Edit: Thank you for all the suggestions and experiences. Closing this out since I won't be going through all the responses after this. I am working on setting the direction for some hiring overhaul for SWE and PM ladders at Google. We have some internal data but that tends to be super filtered given usually no one wants to be super blunt in official feedback. I would really appreciate feedback and suggestions on three things: 1) Based on your interview experience at Google, what sucked and what would have made it better? 2) Based on your interview experience at other places, are there things that scale that were amazing and really improved your hiring experience? 3) If you have experience hiring people, what are your personal top signals for a great candidate (not good, the best ones)? Happy to take any other suggestions too. Any feedback is appreciated. I might not be able to thank everyone individually but I assure you this will at least inform some changes at Google that hopefully make everyone's life better. TC: $4m+ YOE: ~15 AMA if you want to know more about my career path: https://us.teamblind.com/s/zxhGJ5Gy
Tech Industry
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Meta E6 offer.
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How many years into your career should you be less of a code monkey?
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How bad is it in meta?
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Since people still can’t wrap their minds around the fact the Gaza death toll hasn’t changed
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Job market is brutal for SWEs 🥲
4M TC?
For me team matching takes way too long. I wish it was more like metas bootcamp
There’s a trade off between deciding whether to accept and renege a short term offer, or decline and risk seeing if google will have a match for the location I want to work at.
Yes, this is the main issue. People who pass Google will also get offers at other places. It's not reasonahle to expect candidates to stall other offers for this team match.
Wow to the tc. Wondering, what’s the breakdown op? Are you exec level?
as long as everyone hails Google things will never change just so you know 🙃
Things do change, I've made changes happen. The only thing is that it takes a while, just like a large ship.
1) Generic interviews not matching my skillset, recruiter down leveling ahead of interviews
The down leveling is crazy and the way recruiters think its the right thing to do. I had my recruiter tell me that people with 15 years accept the L4 level at google. Also, someone else mentioned this already, the overall time of the hiring process is crazy. Specially after you tell the recruiter, that you have other potential offers in the pipeline.
As for down-leveling, Google is pretty bad... borderline insulting. Yeah you can join and level up in a year but still...
When I was in college I got a screening call from a Google recruiter and she called my cell phone from Texas. I was in Canada. The phone call costed me $50. I was surprised Google people don't use Hangouts. But that was 4 years ago so things prob changed.
Google recruiters are best and most helpful, they give enough time and information to make a candidate feel comfortable. Google interviewers have a hint of arrogance and no fucks given attitude. Most of the time, they just give a hard question and don't care what interviewee is thinking or help them reach solutions. 5 rounds of dsa with around 10 to 15 questions is an overkill. But that's still fair, what's not fair is to reject them in team matching rounds after someone has dedicated their whole month to your company. When we talk about Google employees, they should be able to identify a candidate's strong and weak points from any questions, doesn't need to be a super hard implementation question. Making them code on a Google doc is a nightmare. Python coders have a very hard and uncomfortable time coding on a doc. Atleast give a ide with indentation and syntax highlighting. Care about interviewee's time as well.
+1, some engineers do seem to have god complex just because they know floyd fulkerson algorithm of the top of their mind
Google has actually recently moved from Google Docs to their own text editor that allows basic syntax highlighting and indenting!
Make sure PMs do a full sde loop before hiring them
You do not understand the PM purpose in a company if you think this is necessary
For me, the e2e was too long at G, had to make decisions with what I had VS what could be. On a side note, 4m TC, holy moly
no suggestions, but *bows* to your godly TC
Your comment is exactly what's wrong with this place lmao