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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like she is the "recite facts" type, rather than "quickly think critically" type. Google wants the second type of person, and it appears she is not that. So the interview process worked perfectly; she didn't get a job she wouldn't be good at, and Google doesn't have an employee that doesn't fit with them. I fail to see how this is a nightmare, other than that she'll have to work somewhere that makes her buy her own lunch.

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Totally agree that she was not right for the job, but the process was a bit nightmare-ish :

  “That’s all.  Good luck with your job search.”  The phone clicked-- I was stunned.

In my previous job I conducted a lot of interviews of an analytical style. Some people bombed so badly that is was clear well before the end that they wouldn't make the next round. In those cases, I used the remaining time to either talk to them about the career hopes/goals, or to explain how they could have better approached the problem (these skills are partly learnt..) to help prepare them for their next interview. The way I saw it was that they were expecting 30 mins of my time, so they would get it, even if they weren't up to the job. It a courtesy, and it's also self interest - burnt interviewees make a lot of noise on campus.

When I was 'senior' I never applied to McKinsey, because I'd heard so many horror stories about their interviews - I just didn't want to go anywhere near them. I landed a job with one of their main competitors and spent 5 happy years there...

Googlers are not that bad at ending interviews either. I think this was just one perticular person (Anna) thing.

i agree. i interviewed at Google and thought the whole process was lots of fun. i didn't have any complaints about the people. (i might be biased because i was offered a job; however, i didn't take it, preferring to work at a startup instead.)

Agreed. I was rejected from Google after an on-site interview, but they were quite polite and professional about it.

I totally agree. A company gains nothing by being dismissive. I've interviewed at about 20 companies in the last 10 years, not to mention VC / Angel pitches. Only Google left a foul taste in my mouth. As a CS guy I've had dozens of analytical interviews and have largely done well with them. But the guy who interviewed me from Google acted as if he was doing me a favor. He was curt from the first moment and would sigh and groan if I asked for more specifics on a question. He too basically hung up on me.

He sounds like a jerk, but imagine how much it boosts his morale to feel so superior (even if unfairly so).

That's debatable. Many candidates would rather just end a failed interview early and do something they'd like with their time.

Maybe, but I can't imagine they would be very upset by the interviewer continuing to take a little more of their time either. At the very least, it gives you the feeling that the interviewer fairly assessed you instead of dismissing you because of one flummoxed question. When I interview someone who quickly seems unlikely to pass an intervew, I try to use as much time as possible to make sure my initial impression was correct and the candidate just didn't get unlucky and/or just happens to be overly nervous. Some people are great employees but are bad at being interviewed.

The interview process in this case worked fine. But it's silly and probably causes them to miss a LOT of good candidates. It's measuring a subjects ability to think critically... quickly and while under a lot of pressure.

Is SPEED of critical thinking important? How many positions at Google require people to think on their feet? How many positions require them to be comfortable/effective talking to strangers on the phone (for this woman's position, it might be the case)?

Check out the War For Talent ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/157851459 )... Andrew Chen has a good blog post talking about it: http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/07/28/what-if-interviews-poor...

Bottom line is that studies show over and over that "if you look at the marks that people get coming out of a hiring process versus the on-the-job marks they get in their first year in a job, they are actually not correlated at all."

Speed of critical thinking for simple questions like the $0.10 ad-click question probably is important. If someone can't figure out the answer to that one pretty fast, they're probably not going to successfully figure out really hard problems at all.

True, although I have to wonder if she couldn't have figured it out easily under less stressful circumstances. What's baffling to me is how anyone could think interviews are a good technique for identifying job talent. Many, many (most?) people perform FAR below peak under pressure and that sort of pressure is almost non-existent in most jobs. This isn't pro basketball here.

Apart from the arithmetic fail, I think she did more than well in the creative/copy part. In fact, I think she did more than well. She recognized the brand value, put the story edit in line with the brand/tagline and made a plausible copy on the spot in a situation that is far from normal for that kind of work. All in all, it depends for what she was interviewed for, but then again Google is not good at/famous for copywriting/advertising - they are a technical analysis company, not a creative one.

With regards to your last point: I don't doubt that the vast majority of hiring processes aren't correlated with on-the-job success, but Google is definitely the kind of company that would strive for objective measures and to refine their process. They at least claim it's working. I think it was on the Stack Overflow podcast that I heard a discussion of Peter Norvig's remarks about this in Coders at Work. He evidently posted something similar online:

"Our interviews are more to do with practical problem solving, not with puzzles and tricks. Our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance: we are doing quite well at hiring the right people, we believe, and we work hard at analyzing the process. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process." http://www.mv-voice.com/square/index.php?i=3&d=&t=16...

It would be very interesting to know how Google measures on-the-job performance since you obviously can't talk about correlation without numbers backing it up. I seem to recall having read that on-the-job-performance is not as easily measurable than Norvig seems to imply but I guess that if they successfully managed to reach this Holy Grail they probably won't share the numbers, even less the methods.

Promotion at Google is based on peer feedback, so I'd guess that's what they use.

What's also important is that it was a phone screen: this also saved employees' time on interviewing the person and company's time on flying out, wining and dining the person.

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