[hueving]

>The system is _highly_ prejudiced towards suppressing false positives. This is the right decision,

This is textbook Google propaganda that has been repeated at least since I last worked there 5ish years ago. It's bullshit though because the ratio of competent to incompetent engineers was the same as at FB, MSFT and NFLX (with the latter tending to prune the fastest).

Just because you generate a system that spits out a lot of false negatives, it doesn't mean it has done anything to reduce false positives. This should be immediately obvious given that the relationship between the questions asked in G interviews and actual software engineering is non existent.

Don't repeat the trope that Google's hiring system is actually better at eliminating false positives. There is no evidence of it and if it truly was better, everyone would adopt it in a heartbeat and we wouldn't be working with bad engineers who spent a few months on leetcode to get into jobs way over their heads.

The reason Googlers never care to critically question the sorting hat is because it picked them.

[fsloth]

"The reason Googlers never care to critically question the sorting hat is because it picked them."

I think this is a truism about the quality of most organizations - people who thrive in a specific organization coalesce into the organization and enhance those qualities within the organization that are specific to them.

I presume the fact that Google uses non-professional recruiters makes the recruitment process more about cultural alignment than it absolutely needs to be to gauge the capability to add value in a software engineering process.

[jpatokal]

All the FAANGs operate under a very similar hiring model, because they all get far more applicants than they can hire and can afford to have a high rate of false negatives. "Everybody" can't adopt it even if they wanted to, because your average business doesn't get a million applications a year.

[sidlls]

That isn't really what the comment you're responding to was about. That comment was specifically about the fact that Google purports to target eliminating false positives and the trade off is accepting a high rate of false negatives. In fact there is not necessarily a relationship between the two: or at least not one that Google's process measures.

[mixmastamyk]

> "Everybody" can't adopt it

Oh, but they can and do. The difference between 100 and 1000 resumes is not material—both too many to look at. What I've found is those in the second bracket simply throw out those without a degree and then cargo-cult common practice.

[dub]

> There is no evidence of it and if it truly was better

Year after year the Googlegeist survey finds that one of the things Googlers most enjoy about working at Google is their fellow employees

> if it truly was better, everyone would adopt it

Google has an abundance of money and an abundance of applicants who would like to work there. Companies with fewer applicants per position or lower salaries relative to the industry average may need to be more open to false positives if they want to be able to hire anyone at all. Smaller companies also have the advantage that they can usually fire people more easily than larger companies, which helps lower the cost of false positives for them.

[hueving]

>Year after year the Googlegeist survey finds that one of the things Googlers most enjoy about working at Google is their fellow employees

Hiring has very little to do with that. Perf review, feedback mechanisms, and work environment are orders of magnitude more critical to that. I've worked two startups with completely different hiring processes from Google and the other employees were amazing to work with there too. The key is feedback to correct issues and a quick PIP/fire process for folks not cutting it.

[joshuamorton]

>This is textbook Google propaganda that has been repeated at least since I last worked there 5ish years ago. It's bullshit though because the ratio of competent to incompetent engineers was the same as at FB, MSFT and NFLX (with the latter tending to prune the fastest).

But those companies use hiring practices that approximate, to a high degree, what Google does. Facebook and Netflix certainly do, and Microsoft has a high enough rate of bad hires that you are required to reinterview to switch teams, so that high performing teams can keep reject bad candidates who are already at Microsoft.