[stared]

I second. Most data and anecdata says you need to be a solid generalist software engineer to be hired at Google. You may have some specialty (the vast majority don't), but a single area of expertise won't take you there.

Vide the famous tweet (https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768):

"Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."

To be clear, I think that Google has a reason for that:

- They use standardized hiring procedure (they need to work at a scale).

- A startup/software/machine learning whizz kind won't be useful (or would be dangerous) if they contributed code that does not meet other software enginering criteria.

[pmoriarty]

"They use standardized hiring procedure (they need to work at a scale)."

That's funny. In some HN threads that discussed exposes on awful interviewing practices at Google, time and time again Googlers would point out that Google is a big company and every team does it differently.

So which is it? Do they have a standardized procedure or does each team do things differently?

Update: Ok, maybe it wasn't per team, but the impression I got was that different parts of the company interviewed differently. Whether people you wound up working with wre the ones you interviewed with is a separate issue.

[username90]

You must have misunderstood something, Google doesn't let teams interview their own candidates. At Google you are always interviewed by random engineers from random teams who you will never meet again. And the people who decides if you get hired or not will not ever meet you.

You are probably thinking of Amazon or Microsoft or some company like that, but I have never seen a Googler say that interviewing varies from team to team at Google.

[rahimnathwani]

Of the people who interviewed me on-site at Google, none were in any of the same teams as the roles for which I was being considered.

Only after my packet had passed the hiring committee did I speak with potential hiring managers about team fit.

When I was interviewed at Amazon, all but one of the interviewers was a future colleague. And the one who wasn't led an adjacent team.

[grogenaut]

Amazon has started doing general hire and then placement for senior engineers in some areas, international hires in consumer goods for instance. I like this better as it gives you a lot more options. In the other model if you didn't have good fit you might end up with another partial loop.

I also like this better than the Facebook model where you don't find out your real team for several months after the hire.

For these broad loops they pull people from across the company to do the interview but will have people from your role if they can. Which isn't hard, the roles for most hiring at sdm, sde, fee, TPM.

Amazon always puts one "unbiased" bar raiser on the loop to ensure hiring isn't made for local only optima like "I need someone for 3-6 month shortfall so I'll lower my standards." These people have veto power on the hire and also play the consistency in level role.

Edit: clarity

[rahimnathwani]

That's great.

My experience interviewing for a role at Amazon was a while ago (2012) and in a place where they don't have massive teams of people (Beijing). So I'm sure it's different in present-day Seattle.