SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Papas Fritas writes:
"Tom Friedman writes at the New York Times (NYT) that Google has determined that GPA's are worthless as a criteria for hiring, test scores are worthless, and brainteasers are a complete waste of time. " They don't predict anything," says Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. "The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive [Login required]." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more and the least important attribute Google looks for is "expertise." "The expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.' " Most of the time the non-expert will come up with the same answer "because most of the time it's not that hard, "says Bock, "but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that."
Finally Google looks for intellectual humility. "Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," says Bock. "What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.' " You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.""
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @10:23PM
TL;DR: Whatever Google is doing for hiring? Do the opposite. Their system is messed up.
They tried, multiple times, to hire me.
Every time their hiring process took so long (>2 months was the shortest) that I had already moved on, and every time I was left shaking my head at their utter inability to make a basic decision which every other company I've worked with could achieve in under 8 weeks.
They have actually, literally, multiple times called me back after I told them that I had a different position and wasn't interested in hearing from them again. The previous time I had taken a different job, they called me, no joke, more than a month after I had already told them that since they couldn't even move fast enough to get me a verbal offer in time to merit consideration, the deal was off.
So this last time I just stopped it at the outset and told them to go away.
Also, they appear to be utterly incapable of discovering what someone can do for them, as opposed to discovering that everyone (surprise, surprise) has gaps in knowledge. Go figure. In fact, there's a pattern:
Google: "We want to hire you for Job X."
Me: "Great, I know a lot about that field, as you can see from my resume."
Google: "Awesome. Please explain in detail, unrelated topic Y."
Me: "Not my field, never pretended it was. Can I interest you in my knowledge of X and related topics?"
Google: "No."
It is comically bad. Microsoft made me an (insufficient) offer in about six weeks, after interviews. AT&T took about a month. A month! And Google can't even suck it up in two.
Now, I'm sure some koolaid drinker somewhere will say that the system is proving that Google is smart and I'm useless. Feel free to think so. However, I've made a lot of money over decades doing complicated things for people who cheerfully pay big bucks to have my services, ranging from one week contracts to multi year employment situations. If Google is incapable of figuring out what I can provide for them, there's something a lot of other companies have figured out which they haven't.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by robind on Monday March 03 2014, @10:48PM
This pretty much reflects my experience with Google as well. From first phone call to rejection letter was a solid 4 months, and I think 6 hours of phone interviews.
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:13AM
You must be either a hit man or some Demi-God in the IT world. What the hell do you do to have Google call you back multiple times?
Reading the summary I was thinking "hey, maybe they will take an over 50, 35 years in the trenches developer/analyst with a propensity to ride horses and loves coding (but would love to work from home)". I read your post and I then go "yeah...no".
I'll bet crypto scientist with coding skills in c, c++, assembler, and in an odd way...COBOL (you were slumming).
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:20AM
No shit, there I was, Stallman in my scope as big as can be. I was all ready to spray him with enough lead to drop a hippo, and then Steve Jobs swung into view. Well, I thought to myself, one of them will kill the other, either way I kill the survivor and pick up the fee, but no, they went bar hopping on the Vegas strip. I lost them somewhere around 2AM. Still kicking myself.
More seriously: a combination of stuff. Devops, architecture, DB skills, topped with a creamy blend of infosec and networking. I guess they need people running all their fancy computers. That, and it was hinted to me by various unofficial sources that they like to hire people who work, or have worked with their competition, and that I met that criterion.
I wouldn't. Googlers I've known tell me that the work/life balance is terrible unless you're unmarried and living in a shoebox. Great for 26 year old neckbeards who need to prove themselves and pay down study debts, lousy for anyone with an actual life. This impression has only been strengthened and confirmed over the years, so my net interest in working for them is marginal at best, by now.
I'm usually occupied further up the chain than the mathematical coalface of cryptography, but I've done some pretty innovative stuff on how to make best use of cryptography in the real world (devops + infosec). Google's interviewers never went down that road in my interviews - largely, I suspect, because they didn't feel they could evaluate me there. Instead I'd get asked weird questions about stuff like silicon layering. Why? At my level, the chip either works or I pitch the pig and buy new. I know what an interrupt is, I can discuss caching strategies just fine, but I'm not an EE and I don't want to be. Or I got asked about cluster building strategies, but when I pointed out major flaws in the way that they say they're doing things, and suggest some other strategies, the whole discussion petered out into a cloud of what I can only interpret as politics and NIH.
Frankly, if they'd hired me and listened to me, they might have been less thoroughly raped by the NSA. Oh well. My current employers are happy with my skills (and took about six weeks from first contact to written, signed offer letter).
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:02AM
Uh, that's what Google does. Pretty much anyone moderately competent is guaranteed to have repeat calls from Google recruiters. I've taken to throwing my students at them to get them to leave me alone...
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Interesting) by darinbob on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:43AM
This is because a person in department X will have to interview a person who's seeking a position in department Y. I think the assignment of interviewers to interviewee is somewhat random. So it is normal for the interviewer to know nothing about what it is you do or what your job position will be about. Google doesn't seem to care so much about job fit at times, they're probably assuming everyone will switch jobs multiple times while at Google rather than be tied down to the one thing they're good at.
You're basically interviewing to join a cult.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:55AM
This is what I've heard from other sources, and it makes some sense ...
No, wait, it doesn't. On what planet does it make sense to have some (presumably) high dollar expert stop whatever important and valuable work is going on, and talk to someone else who's being evaluated on a substantially unrelated basis? You are highly unlikely to learn much about the candidate's skills which isn't on the resume, and truly skilled candidates can realise that it's an unproductive conversation. I wouldn't be surprised if that simply put a lot of people off at the ground level.
Memo to Google: Whoever created your hiring process? That person, or that team of people? Find them. Identify them clearly, and then tell your good friends at the NSA that these people were selling secrets to Russia. Fill the vacancies with people who don't mix cannabis with HR strategy meetings.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:06AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by darinbob on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:10PM
This is not exactly how I heard it from friends, but I'll assume I misheard it.
Anyway it is still weird in that almost every other company hires for a specific job, and no one is called in for an interview unless there is a job opening and a job req. Otherwise what happens when the candidate passes the first hurdles but then there's no job this person can do, or the job they wanted to do is full? Or worse they really want to do X but are then told that their job is doing Y, which they haer an expert in but hate doing.
Why wait until after the interview to find out if there's actually a job opening that you want? It's wasted time for the candidate.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:38AM
In a company the size and expansion rate of Google, there is pretty much guaranteed to be a job if they can find someone to fill it. Their hiring process is heavily biased towards false negatives (on the assumption that a bad hire will do more damage to the company than failing to hire anyone), and Google is always expanding into new areas, so almost all of the teams are growing. They have groups ranging from low-level realtime control software for robots to web UI design, so there's likely to be a team where anyone competent could make a contribution.
The only difficulty that they sometimes have is not having a specific kind of job in a specific location. I was offered the choice of doing things I wanted to do in either London, Munich, or Mountain View (where I didn't want to live), or doing something that didn't sound as fun in Paris (where I did want to go). I took the third option and went back to academia in Cambridge (and now collaborate quite closely with a couple of teams in Google and spend part of my time on a Google-funded project).
The down side is that you have absolutely no idea, going in, what the job that your interviewing for actually is. Your interviewer most likely doesn't either, but part of their job is to give feedback on the kinds of position that you'd be a good fit for.
sudo mod me up