I've interviewed at and worked for a number very very large companies before, and none of them have been as disrespectful at interviewing and hiring as Google sounds from these stories.
I'm not defending this practice at all, but I think I can understand it.
It sounds like the typical problems involved in scheduling 10 people to all perform together at once. Nobody can prevent people from getting sick. Going out of town and missing an interview is pretty flaky, but it happens. You can look it as "Google is evil and wants to torture candidates" or "people are flaky".
It's certainly human nature to be bitter about someone fucking up an important day for you, but ultimately, bitterness gets you nothing. It's no problem if you want to complain to your friends or on HN, but why not come back for the second try? Your friend could have had another free trip to Mountain View to actually be interviewed properly, and maybe get the job he wanted. (They do pay pretty well at Google, after all; the interviews aren't for some volunteer position.)
(As for the calculus interview, that sounds like fair game. PMs are supposed to have some PM interviews and some SWE interviews, and math is a perfectly acceptable area to ask SWE candidates. It's not where I would spend my time, but that's part of the process that people hate; different interviewers have different preferred questions. I would probably have asked "how do you test that", which would probably raise a few eyebrows in a story like this too. But ultimately, having that understanding is something I value in future coworkers, so it's what I'd ask about in interviews.)
Finally, if you have any questions about the hiring process at all, feel free to send me an email, jrockway AT google.com. I'm not a recruiter, I'm a programmer who cares about making the process work, but I'll try to help you out!
You're focusing on the details. The huge, blaring point is that some person was flown across the country, probably took time off work, etc. for an interview that was utterly hopeless from the outset and thus pointless. It's Kafkaesque in its absurdity. Make no mistake, this sort of conduct is a black mark on Google.
Funny how the only people in this thread defending it are people currently employed by Google. The world viewed through Google Glasses sounds awfully distorted.
> Going out of town and missing an interview is pretty flaky, but it happens.
Sorry, "it happens", is such a callous sentiment regarding someone's future. "We booked and agreed on a time and couldn't be bothered doing it and couldn't be bothered telling you, either" is outrageous.
It's interesting to see that the Google employees commenting in this thread are OK with people being treated this way. It reveals a lot about the culture. No wonder you fail so badly at customer service.
Maybe you have been at Google so long that you don't realise it, but this is not a normal or decent way to treat somebody. I can't think of anybody I know who would want to work there after going through that interview process even if they did get a job offer.
Interviewers not being on site I can see yes, that can happen and I agree we can attribute that to 'flakiness' if it's a one off. (Although I have to say I can't imagine it ever happening at anywhere I have ever worked, and I've worked in local government, a bumbling bureaucracy if ever there was one).
But failing to return calls just about every single time? Waiting months before getting back to tell somebody they progressed to the next stage or didn't make it? Having to call a friend at Google to find out if you passed the interview or not because they didn't bother to call back? Making snide remarks to the candidate? Just about every account in this thread reveals a similar story of waiting for months to get any reply, not getting replies, not being told how the interview went, not being told why they were turned down. That is systematic and reveals a hiring process that treats people like shit because you can get away with it.
From my perspective, the naysayers (including you) are personifying google to make them look worse. Two interviewers leave on business trips without notice, and the people remaining scrambled to get something together. The system couldn't handle this exception, so everything got screwed up. It's not like they lead him on only to harass him.
Actually, no, it doesn't just happen that people go out of town and miss an interview. Not in normal places.
Now, let's say there was some royal but completely understandable cockup where this guy completely spaced that this day was the interview or whatever. Fine. Where was the recruiter in this? Who was in charge of the process, and why didn't they realize that an interviewer was unavailable sometime in advance?
If I get an interview with a company and then just neglect to show up, odds are they will not give me a second chance unless I had a good reason, something more than just "I forgot". Why should things be any different if the roles are reversed?
Exactly. The job of the recruiter is to send - days in advance - invites to everybody involved, ensure they are not busy and they affirmatively accepted the invite. Even if somebody doesn't keep one's calendar up to date - if invite wasn't confirmed the recruiter should have known and should have done something about it. Looks like serious quality problems in that department in Google.
you say flaky, I say assholes who don't respect others' time. And way to move the goalposts re: your friend would be happy comment. I think what would have made his friend happy is to be treated with respect. Similarly with your bitterness comment; it's not bitter, it's letting the world know you and your colleagues believe it's right to treat people this way (because if you all didn't think this was ok, then you wouldn't do it).
I'm not defending the hiring practices at all; on some level, we lose out on a lot of qualified candidates who would do great work and would be great to work with. I'm not a recruiter, but I try to help out however I can; people on HN regularly email me asking for advice, or to ping their recruiter, and so on, and I'm happy to do this. I want to work with you, and I don't want the intrinsic flakiness of people to adversely affect your experience. But ultimately, I can't control other people, I can only control myself.
All my other comment is saying is how to think about the problem from another perspective. You have a lot to offer Google, but Google is not exactly coming up empty on its end. Therefore, I think it makes sense to cut Google some slack. But if you don't, that's your prerogative. I personally don't aim for 100% perfection 100% of the time, but some people do, and that is respectable.
(Oh, and I don't think complaining about the interview on your blog is bad at all. What's "bitter" is refusing to come back for a second try, even though you still are kind of interested in working at Google.)
You described it as a "free trip to MTV" as if it were some kind of a perk. It's wasting two days of somebody's time, and apparently showing no remorse. At that point the ball should have been clearly in Google's court, surely they could have figured out a less painful way of gathering any extra data they needed. I mean, the guy was in NYC! It should have been trivial.
It's well known both inside Google and outside it that many parts of the hiring process are badly broken. Suggesting that people should just grin and bear such abuse just means the process will never get fixed. While if people just stopped the process if it got silly enough, somebody's bonus would be in sufficient jeopardy to cause some action.
(When I worked at Google I never referred any friends unless they asked me to -- the chance of them having a bad experience was just too high. And recruiters were always pretending to be shocked that anyone could think the process wasn't working properly.)
> As for the calculus interview, that sounds like fair game. PMs are supposed to have some PM interviews and some SWE interviews, and math is a perfectly acceptable area to ask SWE candidates
I upvoted you because it's not fair to down-vote people who are on topic, but you're not correct when you assume that of all things calculus (!?) should have anything to do with hiring a PM.
I honestly fail to see how solving some Cauchy sequence-related stuff 10+ years after you finished your studies has anything to do with managing a bunch of programmers. And I'm not saying this as an I-hate-maths guy, in fact the only A+ I got in college was in calculus, but were I to be given such a question during an interview I would have just left.
The OP says his friend was interviewing for "product manager", which is not that. Product management is basically coming up with ideas for new products and seeing them through to the end. That includes helping design the actual computer program, which is why they ask software engineering questions.
(There are a ton of jobs called "PM", but they're all very different. None of them manage engineers, though, that's just "Manager" or "TLM".)
Sorry to barge in, my guess is that Google looks for the best of the best with a slant toward academia. So maybe a PM from a top notch b-school knows his calculus?
That does seem to be their line of thought in most things, but in what universe is calculus in any way a measure of your ability to manage a product, even as a proxy? It's barking mad. I could be great at calculus but terrible as a PM, I could be a great PM yet terrible at math, and so on. I can see the point if I was applying to be PM for Mathcad or the like, but otherwise....
Working in this industry is just distressing. There are so many really clever people in this industry that cannot reason in any practical way (absolutely not calling you out, bubbleRefuge!!!) I work with a team that cannot figure source control out. People ask interview questions which a seconds introspection reveals will not measure real world performance. It goes on and on.
Sorry. I think I just realized I need a vacation. I deleted a much longer string of absurdities at the end of the paragraph above. My non-ranty point is that clever!=smart, and clever != job performance. Google has admitted in the press that their recommendations from interviews perform no better than chance. I don't get why that was hard to forsee. If you aren't measuring what you are trying to assess, chances are your results will be noise. "I wonder if this person is creative and can think up new product ideas. How will I determine that? Think, Roger, think. I know, I guess I'll ask him the math behind Cauchy distributions, and follow up with a problem in Hilbert space. That makes sense!" ;)
Roge, you are a 100% right. It all begs the question, why are we so obsessed with working at big box companies? The reason this inefficiency in hiring exists is because Google can get away with it. If the short-term survival of G's business depended on hiring, they would have to do a better job.
>>As for the calculus interview, that sounds like fair game. PMs are supposed to have some PM interviews and some SWE interviews, and math is a perfectly acceptable area to ask SWE candidates.
Lets leave the managers alone for a while.
When exactly was the last time, you as a programmer used 'calculus' while writing programs.
Your statement shows everything wrong with hiring programmers these days. Which is to demand expertise in totally irrelevant areas, and when the persons fails to the test declare him incapable of doing his actual job.
And then when you hire people experts in irrelevant areas not being able to do the job, start complaining that good programmers are difficult to hire.
How will we find good programmers when we are not even looking out for them?
Well, it's nice to hear from someone trying to defend the logic. Again, this wasn't my experience, so I can't assign motive to anything like that, but let me try to add a little context:
I'm not defending this practice at all, but I think I can understand it. It sounds like the typical problems involved in scheduling 10 people to all perform together at once. Nobody can prevent people from getting sick. Going out of town and missing an interview is pretty flaky, but it happens.
Except it doesn't at other companies. Or if it does, it's corrected before a candidate shows up at the door. In other words, you value a candidate's time. I interview people all the time, and if I have business travel come up, I look at my calendar and make damn sure I don't have any interviews when I'll be out of the office (and if I do, I reschedule. If an emergency happens, I get someone equally qualified to cover). Heck, I even send personal apology emails when I have to reschedule phone screens.
You know why? Because it's polite.
It's certainly human nature to be bitter about someone fucking up an important day for you, but ultimately, bitterness gets you nothing. It's no problem if you want to complain to your friends or on HN, but why not come back for the second try?
Again, I can't ascribe motive to someone else's actions, but it's because it's disrespectful. It's not like, btw, google was apologetic, or said, "You know what, let's do these next round of interviews over video chat", or "We're going to make this up to you in some way". If I recall these events correctly, it was, "Sorry, you didn't get the job because you didn't do well in your interviews". Then a few hours later, "Oh no, wait, you have to do them all again". That's just disrespectful.
Your friend could have had another free trip to Mountain View to actually be interviewed properly, and maybe get the job he wanted.
Who wants a free trip to mountain view? Bear in mind, this isn't a college grad who is just excited to get to go to california, this was someone who was already an experienced product management executive in a leadership position at a middling-size startup. Going out to mountain view messes with their schedule and their work, and again, it's disrespectful.
As for the calculus interview, that sounds like fair game. PMs are supposed to have some PM interviews and some SWE interviews, and math is a perfectly acceptable area to ask SWE candidates.
If the questions had been in the technical area in question, even from a software engineering perspective, I'd be in agreement. But arbitrary knowledge of calculus seems unkind and unnecessary. That's clearly a style preference, though, as you say.
The point I'm generally trying to make isn't about my friend's experience exactly, it's just to add on to what many many people here have said: that google as an organization may treat employees very very well, but treat candidates very poorly.
Coordinating interviews really isn't that hard. Tracking candidate progress isn't that hard. And when you as an employer screw up, picking up the phone and making an apology isn't that hard. Failing at all three shows a fundamental lack of respect for the people you're hiring. You can't just say, "The system is broken".
I'm not defending this practice at all, but I think I can understand it. It sounds like the typical problems involved in scheduling 10 people to all perform together at once. Nobody can prevent people from getting sick. Going out of town and missing an interview is pretty flaky, but it happens. You can look it as "Google is evil and wants to torture candidates" or "people are flaky".
It's certainly human nature to be bitter about someone fucking up an important day for you, but ultimately, bitterness gets you nothing. It's no problem if you want to complain to your friends or on HN, but why not come back for the second try? Your friend could have had another free trip to Mountain View to actually be interviewed properly, and maybe get the job he wanted. (They do pay pretty well at Google, after all; the interviews aren't for some volunteer position.)
(As for the calculus interview, that sounds like fair game. PMs are supposed to have some PM interviews and some SWE interviews, and math is a perfectly acceptable area to ask SWE candidates. It's not where I would spend my time, but that's part of the process that people hate; different interviewers have different preferred questions. I would probably have asked "how do you test that", which would probably raise a few eyebrows in a story like this too. But ultimately, having that understanding is something I value in future coworkers, so it's what I'd ask about in interviews.)
Finally, if you have any questions about the hiring process at all, feel free to send me an email, jrockway AT google.com. I'm not a recruiter, I'm a programmer who cares about making the process work, but I'll try to help you out!