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Comment by ballgoogler | Hacker News Reader

You know who complains about Google's hiring process... people that don't get hired by Google. I've never heard anybody who WAS hired by Google complain about anything.

Maybe you all just weren't good enough. That's OK, not everybody is the creme-a-la-creme. Look at Google's market cap and Android and Chrome's growth (not to mention their dominance in search and advertising)... Google doesn't need you, and that's why they didn't hire you.

You can cry a river about how Google is "failing" because they didn't hire you... but I think their shareholders (who Google makes very rich) would laugh right in your face and be glad that they didn't hire a whiner like you.

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"I've never heard anybody who WAS hired by Google complain about anything."

Yeah, I don't badmouth my employer in public either.

Google cannot find people to hire fast enough even by its own admission. I have personally never applied to work at Google but I can understand why someone who never anything heard back from a company with over 20,000 people would be a little pissed.

If they have over 20,000 employees and "they cannot find people to hire fast enough"... then perhaps they should impose even stricter hiring standards so they they don't end up with 10's of thousands of employees who are of such low value that they need to keep hiring more.

Google's main problems are not in hiring more people... it is in putting the (extremely high calibre) employees that they already have to work on concise and appropriate projects that will advance the future of the company in the right direction. Google needs to focus on its management decisions and project creation / execution strategy much more heavily that it needs to focus on the hurt feelings of coders who didn't have what it takes to get in the door.

    Google's main problems are not in hiring more people

There's also some incentive for them to get good people before the competition does. It's not like they can't afford the salaries.

So market cap size legitimizes poor etiquette and borderline anti-social behavior?

No, being a company that is built upon and successful due to its engineering culture does. Engineers are notoriously the most anti-social and lacking in etiquette of almost all professionals. Anti-social behavior is what drives most of us into engineering in the first place.

Google's hiring practices are simply a reflection of the type of people that they have to hire in order to be successful as the organization that they are: By engineers, for engineers, of engineers.

There are plenty of other (GREAT) companies out there to work for if you don't like the way Google does business or hires for that matter. The only reason people are whining is that they know exactly how AMAZING it is if you are lucky enough to work at Google (great pay, benefits, food, massages, etc, etc, etc)... and they are embittered by the fact that Google said they weren't good enough.

Rejection is always painful... but its best to take your dignity with you and move on when it doesn't go your way.

I think if you read the comments here and elsewhere closely, it's not that people are complaining Google said no -- it's that people are complaining that Google said nothing.

Google folks I happened to work with, do exhibit "noticeably higher than average" standards of social behavior. This is in addition to being world-class engineers.

OTOH, there is different spectrum of people in every big company - so maybe there are beasts sitting in the caves somewhere that bite everyone passing by too close :-).

You're right in one thing - one should not put the emotions into the process. A little research of past experiences reveals makes this very obvious.

Treat the whole process like a light cocktail-party flirt, and there's no disappointment afterwards. It's a free tour to the $interview_destination_of_choice, after all :-)

Engineers are notoriously the most anti-social and lacking in etiquette of almost all professionals. Anti-social behavior is what drives most of us into engineering in the first place.

Engineers also prefer data to hokey stereotypes and sweeping generalities. Got some?

Counter-example: I got an offer from Google 10 years ago and I turned it down in part because the hiring process was awful.

It's creme-'de'-la-creme, baller.

That's simply false. Lots of googlers complain about the hiring process they went through (common complaints: way too slow, not enough communication, getting tossed around between groups, too many rounds of interviews, stalled process in hiring committee). That's why the process keeps changing, usually for the better.

You know who complains about slavery? Slaves. I've never heard of a plantation owner who complained about slavery.

Thomas Jefferson complained about slavery at the same time that he owned slaves, and he wasn't the only one. It's easy to condemn them for that now, of course. But we no doubt have our own such contradictions.

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