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I don't work for Google, so I don't know how much this applies to you folks. In my experience, while what you are describing is ideally correct, it's often just that -- an ideal. For example, you'll have people insisting (and consciously agreeing) that their objective is to come out of the interview with enough evidence to give a positive or negative score. In the back of their minds, though, they will often be projecting their own insecurities -- about their expertise, about their career, about their job, about their team. Halfway through the interview, things end up being about something else altogether, like interviewers trying to reassure themselves that they're better than who they're interviewing (it's especially hard not to fall into this if it's been years since you last had to implement a red-black tree and you're interviewing a fresh graduate who dreams this stuff in their sleep). It's very hard to get past these things. I struggle with them every time I interview someone, and it's very hard to know when to chalk it up to "the system" and when to chalk it up to your own baggage. Pretending that it's only the former only perpetuates this stuff -- and empowers the ones who actively enjoy abusing candidates and making them feel like crap just for the heck of it. Which is very common everywhere -- including, from what I've heard among my peers, at Google. So far, the most relevant compass I've found for these things is made out of two questions: 1. If I were a candidate, and I'd have gone through this interview, how would I feel about it?
2. If I were to go through this exact interview today, would I still get hired? If the answer to #1 isn't too good, there's probably some individual-level things you can change, but if the answer to #2 is bad, the problems tend to be more systemic in nature. |