Etsy Eng (Etsy Engineering)
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2016–2025
1:00:25 · 713K views · May 21, 2014
Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.
Linked often in hiring-process threads for the anecdote about Google's committee refusing to hire itself, as evidence interviews are noisy.
12 comments from Hacker News
I like this video: this video The speaker formerly worked at Google, and around 8:55 in the video relates the story of being on a hiring committee that was known for being tough on candidates. And a recruiter once forwarded a set of interview packets to them, and they voted "no hire" on all of them. The recruiter then revealed to the committee that they'd been given their own packets, slightly anonymized, from when they were interviewed, and had just voted against hiring themselves.
As someone who interviews and hires engineers I'm not even remotely convinced live code exercises lead to better hiring than any other signal such as a CS degree. I remember when the the coding horror fizz buzz article came out and honestly things have just gotten worse since then. I always like to link the talk where the speaker mentions google hiring committee refused to hire themselves [0]. I suggest that this outcome isn't rare. [0] this video
Like with any BigCo, there are always bad apples (recruiters) and things slip through cracks. But compared to other similar sized companies, Google is quite focused on improving their interview processes. You can find lots of resources online from Google employees explaining it. The one I found very enlightening is from Moishe Lettvin given at Etsy: this video My own personal experience couple of years ago was good. I failed the interview though.
I think this is half the problem when people interview at FAANGs -- they think it's like preparing for olympics and you truly have to be in the top 1%. It's really not. There's thousands and thousands of engineers, from mediocre to truly great. With the right preparation, a lot of it just comes down to getting lucky with who interviews, how they're feeling that day, etc -- luck. You might find this interesting: this video
I've been doing this awhile, and I've seen hiring work really well without the LeetCode grilling. And I've almost always seen the LeetCode grilling be administered by someone who doesn't know what they're doing (and often also tainted with ego, despite the strange claim of some that a LeetCode grilling is objective). That said, if you're sourcing random people, good luck, it's a flood of LeetCode gamers to wade through, and too much of your staff interviewing them might also be LeetCode gamers with no experience doing non-LeetCode interviews. > Edit: BTW, where did you see Google saying their interview process doesn’t work? I have a bunch of notes on Google hiring I'd have to dig through, but the first link quick at hand is this retrospective by a hiring committee person who left (and I have a note about 8m50s being a funny story of the hiring committee realizing that they would've rejected their own packets): this video (IIRC, I don't agree with all the beliefs he still holds, but he calls out a lot of problems they found.)