Google has a secret candidate-finding technique
August 26, 2015 2:30 PM   Subscribe

"If Google sees that you're searching for specific programming terms, they'll ask you to apply for a job. It's wild." "I typed 'request; and half expected to see 'Follow the white rabbit, Max.' Instead, the screen displayed a paragraph outlining a programming challenge and gave instructions on how to submit my solution. I had 48 hours to solve it, and the timer was ticking."
posted by Mo Nickels (118 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Creepy, AND cool
posted by jl87 at 2:36 PM on August 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


The terms they searched for were "python lambda function list comprehension". That's like searching for "cake batter eggs flour salt sugar" and being offered a cooking job.
posted by Pyry at 2:38 PM on August 26, 2015 [61 favorites]


Seems more akin to being offered a cooking challenge which, if you complete, punts you to a recruiter and you go into a giant bin with a +1 on your resume.
posted by aramaic at 2:40 PM on August 26, 2015 [23 favorites]


Neat!
posted by brundlefly at 2:40 PM on August 26, 2015


That's like searching for "cake batter eggs flour salt sugar" and being offered a cooking job.

“You have five hours to deliver a baked cake (or brownies, or really anything containing chocolate because everyone in this office really likes chocolate).”
posted by D.C. at 2:42 PM on August 26, 2015 [27 favorites]


you go into a giant bin

And then you have 25 interviews where they ask you all those smartarse questions and then you get a job at an ad company that makes sundry other wildly unsuccessful things.
posted by colie at 2:42 PM on August 26, 2015 [46 favorites]


I bet they're going to see an uptick in searches for "python lambda function list comprehension" in the following days.
posted by Dr Dracator at 2:48 PM on August 26, 2015 [10 favorites]


This seems like something they use to find people coming out of school. For mid/senior people, they send you a million message on LinkedIn about wanting to "sync up with you for a quick chat to hear about the projects you’ve been working on lately" blah blah blah.

I actually need the reverse of this where the recruiters can't contact me unless their job opportunities pass some of my own hidden test cases.
posted by sideshow at 2:48 PM on August 26, 2015 [61 favorites]


Maybe some of these programmers can figure out how to make a search engine that actually searches for the thing I ask it to search for.
posted by Sys Rq at 2:50 PM on August 26, 2015 [27 favorites]


And all he'd wanted to look at were some videos of snakes eating dinner.
posted by dng at 2:58 PM on August 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Maybe some of these programmers can figure out how to make a search engine that actually searches for the thing I ask it to search for.

They can, but it's not profitable. Why is it now so hard to search for precise terms? Even if you enclose things in quotes they offer you alternatives. Why does search default to "last 15 years", and why does it actually exclude lots of things more recent than 15 years?

Google's algorithms and request language have been tweaked to encourage profitable searches, which means things like "what is a good car" rather than "(byzantium|byzantine|istanbul|constantinople) AND (icon OR ikon) AND heterodox". Google is less useful to me now than it was five years ago.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:01 PM on August 26, 2015 [106 favorites]


I actually need the reverse of this where the recruiters can't contact me unless their job opportunities pass some of my own hidden test cases.

I would pay for this service. So you'll never get funding for it - customers? pshaw!
posted by phearlez at 3:01 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


No, Google, no. The goal is to hire a more intellectually diverse developer corps, not just more people who thought The Matrix was really cool and don't find injecting invasive ads into your search terms super creepy.
posted by phooky at 3:02 PM on August 26, 2015 [9 favorites]


I don't imagine it's lost on Google that this is also a good way to screen for people who have no non-negotiable obligations like kids (to whom they are a primary caregiving parent), eldercare, health difficulties or anything else that would prevent them from dropping everything for 48 hours at a moment's notice. "Look, we offer the challenge to anyone searching on those terms. Is it our fault that women with small children never seem to apply?"
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:03 PM on August 26, 2015 [60 favorites]


an ad company that makes sundry other wildly unsuccessful things

I wouldn't call Android such a huge failure.
posted by The Bellman at 3:04 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


then you have 25 interviews where they ask you all those smartarse questions

FWIW, I heard on the radio that Google now considers their famous smartarse questions to be a failed approach to interviewing, and they don't do that anymore. No idea what they do now instead. Pit everyone into a dance-off?
posted by anonymisc at 3:04 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Google has a secret candidate-finding technique

Just Jeeves it!
posted by Fizz at 3:04 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is Google astroturfing to get me to turn off my adblocker.
posted by gwint at 3:05 PM on August 26, 2015 [8 favorites]


FWIW, I heard on the radio that Google now considers their famous smartarse questions to be a failed approach to interviewing, and doesn't do that anymore.

That's just a disinformation campaign to screen out the olds who still listen to the radio.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:06 PM on August 26, 2015 [9 favorites]


I don't imagine it's lost on Google that this is also a good way to screen for people who have no non-negotiable obligations like kids

Given that I know women they hired who were five months pregnant at the time of hire, and who then received twenty-four weeks of paid maternity time despite having been there for only four months, that's probably not what's driving their selection process.
posted by aramaic at 3:07 PM on August 26, 2015 [16 favorites]


Whoa, that was fast. Google just MeMailed an offer in their PsyOps division.
posted by gwint at 3:07 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


(wait, actually only one was five months, the other was only three)
posted by aramaic at 3:07 PM on August 26, 2015


...and revoked.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by gwint at 3:08 PM on August 26, 2015 [14 favorites]


John Gruber raises an excellent question about this:
It makes me wonder how much Google knows and tracks about queries from programmers at competing companies. Do companies like Apple have policies or recommended practices regarding what employees do with Google services?
If you looked at a list of Google queries from a certain company over a certain period, it seems that you could put together a pretty good portrait of what that company's working on.
posted by Ian A.T. at 3:10 PM on August 26, 2015 [44 favorites]


> GOOGLE GIVE JOB

nothing

> GOOGLE NOW JOB GIVE ME
> EMPLOYEE ME CHUMPERS

nope

Looks like they turned it off, whatever it is.
posted by boo_radley at 3:11 PM on August 26, 2015 [28 favorites]


...and revoked.

Or so you'd like us to think...
posted by anonymisc at 3:11 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


These are the days of lasers in the jungle, I tells ya.
posted by Nevin at 3:13 PM on August 26, 2015 [10 favorites]


If you looked at a list of Google queries from a certain company over a certain period, it seems that you could put together a pretty good portrait of what that company's working on.

I can just see the powerpoint now: Based on our analyses of 456 million searches in the past year, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, the federal government, Burger King, Chrysler, and Sony and the Duggar Family all seem to be working on getting into the porn industry. Breaking this down by industry and kink, we see that....
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:14 PM on August 26, 2015 [24 favorites]


Has anyone here replicated this? This isn't just a work of fiction?
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 3:17 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you looked at a list of Google queries from a certain company over a certain period, it seems that you could put together a pretty good portrait of what that company's working on.

They might have nothing on OS companies like Microsoft, which supplies the development platform and gets (or back in the day used to get?) data every time an application crashed... which means they get a constant steam of data from every project anyone is making. (Or so it was assumed at some high profile companies. No-one really cared though - they trusted that MS would have safeguards against digging its own grave)
posted by anonymisc at 3:18 PM on August 26, 2015


okay but where's the arcade machine where if you're good enough at it you get offered a job commanding a real space fleet, huh?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:18 PM on August 26, 2015 [49 favorites]


>"(byzantium|byzantine|istanbul|constantinople) AND (icon OR ikon) AND heterodox"

Are there any search engines that let you get this specific anymore? Is the old google still around anywhere?
posted by DGStieber at 3:18 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


It makes me wonder how much Google knows and tracks about queries from programmers at competing companies. Do companies like Apple have policies or recommended practices regarding what employees do with Google services?

Definitely creepy. It confirms my suspicions about why recruiters never relinquish any details about open positions in their emails.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 3:21 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I wouldn't call Android such a huge failure.

Google bought the company Android Inc that did the original development in 2005.

(but it's a good thing that they are not stuck in a "not invented here" syndrome like most of the industry)
posted by sammyo at 3:22 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


FWIW, I heard on the radio that Google now considers their famous smartarse questions to be a failed approach to interviewing, and they don't do that anymore. No idea what they do now instead. Pit everyone into a dance-off?

These days, at least in Engineering, they ask questions related to the actual job of software engineering. Source: I am a Google employee who interviews people.
posted by Itaxpica at 3:24 PM on August 26, 2015 [17 favorites]


If you looked at a list of Google queries from a certain company over a certain period, it seems that you could put together a pretty good portrait of what that company's working on.

By this logic, StackOverflow admins know everything that's going on inside Google.

And heck, maybe they do.
posted by GuyZero at 3:25 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


Are there any search engines that let you get this specific anymore?

try duckduckgo
posted by sammyo at 3:25 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't imagine it's lost on Google that this is also a good way to screen for people who have no non-negotiable obligations like kids

This was one guy. Google hires hundreds of people every week and they probably interview 100x that. Whatever el goog's problems are, some teaser problems are not the biggest ones.
posted by GuyZero at 3:27 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's worth mentioning, wrt interviews, that the Powers that Be very much try to be driven by data about what does and doesn't work. Brain teaser questions were a major part of the hiring process for a while, but they were found not to work, so now we don't ask them. Another example is undergrad GPA: Google used to be notorious for asking for GPA for everyone and giving it a lot of weight, even for people who had been in industry for decades. Recently, looking back at all that data, the hiring team has found that undergrad GPA wasn't all that useful a signal for anyone other than folks a year or two out of school, so now it's given way less weight. They're very much at least trying to get this stuff right.
posted by Itaxpica at 3:28 PM on August 26, 2015 [11 favorites]


What I wonder is why this guy is telling people about this? I'm surprised el good didn't ask him to STFU about it.
posted by GuyZero at 3:29 PM on August 26, 2015


boolean AND ("for the win" OR ftw) AND NOT google
posted by leotrotsky at 3:30 PM on August 26, 2015


> GOOGLE GIVE JOB

nothing
You forgot the "sudo".
posted by Rangi at 3:32 PM on August 26, 2015 [22 favorites]


okay but where's the arcade machine where if you're good enough at it you get offered a job commanding a real space fleet, huh?

Close, but it's right here.
posted by resurrexit at 3:33 PM on August 26, 2015


This was one guy. Google hires hundreds of people every week and they probably interview 100x that.

Yes, this is one guy. I'm not talking about this one guy. And you cannot seriously imagine that Google set all this up, hired one guy and then shut it down.

I'm talking about recruitment methods. Disparate impact at the recruitment stage, that is whether recruitment methods get qualified people from under-represented or disadvantaged groups to apply explain a huge portion of the variance when you study workplace segregation. Companies recruit by particular methods and don't realize (or do) that some kinds of qualified applicants are less likely to learn of the opportunity to apply or less likely to apply by those methods. Organizations want to say that they can't hire people who don't apply and it's not their fault if some kinds of people don't apply, but who applies is structured by how you recruit and they do control that.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:36 PM on August 26, 2015 [9 favorites]


And don't tell me, given all the data analysis that itaxpica is describing, that Google doesn't know how the applicant streams from different recruitment sources vary, both in their demographics and in their "commitment."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:38 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


I just tried the "byzantium|byzantine|istanbul|constantinople) AND (icon OR ikon) AND heterodox" search on Google and DuckDuckGo. Google's answers weren't bad, but DDG's were a lot more on-target. But here's the interesting thing: the second answer Google provided came from this thread, specifically DGStieber's comment posted twenty-five minutes ago.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:44 PM on August 26, 2015 [17 favorites]


And don't tell me, given all the data analysis that itaxpica is describing, that Google doesn't know how the applicant streams from different recruitment sources vary, both in their demographics and in their "commitment."

Maybe as opposed to making stuff up, you could actually check whether or not GOOG does anything that would help.

Google to donate $190K to train black, Latino teen girls in computer programming

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to increase the number of women in engineering, we are excited to offer travel grants to the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference

Google launches Hispanic coding initiative in eight US cities

So in summary, Google recruiting is a land of contrasts.
posted by GuyZero at 3:44 PM on August 26, 2015 [11 favorites]


python lambda function list comprehension

I'm rather surprised I haven't searched for that yet, I always forget list comprehension syntax.
posted by JHarris at 3:46 PM on August 26, 2015


Just don't let them put pepper in your soup without tasting it first.
posted by Chuffy at 3:46 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


One question I have is whether it helps Google to restrict this at all (in this case, to people doing searches with interesting terms). Do the search terms have any valuable predictive ability as far as final hiring outcome?

What if they advertised google.com/hiring, where anyone could go and do the same automated programming exercises? Or you could even make the exercises harder, so that even though more people attempt them you end up with the same number of completed sets, with presumably higher quality candidates? (Higher quality in Google's eyes, since while we can argue about whether programming exercises measure ability, it seems Google has already decided that they do, to at least some extent.)
posted by jjwiseman at 3:47 PM on August 26, 2015


GuyZero: That's great...how does it contradict anything I said?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:50 PM on August 26, 2015


> sudo make me a producer
posted by boo_radley at 3:55 PM on August 26, 2015


Do the search terms have any valuable predictive ability as far as final hiring outcome?

Like everything else in life this stuff is all just a game. If you happen to get to the end of this game you go to the next game which starts with getting turned down for an apartment in Palo Alto because the landlords can do better than someone making only $150k a year.
posted by MillMan at 3:55 PM on August 26, 2015 [7 favorites]


Disparate impact at the recruitment stage, that is whether recruitment methods get qualified people from under-represented or disadvantaged groups to apply explain a huge portion of the variance when you study workplace segregation.

It seems to me that this example of pro-actively recruiting kids who are self-teaching themselves from home (in contrast to traditional recruiting of students attending expensive universities) is exactly the kind of go-and-and-find-under-represented-or-disadvantaged-groups innovative recruiting that should be applauded. That this particular method will miss other types of potential candidates means that it should not be the only tool in the box, but clearly it isn't the only tool in the box.
posted by anonymisc at 3:58 PM on August 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Like everything else in life this stuff is all just a game. If you happen to get to the end of this game you go to the next game which starts with getting turned down for an apartment in Palo Alto because the landlords can do better than someone making only $150k a year.

Ouch. The truth really hurts.

(Menlo Park is now unaffordable because Facebook)
posted by Chuffy at 3:58 PM on August 26, 2015


Yeah, I stumbled on that super secret interview page a few months ago. I thought about filling it out but there was a time limit and I was too busy. But it's not like getting that quiz right gets you much, you still have to go through the Google interview process and out of the twenty or thirty friends that have gone through that only a handful have actually gotten jobs there.
posted by octothorpe at 3:59 PM on August 26, 2015


GuyZero: That's great...how does it contradict anything I said?

I feel like you were implying that GOOG was somehow blind to the bias in this particular channel for recruiting candidates. My point is that there are lots of channels used for recruiting and they're all biased to some degree so it seems like a needlessly antagonistic comment.

But if your only point was that this sourcing method has biases, then sure, of course it does. Collecting resumes at the Grace Hopper conference is biased too.
posted by GuyZero at 3:59 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


This algorithm must be pretty random or something. In my years of searching programming terms, I've never received that prompt.

I managed to sneak in via a link someone shared a while ago, which didn't check if you actually were a candidate picked by google's algorithm, or just some random schmuck with a link. I got through a few levels but then ran out of time and got kicked out of the "contest".
posted by ymgve at 4:03 PM on August 26, 2015


> One question I have is whether it helps Google to restrict this at all (in this case, to people doing searches with interesting terms). Do the search terms have any valuable predictive ability as far as final hiring outcome?

Well, I don't know that it's intentional, but as phooky pointed out, it'll select for people who don't find Google's mission [ie: stalker-like analysis of people's online behavior for the purpose of injecting invasive personalized ads] creepy as hell.
posted by Westringia F. at 4:04 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


(byzantium|byzantine|istanbul|constantinople) AND (icon OR ikon) AND heterodox
Google suggests "Did you mean: (byzantium|byzantium|istanbul|constantinople) AND (ikon OR ikon) AND heterodox". No, I did not mean, I don't need the "correct"/popular spellings repeated. On the other hand, they've already indexed this very thread, which comes up as the second result.

DuckDuckGo gives some decent results; their first one is Google's third (after this PDF and this thread). I can't tell if they're more relevant than Google.

Bing just says "No results found", as does Yahoo. Why did I even bother?

Startpage (anonymized Google results) gives the same results as Google, of course, but without this Metafilter thread. Looks like it came up because I'm logged into Google and they know I read Metafilter. Useful or invasive, depending on your point of view (and on what you're searching for).
posted by Rangi at 4:07 PM on August 26, 2015


I have already memorized the URLs to python's list comprehension and lambda function documentation pages, and so I was not offered a job by Google. Bummer.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:08 PM on August 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


> sudo imagetag shocked face
posted by Carillon at 4:18 PM on August 26, 2015


. . . damn.
posted by Carillon at 4:18 PM on August 26, 2015


resurrexit: Racecars are not space fleets. Your argument is invalid.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:18 PM on August 26, 2015


GuyZero/Anonymisc, I think the main reason I don't see that as a contradiction of what I said is that none of those are examples of recruitment, unless I missed something, which I admit is possible because I scanned the articles quickly. Also, I read those primarily as being about demographic under-representation and less about being demanding with regards to "commitment" and life circumstances, though anonymisc made a good point about this getting people who are self-taught and so possibly in more trying life circumstances than people at elite engineering schools. Though again, these don't seem to be actual recruitment efforts.

And yeah, pretty much every recruitment method is biased, though some way more than others. It also gets my goat a little because this is an example of recruiting non-searchers, which are already a category of applicants that tends to be more biased. Collecting resumes at any conference is pretty high up there in the how-biased-is-it-scale, too, but it's so efficient that it's difficult to imagine that would ever go away, and given that (like the google puzzle) it's not primarily biased in ways that are likely to be illegal, there' would be no incentive to change it, anyway.

But anyway, my point wasn't that they are blind to it but that they are probably not blind to it. From an organizational point of view, the fewer competing commitments a person has, the better, and a person who can drop everything to do puzzles probably has fewer commitments than a person who can't. See: "Yeah, I stumbled on that super secret interview page a few months ago. I thought about filling it out but there was a time limit and I was too busy."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:23 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


[ PHP WHY NO WORK ESCAPE TAGS HTTPD.CONF ]

Hey, Facebook offered me a job!
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:28 PM on August 26, 2015 [11 favorites]


Unfortunately for Google, all the Objective-C developers have fuckingblocksyntax.com bookmarked.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 4:33 PM on August 26, 2015 [8 favorites]


Years and years ago searching for obscure SWISH++ fulltext indexing syntax resulted in a side google recruitment ad.
posted by benzenedream at 4:35 PM on August 26, 2015


And boy oh boy does the search-term lottery aspect underscore how much of one's professional achievement is just dumb fucking luck. It's almost artfully satirical: Take that, American Dreamers with visions of Google! You can bootstrap a compiler, but your future is stochastic.
posted by Westringia F. at 4:35 PM on August 26, 2015 [15 favorites]


It's worth mentioning, wrt interviews, that the Powers that Be very much try to be driven by data about what does and doesn't work.

That's really cool, and I'm glad to hear it. As someone who has done a lot of hiring (interviews, designing interviews, selection committees, etc.) it's always really frustrating to have the whole process driven off of anecdotes. Even at some large companies that's really all that's behind the process; you might have an HR department screening for resume keywords, and then the department itself gets to do the final interview, based more often than not on whether a candidate seems similar to other candidates who have done well. But there's no guarantee that the characteristics in question are actually predictive; hell, I've wondered at times if the whole interview process is really any good. But nobody has much in the way of better alternatives. (Well, there are those people who advocate "test driving" employees as a sort of extended weeklong interview, which I think is pretty crappy, but aside from that it's pretty thin.)

The odd part is that even at companies large enough to put together a fairly large corpus of data, they often don't track employees after hiring to see how various pre-hire indicators panned out. I don't know why, exactly, since I've yet to find an organization that didn't think that recruiting the right people was a challenge, but there's never much follow through. (Maybe it's a liability thing, or maybe it's just a too-slow-ROI issue; I've never gotten a straight answer. But no HR department that I've dealt with with the capability of tracking that stuff has ever wanted to, and the companies with the interest in doing it are too small to have the data.) If anybody can do it, I'd think it's Google.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:36 PM on August 26, 2015


Advice: don't bookmark helpful sites if you want a job with Google.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:50 PM on August 26, 2015


The odd part is that even at companies large enough to put together a fairly large corpus of data, they often don't track employees after hiring to see how various pre-hire indicators panned out.

Google did exactly that. They were shocked by the lack of correlation between interview scores and subsequent success at Google. They even considered hiring some random people who failed the interview process to see how they would do.

Source: I used to work at Google.
posted by w0mbat at 4:54 PM on August 26, 2015 [10 favorites]


They even considered hiring some random people who failed the interview process to see how they would do.

Which led to rounds of those suffering from imposter syndrome asking "WAS I THE CONTROL GROUP?"
posted by GuyZero at 5:01 PM on August 26, 2015 [14 favorites]



Unfortunately for Google, all the Objective-C developers have fuckingblocksyntax.com bookmarked.


And most of them are only keeping ObjC in a holding pattern while they retool for Swift.
posted by acb at 5:07 PM on August 26, 2015


W0mbat - I'm really, really interested in that story. Do you know if a) it's written down in public anywhere and b) whether they ever did hire people who'd scored badly as a control?
posted by cromagnon at 5:41 PM on August 26, 2015


The big software companies put a lot into recruitment. I was pretty astonished when places like Google and Facebook started hitting me up through my entirely disused LinkedIn profile given that I was less than two years into a software career and distinguished by nothing but having gone to a good school (that a lot of people in the area have also gone to). I thought they must just interview everybody to find overlooked talent, plus I had a pet hypothesis that my current employer's name sounded like something much more impressive than it actually is. But maybe they liked that I read stuff about programming languages?

(I don't work at Google. Made it to the on-site at least.)
posted by atoxyl at 5:47 PM on August 26, 2015


Why is it now so hard to search for precise terms?

You need to select the "verbatim search" option, even with quotes, to make them not be helpful and rewrite your query. You can do this manually (do the search, click on 'search tools', toggle 'all results' to 'verbatim') or do some setup / plugin magic to make it the default (which just means adding '&tbs=li:1' to the url).

Without verbatim

With verbatim

How to make verbatim the default.
posted by zippy at 6:01 PM on August 26, 2015 [27 favorites]



Google's algorithms and request language have been tweaked to encourage profitable searches


Not exactly. They've been tweaked to encourage fast searches. The reason they rewrite your search terms is that they can return the rewritten ones a hell of a lot faster than if they have to run your search from scratch. And for most people, the rewritten terms are fine.
posted by asterix at 6:08 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Raise your hand if you are "most people"
posted by Wolfdog at 6:21 PM on August 26, 2015


"(byzantium|byzantine|istanbul|constantinople) AND (icon OR ikon) AND heterodox"

I tried that search. This thread is the top result.
posted by thelonius at 6:25 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Joe in Australia: "Maybe some of these programmers can figure out how to make a search engine that actually searches for the thing I ask it to search for.

They can, but it's not profitable. Why is it now so hard to search for precise terms? Even if you enclose things in quotes they offer you alternatives...

Google's algorithms and request language have been tweaked to encourage profitable searches, which means things like "what is a good car" rather than "(byzantium|byzantine|istanbul|constantinople) AND (icon OR ikon) AND heterodox""


I dunno - I was able to find this thread with your query! *sigh*

I totally agree with you on that though.
posted by symbioid at 6:29 PM on August 26, 2015


Damnit Thelonius!
posted by symbioid at 6:29 PM on August 26, 2015


Guess I learned my python too early. I'm pretty sure I googled that exact phrase back when I felt like I had to use every language feature imaginable. However, unless I'm misunderstanding what is meant by list comprehension syntax, I'm not sure why someone would ever forget. It, unlike making iterators and generators or even using decorators, is a basic language feature. (That is sometimes the slow way of doing certain tasks, sadly, since list comprehensions are elegantly concise)

A basic iterator or generator is easy enough to remember how to write even if you only occasionally use Python, but actually fully implementing them is where it gets a bit harder to remember for me. It's actually kind of nice that a half implemented one will work fine if that is all you really need
posted by wierdo at 6:33 PM on August 26, 2015


the hiring team has found that undergrad GPA wasn't all that useful a signal for anyone other than folks a year or two out of school

Can Google somehow get this information out to all those hiring managers still asking dumb questions?

I'm still pissed about being queried about my GPA and SAT score for a senior-level software position, when everybody knows the only people who remembered their SAT score were those who peaked in high school.
posted by meowzilla at 6:47 PM on August 26, 2015


> array length in labview c++ python java javascript jsp c# haskell vb

Yeah, Google's not going to hire me based on my searches.
posted by underflow at 6:47 PM on August 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


At my high school, two of the three national merit scholars were also the biggest Deadheads. I'd put fair odds on their peaking during the SATs.
posted by zippy at 6:50 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


I hope that playing those Google Santa games will qualify me for some sort of fancy job, kinda like The Last Starfighter.
posted by dr_dank at 7:34 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


Really doubt this is just based on search terms - they have IP, cookies, probably a Google account and all info attached to work from, and the search terms would just be the trigger.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 7:37 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


And most of them are only keeping ObjC in a holding pattern while they retool for Swift.

I wish. Swift is way better now then when Apple introduced it in its natal pre-alpha crash-all-the-time stage last year, but it's still not quiiiiiiite ready for prime time.

Plus, hey, Obj-C has grown on me! Like a mold.
posted by Itaxpica at 8:17 PM on August 26, 2015


cromagnon, it may be from Lazlo Bock's book "Work Rules!" but after a quick search through my copy I didn't see that specific anecdote.
posted by GuyZero at 8:42 PM on August 26, 2015


One interesting thing I did learn from Work Rules! is that the programming challenges on billboards and the sides of busses and so forth that they used to do netted Google exactly zero hires. This seems like a variation of exactly the same thing, so I wonder what makes this different? (My guess: some engineer's fun side project that is cheap to launch.)
posted by phoenixy at 9:04 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


sideshow -- I have that. Google hasn't figured the hidden tests out yet.
posted by joeyh at 9:33 PM on August 26, 2015


"Jeeves it" says Fizz, above. Good idea. The returns include the WSJ article How to Ace a Google Interview
posted by Schroder at 11:46 PM on August 26, 2015


I still like google's approach to searching. When you get down to it, most people, and I include myself, are quite lazy when they google things. They want google to read their intention for them. This was the problem with Ask Jeeves, which suggested in it's name that you should phrase your search as a question, despite this being a terrible idea. Now Google will actually do pretty well if you ask it a question, because it's adopted to how humans search for things, rather than try and get humans do adopt best practices while searching. Obviously this excludes people who actually know best practice, and want to use it in their searches, but for most people it will work well most of the time.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:29 AM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


These days, at least in [Google] Engineering, they ask questions related to the actual job of software engineering.

That's true, but I do kind of wonder about the types of question they ask. Like, yes, you do have to write algorithms to walk over an acyclical directed graph from time to time, but I've been in industry for ten years, and actual algorithmically difficult code is something I do maaaaybe once a year. 99% of the job is design patterns, maintainability, and testing your damned code. Only asking candidates tricky things about recursion is sort of like asking about the ignition timing on a 1955 Bel Air Chevrolet with a 327 cubic-inch engine. Sure, you get to feel like you're only hiring "smart" people (whatever that means), but knowing that Chevy didn't make a 327 in 1955 doesn't mean you can rebuild the carburetor.

Source: bitter developer who just got turned down at Google
posted by Mayor West at 5:51 AM on August 27, 2015 [9 favorites]


"There is no way that these tire marks were made by a 1964 Buick Skylark. These marks were made by a 1963 Pontiac Tempest."
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:56 AM on August 27, 2015


So, I guess this must filter out all of the Scala and Perl developers...
posted by schmod at 7:05 AM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Swift is way better now then when Apple introduced it in its natal pre-alpha crash-all-the-time stage last year, but it's still not quiiiiiiite ready for prime time.

There are apps in the App Store that say otherwise. And older apps in which all new parts of the codebase are written in Swift.
posted by acb at 7:18 AM on August 27, 2015


werido They could be specifically recruiting entry level. Then they get to mentor them through the formative parts of their career. The could be trying to get hires before they have had a chance to form bad habits and get lazy. "Oh since I didn't do a good job on the design I'll just write the unit tests this with decorators."
posted by bdc34 at 7:24 AM on August 27, 2015


snuffleupagus: ""There is no way that these tire marks were made by a 1964 Buick Skylark. These marks were made by a 1963 Pontiac Tempest.""

Nice try, but the '63 Tempest didn't have tires. We'll be in touch, thank you for your time.
posted by boo_radley at 8:16 AM on August 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


What I think "foo.bar" really tests is willingness to jump through elaborate hoops for an otherwise uncompensated, slim chance at just getting a job interview. My problem with it is the same problem I have with ARGs; it feels blasphemous to set some arbitrary goal for random people to meet and expect them to try to meet it. Actually going through this process, willingly, feels... sycophantic? Especially since the whole system takes several days to do, wow.
posted by JHarris at 10:16 AM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


So, I guess this must filter out all of the Scala and Perl developers...

Yes, it does. Why shouldn't it? Google doesn't need Scala and Perl developers. It has a small list of official languages (C++, Java, Python, JS, Go, Obj-C for iOS development) that are used for all development in the company, and between them they cover experience that 90% of programmers have. If you've never worked in any of them, why should Google want to hire you? The same is true in reverse: I've never worked in Scala; I wouldn't expect a company that did 100% of its work in Scala to go out of its way to recruit me just because.
posted by Itaxpica at 10:50 AM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't imagine it's lost on Google that this is also a good way to screen for people who have no non-negotiable obligations like kids (to whom they are a primary caregiving parent), eldercare, health difficulties or anything else that would prevent them from dropping everything for 48 hours at a moment's notice. "Look, we offer the challenge to anyone searching on those terms. Is it our fault that women with small children never seem to apply?"

Seriously, I think one of these popped up when I searched and my immediate reaction was "neat" but then it said 48 hours and I then I realized I had no free time in the next 48 hours...

Also I don't know python, but had to fix someone else's script, which is why I was googling either "python map inject" or "python lambda" or something (coming from ruby) in the first place. It was a pretty basic search term to target so it seems like maybe they missed their mark w/ me.

Although I can still navigate to google.com/foobar and log in; probably anyone can with a google account?
posted by czytm at 10:56 AM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


That's true, but I do kind of wonder about the types of question they ask. Like, yes, you do have to write algorithms to walk over an acyclical directed graph from time to time, but I've been in industry for ten years, and actual algorithmically difficult code is something I do maaaaybe once a year.

That is generally my take on algorithm-heavy interview questions, too (I bet 90% of the code I write is essentially linear scans over arrays/sequences or doing stuff with hash tables), but there are situations where that sort of knowledge is needed or certainly helpful, and Google is one of those rare places.

I've heard people say that Google's internal, proprietary infrastructure and systems are 5-10 years ahead of the rest of the industry (having worked inside and outside Google, that seems plausible to me)--and building systems like that requires pretty much the kind of hardcore engineering that they're testing candidates on.

Not every software engineer at Google is working on novel engineering problems, of course, but many are, and I know they like having a pretty high bar for all candidates.
posted by jjwiseman at 11:01 AM on August 27, 2015


*raises hand*
posted by joannemerriam at 11:29 AM on August 27, 2015


Why is it now so hard to search for precise terms?

>How to make verbatim the default.

I clicked on that link and google helpfully translated the content into Greek, making it nonsensical in the process. So nice to be catered for.

Hint: systrans sucks.
posted by ersatz at 1:09 PM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Actually going through this process, willingly, feels... sycophantic? Especially since the whole system takes several days to do, wow.

I don't really agree, because if you don't care for this highly unusual process, you apply the usual way. But if you're a someone who is self-teaching, then stumbling onto high-quality challenges is not like hoops you have to jump though, it's more like being offered an unexpected new dimension to help you, with an added excitement of mysteriousness that a textbook doesn't provide. As I read it, a job interview was never being dangled as the prize - it was not mentioned or suggested until after you ran out of challenges. The only "prize" as far as the learner is aware is completing a challenge and getting a new one. I really can't imagine that failing to complete those challenges or snubbing them entirely can be held against you if you happened to decide to apply for a job the regular way.
posted by anonymisc at 1:37 PM on August 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


"Jeeves it" says Fizz, above. Good idea. The returns include the WSJ article How to Ace a Google Interview
posted by Schroder

From the article:

"You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?"


I think my answer would be, "I look for the cake nearby that says, 'Eat Me,' and I show it to you, pointing at the words..."
posted by Chuffy at 1:44 PM on August 27, 2015


Actually going through this process, willingly, feels... sycophantic? Especially since the whole system takes several days to do, wow.

Some people have a track record, some people don't.

If you have time and talent but no track record, this is not the worst possible process.

If you have a track record and not as much time, send a resume. It's not like resumes have somehow gone away here.
posted by GuyZero at 1:53 PM on August 27, 2015


Yo dawg we heard you like lambda functions so we gave you a test in a test that's not an offer in Mtn View in person it expires in ten minutes oh snap not impressed why did you bother have you tried Bing?
posted by krinklyfig at 3:45 PM on August 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


Google doesn't need Scala and Perl developers. It has a small list of official languages (C++, Java, Python, JS, Go, Obj-C for iOS development) that are used for all development in the company, and between them they cover experience that 90% of programmers have.

It used to be Python/C++/Java, though in reality, it seems to have switched mostly to Java in recent years. I suspect that it's the human-resources equivalent of Google's hardware-procurement philosophy; just as they started the Googleplex by buying generic Intel motherboards and installing Linux on them (because they're cheap in volume and the bang/buck ratio is higher), they retooled on Java because the bulk of CS graduates know mostly Java, and finding the best developers in the tide of Java-skilled grads had a better bang/buck ratio than picking through the highly opinionated Haskell/Erlang/Python wonks (and also would lead to more malleable programmers). Hence Google do everything they can in Java, even having developed a tool (GWT) which compiles Java into JavaScript for web UIs.

One might think that Scala would be in with a chance (it runs on the JVM, can leverage Java libraries and can do Haskell-style fully functional programming (scalaz) and Erlang-style agent-oriented programming (Akka)), but Google's approach seems to be the opposite way; rather than allowing the virtuosi to show off, Google's latest thinking (with Go) seems to be about turning programming into a more regulated, assembly-line process, where there isn't any room for artisanal flair and the human resources on the team are more or less interchangeable units of labour. Languages like Scala (and probably Swift as well) could allow too much disparity and disharmony for a regulated industrial process.
posted by acb at 3:45 AM on August 28, 2015


Having worked on a large-scale Go project at Google, my experience is entirely alien to that. It's not about creating programmer automata, it's about the fact that most of the things that are clever or fun in a small-scale project cause all kinds of chaos in large projects. There's still plenty of room for creativity and skill (if there wasn't, engineers wouldn't be paid so damn much), but with some of the nastier edges sanded off. This is a good thing. The "virtuoso" hack that you wrote today tends to become the nightmare bug that I have to untangle in six months. Go is designed to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot in the ways that people most commonly shoot themselves in the foot, and there's a tremendous value to that. And honestly, the real-world distinctions between Go and Swift are so tiny as to be the very definition of the narcissism of small differences. The only really big one I can think of is generics (which, yeah, Go fucked up on).

I haven't used Scala in a few years now, but does it still take a geologic age for the tiniest of compilations to go through?
posted by Itaxpica at 7:22 AM on August 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Google's latest thinking (with Go) seems to be about turning programming into a more regulated, assembly-line process, where there isn't any room for artisanal flair and the human resources on the team are more or less interchangeable units of labour. Languages like Scala (and probably Swift as well) could allow too much disparity and disharmony for a regulated industrial process.

As a QA engineer, I'd be very happy if developers saved their "oh, so clever " creative code for their personal github projects and just coded to the house style at work.
posted by octothorpe at 7:46 AM on August 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


It doesn't sound like somewhere I want to work (though in fairness that described 98% of places) but as someone who has been in the software business for 20+ years - that sounds like a pretty brilliant and desperately-needed-by-our-industry approach to me.
posted by phearlez at 8:08 AM on August 28, 2015


Hence Google do everything they can in Java, even having developed a tool (GWT) which compiles Java into JavaScript for web UIs.

I'm not even a web developer and even I have heard of Angular.
posted by GuyZero at 9:12 AM on August 28, 2015


Hint: systrans sucks

Google dumped systran 8 years ago.

in reality, it seems to have switched mostly to Java in recent years

It's been a few years since I've been at Google, but when I got there I was surprised at how basically all the most critical code and big systems were in C++ (except, say, most of YouTube) and I would be surprised if that weren't still the case now.
posted by jjwiseman at 10:47 AM on August 28, 2015


From my time working there I remember Google's main use of Java being the Ad system, and the various Android apps.

The Google Video web front end was in Java (back when it was a video upload site), but that's a thing of the past now.
posted by w0mbat at 1:13 PM on August 28, 2015


I haven't used Scala in a few years now, but does it still take a geologic age for the tiniest of compilations to go through?

I last used it earlier this year, on a 2014-vintage MacBook Pro, and it wasn't a noticeably long process.
posted by acb at 3:27 PM on August 28, 2015


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