[ahmadss]

A friend of mine spent ended up spending 9 months in the Google pipeline for a PM role. During the early phases of the cycle (1 month in) he received and accepted an offer at Capital One and joined as a PM. Spent 7 months at Capital One while still interviewing for Google, and then managed to get an offer and team placement.

Surprised it took that long, but he's happy he stuck w the Google process.

[Balgair]

I'm sorry, someone must have spiked my coffee this morning.

Am I reading this right? Your friend spent 9 months interviewing for a single job?

And then he decided that the company that had been trying to hire him for a pregnancy's worth of time was somewhere that he wanted to work after already having a job that hired him in a month?

Is this 'normal' for the Goog? If so, why am I not shorting this company?

No really, what did they put in my java today?

EDIT: Actually, yeah, someone put in some sort of super caffeinated beans today. Sorry for the somewhat manic posting here.

[crazygringo]

Yes that's not abnormal for a Google PM.

Basically it takes ~2 weeks of initial phone screening and scheduling, then another ~4 weeks that will involve setting up the full day of interviews and collecting feedback and making a decision on whether or not to hire.

So basically after ~6 weeks from first being contacted by a recruiter, you know whether or not Google wants you. This is not unreasonable for a large company.

BUT -- this is just as "generic PM". Because then there needs to be a match made between you and a specific PM position.

And so this is where you basically wait around for a PM position to be open that is in a geographic location where you're willing to work and the team thinks you're a good fit. If you're willing to relocate anywhere in the world (or especially Mountain View) it's not going to take anywhere close to 9 months. But if you're only willing to work in Boston, for example, it may very well take that long. Over those 9 months, you might wind up having ~3-hour interviews with 5 different teams seeing if you're a good fit. Also remember that even if a team wants you, you might decide you don't like the team (e.g. you want to be a PM on something closer to Waymo than to Ads).

Also remember that PM jobs aren't nearly as fungible as software engineering jobs -- if it's an enterprise product they might want a PM with an enterprise background, if a consumer hardware product then a PM with consumer hardware experience.

But it's not like you're having a new interview every week for 9 months or anything. It simply can take 9 months to match up the right person for the right role when there are geographic constraints.

[Balgair]

I want to make sure I'm on the right page here:

PM = Project Manager.

Projects can range from something like all of Project Loon down to some one small little thing.

Project managers can manage many people (and other managers) down to only one other person.

Project managers are given access to budgets, including hiring and project budgeting.

The role is somewhat ambiguous, but you are definitely in the 'Management' side of the business now, not the 'Labor' side.

[jtefera]

PM at Google is normally Product Manager. Project Managers are called Program Managers (PgM). Most program managers at Google do not manage anyone.

[tytso]

In my part of Google, we use TPM for "Technical Program Managers" instead of PgM.

In general a TPM at Level N will have the technical skills of a Level N-1 SWE. So many TPM's have a CS background, and a good TPM is an amazing partner/resource for a TL to have, especially for a large, complex project which spans multiple teams and multiple departments.

For my Hybrid SMR project, my TPM came out of a HDD vendor, and was very well versed in the technologies of HDD internals. At the same time, he could navigate all of the bureaucracy and process to get test racks ordered, populated with servers, and installed in data centers. He could also create the capital budget plan and get it submitted and approved through finance so I could concentrate on the technology. A good TPM is critical for the success of a large projects; I couldn't have done it without him.

[Balgair]

Yes, thank you. Big difference in my understanding there.

[luckydata]

The process has two steps:

1. validate that you pass the minimum bar to work at Google as a PM. Whichever team ends up talking to you, they know you're at least minimally competent.

2. understand if you are a fit for the specific team and product. That might take a long time cause openings come and go, sometimes they get filled by internal candidates which are always a favorite cause learning how to function inside Google takes time.

It's annoying from the perspective of an external candidate but now that I work at Google I understand why it's done this way, especially considering that Google has a very weak internal training system and the chaos is so prevalent it takes at least 6 months to get the hang of things.

[vidarh]

Turned down Google receuiters way too early to know if that's typical, but Facebook recruiters told me from the outset the process was 6 months and that they'd provide me with a reading list, and was then surprised when I told then I'd let them know if I was willing to consider that if they provided me with a compensation range. Days after, once they'd figured out the comp range, I told them I wasn't interested. This is London, and while their total comp was good, it was not SV good and not a big enough step up to be worth 6 months of interviews and a reading list.

[alasdair_]

> Facebook recruiters told me from the outset the process was 6 months

That's crazy. When I joined FB a few years ago the total time was under a month.

The reading list thing makes sense for some people who have never done a FAANG-like interview before. I remember moving from London to the USA early in my career and I had no idea how the process worked and so I got my first phone screeen with Amazon, thinking I'd explain a bit about my background and we'd have a bit of a chat and instead I got "Okay. Give me code to perform an in-order traversal of a binary tree." which was NOT something I was remotely prepared to do at the time :)

If you know the format and basic types of questions (and have access to leetcode etc.) it's not too bad, but a lot of these resources weren't around 15 years ago, especially to people from another country with no context.

A second Amazon interview aside: in an in-person interview I did, things had been going very well and I was on my fifth interview of the day. Again, I was recently from London and hadn't fully understood that words mean different things in the USA than they do in the UK. I was asked to design a GPS system. This seems simple enough if you know that "GPS" in the USA is the same thing as a "SatNav" or "Satellite Navigation" system in the UK and that the goal would be to build a system that could compute an efficient route between two points.

The problem was that I assumed the person wanted, well, a GPS system. i.e. he wanted a design for a set of satellites in geosynchronous orbit that would, using very precise timing, allow a person almost anywhere on earth to get a latitude and longitude like "12.345, -2.345" and so we spent almost the whole of the conversation talking about two different things and even when I was given the hint that maybe I could use some kind of graph algorithm, I had no idea how to use Dijkstra's to solve clock drift on a satellite :)

[vidarh]

The thing is, at my level of experience (27 years) I can get jobs plenty of other places without having to prove entry level skills, so being given a reading list is a hard no unless they offer a very substantial increase. And at least Facebook couldn't.

For some I guess it'll be worth it, but this insistence on that approach then means they're causing the candidates with enough experience to get competitive offers elsewhere to self-select away.

[Gunnerhead]

Hahaha, I enjoyed your comment, gave me flashbacks to some of my first FAANG interviews.

[Balgair]

What would such a list even include?

[vidarh]

Data structures and algorithms and other stuff intended to help you answer stuff you'd look up in a book if you can't remember in a real world situation. They're maybe useful if hiring for junior positions, but not much past that.

[puffoflogic]

In my experience the reading list thing (seen at other companies) is either DEI lipservice or a trap for the tryhards, or possibly both depending on how cynical you're feeling.

There's a ton of people on the internet who claim that they just haven't done enough leetcode to get into FAANG but they're sure it's The Way, and anyone who is in FAANG cannot possibly dissuade them from this belief. I imagine they're reading the interview prep books too and still not getting in.

[vidarh]

Maybe, but to me the whole reading list thing just added to a feeling that I didn't want to work at a company that approached hiring that way, whether or not it was actually necessary to read them.

I'm senior enough that I don't need to deal with that bullshit to get a well paying job, so in not trying to sell me on why I should want to work for them but instead giving me junior level "homework" they made me mentally raise the bar for how much money it'd take to make it worthwhile quite substantially.

Maybe they don't want people like me, and that's fine if that's an intentional choice on their behalf and not an effect of failing to realise that it's pushing away the most experienced candidates who have other options first.

Add to the fact that I was hesitant to even consider Facebook to start with and it was easy to pass on it.

[slt2021]

if you know the history of Google's product launches (virtually all of them have failed/were killed, only successful products are search/ads and acquired products like youtube, maps, etc) - you will understand why they hire 9 mo for simple PM role

[Balgair]

To me, that history seems to indicate that the 9 month process is effective at making unwanted products. What am I missing?

[slt2021]

You are not missing much, Broken Hiring process & broken incentives to launch whatever in order to get promoted == status quo at Google with its products

[michaelt]

If a company had a 9-month-long hiring pipeline for me, I would worry their internal decision-making processes would make achieving anything of interest a Sisyphean task.

[mattkrause]

You're gonna love how academia works :)