when you rent-seek most of the online world.
In real estate, the value of a property is often tied to the value of the rental income it could bring in, even if it's never been offered for rent.
'Rent seeking' doesn't refer to the same kind of 'rent', of course, but I think the analogy holds up pretty well. All Google has to do is turn a few screws, and the rest of us will have no choice but to sing whatever tune they call.
I think it's very destructive of meaningful discussion to redefine a term of jargon in order to exploit the stigma of the original definition while talking about something else.
Then this would imply that selecting for people who want to work at Google, instead of the "best candidate" is a valid strategy because it leads to better outcomes.
Again I think this whole line of thinking is nonsense, but even if you take it at face value, it still doesn't make sense.
Of course. I'm well aware that I'm considered mentally defective (or maybe just garden variety low IQ) by the hiring committee. That doesn't really change my observation here.
You pop up in every post about Google or Facebook and make the conversation about yourself, wallowing in self pity because you didn't land a job there straight out of college. This might sound harsh, but you need to get over it and move on.
^^ what this guy said. You named yourself lowiqengineer because your SAT score was “only” 2200. That’s in the 98th percentile —- if it were an IQ test, it would get you into Mensa, the organization for high IQ people!
You talk as if people from FANG (your invented acronym to exclude Amazon) look down on all others, but it seems that you are the one looking down on all others, everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to get into G/FB straight out of college while also building up not just 1, but 2 or 300k or net worth.
These companies you aspire to do behavioral interviews, and I’m guessing you’re failing them.
Take a step back. You won’t “fail” life because you “only” got a job at one FAANG and not another, or because your net worth is only 100k straight out of college....even the sentence I just wrote sounds completely ridiculous.
Your problems are stemming from how you view yourself and the world, which is full of false assumptions. A lot of smart people on HN have told you this —- you should listen to them.
> These companies you aspire to do behavioral interviews, and I’m guessing you’re failing them.
Don't know why people say this. I'm usually pretty good at behavioral interviews. The problem is the algorithmic interviews (again, this is where my IQ fixation comes from).
IDK man, compared to most everyone else I seem to have failed life at this point given that I have zero accomplishments and little financial security.
> compared to most everyone else I seem to have failed life
Please realize how offensive and insulting this is.
You were hired by one of the most successful tech companies, which most people could never aspire to. You claim that Amazon pays you 80% of what (you assume) Facebook or Google would pay you, which puts you financially ahead of the vast majority of people. By calling yourself a failure, you’re calling nearly everyone on Earth an even bigger failure, which is offensive and makes you look extremely entitled and detached from reality.
> Don’t know why people say this.
It’s because you come off in your posts as entitled, obsessive, elitist, insensitive, and bitter. These are the only sideS of yourself that you convey here, so that’s why people assume you’re failing your behavioral interviews.
Sorry again if I’m being harsh, but you’ve been posting the same stuff here for months, and every discussion gets derailed by people consoling you or advising you, which you invariably reject. Let’s stop going in circles.
Serious question: How do you know you're good at behavioral interviews? Have you ever seen the feedback written on a behavioral interview? The companies you're describing don't usually give out feedback to applicants, so you can't know, right?
It sounds to me like you have anxiety. I'm saying this because I have anxiety, so I know what it's like. One hallmark of anxiety disorders is that you think things are true about the world, even though you don't actually have evidence this is the case. Or, you fixate on some pieces of information while ignoring evidence to the contrary, which again is irrational thinking. Or you hold assumptions about how the world works that aren't proven. You should look into cognitive behavioral therapy as a potential solution.
You say "compared to everyone else". But, you have to acknowledge that the net worth and income numbers you named put you into the 99th percentile, right? So, you actually mean "compared to a very small subset of people I have failed", right? And this is just a completely irrational argument. I mean according to this vein of thinking, then since I don't have as much money as Jeff Bezos, I've failed. And the implication then is the whole world has failed. Right?
I've always passed interviews that focused on behavioral aspects, I've frequently struggled in algorithm focused loops (bombed 2/4 in my Google onsite because, again, I'm intellectually inferior). Besides, until recently G didn't include any behavioral loops.
> "compared to a very small subset of people I have failed"
Compared to nearly everyone at elite universities I have absolutely failed. I'm sure some of them will become the Jeff Bezos of 2050 as well - it's irrelevant that it's still a small number. I don't want to be compared against somebody that works at Cisco or IBM for instance for the work and mental anguish I've put in.
Even here you have many false assumptions though. For instance, the Harvard median new grad salary is 69k [1]. So you’re wrong in your assertion that compared to nearly everyone at elite universities you have failed. By your own definition of success, compared to most (by definition of median) people at elite universities, you have succeeded, and it’s they who have failed.
You also have an implicit assumption that people who work at Cisco or IBM haven’t put in work or mental anguish, and you’re wrong. I know many people who worked and studied hard to get jobs at these places.
You’re artificially restricting the set of successful outcomes so that you can say you’ve failed because you don’t fall into that arbitrary set. Not to mention that your entire definition of success as defined by things like money and perks is wrong.
The perspective is inverted. From the perspective of a Harvard/Stanford/CMU/MIT undergrad working at Amazon is failing, which is nothing to say of IBM or Cisco (this is what I've understood after talking to several). I'd wager that the median new grad TC for Harvard CS students is at least twice that.
I was about to disagree with what seems like a personal attack but then without looking at the posting history of the poster you replied to and just looking at the username. I have to agree.
On another note, I’m in my mid 40’s spent all of my time bouncing between yet another CRUD job most of my career (not complaining, it’s paid for a decent lifestyle in my relatively low cost of living area) and I’m always encouraging fresh CS grads to go for broke and take the r/cscareerquestions route of “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG”, knowing they will make more fresh out of college than I did until a few months ago.
I had a phone conversation with a hiring manager once, and obviously I was not the right type or class or caste or something, but it wasn't a technical screen at all, so it's a mystery to me forever what exactly determined the "in group" as you put it.
As such, I know I'm biased towards them, but I can't really assess the overall company.