[haberman]

I'm a Googler with the opposite complaint: in my neck of the woods we seem to be so picky that you start to wonder how any of us ever got hired. A person can do 10 or 20 interviews and have none of them (even the ones who seemed good) get an offer.

Google's a big company, so I'm sure that some pockets err on one side, some on the other.

[vic_nyc]

I agree with you. And the effectiveness of the criteria Google uses to screen & interview candidates is highly debatable, at best.

One of their recruiters once contacted me (because I went to a 'top university') but decided it would be a 'waste of time' because I hadn't done any Java or C++ recently. It used to be that Google was interviewing for knowledge of the fundamentals unlike most other 'business-oriented' companies that want specific recent skills.

Nowadays it seems that they've got the 'worst' of both worlds - I heard they interview for very hard-core graph programming algorithms, and at the same time they want recent experience with Java or C++. So basically if you've recently only done Lisp/Smalltalk/etc or even Python, you don't qualify. Where is the logic in that?

On top of that, my impression was that the salary levels of their employees were fairly astronomical, on par with the ones paid by banks/hedge funds, but that definitely doesn't seem to be the case.

[robrenaud]

I've done more than 100 interviews at Google.

The first candidate who I interviewed and was hired coded in Lisp during the interview.

I recently interviewed a candidate who did a lot of iphone development and was obviously very bright, but didn't code very well in straight C get hired.

Candidates coding in Python during the interview is pretty common and I certainly don't count it against them.

I am not sure what recruiters are looking for and filtering upon, but if you are good with C++ or Java, even if you haven't used in the last few years, that is more than certainly enough. If you aren't good with C++ or Java, but you are really good anyway, you can still make it through the interviews, but it will be harder.

[strlen]

> A person can do 10 or 20 interviews and have none of them (even the ones who seemed good) get an offer.

That's actually fairly common in the Silicon Valley. It's 10 to 20 people on the market, not 10 to 20 programmers selected at random: some are specialists in fields other than the ones you're looking for (or their resume is misread by the recruiter e.g., someone who has experience with enterprise search but is being interviewed for a web search position), others lack certain specific knowledge you do want, yet others are looking for a place where they can be "promoted to their level of incompetence".

A rate of 1/10 or 1/20 (5-10%) is actually very good and indicates an ability to recruit and screen well.

[smackfu]

If 10 or 20 people are getting to the technical interview stage and failing to qualify, that points to a problem. That adds up to a lot of non-productive time for the interviewers.

[nostrademons]

If you reject those 10-20 people at the phone screen stage, you end up with another problem that Google has been accused of: you overlook many qualified candidates who just had a bad day on their phone screen or drew a bad interviewer or got quizzed on questions that aren't their specialty.

It's a balancing act. Reject too many in phone screens, and you miss out on talent. Reject them at the interview stage, and you waste interviewer time. Accept them and put them on teams, and you drag down the level of the team and cause morale problems. Google's been accused of all of them, but in my experience, hiring sucks wherever you are, and they do the best they can given the data available.