Google has hired ~100,000 people in the last decade. They have probably interviewed 30M+. Broad generalizations like "their interview process is failing" are pointless. You don't build a $2T company with a broken hiring process.
This keeps coming up but is worth repeating – the goal of any large company's recruiting process isn't necessarily to hire the best possible candidates 100% of the time. There are always trade-offs. Every interview takes time away from employees. There is no way to predict 5+ years of performance from a 1 hour interview slot. Education, credentials, experience are all valid data points but again not a great predictor of success. Hiring is ultimately an exercise in balancing many different priorities and hoping for the best result. Some able candidates miss out, which sucks, but that's factored in. It's also much more important to keep a bad candidate out than ensure every possible good candidate is hired.
Every single one of these articles/tweets/anecdotes boils down to "Google didn't hire me and I'm very smart so their system is totally broken".
Chill out a little. What makes these threads explode is that many many people have spent weeks or months of their lives preparing for an interview at Google - it can create a lot of reasonable resentment especially when one feels they haven’t been given a fair shake - and by many accounts even Google recognizes that there’s an element of luck involved even when the person is good.
This would be a good argument if google had diversified products. But it relies so heavily on one product it makes you wonder if engineering quality even matters to google's success. Google's Ad business can hide the worst systemic problems because it makes so much money.
In other words, google's success says very little about the quality of it's hiring process.
Much of Google's success was cemented in place back in the day when they recruited people by putting fun little puzzle inserts into computer magazines.
That's such a huge difference from their hiring practices now.
Comments
Google has hired ~100,000 people in the last decade. They have probably interviewed 30M+. Broad generalizations like "their interview process is failing" are pointless. You don't build a $2T company with a broken hiring process.
This keeps coming up but is worth repeating – the goal of any large company's recruiting process isn't necessarily to hire the best possible candidates 100% of the time. There are always trade-offs. Every interview takes time away from employees. There is no way to predict 5+ years of performance from a 1 hour interview slot. Education, credentials, experience are all valid data points but again not a great predictor of success. Hiring is ultimately an exercise in balancing many different priorities and hoping for the best result. Some able candidates miss out, which sucks, but that's factored in. It's also much more important to keep a bad candidate out than ensure every possible good candidate is hired.
Every single one of these articles/tweets/anecdotes boils down to "Google didn't hire me and I'm very smart so their system is totally broken".
Chill out a little. What makes these threads explode is that many many people have spent weeks or months of their lives preparing for an interview at Google - it can create a lot of reasonable resentment especially when one feels they haven’t been given a fair shake - and by many accounts even Google recognizes that there’s an element of luck involved even when the person is good.
This would be a good argument if google had diversified products. But it relies so heavily on one product it makes you wonder if engineering quality even matters to google's success. Google's Ad business can hide the worst systemic problems because it makes so much money.
In other words, google's success says very little about the quality of it's hiring process.
Much of Google's success was cemented in place back in the day when they recruited people by putting fun little puzzle inserts into computer magazines.
That's such a huge difference from their hiring practices now.