[jamespollack]

Google tries to "remove bias" by not having you interview with anyone you might work with or even people in your area. During my onsites for a VR role none of my interviewers were VR people. It's "in case you want to switch teams". Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s

Spoke with a recruiter a month or two ago about a Developer Relations role and when I asked about the total length of process (because previous Google interviews were 6 months), I was told that they actually don't even have any of the Developer Relations roles that I was interviewing for available. If you do get through the interviews, you just sit in stasis until they get a 'quota' of more jobs to fill. There's no such thing as "figure out what team you're going to work on". Talk about making you feel like a cog.

FB recruiter on the other hand recently said they interview and hire you, then you'd have a rotational program for a while and you pick which team. Seems more reasonable. But who knows what the truth of it is.

Recruiters will say anything.

[Shish2k]

(Full disclosure: FB Engineer, not in HR) - last I checked the standard thing for engineers was to be hired for a very generic role (eg “software engineer”); being interviewed by people with the same role. No aiming for (or trying to avoid) any specific team (of the ~20 people who I’ve interviewed who ended up getting hired, I think 3 of them ended up choosing to join my team?)

Once hired, there’s 6 weeks of training on all the internal tools / architecture / how things fit together. During the final two weeks of training (and a week after if you’re still trying to decide), you’d pick a few teams who look like they match your interests and skills, spend a few days with each, then decide which to join.

> Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s

I mean, that can (and does) happen… I’ve had teammates decide they’d had enough of fighting buggy closed-source BIOS firmware so they go spend a year working on live video streaming, then get into AI to learn something completely new. I’ve no idea what percentage of people make large switches like that, but it’s common enough that the process is well known and supported.