[paxys]

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768.

Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

[throwaway5283]

This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing.

Before joining, I had endless enthusiasm for computer science and programming. Now I feel so unenthusiastic that I question my future in this industry.

[igetspam]

I worked there in the early 2000s. It was fun. Then it wasn't any more. I was much earlier in my career and when I left, having it on my resume meant a lot. Now I've done more and more interesting things. I told the FAANGs, in no unclear terms, I'm not interested. They seem to have gotten the message eventually. I like small companies. You work harder and have a lot more impact. The compensation is good too.

Leave. The grass is greener.

[bradlys]

> I like small companies. You work harder and have a lot more impact. The compensation is good too. Leave. The grass is greener.

What small company is regularly paying over $300k+/yr for senior software engineers and paying over $500k/yr for staff+?

The only people I see leaving the big companies are those who already got their riches and/or bought real estate earlier. The rest of us are either tied to them or trying to get in because the real estate market dictates you must earn that income to stick around the bay.

[probably_wrong]

> the real estate market dictates you must earn that income to stick around the bay.

Well, there's your problem right there.

There are plenty of smaller tech hubs around the world.

[khalilravanna]

Big +1. Leave the Bay Area. Heck, you could even get a Bay Area job that allows remote and then leave the Bay Area. I worked remote from ATX for 2 years for an SF startup and it was great!

[thefourthchime]

Hah, same! Love working from in ATX

[eropple]

Many of them don't feel particularly smaller, either. I've had literally no desire to move to San Francisco; senior+ jobs here in Boston pay more than enough to comfortably pay a mortgage somewhere nice.

[throwaway582]

That sucks that you've had that experience, I'm sorry. I hope it's the exception and not the rule. I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising, and my experience has been pretty great—indeed, working on interesting problems with a high degree of autonomy. I do need to persuade others of my ideas sometimes, or let them persuade me against them, but this seems like a good thing, and doesn't feel political. Throughout my team and the other teams we work closely with, I find my co-workers and superiors to be thoughtful, smart, open-minded, and really nice to work with.

[whatevah5982]

Some years ago I was unsatisfied with my pay and I accepted the interview of a Giant Search corp, getting to the on-site interview. The lunch with random employees was perhaps the best part of the experience for me, as it became abundantly clear that a good chunk of devs that I had some conversation with outlined in very generic terms the same basic stuff everybody else needs to do in software: maintenance, basic infrastructure, scripts, and so on. Which is, you know, totally expected.

I'm pretty sure that everything is at scale and so on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that up to that point the stuff I would be working on was not on the table and I could be switching from a place where I like what I'm doing [biotech] to just a highly paid but plainly boring SE job.

This curbed my enthusiasm instantly. Up to that point in my career I always considered available positions based on the actual function I would be doing in the company, never vice-versa.

The afternoon sessions didn't work as well, and although I could still have some extra interviews through phone calls I cancelled them a few days afterwards.

I cannot say for sure what did I miss, but I am certainly totally disillusioned for Big Search as a company today due to it's consumer attitude that I no longer wish for a position there.

[pansa2]

> I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising [...] on interesting problems

Genuine question - what do you consider to be interesting problems in advertising?

[busterarm]

Having worked on the spend side of things and at high stakes (9 figure budgets), targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating. More than anything else I've done in my career, even. This is especially true when you have constraints, like being in a regulated industry such as legal marketing.

The only problem is that it's hard to command a salary commensurate with how good you are at it unless you're in business for yourself AND the one spending the money.

[blub]

"targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating"

I thought the answer to that was a rather bland "by gobbling up even more information about everyone"?

[busterarm]

Not all data points are useful. Different pools have different profitability advertised in different ways.

Some highly useful data is hard to get directly or requires significant and/or stealthy spend.

[throwaway582]

I work on infrastructure. Security, privacy, speed, reliability—all of these are complex challenges, especially at our scale.

And it's a reasonable question. Thanks for asking.

[Ygg2]

The only interesting problem in advertising - How to part people from their money :P

[toohotatopic]

Move? You got in without preparing. You can make it anywhere. Nothing is more precious than your enthusiasm.

[cbHXBY1D]

Similar experience and similar feelings here :/

[jonathankoren]

You joined a giant megacorp. They’re all like that. There’s very little difference between Google and Oracle in this regard.

[AlexCoventry]

From what I've read, Google is a much more humane and pleasant environment to develop software in.

[monoideism]

That's what I hear, but then I see comments from folks like User5283 above. I have the impression it may be changing into something much more similar to a typical corporation after years of avoiding that fate.

[hutzlibu]

Beware though, that he or she used a throwaway. Comments can be made by anyone, also a marketing company contracted by oracle who still want talent and have to shame competitors with better image.

(but the comment did seem legit and it is obvious for posting that anonymous)

[monoideism]

Yeah, I agree we should be cautious. But it does comport with what I've heard recently from actual Google employees, or (more often) ex-Googlers.

[eropple]

HN doesn't remotely begin to matter enough for companies to waste money on propaganda efforts.

[notyourday]

Much higher pay has a tendency to color the everything better

[jfkebwjsbx]

That was a decade ago.

[neilk]

I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all.

Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image.

Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?

Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.

I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.

[cmrdporcupine]

Google gets so many applicants it's irrelevant how counterproductive the interview process is. It selects for people similar to the interviewers, but that matters little, since they can afford to say No to 99% of candidates because thousands will still apply.

What boggles my mind is to see the same type of "skill testing" whiteboard coding interviews at smaller companies and startups that pay far less and don't have golden handcuffs to offer.

I've been at Google for 8 years. If I went to one of these smaller companies to interview and they asked me to whiteboard a data structure or algorithm problem I'd just walk out. I'm not the best programmer in the world or particularly shit-hot, but I'm sure there are many that are that would do the same.

Companies copying this process are doing themselves a disservice.

[pandaman]

>Google gets so many applicants it's irrelevant how counterproductive the interview process is.

It still may be relevant when you are looking for a specific domain knowledge instead of a generic "programmer". A great example is Amazon Game Studios. They employ the general Amazon hiring process from what I understand yet, as a game studio, it's a complete and utter failure. There are just few thousand experienced game programmers in the whole world and only a fraction of them wants to apply at Amazon at all for different reasons. You cull 99% of them and you are left with inexperienced people who will not be able to learn anything since there is nobody to learn from. Even if few experienced people got through or went around hiring process (e.g. celebrity programmers hired without whiteboarding) they will be in a minority and unable to mentor the rest of the studio. Google and Facebook are spinning up their own game studios and I expect the same result from them.

[numpad0]

One thing I wasn't aware as a nerdy teenager was how everything is valued IRL in its guaranteed minimum performance, not conditional maxima.

No one is interested in your peak performance, all it matters is consistency, predictability, stability, those robustness metrics. Say interview questions kinda sucks, but you show some competency still, means predictable most of what they have to throw at you will at least partially stick, minimizing factors.

You could argue that a workplace that prefers a trait like that doesn't sound like a place for artists' dream place we all desire, but more towards a "software manufacturing factory" envisioned by electric companies like Hitachi in the '80s, if you do I think maybe it is and maybe they were right to a certain extent.

[thewhitetulip]

> Unearned privilege?

I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code"

But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?

[paganel]

Now I’m curious why they didn’t use dicts, I love dicts. I’ve been writing Python for a living for almost 15 years now and dictionaries and (reasonable) list comprehensions still attract me like they did the first day I “met” them.

[thewhitetulip]

I don't know. It was bizzare to hear it.

To be honest the lady taking the interview didn't understand my code, at least that's what I got. The guy with her definitely didn't understand a line I had written.

Maybe that was her way of protecting herself or something else

But I've never come across any real reason to not use dicts

[neilk]

I took that part out. I don’t really know what is in other people’s minds.

[Rury]

Steve Jobs had a theory about why this type of stuff becomes prevalent in the lifecycle of companies: https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation...

Sounds a lot like google here.

Frankly though, I think there's something more fundamental about large organization as to why this sort of stuff happens (not just at companies). Perhaps it's the iron law of oligarchy, but corruption seems inevitable at scale. Very few innovative people seem able to reap or retain the most value of their work.

[ddalex]

> Very few innovative people seem able to reap or retain the most value of their work.

Once a company pays you, it's not your work, it's their work. They paid you fair and square.

IMHO a developer need to produce about 10x what's his paid as to cover for the company costs and profits. If one thinks that they can cover those 9 tenths in marketing, office space, infrastructure, admin and legal costs in a more efficient manner, they should quit and start their own company.

[TheOtherHobbes]

They don't own your innovation outright unless that's in your work contract and you haven't negotiated a fairer deal.

And I have no idea where you get your 10X figure from. In fact it's very hard to estimate the specific business value of specific dev work in very large companies, over any time period.

From a high enough level the job becomes "Pay devs to keep the engines running." Unless you're innovating new products/services at a senior level, it's hard to break it down further.

Which is partly why the interview process has become homogenised. Realistically most developers are engine components, not engine designers - although it's easy to be fooled when your component value is process optimisation - and FAANGs have optimised the funnel to select good components.

You need to be senior++ and/or in startup land to be an engine designer - which differs from being a component because it allows independent agency for strategic goal setting, instead of optimisation of tactical implementation.

[hinkley]

most groups don’t change until it is obvious to most of them that what is going on is not working.

When most people stop returning Google’s phone calls, so that positions go infilled, then they’ll start talking about change. Right now there’s still enough supply that they don’t have to do anything,

[LeftHandPath]

> Cynical answer though

Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job.

And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).

[monoideism]

> and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

Eh, there's a lot of us who haven't done great financially but who have written a lot of open source code being run at bigcos. Being an entrepreneur requires another skill set altogether. One that I seem to lack, although I finally have come up with a solid idea in the last year that might get me somewhere whenever I'm ready to make the move.

I'm sure if I spent significant time preparing, I could do well at Google's interview process, and other FAANG companies have tried multiple times to get me to interview (oddly, never Google), but I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me. I've been much happier working for smaller companies. The one time I worked for a large corporation years ago, I was miserable. People say Google is different, but I'm not convinced.

I would like that sweet compensation, though.

[danzig13]

Don’t forget a lot of entrepreneurs fail until they don’t.

[ernst_klim]

> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

I think the reason is a bit different.

Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm.

That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anything else.

Their code is pretty bad most of the time, they've took beautiful Webkit and turned it into Blink mess. They are all about algorithms, they don't care about code.

And that's a pity that people are copying Google's methodology without understanding why Google is doing so. If you are developing an OS, you'd be better copying Microsoft, which had much of a different approach, nearly without any algorithm questions.

[hanswesterbeek]

Indeed! This cultural / historical angle of looking at the issue hits the nail on the head.

[phkahler]

>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems?

I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.

[peterebailey]

Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

[danbmil99]

How many interviews involve asking the prospective hire if they know how to gather and define requirements?

[tsukikage]

This is implicit in a coding interview, though. I, the interviewer, take a couple of sentences to describe a problem. What next? Way too often, rather than ask more questions - gather and define requirements - a candidate will launch straight into solving a problem different from the one I am describing.

[adamsea]

Requirements gathering in reality can often require more soft skills or political skills, which doesn’t seem to be the primary focus of these interviews. Which isn’t to say the skills you mention aren’t important.

[username90]

Most engineers at Google never talk to non-engineers, the requirements gathering comes instead from looking at code, reading design docs and talking to other engineers.

[hanswesterbeek]

AKA "rush to keyboard" syndrome.

[phkahler]

>> Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

It's like that everywhere. Nobody comes to you with complete requirements. People/customers come with problems they need solved. Sometimes an outline of a specific solution is specified, but there's always a lot of detail missing.

[mwest217]

Not at all. I've been at Google for a bit over two years, and my experience has been at the far other end of the spectrum: a lot of autonomy, gathering requirements, designing & implementing. Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. If it's less than a day or two of work I can generally just go do it.

[alok-g]

How much of interview-style coding is involved in your work? More broadly, would you agree to the OP that interviewing for software developers is broken?

[rekabis]

> Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on.

You’re clearly not working on their military-contract Terminator-drone program…

…Unless “better” means “stone cold dead”.

[ddalex]

Working at Google. My opinion is my own, etc etc

What you get told is What needs to be accomplished, but not How, if that makes sense.

E.G. IF you choose to accept this challenge, this platform is running at XX% availability and we need to run it at YY% availability. HOW you get to do that, it's up to you.

Some folks don't accept these challenges and they go and find and fix their own interesting problems. But that's harder because you have to get buy-in from managers in order to get resources for that.

There is space and need for everyone.

[smueller1234]

Google's big enough that no one person could possibly speak confidently for all of engineering in this regard.

For what it's worth, this doesn't match my experience at all. In the area I work in (SRE in technical infrastructure, but the same seems to be true for our dev partners), I see a lot of expectation for bottom up ownership. I could totally understand if somebody with a different mindset and perspective (I'm a manager, so I can see pretty clearly what's valued at evaluation time) arrived at a different conclusion.

[pjdemers]

Right. Coding tests are designed to find people who are happy in a job where their only responsibility is: "Here's your coding assignment. Go do it." Technology companies are overfull of engineers who want more responsibility than that. They don't need any more.

[simonebrunozzi]

And it reminds me of this one too: https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383

Brian Acton, rejected by Facebook in 2009. Then in 2014 FB acquired his company for $19B...

[evidencepi]

Agree, they want smart workers (well you have to be smart at some degree to do software). And they don't care if they will miss some genius, they just let other companies help the selection process, and if you turn out to be gold, they will pay a big money to get you.

[ampdepolymerase]

It is actually pretty well known that the second way into FAANGs is through acquisition.

[monoideism]

I've heard of at least some of the FAANGs do the typical interview process for acquisitions.

[mikaraento]

I can confirm this from personal experience (at least it was the case 10 years ago).

[ampdepolymerase]

That sounds terrible, can you elaborate?

[monoideism]

I've read from blog posts and even from conversations that companies require acquihires, particularly non-founder employees, to go through an interview process. It may be shortened, but they still often have to do the typical algorithmic interviews.

I'll see if I can find one of the blog posts I've read about the process.

Note: to be clear, I'm describing the process for acquihires, not founders just wanting to sell their company and walk away with some cash (which actually seems to be somewhat unusual).

Edit: this was discussed in a similar thread on HN just last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943500

[gambiting]

Is that a uniquely American thing? I'm 100% certain that even if the company I work for was acquired, my current contract would still apply. So I would need to be given at least 3 months notice, and couldn't be discharged without a good reason - failing some internal interview wouldn't be such a reason.

[hansvm]

Perhaps. Most places in the US an employment contract can be terminated at will for almost any reason or without any specific reason.

[tomnj]

Can also confirm from my own experience 3 years ago

[austincheney]

You could have saved a lot of space just saying button pressers. This is most large companies and why I am burnt out on writing software professionally.

The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play it safe, follow popular trends, and don’t take any risks on product improvements.

To think about it another way the idea is to create mediocre software with mediocre developers because the software is thought to cost less than finding, hiring, and retaining top quality people.

[ozim]

Now connect the dots with: How much customers are willing to pay for software developer work?

They don't want to pay anything. They don't deserve best software written by best developers. Take for example GIT, which is extraordinary piece of software, saves a lot of problems and time. If it was not free, most software shops would just keep copies of folders with dates or whatever insane ways they had (SVN is for me insane way as well :) and big paid VCS were popular at big co's. not even one became close to "industry standard" as GIT).

[shaan1]

Makes perfect sense. Thats when you know you need to short the stock in the LONG RUN. Because all they know is taking orders from someone and running it. This is the same with all companies. If Mark Zuckerberg steps down from Facebook, you can pretty much know, it's going to go down.

[kohtatsu]

False; Google wants everyone like them to keep them away from the competition.

Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.

[kortilla]

That’s a lie they tell employees to make them feel good about themselves. If they actually cared about keeping competent engineers away from competitors, their interview process would be tuned to look for engineering skills, not leetcode.

[crimsonalucard]

Straight from the horses mouth I once asked Gayle Lackman on quora: does their exist engineers who no matter how hard they study can NEVER make it through the google interview process? She said yes.

She said that this is because Google optimizes their interviews for IQ. Not just raw knowledge.

[kortilla]

That’s incorrect. An interview process with true negatives doesn’t mean it isn’t loaded with tons of other false positives. Being good at leetcode has no relation to engineering skills, despite it being a skill in itself.

[crimsonalucard]

Where in my comment do I talk about leetcode or false positives?

Not only are you incorrect, but you are completely off topic.

I am saying Gayle Lackman, the author of Cracking the coding interview and, in the past, one of the board members who decide on candidates in the google interview literally told me word for word that the interview optimizes for IQ. Meaning that there are tons of engineers who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough.

Understand?

[kortilla]

I’m telling you that Gayle is full of shit. They have deluded themselves into thinking they are measuring IQ when they aren’t.

> who can spend a life time studying and never get into google because they are genetically not intelligent enough.

Cool story, but a test that has some true negatives says nothing about its false positive and false negative rate.

Gayle has to convince you that an entire life’s work impacting hundreds of thousands of people’s careers isn’t deeply flawed (because that would reflect pretty poorly on Gayle).

Gayle is the last person you would want to ask if the Google interview process is good. Understand?

Would you ask Donald Trump if his presidential administration is doing well?

[anticensorship]

Ironically, the people who are truly of the highest intelligence and skill level would never choose to work at a place like that. So it's fair to say that what they are actually selecting for are people who are smart, but not too smart. Just like cops, really.

[Retric]

Reading posts like that make the process seem stupid, but it has utility for the interviewers. All of this silliness is creating an artificial talent shortage which drives up salaries at FANG companies.

It’s far from universal, but the incentives between managers, workers, and shareholders never really align that well.