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Comment by sown | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of it is legacy.

Google said early on they want to hire the best and brightest and that was the most important. We got the mantra that passing over a good person is better than hiring a bad one. And they were right. But they're a huge company now. They, and other gigantic tech companies are always complaining they can't find 'good people'.

But how do you make this philosophy scale? Do you say, "This person is smart but lacking some skills so we'll invest in them"?

I have no idea. :(

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Smart people will learn what they need to to do a job if they're interested in it.

Google has decided that the only way to tell if someone is smart is by asking academic questions.

Even though anyone with half a brain knows that there are other ways to gauge how smart a person is... such as experience.

Does anyone really think Max can't look up how to invert a binary tree if he needs to do that? He obviously knows how to read and learn. So why is that a reason to reject someone?

Google is filled with smart people.. but their interview process is pretty stupid.

> Google is filled with smart people.. but their interview process is pretty stupid.

My guess is that they're unable or unwilling to improve the process but they don't really have to since they're deluged with candidates.

"Our current interview process managed to hire me.

I think I'm really smart.

Therefore, our current interview process manages to hire really smart people. Why change it?"

> Google is filled with smart people.. but their interview process is pretty stupid.

Google is filled with people who can solve Data Structure / Algorithm questions in 50 minutes on a whiteboard. Their interview process selects for people whose past experiences led them to being able to solve Data Structure / Algorithm questions in 50 minutes on a whiteboard.

The extent to which solving Data Structure / Algorithm questions in 50 minutes has anything to do with building maintainable production software, developing talent, a good working environment, or even this mysterious concept known as "being smart" is up for debate.

> Google is filled with people who can solve Data Structure / Algorithm questions in 50 minutes on a whiteboard.

I wonder about that, actually. I mean sure, right after they're hired, I bet they're GREAT at doing whiteboard problems. But then after a few years of real work, I bet they've coded about as many algorithms from scratch as the guy from Unknown, Inc. (which is approximately two) and they probably wouldn't even pass another Google interview without a boatload of practice.

> The gigantic tech companies are always complaining they can't find 'good people'.

The "can't find good people" argument can usually be solved either 1) raising the pay, or 2) increasing the labor pool (i.e. H1B, etc). Raising the pay is what is done in finance because it's harder to make the argument that the required "skills" are lacking in the labor pool. To enter investment banking, and then private equity, it often only requires a B.A. in French literature and willingness to work 90 hours.

The "supply problem of engineers" is the great lie of our industry of our time.

I guarantee if dev positions paid as much as medicine or ibanking you'd have more devs. Not necessarily really good devs, but certainly people who pass the Ivy + 1600 SAT sniff test and can memorize the SAT book of Google interview questions.

They'll do it when they start to care more about how much their employees cost. Screening too narrowly drives up the price.

I wonder about that. What percentage of their employees are recent college graduates? From all of these anecdotes, it seems like their process is optimized to select cheap recent CS grads.

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