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Comment by Fixnum | Hacker News Reader

Yet Google still has a reputation for very selective hiring ... is that because most of the hiring decision isn't interview-related (degree/GPA/projects/resume)? Or is it that, while the data structures/algorithms questions might not be too hard, it's possible that the interviews are still difficult, due perhaps to a degree of randomness, or to high standards (candidate is IO-bound not compute-bound, never makes a mistake, uses of axiomatic semantics to prove correctness as she writes...)?

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It's because, as has been observed by many others, most candidates simply can't code.

If 90% of people who walk in the door can't implement FizzBuzz, and Google wants to hire the top 10% of coders, then it would be expected for the interview process to reject 99% of interview candidates. A more typical hiring goal of "top 1% of coders" means a 99.9% rejection rate.

The phone screen process is supposed to reduce the number of low-quality candidates, but it's a fairly coarse filter, and very easy to game.

Google cares much more about what you've accomplished than about what number is on your transcript, what university's name is on your degree, or even whether you have a degree. If you feel your GPA is too low to be taken seriously, spend a few months coding and put it all online for browsing.

Wow, if Google wants to hire the top 1%, it hardly means rejecting 99% of the interview candidates.

First of all, that logic only works if Google only wants the top 1% of people who apply to Google, and that Google is completely and absolutely incompetent at weeding out the bottom 99% through other screening methods.

Secondly, I doubt that Google has any kind of monopoly that allows them to determine what, exactly, the top 1% or even the top 10% is. A lot of people are fond of throwing these percentages around without even rudimentary data to support their notions of competence - which I think is probably fair to use as a data point for evidence of incompetence.

Thirdly, I could go on, but...

I think you misread my post. Rejecting 99% of interview candidates would provide a result of hiring the top 10% of coders, because 90% of the interview candidates cannot write code. Hiring the top 1% requires rejecting 99.9% of candidates.

You're assuming that other levels of screening (resumes, phone screens) must not be working properly if there are so many bad interview candidates, but really they're working very well. A large company will receive millions of applications for any position, and needs to winnow that down to a few hundred interview candidates. How many nines of rejection do you expect out of a phone screen?

I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I expect a baseline phone screen session to reject someone who cannot FizzBuzz.

Is that so hard to accomplish without inviting someone in for an interview ? I cannot answer in the affirmative as I do not work in HR.

I think what is meant is that 90% are rejected at the phone screen, and the top 10% or 1% are of those who can code, ie passes the phone screen. That makes them 1% or 0.1% of your initial applicant pool.

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