Why I Don't Talk to Google Recruiters - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2017/02/21/say-no-to-google-recruiters.html <comment><USER3> Unlike most of HN (it seems), I like hearing from recruiters, because despite the very low signal-to-noise ratio, there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job". It's zero cost to me to politely reply to a recruiter and ask for more info, and I try to at least respond to everyone. What I've found is that they must have a lot of candidates they're juggling because falling out of the funnel is surprisingly easy!

It's amazing how often "Hey, thanks for reaching out, I'm interested. Can you tell me more about the role?" results in the conversation ending right away. Probably over 50% recruiters that contact me do not reply back after that very polite and neutral response.

Many who do keep the conversation going have not read my profile or resume carefully, so I'll give them a summary of the types of work I'm actually interested in, which is never what they contact me for, and politely decline to move forward with the (usually way too junior) role they are looking to fill. That will almost always end the engagement.

Sure, it's a lot of noise, but filtering is very cheap: the time it takes to reply back. My actual success rate with recruiters probably pretty average. Of the eight or so jobs I've had in my ~20 year career, about three were obtained through recruiters, two times through in-house staff, once through an external recruiter.

<comment><USER4> I take it one step further: the email address on my resume is a black hole. Its only purpose is to feed an autoresponder who kicks back a warm, generic, email thanking the recruiter for their time, acknowledging they have a difficult job, and lays out my requirements for any position: what I am and am not interested in doing, my salary/hourly/per-project requirements, my location requirements (100% remote), etc. At the bottom, there's _another_ email alias along the lines of 'firstname.lastname@example.com' that goes straight to me. I ask the recruiters to not email that address unless they've read the whole thing, and their position matches my requirements. I get 200+ emails to the catch-all autoresponder a month, and maybe 1 (qualified!) reply to the 'its really me' alias every six months. About once a month, I get an email to the 'its really me' alias from a recruiter expressing joy, amusement, and thanks for spelling out what I'm looking for so early in the process. All in all, it's a far more pleasant way to go about passively searching for The Next Big Role(tm).

<comment><USER5> I think you're right to thank them for their difficult job. I seriously got bored just reading the description of your setup. What percent get through to the second email? Is it like 10%? 50%?

<comment><USER6> They said 200 emails/month to the general and one every six months to the second email, so that's well under 1%

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don 't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them._

Let's presume this is out of preference and not ability. It's a pretty basic concept. If your _preference_ stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn't seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts.

Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that. I'd rather hire someone who knows exactly why it's O(n^2) and why adding to the end of an array that doubles when it expands is O(n) amortized. Why? Because a different but analogous situation might well come up in a programming job, and the person who likes to think about such things is more likely to spot the potential problem and avoid it altogether! The fact that the op would actually feature the above sentences as a large text excerpt sets off the "Dunning- Kruger" alarm for me.

That said, the op still has a good point. There is considerable organizational disconnect being displayed here. Those big companies would do well to have developers or a puzzle website do the initial filtering, rather than waste people's time by alternatively telling them they're supposedly wonderful, then supposedly horrible.

<comment><USER8> Conjecture: the majority (by far, probably on the order of 75%-80% or more) of programming and engineering problems to be solved in a typical company or typical application will not see significant differences in performance by selecting a naive implementation.

For example, in your string concatenation example, the naive solution is good enough _except_ in situations where large numbers of strings are to be concatenated in a given run, or the strings are huge, etc., _relative to the compute environment._ Does it really matter if one uses an O(n^2) solution when a few dozen (or even a few hundred) such operations are applied on "small enough" strings in a given execution on modern computer hardware? No, it just doesn't.

Select candidates who are keenly interested in and knowledgeable about algorithms for positions where it's important (i.e. part of the regular course of development), not because of that slight chance there is one edge case where one adjustment to a more efficient algorithm might possibly be useful at some indeterminate point in the future.

<comment><USER9> Sure. But at the scale of e.g. Google, Amazon, etc. how often do you think they are performing these lower level computations?

From my experience: very frequently.

So it's useful at these corporations for all engineers to have this understanding, I think.

<comment><USER10> From my admittedly limited experience at Google, given the size of the input data even a "small" project deals with those little algorithmic inefficiencies really add up quickly. You have to do a lot of optimizing and using clever data structures to make something work at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring the engineers I want to work with. It's not a matter of whether I could pass that interview; it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to get code reviews from people who can pass that interview. Whether I want to rely on the code of people who can pass the interview not to break down in interesting and novel ways.

I have seen the worst apps written by "Very Smart People" who obviously had never built an Android application before. It doesn't matter how smart you are, the first time you do something it _will_ suck. I have had catastrophic failures caused by premature optimization, because locking a tool into a fancy algorithm before you know where the actual bottleneck is is a recipe for disaster. I have seen so many problems caused because people couldn't take feedback or didn't ask for help, because they were so wrapped up in being The Kind Of Person Who Knows The Answers.

Frankly, passing algorithm questions is a great way to signal that I probably don't want to have to deal with your code.

Personally, I love working with people coming out of the good agencies because building 15 or 30 applications from scratch in an environment with strong mentorship and rapid feedback is, in my experience, more likely to produce a good programmer than all the smarts in the world.

<comment><USER12> > The reason I won't work at Google is because Google is incapable of hiring > the engineers I want to work with

That's a very bold (even arrogant, sorry) statement about 57,000+ (googled it) employees.

So 57,000 are worse devs then you ? This is what i hear from your statement, correct me if I am wrong ..

Many extremely talented people want to work for Google. They will take the tests, even if they don't agree with the hiring system at all .

Maybe they want to work at Google despite its incapability (according to you) in the hiring and testing process.

> it is whether I want to work with the code of people who can pass that > interview

Have you found any correlation between poor code and being able to pass Google's interview ?

(edit: new lines)

<comment><USER13> Since Google is an advertising company that even hires their own chefs, I would not expect 100% of their employees to be software developers.

It's more on the order of 20k developers, not 57k.

[https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does- Googl...](https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Google-have)

>Have you found any correlation between poor code and being able to pass Google's interview ?

 _cough_ _cough_ Angular 2

<comment><USER14> Back in the day I worked for a company that had in a single division more engineers that google has employees :-)

<comment><USER15> Who? IBM?

<comment><USER14> BT Systems Engineering division effectively the heir to Tommy Flowers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Its the London Cabbie(1) method. They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people (for the value of smart that fits their biases).

They just need as many warm bodies as possible to ram through their test so that a few trickle out the bottom of the funnel to keep the ranks from shrinking. If too many started getting hired, they'd add competitive basket weaving to the skillset if that's what it took to balance it.

(1)[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/special- features/201...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/special- features/2014/08/140808-london-cabbies-knowledge-cabs-hansom-uber-hippocampus- livery/)

<comment><USER3> > They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for > smart people

I've found this to be decidedly not true, from many recruiter contacts. They have a role in mind they're trying to fill and if you point out that it's far more junior than what you're looking for, the conversation's over.

Think about how must companies hire. The hiring manager fights internally and finally gets a req for a very specific role. They have to fill that role. Having a generally smart person would be great but they have this immediate need and they can only hire one person. And once that req is filled, no more hiring until you get another req.

I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this!

<comment><USER17> > I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and > then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can > add the most value. Nobody does this!

I don't know about letting people "define their own role", but a lot of the biggest companies are constantly hiring without a specific role in mind. If you've got thousands of employees then your best strategy is just hire the smartest people you can find, and figure out how to use them effectively - <USER2> have enough roles available that you'll find something for anyone to do, and while not every role you need filled is someone's dream job, a combination of internal mobility between teams and great benefits and pay will attract a lot of good candidates.

<comment><USER18> The problem, from my perspective, is that I (as a candidate) have certain things I want to work on. You might have something I _can_ do, but is it something I _want_ to do? I don't want to be hired into a general pool; I want to be hired for one of the specialties I am interested in.

<comment><USER19> The problem is that what interests you now may not be economically valuable next year. They want you there past one project, because the future is too murky to guarantee your current role will continue to be needed.

Google et. al. are hiring generalists because they want people of a mindset such that when the entire special-purpose they hired them for dissolves, they're willing and eager to ramp up on a new project and new challenges instead of saying "Well, the foo project is closing down and foo's pretty much what I wanted to do, so I guess I'm going to quit (and take all the knowledge and skills Google spent time and money to train me up on with me)."

<comment><USER18> You are taking a much too narrow view of "specialization". If project foo is really the only project at Google that uses the skills I like and know best, I am probably not going to apply there.

I get that there are people who don't care (much) what kind of code they are working on. If those are the people Google exclusively wants, that's fine. I just won't have a place there. I do _not_ think this is a generally-advisable strategy, though, as the GGP I was responding to indicated. In fact, I'd argue that well-crafted teams of specialists are superior to, but harder to staff than, teams of generalists.

<comment><USER20> The funny part is that for all the work Google has done building a hiring process that searches for talented generalists, the actual work they have to offer is really boringly specialized. Most of what's going on in there is just stacks upon stacks of web-service middleware, endlessly slinging RPCs back and forth at each other. If that's your bag, then yay, Google is a great place to work! - but for me it was really discouraging to realize, four months in, that no more than ten per cent of Google was doing anything I was ever likely to care about. I didn't last long, and wouldn't go back (not that they'd be likely to want me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is no standard way to interview a software engineer. Whenever one of these threads come up we see multiple posters explaining their process, and while each process has it's upsides and downsides, no two are exactly the same.

For a company the size of Google, with the amount of applicants they receive, I would assume that an interview standard is absolutely necessary. It's not perfect, but for 95% of developers out there you know EXACTLY what you're going to get when you interview Google. I think there is something to be said about that. Google recruiters tell you what the interview will be like, they give you study materials, and are pretty gracious with scheduling. If you don't like the process, that's fine, but I think Google in particular has done a good job of standardizing their process. It may not work for individual cases, but I would assume it works well for the company.

<comment><USER22> the problem with the way Google interviews is that, despite it being heavily standardized, it is not sensitive to non-algorithmic skills and talents that interviewees have. It will _only_ pass candidates who are unusually good at algorithm puzzles, on whiteboards, under time pressure.

<comment><USER23> > it is not sensitive to non-algorithmic skills and talents that interviewees > have.

I work at Google and do interviews (though I don't enjoy them). We do ask questions around domain expertise, software design, etc. It's not all just coding and algorithms.

A good question:

1\. Has a low enough floor that a poor candidate can still make _some_ progress and not feel like they are doing poorly and get stressed out.

2\. Has a high enough ceiling that a strong candidate doesn't blow through it in five minutes.

3\. Has a smooth ramp between those points.

4\. Doesn't rely on too much domain-specific knowledge so that a candidate who happens to have a random gap in their background that leaves them totally hosed.

5\. Is concrete enough that the interviewer can capture that feedback in a way that the hiring committee can easily understand.

6\. Isn't well-known outside of Google as stock interview question so that candidates can game us by just learning the answer.

7\. Isn't asked by any of the other interviewers the candidates sees.

8\. Can be explained and worked through in about twenty minutes.

In case it isn't obvious, it is _really really hard_ to find good questions that pass that gauntlet. Questions do tend to skew towards smaller-scale algorithm coding questions because I think those tend to survive that gauntlet better than most other questions.

        > unusually good at algorithm puzzles

Interviewers are trained to not ask "puzzle" or "trick" questions. Not only are trick questions a shitty experience for the candidate, they are a shitty experience for the interviewer too. My job in an interview is to get as much data as I can about a candidate in order to provide information to the hiring committee. If I ask you a trick question, I get about one bit—in the binary sense—of data from you: did you find the trick or not?

I don't think you have to be _unusually_ good at algorithms. I basically read some Wikipedia articles and spent a few hours in the hotel cramming Algorithms in a Nutshell, and I managed to squeak through.

That time was incredibly well-spent. Since then, I have relied on that algorithm knowledge way more than I expected too, and have since spent more time learning algorithms and data structures because I can clearly see it's made me a better programmer.

        > on whiteboards,

That part is hard. We allow candidates to use a laptop too, if they prefer, or both. My experience is that candidates who use the whiteboard, at least for the earlier "design" parts of the question tend to do better than the ones that go straight to typing.

We need to learn how you think, and putting a screen in front of people tends to make them clam up. If all I see is the code you write and you don't explain your thinking behind it, I don't get much data.

        > under time pressure.

That part is really hard too. The reality is that interviewers _and candidates_ have a limited amount of time they can put into this process. Keep in mind that most candidates are currently employed and don't want their job to know they are interviewing. Many of them travel to interview. There are only so many hours.

<comment><USER24> > I don't think you have to be unusually good at algorithms. I basically read > some Wikipedia articles and spent a few hours in the hotel cramming > Algorithms in a Nutshell, and I managed to squeak through.

Either a lie or you are unusually good at algorithms. People work > 50 hours on Leetcode, CTCI, etc. to try and get a job at Big 4. A couple of hours just reading Wikipedia articles isn't even close to the amount of effort people put into 'gaming' the system these days.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, I should have been less flippant here.

That was the only prep I did _for the interview_. I was a senior software engineer at EA at the time, with about a decade of professional software experience.

I don't have much of an academic background, but I had written and shipped quite a lot of code by that point in time.

The cramming did help—several of the algorithms I read about were either new to me or I hadn't seen in ages—and some of them did come up on the interview. (I've also used almost everyone of them at my work at Google since, strangely enough.)

My point was just, if you are already a good enough engineer to be successful at Google but don't "interview well" because of whiteboard experience or algorithms it's pretty easy to shore up those two things. You don't need to spend a decade at a monastery meditating on Knuth.

If you're a decent coder, you've already done way harder things. Breaking down a big messy problem into pieces you can code and test is _hard_. Shipping applications is hard. Breadth-first search is not hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been working as a software engineer for quite a few years now and I'm sure I'm a much better software engineer now then when I graduated. I now have years of solving varying real life problems with real-life constraints (budgets, deadlines, ...) using a big amount of different technologies, working with a lot of different people, ...

However, I'm also pretty sure I'd have a better chance on the Google interview right after graduation then now, when all the theoretical stuff was fresh in my brain. So I'd have more chance while being a (in my opinion) less useful engineer.

<comment><USER17> > However, I'm also pretty sure I'd have more chance on the Google interview > right after graduation then now, when all the theoretical stuff was fresh in > my brain. So I'd have more chance while being a (in my opinion) less useful > engineer.

The thing to understand is that Google is more interested in not hiring potential bad hires than in hiring every good hire. Part of the reason the interview process works the way it does is to filter for people willing to put in some effort. If you want a job at Google, it's not a big deal to spend 3-5 hours a week for a few months getting sharp on the basics. If you're not willing to do that, then that's a good sign that you're not really invested, and may not be the best hire.

Google will totally lose some good hires this way of course. But their philosophy is explicitly that it's better to lose a good hire than make a bad hire. I think they're probably right.

<comment><USER26> >Part of the reason the interview process works the way it does is to filter for people willing to put in some effort

That's the sales pitch, but it's actually just because there is no other interview approach that works at scale for the volume of candidates they get. If they didn't have a stack of 100,000 resumes, they would throw this ridiculous process out the window in a heartbeat and actually interview people for the position.

<comment><USER17> > If they didn't have a stack of 100,000 resumes, they would throw this > ridiculous process out the window in a heartbeat and actually interview > people for the position.

Absolutely.

If they had far fewer resumes then they'd be much less willing to pass on potentially good hires, and more willing to risk bad hires. You make it sound like we're disagreeing, but this is 100% consistent with what I said.

<comment><USER27> You're not saying the same thing at all. Your statement assumes the process eliminates bad hires, while GP's point is clearly that it doesn't.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either side, but you clearly aren't in agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Similar story: a few years back I was interested in applying to TopTal for side work. As a senior engineer working with well known companies, I thought the acceptance process wouldn't be as bad as claimed on their homepage.

Passed the first personality interview. The second was a coding challenge. I said to the interviewer several times I have not studied algorithms, and that if the coding challenge involves them, I would prefer to drop out and not waste time for anyone involved. I was very happy to say that multiple times - I know what I don't know. The interviewer goaded me into taking the challenge anyway, saying I'll "definitely be fine and pass."

The next day I attend the timed coding challenge. Three algorithm puzzles that are in no way insignificant. I had Google at my disposal and _still_ could not solve a single problem - although I came close on one involving permutations of chess pieces.

Unreal. At least Yegor had the good fortune of not being directly lied to by the recruiters!

</comment><comment><USER29> > There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't > know those answers and will never be interested in learning them.

Interview process: complete success.

<comment><USER30> I'd be interested in hearing from people who work at Google, and get to figure out a cool algorithm for solving an interesting puzzle-problem more an about once a year. I bet there aren't very many.

In my experience, the stuff you do in this kind of interview has very little relation with the stuff you do in the actual job. (I wish it did! I love those algorithmic puzzles.)

<comment><USER29> I don't know about the average but at Google I probably write a new call to std::set::find twice an hour, and it's important to know that std::set is a red-black tree, and how std::set::find is implemented and how much that costs and so forth. Fluency with data structures and algorithms is not some kind of brain candy. It's absolutely necessary to get the job done.

<comment><USER31> I've been a developer for 30 years, helped start a half dozen companies. Since college I've never written a single tree traversing algorithm, and would need to Google red-black tree to know what it is.

There is a whole world of development that is OS specific, UI specific, shipping commercial applications. Shipping quickly is always a higher priority than performance, because adequate performance is usually trivial to implement with hash tables/arrays/linked lists.

<comment><USER32> I'm not entirely sure _adequate performance_ is good enough when you work at the scale of Google...

<comment><USER33> The performance bottleneck is not always where you think it is.

<comment><USER34> That's why Google measures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > I learned my lesson two years ago, when Amazon tried to recruit me. I got an > email from the company that said they were so impressed by my profile and > couldn't wait to start working with me. They needed me, nobody else. I was > naive, and the message did flatter me.

I learned mine with AWS as well:

Scheduled call. They forgot to call. Waited like an idiot for an hour. Ok fine big company yadda, yadda.

Had the phone interview. Liked me, called me onsite.

Before coming onsite was sent the Leaderhips Princples and told to learn and will be quizzed on them basically. Had 2 offers in hand already and was told they'd get back to me at most 2 days after the interviews.

Got to the site. Future manager who was supposed to interview me not there.

Whiteboard questions, solve some algorithm puzzles. "Tell me about your worst failure". Most people I talked to would not have even worked with. People did not seem happy, kept warning me about how hard it is to work there and so on. (Subconsciously perhaps telling me to stay away?)

Lunch time comes, at least think I'll eat lunch with future team. So I wait, and wait, and nobody shows up. Ended up wondering the hallways exploring. Hoping someone would ask me if I am supposed to be there.

Then I got a bit snarky after that and kind of gave up on the chance of wanting to work there.

Went home. It took them 3 weeks to call me. But I wasn't surprised by that point.

<comment><USER36> Shitty experience of not showing up apart, I know that, at Google, the fact that the hiring manager isn't involved in the selection process is done on purpose, to reduce bias.

<comment><USER35> That makes sense then. But in my case I was definitely looking forward to talking to him and he was supposed to be there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think when a company reaches a certain size it is hard to expect that there is such a thing as "a manager looked at my github/qualifications and decided they need me so they will tailor the interview to my skillset".

At this point it feels the interview process is becoming more of a combo between a hazing ritual and a lottery than something actually useful to ascertain if the person interviewed would be a good match for the position or not.

The longer the interview is, also, the more likely one will be discarded because one of the many interviewers is having a bad day, or because after several hours of whiteboarding one can understandably draw a blank on a simple question they would've waltzed through 4 hours prior and be failed because of that. How long before interviews also contain an anti-doping panel to weed out candidates trying to improve their odds?

It is strange though that in a country where there is at-will employment one is basically told that hiring the "wrong person" could destroy the company or something and so the interviewer has to make really really really really sure that the candidate is absolutely ok.

I personally think the risk of hiring somebody and they can't cut it after three months and you have to let them go, is worth not passing the candidate that doesn't do well at whiteboarding but will instead prove to be great when tasked with real business problems that take more than a few minutes to solve.

<comment><USER38> _It is strange though that in a country where there is at-will employment one is basically told that hiring the "wrong person" could destroy the company or something and so the interviewer has to make really really really really sure that the candidate is absolutely ok._

What it does is destroy the recruiters reputation and KPI charts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Being an agency recruiter in 2017 is becoming impossible in that fewer and fewer people are even willing to talk to you, which is one reason I've diversified into resumes and coaching. I have almost 20 years in the industry, led a large successful users group for 15 years, have published tons of content for tech pros (often critical of recruiters), and have a pretty solid reputation in the industry, I write targeted and friendly approaches (no surprise calls at your desk), and I still have difficulty getting responses from people. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for people who don't have my 'cred' with developers, but the signal to noise makes most people filter out all messages.

So for the most part, I've stopped reaching out to new candidates. Outreach is mostly futile, so my time is better spent doing other things to try and get potential candidates to come to me instead. It goes completely against what recruiting is built upon (always be recruiting, recruit everybody, source, smile and dial, etc.), but when people approach me the outcomes are much more positive.

When I got into recruiting (circa 1998), the primary skill of a recruiter was just identifying potential candidates. There was no LinkedIn, nobody had websites, no social media. The skill was calling into a company and finding out who the Java developers were by navigating different people, and in my case I did this without lying to anyone (there was rusing, but no outright lies).

Now identifying people is ridiculously easy (identifying actual talent is a little different), and so easy in fact that we've turned into an industry of spammers. This model doesn't seem sustainable, and I expect agency recruiters will continue to be replaced by better systems. Nobody seems to have gotten it _just right_ to this point, but some are getting close.

<comment><USER40> I used to respond to just about every recruiter email/call. Problem is, as you noted, that so much of what I receive these days is spam that I've stopped bothering to reply to most of them.

Now, occasionally I'll receive a well crafted email that was obviously specifically targeted to _me_ and I'm so impressed that I have to reply :)

<comment><USER39> Most of my responses do mention that they did so because of the attention to detail in the message. Even the ones that are well-crafted still don't get much response. I envision that they're deleted by most people unless they are actively looking or pretty set on doing so rather soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't know how it has changed since I left but when I was at Google and interviewing folks the idea was to find smart people who could get things done and then figure out what to do with them if they decided to join. As a result it was literally impossible to have your "future manager" interview you, because that person was only identified after you accepted[1].

But "recruiting" in the sense the author discusses is really more like a lottery for people calling themselves recruiters than it is actually finding of talent.

There are a number of these people that email hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, while simultaneously creating a "resume" out of information they found out about them online and submitting that to companies. Then when the company says "we'd like to see Bob" then they go back and figure out who Bob was and they contact Bob and try really really hard to get Bob to take an interview with the company, and if this match works they pocket anywhere from 15 to 25% of Bob's annual salary as a finder's fee.

So low overhead work that can be pretty easily automated with the occasional out sized payout? That is the recipe for a fishing business and that is what we get.

I got an email from a friend who had my "resume" cross their inbox. They emailed me to tell me my resume skills had really plummeted, what with a bit of my LinkedIn page, some Github repos, and snippets of broken english mashed together. I tied the source back to one of the "recruiters" who had sent an email saying they had companies asking for me to apply (no I didn't respond). We speculated whether the resume mashup had been done in house or if there was some Turker somewhere who was doing 'resume assembly from accessible data'.

Bottom line is that there is money to be made so people will come out and try to get that money.

[1] There were some exceptions of course and certain skills or disciplines but it was the general rule.

</comment><comment><USER42> As a hiring manager at Amazon, I'm super excited to talk to candidates. A new job is, after all, an incredibly important life decision on the same level as getting married or buying a house. And as a manager, making sure I hire the right people to build the kind of diverse, respectful, collaborative, representative, professional, mentoring, balanced and focused team that I can is the most important thing I can do on a daily basis.

In fact, I spend a non-trivial amount of my day personally looking for, and reaching out to, prospective candidates, with no recruiter involved.

With that in mind, Amazon recruits so widely that I couldn't possibly talk to every prospect; there just aren't enough hours in the day. So I think it's important to have recruiters doing the basic screens, and am delighted to take over from there.

Anyone who wants a job at one of the big companies should understand that there's going to be some bureaucracy on the intake side just because the volume is unbelievable. If you feel like you've had a bad experience with Amazon in particular, please reach out and let me know and I'll see if there's anything I can do about it.

<comment><USER43> That NYT expose has scared anyone you would want to hire away from your pipeline altogether.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside- amazon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon- wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER42> That article does get raised quite a bit. Fortunately I've never seen behavior like that in my org. If I ever did, I would escalate it all the way up to jeff, because working like that would be unacceptable and frankly incompetent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> To contrast and say something surprisingly positive about Amazon. A local Amazon engineering manager looking to hire people sent me a note and suggested we discuss over a coffee. While I didn't want to pursue the opportunity I definitely left with a much better opinion of Amazon.

Also contrast with Microsoft when I had a series of technical interviews with members of the team I would be working with. I ended up going with a different opportunity but again I left with a good impression.

The Google hiring process sucks IMO. I've been approached a few times. I recall one phone coding interview where the Google engineer was condescending and trying to prove he's smarter than me. It seemed like he was in a bad mood or something, that can happen I guess. In a later recruiting attempt a Google recruiter called me, said he'd follow up, and then left Google to go work for Apple without having anyone follow up with me. Yet another recruiter, when he heard what area I'm interested in, said I've no chance because everyone in Google wants to work there. One thing that should automatically give you pause is a recruiter in Texas while the jobs are in California. Clearly that recruiter doesn't interact closely with the teams he's hiring for.

Google has gotten away with this for so long because they can be picky. Every open position has 100's of candidates. But times will change. They certainly have a lot of good people but they also have a lot of less good people. I've worked with some ex-Google people and they're really just like everyone else. Conversely there are lots of very good/smart people who don't work for Google...

</comment><comment><USER45> This also solves another problem. Many orgs have their recruiters slot a candidate into a particular role really early on in the process (possibly even before the first phone screen). So you're not applying for _a_ job at FooCorp, you're applying to be a Level 2 Engineer on the WidgetSearch team. By the time the third interview finishes, it turns out you're a bad fit, and the process stops. This doesn't mean there's not a great role for you inside the company, just that the you were tagged for in their recruiting software wasn't it.

By having the future direct manager involved early, they can hopefully say "I need a algorithm person, not an OOP person. Go talk to Carla, she's been looking for someone like this" sooner.

<comment><USER46> They should ask you whether you want just to join the company in any role or you want to be working in a specific role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Regarding his canned response:

> Thanks for your email. I'm very interested indeed. I have nothing against an > interview. However, there is one condition: I have to be interviewed by the > person I will be working for. By my future direct manager.

This kinda misses the point. I can't speak for any companies besides Google, and this is all my personal sense and not the company line, but anyway: speaking with a hiring manager who wants you is actually less useful than speaking to a disinterested stranger. Hiring at Google is done by committee and actually regards feedback from a hiring manager with some suspicion. Here's why:

Google allows for a lot of mobility. Internal transfers are common, projects are scaling up all the time, sometimes new engineers don't gel with their teams and want out, and we _strongly_ prefer to keep people within the company when projects scale down. Given this, hiring an employee solely on the basis of an enthusiastic manager's word is a recipe for lowering the overall level of engineering. Even if Yegor had the strong support of a manager who wanted him, he'd still have to go through the same raft of interviews and be judged by the same hiring committee.

Alright, fine, I hear you say, but if a manager likes you, surely that's still a positive signal? Well, in the best case scenario, sure: you're talented, the manager is wise enough to spot a good engineer when they see one, and they express their assessment honestly. But the best case scenario involves the manager acting as though they were a disinterested outside, so why not get the opinion of an actual disinterested outsider? However, what if the manager is short-staffed and just needs whatever help he can get to meet their goals? What if the endorsement is made on some biased basis, such as going to the same school or assessment of talent in an area unrelated to engineering?

For all their warts, whiteboard-based interviews are the state of the art in assessing the capabilities of a large number of candidates within reasonable time and cost. They're not foolproof, and smaller companies can afford to (and should) use more bespoke methods. However, at the scale of Google and friends, they're unfortunately the best thing available. But I won't lecture hacker news on scale. We all know expectations have to be adjusted as systems grow.

<comment><USER48> You miss the point of the article. Yegor doesn't want to be put on a team using technology completely orthogonal to his expertise. He isn't interested in spending 3-5 hours per week for a few months to cram on algorithms study so he can use it once on his interview day.

Many other companies hire by role. There is no ambiguity in where a software developer will end up working on. Facebook and Google use centralized hiring. Yegor's point is that this uncertainty regarding team placement is a strategic disadvantage.

Despite what you might think, Object Oriented Design isn't going away anytime soon. There is no need for Facebook or Google to prematurely optimize away the risk of an obsolete engineer at the expense of rejecting domain experts for an important project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Personally, my biggest issue with interviewing at large companies like these by people whom you aren't necessarily going to be working with, is that not everyone is in a position to interview people. I personally hate interviewing other people and having to be responsible for their futures. I was never trained for it, and I don't want to ever deal with it. I just want to code and make sure the product I'm working on is coming along smoothly.

I've had countless interviews where I could immediately tell upon entering the room that the interviewer does not want to be there at all. It's a lose lose situation. For me, because I get demoralized instantly, and he's already got a chip on his shoulder for having had to do this in the first place. Everything I say going forward from that point on is an uphill battle.

I think only managers/very few people who are truly trained should interview people as that is kind of the essence of a manager's job--making sure they have happy, solid team. I don't even mind the technical questions. I just want to be in a room with someone who is actually potentially excited having me there. Not grilling me in a depressed fashion

<comment><USER50> Facebook has a "shadower" who is in your room just to learn to be a better interviewer. A shadower pairs up with the interviewer for each round.

You can't just say inexperienced interviewers can't interview, then how would anyone ever get experience?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The worst part for me is how long the process takes, and how much time is invested for an interview process where the success rate is so low.

My recent experience with AMZN was:

\- get contacted by recruiter, schedule a call with recruiter a few days later

\- take a take-home coding test a few days later

\- talk to the recruiter again a few days later to tell me I did well on the coding test

\- talk to another recruiter a few days after that, get scheduled for an all- day in person interview 4 weeks in the future

\- cram cracking the coding interview for 4 weeks

\- go to the interview all day, hear at the interview that I was close but didn't pass, they recommend I should try again in 6 months.

All in all thats a pretty big time & mindshare investment

<comment><USER52> May be not for many people here on HN but for very large number of engineers job opportunity Google/Amzn/MS/FB etc are once in a lifetime type. I have not met people in my circles who would balk at interview process there.

<comment><USER31> Your best opportunity as a young engineer is always with a startup with smart leadership. You'll get to do far more and learn far more. Google/Amazon/FB/MS etc are full of smart people and offer a more 9-5 type job, but you will find it much harder to do interesting things.

<comment><USER53> When I graduated, Google/Amazon/FB/MS, I _knew_ people were smart and the job would be okay at the very least. How should I have gone about figuring out which ones are "a startup with smart leadership". I remember being overwhelmed by everyone, everyone came across as smart.

So I counter your advice by saying the best opportunity for a young engineer is likely a large company that is well-known for having generally smart people. At least I learned what I wanted and didn't in the rest of my career.

<comment><USER54> Interviews are a two way street. For most companies you should be able to talk to the hiring manager and other developers that you would be working with. Ask yourself whether as a junior developer if you will be able to learn from them. This includes technical skills, soft skills, and personality.

From my own experience I interviewed with a small company right out of school where I would have been the second or third developer (I forget now). One reason I did not pursue it is that I seemed to know more about development best practices than their existing developers; for example they did not use source control at all. While I would have had the opportunity to make a big impact on the product, I don't believe I would have grown much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'd also like to add my own experience dealing with recruiters from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix.

They are liars. They most definitely will e-mail you whatever it takes to get you into the first part of the funnel. They'll tell you its a "special project" or try and make it seem like somehow you're exactly what they are looking for. It's not true; I've been down the route a few times and have easily been able to spot the deception at second phone call. I do wonder how many brilliant people are abjectly turned off by these tactics and don't make it into these companies. But I rather think that's a good thing, call it bio- diversity. No one company should get too many very smart people.

And, unlike the OP, I can actually solve the bizarre algorithm questions they ask. Although I 100% believe they tell you absolutely nothing about the person but their ability (read: desire/motivation) to read and comprehend a basic text on the subject. No, you don't need this knowledge (unless specifically required) to be effective at your job despite what others here are posting on about.

Tech companies, once they reach a certain size, become little more than meat shops; corporate behemoths, not unlike other large companies that run the same dog and pony shows but for different kinds of human talent and capital. This is not to say they can't be good places to work, or have cool and creative teams within them, but the chances of you getting hired into one have nothing to do with the recruiting process, unless the hiring manager or manager of a specific team reaches directly out to you. If it's a recruiter doing the reaching, you'll be forced through the opaque funnel and likely lied to or manipulated in some way. Its just the nature of their job.

By far the best way to find a great job is to:

If you don't already have contacts in the industry or niche you want to work in: Go to work for a startup in the space to build your network and domain expertise.

If you do have a contact, have this person refer you from the inside. In many cases your interview process will be completely different. Following this I've actually not had to deal with recruiters much at all; maybe only as a formality.

<comment><USER7> _No, you don 't need this knowledge (unless specifically required) to be effective at your job despite what others here are posting on about._

Pretty much like how the Asiana Airlines pilots didn't really need to know how to manually land a plane.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214)

<comment><USER56> That's a ridiculous analogy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> A few years ago I decided to never do these algorithm, fizz buzz and whatever tests again in order to get a job. These tests have almost nothing to do with my daily work as a software developer.

With very much ease I can ask the interviewer/dev to solve a seemingly simple algorithm, where I'm almost 100% sure he will fail, even if I'd gave him 6 hours to solve it.

I've seen so much horrible code in my life, there is no fizz buzz test that can prevent you from that. I am wary of companies doing these tests as it tells me they have no clue what my work is about.

If a company wants to hire me they can look at some of my production code and the live results of it. If that is not good enough for them I'm not interested.

</comment><comment><USER58> > I should have told her that I didn't want to be interviewed by some > programmers, because I would most certainly fail. There was no need to try. > I wanted to be interviewed by the person who really needs me: my future > boss. That person will understand my profile and won't ask pointless > questions about algorithms, simply because he or she will know what my > duties will be and what kind of problems I will be capable of solving, if > they hired me.

While I agree with the author about algorithm questions being relatively pointless, my sense is they don't know about the team matching process. After I interviewed with Google, they presented me with a list of a eight teams who were interested in me and asked me to rank them in order of preference. They then had me come back a second day and meet with the managers of the top four teams I selected. At the end of the day, I ranked the teams again. The team I ranked the highest who also wanted to hire me was the team I would have joined if I had accepted my offer.

I much prefer the current process where you have one day of general interviews, and then go back a second day and just talk with the managers of the teams you would be interested in. It would only make the process much more of a hassle for everyone involved if you had to be interviewed by the managers of every team for which there was mutual interest.

</comment><comment><USER59> The lesson based on your experience could be the advice you gave. But it could also be:

Don't get your expectations too high. If you have achieved something in your programming career already, you've done it. Something to be proud of. "Bad" interviewing practices of top companies, and the outcomes that follow, don't and shouldn't undermine your self-worth. Just take the whole interviewing experience as a chance to meet new people, have a mentally stimulating exchange, and that's it. If they hire you, great; you were able to capitalize (in one very specific, and by far not the only, way) on your achievements. If they don't, you go back to doing the great stuff you're already doing.

<comment><USER60> > Just take the whole interviewing experience as a chance to meet new people, > have a mentally stimulating exchange, and that's it.

You're not wrong, but if one needs to put a premium on their time it's a little more complicated than that. Particularly if you need to take time off and travel for an interview, it'd be nice if the whole thing was more than a minor social experience.

<comment><USER59> Yeah I should've mentioned that. Well I guess I did in a way when I started by saying either the lesson from the blog post or the lesson that I talked about.

To summarize, if you put a premium on your time then we reach the conclusion in the blog post. If you are willing to reduce the premium, then we have the alternative conclusion that I suggested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> At Netflix I was interviewed by the manager I'd work for (in fact, I was interviewed by two managers, as I had the option to join one of two teams). As part of recruiting I had many conversations with my potential manager about what exactly I'd do, and how my skills can be best put to use. I ended up picking Netflix, and it's been great working here. I wish more companies interviewed in this way.

I've had the other type of experience at a major tech company, similar to what was described in this post. Interviews that were generic and not focused on what I'd been told by the recruiter the job was. I spent all day exercising brain cells from University classes a decade ago, rather than my industry experience. I remember feeling odd about it afterwards: that's the first time I've had to recall those skills since University, yet I've been working in this role for a decade and haven't needed to remember that doing the actual job...

</comment><comment><USER62> I've been thinking about it for a while to try to transition from a mechanical engineer to a software engineer but are all the interviews as miserable as HN makes it seem? I feel like these interview structure is a form of deterrent. I had a quick call with one of the recruiters from Apple for a hardware engineer position. He said the interview will take about a week and needs about a month to prepare... I didn't call back because it doesn't even seem reasonable to me.

I've interviewed many times (mechanical engineering positions) for big companies (10K employees+) to small (<50 employees) and they're usually a one day remote and one day on-site interview. There would be a couple of technical questions and some technical discussions but nothing like, solve this Navier- Stokes equation for creep flow from your memory. I don't think any competent manager would even ask that to me.

<comment><USER54> There is a big difference between computer science as taught and software development in practice. These hiring practices are there to weed out people just can't design applications or write code with any proficiency.

<comment><USER62> But can't that be said about every discipline of engineering? I could be wrong but these hiring practices are particularly prevalent in the software roles compared to the other major discipline of engineering. I'm more curious to what is different about software engineering/development roles that require these methods. The amount of applications or size of the company doesn't seem like a logical reason since I've seen equally sized (employee-wise) companies weed out and select specific roles pretty well (relatively).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Places like google give you a guide on how to prepare. So it consists of stuff like algorithms and data structures. I do wonder sometimes how much it is tailored to getting people who are fresh out of college rather than more experienced. My take is that you basically have to spend time preparing and studying so as to get past those types of questions then finally you talk one on one with the people you likely would work with and then it's smooth sailing for experienced people. But the entry bar can be pretty tough to get past with zero prep.

<comment><USER64> Why should skilled developers with extensive track-records in their field be forced to use their free time to cram for college-style exams? Other professions dealing with exact-sciences / engineering don't seem to have this problem..

<comment><USER65> While I agree with the sentiment, I wouldn't call it "college-style exams", to be honest. Colleges would be quite different if exams were conducted one-on- one, and instructor would have been willing to talk with you through the problem and cared more about your thought train and approach rather than the exact solution. In fact, I am pretty sure that if you just knew the correct solution and the answer to the coding interview and simply wrote it down silently on the whiteboard (which would be the best outcome on a college exam), you would be rejected instantaneously.

<comment> FLUX-YOU >simply wrote it down silently on the whiteboard (which would be the best outcome on a college exam), you would be rejected instantaneously.

No, jesus. Some people need to switch to a presentation mindset and out of a problem-solving mindset. This is completely normal in life.

I'm starting to think most interviewers are terrible only for not having a decent amount of social interaction with strangers. Let's just admit it's 90% hazing ritual at this point so we can get on with putting up guides to get through it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> You aren't going to interview with your future manager because they don't know who your future manager is. They need to hire hundreds of people, they aren't going to try to get separate candidates for each role, and they aren't going to have you interview with a hundred different managers.

My company is experiencing this as we grow; we have too many openings to have each team try to recruit for their open spots. We need a more general queue of talent to hire, so that we can interview for 10 open spots for every interview we do.

<comment><USER67> > You aren't going to interview with your future manager because they don't > know who your future manager is.

I generally agree when it comes to cold resumes. However, in this case, OP is talking about being actively recruited. In that case there ought to be a specific manager that was looking for a specific type of person. Otherwise the recruiter is just wasting everyone's time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is a classic example of what we call a blogrammer and self-serving bias.

Classic CS (Algorithms and Data Structures and basics of FP) is the must. The questions about subtleties of C++ syntax is, perhaps, less reasonable (but they are aimed to catch an experienced dev instead of a self-proclaimed wizard) but ignorance of the basic CS is a major red flag.

</comment><comment><USER69> I get so many obnoxious unsolicited recruiter emails that I have set an email autoresponder that triggers when the word "opportunity" comes in from someone I don't know. Here's the template:

\-----

Hi,

I get a lot of messages like these. Since time is valuable, I promise to fully read your original email plus any job web pages that describe the opportunities you are hiring for for $100. You can paypal me at <your email here>.

For $500, I'll even do a coding exercise or come in for an onsite interview.

Cheers,

<Yournamehere>

\-----

</comment><comment><USER70> The interview processes at a lot of those big companies favor fresh university graduates - Other than that, they are completely random. I bet that if they forced existing employees to take a slightly different variation of the test again, most of them would fail - Someone could be an expert with graph algorithms, but if a question popped up about decision trees and minimax adversarial search, would that graph expert still be able to solve the problem in time?

My personal experience with the interview process at a couple of these companies is that even if you CAN solve the problems, you will usually run out of time - Unless you practised that specific problem recently.

Also, they tend to favor engineers who can come up with solutions quickly as opposed to engineers who can come up with optimal solutions.

They could look at stuff like open source projects you created/worked on, past successful companies you've worked at, etc... But no, they don't care about that; instead they prefer to have this random selection process which favors experts in specific algorithms or thinking styles which often have nothing to do with the company's core business.

</comment><comment><USER71> Another data point of ridiculousness:

I fairly often receive emails from recruiters who have 'read my profile' and found me to be 'a great fit' for some 'senior ...' role.

Had they _actually_ read my profile, they'd have found me to be a student, who's only relevant experience is as an intern, and has accepted an offer for a graduate position.

Certainly not a fit for senior anything, but it makes me wonder how far it would go if I replied OK - do companies using these recruiters get hopelessly underqualified candidates to interview on a regular basis, and still stick with them?

</comment><comment><USER72> > There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't > know those answers and will never be interested in learning them.

They are just looking for smart people. If you ever looked it up it's 5 lines of code. That's the whole point they're not forcing you to learn something:

A) so esoteric you will never encounter in your programming career B) so complicated that you'd have to spend days practicing it, etc

In my opinion a lot of these questions are disguised IQ tests wrapped in algorithms since they can't blatantly ask "brain teaser" questions anymore.

<comment><USER73> You mean like the famous inverting tree whiteboard exercise that the Homebrew author failed?

Which lead them to refuse to give a job to the guy that actually developed a software used by those with higher IQ to come up with tree inversion algorithms?

<comment><USER72> Yes, I completely agree with you that their recruiting system has a lot of false positives, but I was just clarify that algorithm questions are really IQ questions, which is as you rightly point out is a flawed proxy for predicting how well someone will perform in their role.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> > Clearly, I'm not an expert in algorithms. There is no point in giving me > binary-tree-traversing questions; ...I'm trying to be an expert in something > else, like object-oriented design, for example.

I've always been surprised by the focus on algorithms in interviews. Maybe I'm an outlier but in my entire career I very rarely have to implement any complex, low-level algorithm - usually I can just use a standard library. But _almost every day_ I'm using object oriented design to refactor code or meet new business requirements.

</comment><comment><USER75> It's like this person was inside my head. I agree basically word for word and do the same thing, cannot be bothered anymore, like he suggests, if they are telling him his profile is so great and 'impressive' why must they schedule a regular interview and on a whim reject him. Waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER76> Yeah it kind of sucks, but from Google's perspective it's absolutely necessary. So many people talk the talk, run a blog, have a neat looking resume/website/GitHub and just cannot perform. Unless you're an undisputed rockstar in a specific area and they're hiring exactly for your expertise you can't expect anything else. It's a huge waste of time to custom tailor to each candidate when 90% won't receive an offer.

> There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't > know those answers and will never be interested in learning them.

Take an afternoon and skim Cracking the Coding Interview before applying. There's no reason a competent engineer shouldn't be able to solve questions like that. You know exactly what's expected of you, show some initiative.

<comment><USER77> Disclaimer: I have interviewed-trained twice at Google but I don't like the process for interviews. Athough I work there, My opinions have nothing to do with Google, just my own.

I think the process selects well for new grads who have recently completed algorithm courses.

I think the process selects well for people who are comfortable with doing work on a whiteboard.

I think the process selects well for people who are motivated enough to work at Google that they read and study books like you mentioned for weeks, and do a bunch of practice self-study interviews before coming.

Whether that set of people overlaps significantly with what makes a company do well -- I don't know. I'm not sure.

But I am pretty sure that the reverse assumption, that people who don't pass those bars are not good canddates, is an arrogant position that only a company of Google's standing and size can/should get away with.

What I don't get is the trend of small companies, startups, and the like, copying this interview process. It is entirely not a match nor a way to find the kind of motivated, culture-fitting, creative people you need in a smaller company.

<comment><USER78> >I think the process selects well for people who are comfortable with doing work on a whiteboard.

If I am not mistaken, you can choose to do the exercises on a Chromebook in an IDE instead of the whiteboard, so there's that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Today, I read something very interesting on the Slack engineering blog on an older post - [https://slack.engineering/a-walkthrough-guide-to-finding- an-...](https://slack.engineering/a-walkthrough-guide-to-finding-an- engineering-job-at-slack-dc07dd7b0144#.yptbjwpi1)

 _Many candidates think they need to find someone currently at Slack to "get their foot in the door." Rest assured this is not the case; in fact most of our hires have come from people who have applied via our careers page. We take all applications seriously. We care deeply about diversity at Slack and when you only hire from your current employees' networks, you tend to get a homogenous set of candidates._

Kind of, the opposite of how Google hires. I wonder which one is the right approach.

</comment><comment><USER80> I've turned down actual offers because even some medium-sized companies won't tell you which team you'll be working on when the offer is extended.

I get that things can be fluid, but its such a meat machine.

<comment><USER81> That is when you know they just see you as another cog.

<comment><USER82> These perspectives are very negative. An alternative view is that there are tons of interesting problems and projects and applications to be worked on, and to some degree at least you get a say in which ones you work on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I did a second phone interview at Amazon once. I have several years experience and understood the algorithm for the problem fine but got tripped up on the syntax a little. I was interviewing for a specific team and I could tell the interviewer was just looking for an excuse not to hire me. Perhaps I dodged a bullet in not getting on that team, but now I have to wait before I can apply anywhere else at Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER84> The amount Amazon spends on airfare for these wasted trips must be staggering. I'm in Chicago and I don't know very many people who haven't gone on this strange pilgrimage to Seattle.

<comment><USER85> Amazon has free shipping with Prime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> > some programmers who didn't know a thing about my profile asked me to invent > some algorithms on a white board for almost four hours.

Yep. Did the phone interview after weeks of back-and-forth, told them what I was interested in, told them I was only interested in working on such-and- such, then they drop me in the standard "write memcpy for us" interview. The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 months."

If someone like David Presotto or Rob Pike want to recruit me directly, fine, but after similar experiences with Amazon I've decided the typical mega- startup interview process is for the birds.

<comment><USER87> > The last interview was some dude with a weirdly confrontational attitude who > wrote some assembly on the board and said "Find the bug. It took us 3 > months."

Not great, but there is a world of difference between, on the one hand: (1) there is a bug; (2) it's in these 30 lines of code, and on the other hand: something's wrong, and the problem might be somewhere in your two million lines of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> A thought occurred tine that maybe these types of interviews aim to filter for specific people. An H1B from Asia will have the motivation to memorize "Cracking the Coding Interview" as well as the pressure to stay and say yes to everything. This creates a distortion at the IC level. At the management level, the filters create another distortion for cultures that heavily bias statis and grouo standing (rather than get a paycheck and do the minimum to stay). At the final leadership level there isnt even another filter from the managers. The candidates come through entirely other channels, usually network related.

</comment><comment><USER89> Interviewing only with your eventual manager is massively inefficient. Imagine I'm a hiring manager with one headcount available. Let's say Google gets about 5000 applications per day and hires 50 people per day, so I need to interview around 100 people to fill that spot. If two of those people meet my criteria, the extra ones get rejected anyway. Even more time is wasted than with the algorithm question approach (and honestly, stuff like tree traversal comes up all the time, even in client application code, so you might still get asked about it).

<comment><USER90> Engineers/managers from somewhere in the organization are still needed to phone screen and interview people that make it through the initial recruiter bar. If people in your team were to interview applicants for jobs on your team wouldn't it take the same amount of time on average?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Part of the problem is that these companies don't know who your direct manager will be, since they don't know where you'd best fit! Or worse, by the time you finish your notice period, they've re-orged and another team needs engineers more than the originally-intended team.

One of the skills they're looking for is adaptability/flexibility, to offset the terrible resource planning.

The message I really get from this post is that they'd be happier in a more structured, predictable environment, and there are plenty of places like that, old+new, small+large.

</comment><comment><USER92> Am I the only one that kinda forgets these kinds of stuff, like binary-tree- traversing? What I mean by that is that I forget the implementation (let's say in C) very often, and have to go back and look at text book/google/and spend time implementing it. While conceptually I can explain and present everything, at any time, and show you that I understand specific data structure and algorithm, it's use cases, strengths and weaknesses, when I fire up terminal and try to write it straight from the head it takes time. And I always feel like I have to "relearn" the implementation and think about it in specific way.

These questions sound pretty daunting and stressful to do, @Google, on whiteboard, in front of strangers who's temper and mood can vary a lot. I am student still, while working for company like Google sounds awesome, and there is a lot of smart people and cool stuff to do, it's "scary" recruiting techniques and that "cog in the machinery" feel is what turns my excitement down. Especially cause I am not so good in academic sense of learning. I tend to be one of those who work on their own, and hack with things in their free time, where my results in curriculum aren't as great as people expect them to be, but once it comes down to conversation/discussion/implementation people often surprise themselves and are kinda confused.

<comment><USER93> No you are not alone. The expectation is you've reviewed and practiced these subjects before going in. Hopefully with a few weeks of practice you should be able to remember them enough to write them out on a board. But yeah it can be thought, the interviews are stressful and not good for introvert candidates or those who struggle under pressure. (I'm in the latter group. practice helps).

It's not a great system but it's the best they have come up with so far. It's frustrating because it's got a high false negative rate. Failing it isn't a indication of you on the job skill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> I like how every week one of these posts comes up.

So many posts telling the world that they don't want to be the algorithm guy-- the world doesn't care. Forgetting the Maxim: "Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up."

[https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/potenti...](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/potentialdemotivator.jpeg?v=1414017238)

<comment><USER84> But an "algorithm guy" kind of IS the astronaut, no? Most work is line of business, CRUD, wiring up web forms, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Maybe he should talk to Google's contract recruiters. I got interviewed by my manager, my interview was extremely relevant to the tasks that have since been expected of me... it was good times.

Between the perks, the pay, and getting to work on various projects that always have me learning new and exciting things about front-end development I think the fifteen minute investment I made in exchanging pleasantries with a recruiter has paid off. Though that could just be my morning coffee talking.

</comment><comment><USER96> Well, in their defense (Google/Amazon/Facebook etc), a team leader or any other particular person cannot interview 500 applicants, so either more people are interviewers or they are way more specific with initial resume (which can be fake to a big extend).

I don't like algorithm questions either but at least they optimize by time, the alternative is to have people in for a few days, or spend a day doing chat interviews and risk getting a bullshitter.

<comment><USER97> > _a team leader or any other particular person cannot interview 500 > applicants_

While, yes, it often takes interview more than one, and often several people, to find a desirable candidate — it's not that high. Given that any candidate will see probably around 4 interviewers, I don't think asking that the manager interview is that big a deal. I have to agree with that part of the article (though I disagree with it on the whole): meeting your manager-to-be is important. (And I don't think one understands this until one has a bad manager.)

In a prior job, we would also omit the manager interview if it was certain the candidate wasn't going to be a pass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Amazon won't hire you just for one role. The company allows free movement between teams by SDEs. If you're an SDE, you're an SDE, and you're welcome to change teams so long as the new manager will take you.

If you don't know algorithms, maybe that's okay for the team you're joining. But hiring you means screwing over the team you're going to be on in 3 years. That's why they interview that way.

<comment><USER99> Nit: I believe you can't move more freely than once every 30 days or so. ;)

<comment><USER98> When I joined, it was once every 12 months. All I know is that they removed that rule recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I think you're missing the point - those things that you don't like about the Google interview process are meant to eliminate bias. Your hiring manager doesn't interview you because they might make compromises. People interviewing you don't review your profile because they might have a bias if they know about you.

All of the things that make those interviews effective are the things that you are complaining about.

</comment><comment><USER46> I did an interview with Google few years ago, I still don't know the position they wanted me for. I make pretty clear my preferences but I was interviewed by random engineers not related with what I wanted to do in Google.

I guess they just want software engineers as workforce. They don't really care about what you want and your skills, if you are very good at something you will probably be good at something else.

</comment><comment><USER101> I think most young engineers are surprised to find that after they've navigated the hiring guantlet at BigCorp, they were never interviewing for a specific position to begin with. They were interviewing to be thrown into a pool of new hires.

When they show up for their first day of work, then they basically role the dice to determine whether you go to team A (interesting work) or team B (shit work).

</comment><comment><USER102> That reply has a lot of worth to it. I very nearly worked for Yahoo many years ago and was very excited about it, but it fell apart at the last minute. In the end, what should have been my big red flag is how evasive they were every time I asked to talk to someone specifically from my team. I was given offers from multiple specific teams and had to choose one before I was given the details of the offer (i.e. salary and other benefits), so I had assumed there _was_ a specific team. In the end their turned out to be a massive disconnect between my qualifications and what they were going to have me do. I really didn't appreciate it, especially after I had tried so hard to do more specific preparation from my end. Now I look at this standard reply and I think its genius. I'll go the extra mile for my employer but if they're that impersonal right off the bat it's probably not a good match. Sure, they're running at scale and maybe anything more isn't practical, but clearly it's not for me.

</comment><comment><USER103> I'm up in the northeast and at a level where I'm not going to get emails from Google/Amazon/etc for an engineering position. But I do get a ton of what I consider recruiter spam - usually something tangentially related to my background, and often fairly junior (I'm on the very low end of the executive ranks nowadays).

I used to ignore it, but I've decided since that while I'm not going to be remotely interested in the role they've proposed, I can at least clarify my background and career level should they have something more appropriate.

And for the total form email recruiter spam, I'll sometimes reply asking their rate range for W2 and 1099. I never get a response to those. Well, I'm lying, I did once and it was to say "let's discuss it on a call." No thanks, that means it's low. And being a small world up here, I knew who the client was anyway, and what they were trying to do. I had no business getting that email.

<comment><USER104> > I never get a response to those.

Exactly. Thats what makes this such a difficult game. If you _pay enough_ , filling positions won't be a problem. The problem comes when you try to fill positions while simultaneously suppressing wages to the lowest tolerable level. Even the dumbest monkey will learn to do tricks if you offer enough bananas.

<comment><USER103> But nobody wants to pay enough. I hate to be a presumptive asshole, but if I get 5 different emails from 5 different recruiters for what appears to be the same position with the same client - all either form emails or in barely readable messages (or incomprehensible voicemails), I'm going to presume they're not offering anything reasonable relative to the work asked.

<comment><USER104> I had to fight for it, dealing with some really skeezy recruiters for a contract position that advertised/expressed a rate of $x5/hr, once I passed one of the 3 phone/skype interviews, and they realized I was a viable candidate, they immediately tried to insinuate that they couldn't afford anything more than $X0/hr or a fulltime salaried position at $(X-10)/hr. I said shove it, and lo and behold, they called back and the $X5 rate was yet again available. I complete 2 more interviews, and they get ready to draft an offer and they tried _again_ to get me to accept $X2/hr, then $X3, for no explicable reason. I said no, and in my offer letter they wrote $X5/hr *{rate may change at time (sic)}. I made them re-draft it, flew to the client site, and after a tense 2 weeks (worrying if I got paid the full amount), I finally got paid what they advertised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> The other way to respond: thanks, I'm interested. Alternatively: no thanks, I'm not interested. Recruiters aren't monkeys or slaves. This post is arrogant and rude.

<comment><USER106> THANK YOU. I'm concerned I had to scroll down this far to find a comment that calls out the author on this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's tons of information online about what the big companies' interview processes are like. If you show up to an interview without bothering to do any research or preparation (like the author clearly did), then it's not going to be surprising when it doesn't go well.

Maybe I'm setting too high a bar, but I feel like it's not unreasonable to expect someone to spend an hour or two doing research on the interview process before flying out to Seattle. If he had, he'd have realized it was going to be heavy on the white boarding and algorithms, and then could have chosen either not to waste anyone's time, or to really prepare.

The recruiter totally should have let him know what to expect of course, but it's a strange sort of entitlement that leads someone to be upset when they don't get a job just for showing up.

<comment><USER107> I look at it backwards: Rejecting a candidate to day doesn't mean that they won't be exactly the kind of person I'll need to hire 3 years later, as both my needs ad theirs have changed, and therefore, I think that a good candidate experience is crucial. I want people that are rejected, or that leave the process early, to remember the experience positively.

Thus, I do not expect anyone to do research on the interview process: Before anything other than the basic recruiter chat, every candidate should receive a pretty good picture of how the recruiting process goes: Number of interviews, style of content, time to wait between an interview and its next steps... If a candidate is ever surprised, It's the company that fails.

If a shop that has a couple of hundred developers can do that in a cost effective way, so can the bigger tech companies. If they fail, it's because their standards for how to run a company are way too low.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I totally agree with this actually. Amazon totally should have done everything you say. As it happens, I know that Google is really good at doing the things you list.

The fact that Amazon screwed up doesn't mean that the author of the blog post didn't also screw up though. He really _should_ have figured out what he was getting into before getting on a plane.

My take on the blog post is that everyone involved was incompetent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> "I do realize that these are multi-billion-dollar companies, the best in the industry, and I'm nothing compared to them."

Making a lot of $ as a _company_ does not automatically mean that every _individual_ working for the company is "the best in the industry". And the more they hire, the more this will be true. I have worked with people who ended up working for Google and they were certainly _not_ the best developers I have worked with. They were good but not great. Also, to make a lot of $ as a _company_ you need to have a good _business_. You don't need top developers. Just _good enough_ developers. With a few really good ones mixed in to take care of the core components. A great business idea with OK developers beats a bad business idea with top developers every time.

</comment><comment><USER109> Reminds me of my own story on a much smaller scale and at a much smaller company, but very similar experience so let me share it.

I recall my interview many years ago (10+ yrs) at a small Microsoft partner, this was when I was still working in banking but wanted to do more interesting work and grow my career. I was younger, ambitious and also as this post talked about, fairly new to the interview process.

I found them through a recruiter, they setup an interview and I was very anxious but excited, showed up ready to show them why I thought I could do the job they needed, why I could be a great senior .NET developer.

I met that day with one person, who asked me a bunch of very very narrow questions around some ASP.NET thing I never needed to do but could have Googled and figured out. But on the spot, if that was the scope of the interview, well then I was certainly not "qualified".

I then left, very confused and very demoralized. Is this what it meant to have interviews at jobs more interesting then some random NYC bank?

A short time later Microsoft recruiters called me back in regards to a resume I submitted 6+ months before all this started and totally thought that Microsoft didn't want me, I mean look at the crazy experience with the partner. But my buddy, a more senior developer told me "dude trust me, that was a BS interview, you HAVE to go to this interview and you'll see, you have a good chance".

The Microsoft interview was the standard Microsoft Consulting one, multiple people plus the hiring manager. I felt welcomed, they all focused on different technology and at a high level which made a lot of sense. I met my future manager, she seemed to like me. I got the job and I have not looked back, working now at Microsoft for 9 years. I was honestly very impressed with the Microsoft interview process and have helped hire others to the team over the years. It really works if you do it this way and the manager is included, but yeah many companies and even many teams within Microsoft don't do it that way and I don't get why.

</comment><comment><USER110> Usually the first question during the phone screen is "Do you know Quick Sort; What is its time complexity?". At that point it's a quick thank you and phone drop. I am in no mood to solve the formal equations of the time-complexity of quicksort on my cell-phone.

</comment><comment><USER111> I wonder how high up you have to get before the top-tier companies are willing to make an exception to their standard interview process. Director? VP?

<comment><USER112> I have a friend who would be level 7~8 at Google and he still gets generic emails from recruiters.

Not sure they actually do hire anyone straight to this kind of engineer levels though, I assume they'd give you the salary and responsibilities and make you earn the title through promotions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Why _I_ don't talk to Google recruiters: they never call.

</comment><comment><USER114> I don't think the problem the author is highlighting here actually has very much to do with recruiters. The recruiting industry _is_ full of scamminess (spam to both engineers and companies, false-flag recruiters who claim to represent famous companies). However, as broken as the industry is, I don't think it's behind the author's problem here. He's talking about interview randomness. He was heavily recruited by Amazon, then failed the interview.

This is not a rare event. We have data on this from running Triplebyte. Almost no engineers passes all their interviews. The top cohort on Triplebyte goes on to pass about 80% of their interviews. These are strong, strong engineers (successful startup founders, ICPC national winners, Google staff engineers), and they still fail. Almost no one can consistently pass more than 80% of interviews.

One reason for this is just incentives for companies. False positives (bad hires) are far more expensive to a company than false negatives (rejecting a good person). So companies rationally bias toward rejection. To a certain extend we just have to accept this as rational. (Although I do think that companies tend to assume that everyone they reject is bad, and discount the cost of false negatives).

But I DO think the situation can be significantly improved. Interviewers vary significantly between companies. Some companies want everyone they hire to understand low-level systems and concurrency and thread scheduling. Others think this is irrelevant and want everyone they hire to be very fast and productive in modern web frameworks. Some think that CS is important, others think that it's bookish and irrelevant.

All of this makes sense (different companies do different things). The problem is that you can't tell from the outside what a company wants to see (oddly what the company wants often has little to do with the type of engineering they're doing. It seems to just be an engineering culture that develops over time). And companies themselves often are not aware of how what they want is different from what other companies want. Each company just says that they want to hire "excellent engineers", and think that that means the same thing to them as to everyone else. It's the cognitive bias where everyone thinks that the things they are good at are the core of the discipline.

This adds noise to interviews. At Triplebtye, one of the big things we do is measure this (by evaluating engineers already working at companies, and updating our model with the feedback on each candidate we send). I'd love to see this sort of approach take hold across the industry (and companies get better at advertising honestly what skills they care about).

</comment><comment><USER115> As a counterpoint, all other things being equal, if I were building a software team I'd hire a candidate who could pass a basic algorithms interview over a "OOP design" specialist who couldn't.

</comment><comment><USER116> I agree with this post. I've turned down Google interviews twice precisely because I was immersed in personal projects and didn't want to spend the time needed to practice algorithm writing just for a test. I could understand if they ask you practical questions like "when and why would you use a trie?" that seems more appropriate than "write a trie on my whiteboard or you're not smart enough to work here." None of their engineers are writing trees by hand and in fact are actively encouraged not to "reinvent the wheel."

</comment><comment><USER117> > _There was a clear mismatch between my profile and the expectations of the > interviewers. I don 't blame them, and I don't blame her._

I think this is the underlying key point.

If you walk into an interview and there's a mismatch, you will fail. But since "applicant tracking systems" have you now, when someone wants to bring you in next time, the answer will be "yes, we interviewed them before.. meh" and you're passed over.

I appreciate the author's approach. It kills the time wasting but is still respectful.

</comment><comment><USER118> Why _I_ Don't Talk to Google Recruiters?

Because they know already _everything_ about me. And you. And all of us.

</comment><comment><USER119> See his posts How We Interview Programmers [0] and Hacker-vs-Programmer [1] for more insight. It is ironic, then, that the author is claiming that algorithms, and knowledge of them, are unimportant for a programmer. "There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them." He believes he is a good programmer, and that learning algorithms is not necessary to qualify as a good programmer.

I think the claim is based on the idea that we now have tons of memory and disk, so programmers don't need to worry about optimization. Which seems to have an obvious contradiction, which is that if you have huge quantities of memory and disk then ignorance of algorithms, and, e.g. O(n^2) causes shit- hitting-fan failures. Re: [2].

[0] [http://www.yegor256.com/2016/03/01/how-we-interview- programm...](http://www.yegor256.com/2016/03/01/how-we-interview- programmers.html)

[1] [http://www.yegor256.com/2014/10/26/hacker-vs-programmer- ment...](http://www.yegor256.com/2014/10/26/hacker-vs-programmer- mentality.html)

[2] [http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/](http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/)

Edit: added the quote.

<comment><USER120> _It is ironic, then, that the author is claiming that algorithms, and knowledge of them, are unimportant for a programmer_

He didn't say that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> You can actually keep the requirement and work for a big company, I believe this is how Apple recruits. It is my understanding you will talk to and be interviewed by your future manager.

</comment><comment><USER70> I agree that these kinds of tests are terrible but I don't want to work for companies that have a bad recruitment process anyway - If their talent acquisition strategy has started to degrade then the level of talent in the company will start to taper off as well - To me, that's a signal that the company will stop growing soon.

Companies play the numbers game, so you have to play the numbers game too. When looking for a job, I usually apply for like 100 positions and maybe get like 50 calls/pitches from recruiters, then from there I pick maybe 5 to do the technical challenge - Out of those maybe 4 or 5 have a reasonable code challenge and I only attempt those.

Sometimes the tasks have a deadline; in these cases I will intentionally submit my code slightly late (but I make sure it's good quality); if the company is too upset about me missing the deadline (and ignoring the code quality) then I will cross them off (or they cross me off; it doesn't matter); I don't want to work for such companies.

Then I end up with maybe 2 or 3 really good offers with companies that match all my requirements.

My point here is that the recruitment process is a two-way street; you can test them as much as they test you. The recruitment process says a lot about the company if you know what to look for.

</comment><comment><USER122> I really like this strategy, fighting back against these monolithic HR departments and bored engineers asking terrible questions is something we need to do more and more.

</comment><comment><USER123> Google left a sour taste in my mouth after my first interview there. Recruiter was a mess. I had one phone interview with no coding questions. My resume could not be more clear that my best language was Python. Yet, every single question they said "use C, C++ or Java." It was very awkward and intimidating because although I knew those languages, I wasn't confident with them and the recruiter already knew this.

<comment><USER124> That's strange, none of my interviewers there had any objection to my using Python. This was a few years back; perhaps things have changed.

<comment><USER125> After I did my phone interview and study problems in Python, I was told when I got onsite for whiteboard problems that they really preferred C++ or Java. It was a little late for me to switch mindsets day-of, didn't get enough recommendations to hire.

<comment><USER126> Weird. That is definitely not standard practice, at least as of a few months ago. Candidates provide their preferred languages and are supposed to be matched with interviewers who are familiar with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> I liked this post do much! I totally relate to what you are saying. A friend of mine recently interviewed to Google (true story), and told me about the process. Hearing about the questions he was asked completely blew away my esteem of Google, and my desire to work there. Exactly the kind of algorithm efficiency questions you describe, which is something completely unrelated to the job he was interviewing for. Also, some questions like "estimate the size of area covered by all roof tops in the city" which is nonsense to me.

I wrote this article a while ago about how I hate that kind of interviews, and actually how I personally interview. Swear to god this was before that friend told me about his process, but they miraculously managed to exactly ask all the questions I considered wrong in that article!

[http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/07/07/how-i- interview](http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/07/07/how-i-interview)

</comment><comment><USER128> I'm sick and tired, too. Yesterday same 'retarded-monkey' style interview for a company here in Ireland. They require 5+ years of C ++ on Linux, knowledge of the standard library, design and implementation of high performance, scalable, distributed and resilient systems. Questions: implement a stack, traverse a b-tree, Caesar cipher, an example of polymorphism, etc. Honestly I felt they stolen 2 days of my life! I'm not a noob! In the last 20 years I had not the necessity to encrypt a socket with the Caesar cipher, nor to write a stack from scratch! How do you suppose I could show you that I can write in "high performance, scalable, distributed and resilient systems" ? Seriously they think this is a interviews for seniors? One of them asked me the date of birth "It's illegal but we need for it Security Reasons", yes, sure, take my vocabulary and look up "junior"!

</comment><comment><USER129> "I'm sorry, recruiters, no more standard interviews for me."

This whole blog post reeks of arrogance. You write a few books, done some presentations at a conference and suddenly you are above the standardize hiring process? Next time, just tell the recruiters you don't do interviews and only do consultations at X rate.

<comment><USER130> Yes, someone like that is above a standardized interview process.

But that is only because we are _all_ above such a process.

There is no single standard for software professionals' _jobs_ , and that is why it is stupid and foolish to have a single standard for hiring into those thousands of unique jobs.

For most companies, the only skill you _need_ to have and develop is how to shovel that company's unique and specific type of manure, or if you prefer, how to prepare their unique and specific flavor of sweetened "ade" beverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> I'm wondering what was Google interview for Guido van Rossum?

<comment><USER132> Exactly! I'm sure Rob Pike and Guido didn't go through the typical BS.

What's curious too is that I've never heard either of them comment on their individual interviews at Google. Maybe Google made them sign a gag order.

My hunch is Pike & Guido were approached directly by management at Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> The idea of speaking to your future manager is a bit absurd for this type of job, where they're not hiring you for a specific role with a specific manager. If they did that, the project you're hired into may not exist in a few months. They want people who would be good at any project, under any manager.

</comment><comment><USER134> Better than my emails from new clients:

"Head office called last week. We need X but have no idea what X means. We asked Bill to look into it but after a day his eyes started bleeding. Help!"

( Im an attorney doing privacy and compliance work. I've never been given a night in a 5-star by any current or potential client. )

<comment><USER135> As a preface for working at Amazon, that 5 star hotel is like a condemned prisoner's choice of meal.

<comment><USER134> The military has put me up in some rather nice on-base hotels a few times. And they send a driver to pick me up in the morning. Id take a free meal at the chow hall over the breakfast buffet at most 5-stars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER136> I've stopped talking to recruiters in general. I've never had someone reach out because I'm a good fit for the role/company, but I've had a lot where it's obvious that I just ticked enough boxes on their hiring checklist to push me through the pipe.

Once I got messaged by a recruiter who was very enthusiastic about meeting "expert Rails devs" and wanted to hop on a call to see if I had any interest in their company. I've never touched Ruby in my life though.

I also just started my first machine learning job recently. Before I was even a month into it I started getting messages from recruiters from companies like Microsoft who were looking for "top ML talent" like me.

Unless there's an actual genuine interest from the recruiter, I don't think you gain any advantage by responding to them.

</comment><comment><USER137> Asking to be interviewed by your future boss seems like a proxy for asking to be interviewed in such a way where it's directly relevant to your job. If so, why not directly ask for the latter? Your future boss isn't the only one who can perform that sort of interview.

</comment><comment><USER138> I've mentioned this a couple of times on here, but I'll say it again because it's (somewhat) relevant.

What are you guys doing to get Google recruiters to notice you?!

I get at least 2-3 messages from recruiters every day, and it's your usual nonsense. They have an exciting role in an unnamed company that pays a competitive salary, the usual stuff they spout when they don't actually represent the company they're hiring for. I can count on one hand the number of emails I've had from big companies. Amazon have emailed a few times about working for AWS in Ireland, and I've had an email from Microsoft that led to nothing.

I'd consider myself a decent developer. I have a CS degree (albeit from a crappy uni), I've done well everywhere I've worked, I've given talks at local user groups, and I've got open-source contributions under my belt. I'm primarily a .NET developer, but I've worked with Java, Python, and PHP before, so I'm not limited to a certain stack. When I left uni I applied to Google and never heard back, and over the past few years I've sent a CV in, only to be rejected after about a week by whichever hiring manager handled my application. I've even added a few Google recruiters on LinkedIn, and they never have anything for me.

For me, I'd say that the interview process is one of the reasons I'd like to interview with Google, because it's so different from everything else I've done. Sure, as I get older the idea of jumping through all these hoops to work for a huge company that seems to favour recent grads becomes less appealing, but the idea of being able to pass such a grueling interview and work on hard problems still wants me to dust off the CV and apply to Google again.

I fully appreciate the OP's point of view. Experienced developers have very different standards of working to newer developers. The more you work, the longer your requirements for employment becomes. However, I think the potential positives of working for a company with the resources like Google tends to outweigh the negatives.

</comment><comment><USER34> How is the author going to create his programming language without tree traversal algorithms?

<comment><USER139> He can learn them on the go, he doesn't need to prepare beforehand.

That's what most people do when they face a problem, they try to learn how to fix it.

<comment><USER34> He just said he has no interest in learning them ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER140> I talked to (very nice) Google recruiters off and on for a few years, until I mapped out enough of the SRE knowledge set to know I wouldn't make it through the interview process. Maybe someday... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER141> I think the recruiting process is designed to minimize type II errors (false negatives), namely someone who passes the process but would later turn out to be a bad recruit. Inevitably, the type I error (false positives) grows, those who are good but rejected in the process.

I don't understand this risk averseness in the recruiting process by the employers. Especially, in countries with favorable dismissal laws for employers.

Glad to see that someone puts condition on the interview process and doesn't submit to their rules.

<comment><USER142> Having someone around who the team likes, but can't code their way out of a paper bag (type I) is still a problem.

If you have a culture that you're there to work, and to make the company money then it's not as big of a problem as it can be if you've got a ball pit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER143> Fun trick: Change your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles to have a specific spelling or something of your name - you'll start to notice that a vast majority are scraped and automated.

</comment><comment><USER144> I find it hard to believe they simply disappeared. Recruiters will pester you until _you_ give up or say you aren't interested. They even make promises they can't keep, in order to get you to the interview.

The last time I was looking for a job, I talked to recruiters from Facebook and Amazon, and the first thing I told them were my salary requirements. They told me it "wouldn't be a problem." Then later on, I found out I was going to be offered a lot less.

</comment><comment><USER145> I sometimes agree to these kind of interviews, since I can visit my friends and have a dinner on a company dime. Never expect anything else out of these though.

</comment><comment><USER146> I take the recruiter's call just to get market information. Who is hiring? What are they paying? What's the market for someone like me? Or someone I may want to hire? Who is doing interesting work?

For better or worse, the "Mass hire smart people" is the most efficient way for these large companies to recruit. It's very good for ensuring universal standards of quality. But it suboptimal for specialists like the OP.

</comment><comment><USER147> It's an unreasonable ask. Not a single engineer stays his whole career with the same manager. Furthermore, needs change since demands and projects change.

Therefore at a big company the best strategy is to check fundamentals.

I agree that it's a BS strategy. I would love that the hiring process is a internship or some other real work simulation. Unfortunately they do not scale.

Maybe the author should consider a smaller company where one can predict the future role.

</comment><comment><USER148> I acctually love questions about how to best traverse a tree, binary or not. Maybe I'm ready for an interview at least? But why is it me who should be put through a four-hour white board coding session? I would collapse after 40 minutes. They can code. Why can't they be the ones at the white board? I can "architect" and correct their mistakes. They would still be able to evaluate my competence.

</comment><comment><USER149> At this point in my career I typically respond by stating that I'm only interested in remote work and asking what their budget is.

I have yet to hear back either.

</comment><comment><USER150> At Facebook you can usually chose which team you will join after bootcamp, so asking to be interviewed by your future manager is a bit of a problem.

<comment><USER151> The recruiter could just reply with such an explanation, and then explore of if something could be done to satisfy the candidate's desired to be interviewed by a specific person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER152> A lot of things things come up over and over again that is why I have a copy and paste file of what I use often. 90% of the time what I need is in my file. Everyone should be given a standard copy and paste file with the algorithms that come up often rather then needing to be written from scratch. Also now you can save $50,000 per employee by being able to hire from lower then the top 1%

</comment><comment><USER153> People questioning his ability as a programmer are missing the point. He was approached by the recruiter/amazon, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER154> I've interviewed at the major software companies, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. In all interviews I was interviewed by the people and managers I would be working with. In many cases, I would also interview with members of other teams I would be expected to interact with. I now realize I must have taken that for granted and did not realize it was a privilege.

</comment><comment><USER155> I don't talk to them because I probably am not smart enough, am too old, went to a crap school, only want to do remote consulting anyway and most of all, I don't care one bit how Google does, besides my browser search working. In the end I still make more than 1% of developers so I'm not too choked up about it. You could say I'm stupid-happy.

</comment><comment><USER156> Companies who need to hire a lot of general purpose high quality engineers who are highly desirable can design interview processes with high false negative rates. Where his argument gets off the rails is that it's hard to really argue a good facility with data structures and algorithms isn't at least one strong heuristic for a software engineer.

</comment><comment><USER157> I stopped replying altogether. They keep saying on linkedin they liked my profile, that's the first and last mail they send me as I never respond as I clearly know my career path ,the kind of companies I want to work with and how to get them interview me. I do have a separate mobile, email accounts for job profile.

</comment><comment><USER158> I never had any luck with incoming recruiters and often it turns out into huge waste of time. Scheduling/re-scheduling, they don't call on time, there's a delay, there's something else. In the end it looks like they are not really hiring otherwise they'd treat you with more respect.

</comment><comment><USER159> For those who are bored with the "new opportunity" emails from Google and maybe other companies: rather than trolling recruiters with obnoxious responses, you can just ask them to add you to the non-contact/ignore list and most probably they'll not bother you ever again.

</comment><comment><USER160> I have just been through the Google process for recruiting. While I have some minor complaints about timing, I never once was not interviewing with the team and leadership that held the req. Heck, even their technical was respectful and topical every time.

So I'm a bit confused by this post.

</comment><comment><USER161> I couldn't even get the part where they fly you to the HQ and pay for the hotel. I'd make sure to ace the whiteboard interview if I got that far! But nope, the farthest I got was talking about irrelevant non-technical stuff over Skype and then nothing.

</comment><comment><USER162> If working for Google is such a Valhalla, why do people leave after 1.1y

[https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Google-employees-have-such-a- lo...](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Google-employees-have-such-a-low-average- tenure)

<comment><USER93> Read some of the response and it's what I expected, fast hiring rate make tenure number artificially low. That's true at most large tech companies right now, they've grown massively in the past 5 years.

<comment><USER162> Can't be this. Fast hiring rate, say 15-20% y/y growth, would only push average tenure down by 15-20%.

[https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/4766345812...](https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/476634581293.png)

[http://www.koozai.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Google- Empl...](http://www.koozai.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Google-Employees- Chart.png)

[https://cdn.geekwire.com//wp- content/uploads/2015/10/amazonw...](https://cdn.geekwire.com//wp- content/uploads/2015/10/amazonww-e1445553945718-620x394.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER163> Ironically the example given (Amazon) does include the hiring manager and engineers from the team in every interview loop.

Teams do their own hiring which has its downsides in terms of consistent quality, but does mean you will be interviewed by the direct manager.

</comment><comment><USER164> Every email from a recruiter is a chance to secure part time consulting work even if you're fully employed and happy at your job. Great way to build your freelance résumé and secure more money quite easily.

</comment><comment><USER165> I actually wrote a short field manual on this (partially as a joke) to try and sell to recruiters that gives them tips about actually, you know understanding the candidate they are contacting.

</comment><comment><USER166> I've had pretty good experiences with recruiters who talk to me about the job or department they are hiring for. I've enjoyed the process but maybe I've been lucky.

</comment><comment><USER167> what are you guys talking about ? Some of the best minds that I know work at Google. How is asking algorithmic questions inappropriate for a CS candidate ?

</comment><comment><USER168> [http://www.yegor256.com/testimonials.html](http://www.yegor256.com/testimonials.html)

?

</comment><comment><USER169> When there is a popular article here criticising a big employer, in this case google. People commenting should be declaring their affiliation with that employer. We want to hear what you think, really! Criticising the article when you have a dog in the fight you're not revealing is just plain dishonest.

A lot of comments here, not many saying "Disclosure: I (used to) work there"

</comment><comment><USER170> The title should be "Why I Don't Talk to Any Recruiter"

</comment><comment><USER171> tl;dr: He sends an email to the recruiter requiring that he interview with the manager he will eventually work for. Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER172> I'm not sure the OPs approach is reasonable, and I would decline any candidate who tried to put constraints like this on the process. In particular I don't think it's reasonable to insist on being interviewed by the direct manager and I don't think it's reasonable to refuse to engage with algorithm and other whiteboard questions. As a meta-point, a company should try to standardise their interview process as much as possible in order to provide each candidate with an equal chance to succeed. This is very important in attempting to address inherent biases etc.

Apart from filtering out unsuitable candidates, one of the purposes of the interview process is to determine where exactly a good candidate might best fit. Although you get a good guess at this from their CV, oftentimes I find myself suggesting a good candidate be routed to a particular team based on strengths and weaknesses they have demonstrated in the interview process that were not apparent before. There is an information asymmetry at the heart of this that is hard to solve - I know a lot about my company, its teams and their needs, and the candidate (hopefully) knows a lot about themselves, what they are actually good at and want to do. What this means is that the direct manager is not necessarily knowable ahead of the interview (and subsequent review).

Secondly, just because someone is a team lead/manager does not necessarily presuppose they are a particularly good interviewer. Interviewing is a skill that not everyone has and there are good reasons to keep the interview pool to a set of people who see a wide swathe of candidates and are able to calibrate their interview based on experiences of lots of candidates. This means the hiring manager (even if you know who she is) may not be on the slate for interviewing.

Finally the "I'm not prepared to answer questions like x". Although this is becoming a trendy thing to say on HN (most typically about algorithm/whiteboard type questions), refusing to engage constructively with a question is a huge red flag for me, and likely to indicate a personality type that I don't want to hire. I would readily admit that the data shows that algo questions often don't have as much signal as people used to think. However, structured work exercises have been shown time and time again to be a very good indicator of subsequent performance. I _do_ need to know that you can actually program, and often offer a choice of an algo question or a structured code review (where the candidate and I talk through some code on their github or that they can provide me for the review).

There are good and bad ways to ask algo questions as there are with many questions. It's pretty pointless to ask an experienced programmer to write the algo for heapify; they either know it or they don't. However, if you're a recent compSci graduate and you don't know these things I'll suspect that you didn't really pay attention in class and mostly coasted.

One of the hardest and very best interviews I have ever had consisted of someone deliberately re-asking one of the algo questions I had performed poorly on at the beginning of the interview process (after I had a couple of weeks to think about it). This proceeded into a very very tough interview that pushed me beyond the bounds of my compsci knowledge to how I think about solving hard problems. It wasn't about what "book knowledge" I could recall but rather about how good I was at applying my knowledge in a tough situation.

</comment><comment><USER173> Anyone find it interesting the author had a bad experience with Amazon but titles the article with Google and he has a problem with company integrity?

</comment><comment><USER174> In my opinion Google hiring is corrupt. They are under federal investigation and a civil lawsuit. The reason recruiters contact a large number of people that won't be hired is they need a lot of no-hires to make their stats balance out and keep up appearances. Other big companies do this as well, Google just purports to be better.</comment>