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Comment by super_mario | Hacker News Reader

Google phone screen isn't with a recruiter. It's 3 one hour long phone interviews with engineers where you program solutions to problems in a shared google document. Some of the questions you get asked are absolutely non-trivial and will take you an hour to solve.

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What you are describing is one of the proper phone screens with engineers. Before that they will sometimes do another round of screening that is just a HR person reading standard questions and checking if you got the correct answers (most of these questions have numeric or very specific answers that are binary correct/wrong and can be checked by a layperson)

I'd hardly call it proper. You're asked to code some stupid problems in a Google Doc (which is extremely bad at handling code), while the other person's waiting around on the other line impatiently, asking stupid questions like 'how can you make this faster?' If that's a proper interview, I'd hate to see what's improper. At the very least, they should give you quiet time to work alone. I don't expect to be working while someone else is talking to me, asking me questions, or breathing down my neck, but apparently this is a required skill at Google and most other places that use such idiotic "interviewing" techniques. I'm certain they are losing out on a lot of great talent simply because of this.

You're upset that a job interview for a programming job requires you to program?

Without proper tools in an environment I can't think in with someone literally breathing down my neck (or on the other side of the phone line). Yeah, I am upset because I can't think in those conditions and neither can most people.

The pressure is a little higher than real life, but the problem is easier. The phone interview questions are things like "write atoi()", not "write a database system to handle 4000 transactions per second per entity group with globally-consistent reads across three continents", which is the kind of work you might be interviewing for.

I think success at a phone interview question is a good positive signal. That's all you can get in interviews, signals.

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