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Comment by discmonkey | Hacker News Reader

Having recently won the google hiring lottery, I wanted to add my experience

total length of time ~ 7 months emails sent/received ~ 50 phone calls ~ 20 technical interviews: 7 (1 with screen with recruiter, 6 with engineers)

team match interviews: 3 (for me at least these were real interviews, in that I "flunked" the first 2, and decided to take the 3rd one very seriously before getting an offer)

Before getting hiring approval, I honestly felt that I would get rejected, and I can honestly say that being more "personable" and very "communicative" probably had a lot to do with why I made it through.

My honest advice would be to stop thinking of these long interview processes in terms of a a binary outcome that you have complete control over. Instead, think of it as trying to maximize some hidden parameter of a binomial distribution, where every interaction slightly increases your odds in the final coin flip.

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I agree w/ the sentiment of your last statement.

However, I wholeheartedly could not disagree more w/ "having won the <insert_x_silicon_valley_company_here> hiring lottery". 80+ hours of interviewing? No offense, that doesn't sound like winning the lottery. That sounds like you don't value your time. Unless you're getting paid for that many hours of interviewing or receive a signing bonus to make up for it, any company that does 10+ hours of interviewing can take a rusted iron rod and shove it up their own arse.

In a market where software engineers are in super high demand, if a company cannot refine the technical interview(s) down to a max of 3 hours for any specific role, then why waste your time? I understand wanting to gauge a candidate's technical abilities. But there's a balance between understanding the candidate's technical abilities, the technical knowledge required for the job, and (the most important bit) what can be learned on the job for the role.

Agreed that the hour invested may not be worth it for a large percentage of people (again I got lucky, I would feel so differently if I was rejected after 7 interviews).

Google's point is just that they prefer to avoid false positives at the cost of (potentially) a lot of false negatives. The current interview process is probably some local optimum;

I haven't worked at a company yet that is actually good at interviewing. Where good is optimized over high recall and accuracy and a small time investment.

I know that Google does have one big advantage, in that a good percentage of people that get the offer end up accepting. That (unfortunately) gives Google a lot more leeway and possibly less incentive to further optimize the interview process. Software engineers are in high demand, but also Google is in high demand among software engineers.

At my previous job, trying to find a candidate for a role essentially involved lowering the bar until somebody was no longer in demand, since we weren't "in demand".

sounds like a literal nightmare, and your prize is... working at Google? No thanks!

For what's its worth, I really didn't think the technical interviews were nightmares. It was mostly talking with very intelligent people who were volunteering their time to screen candidates. Though how much one enjoys brain teasers over productive work is of course a matter of personal perference. Everything else (emails, phonecalls, etc) were definitely tedious.

As for working at Google, I think it really depends on the person. For me it was a good gamble in terms of both immediate learning and future opportunities; for others it won't be. I do find the opportunity to have my code (or what's left of it after reviews anyways) reach billions of people a thrill like no other though.

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