This is the pre-screen, very likely conducted by a poorly-trained (or incompetent) recruiter. IIRC, there is a ton of room for response variety in the answers, and the screeners are trained to handle them (obv. very difficult to do well.)
The pre-screens are act as first-pass filters before the actual interviews (conducted by engineers.) Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process.
Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process.
Yes, and it's worth remembering that Google are the unfortunate casualty here. Being rejected as a false negative sucks as a candidate, but ultimately there are plenty more developer jobs around if you're actually good. As a business rejecting the right person could cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, mistakes, and bad PR.
Google believes the opposite, that hiring the wrong person could cost that if they have a negative impact on the teams they work in so they prefer false negatives over false positives.
The lawsuits happen because people don't have real savings due to high cost of living/lifestyle inflation and reliance on employer benefits. If losing your job wasn't such a potential death sentence, I think it would be easier to fire people.
It's hard to square that with the whole 10x engineer thing.
It is true that hiring a security risk could be more damaging than rejecting a super talent, but all companies have systems in place that should reduce impact of incompetence and manage out inadevertantly hired incompetent people, because no hiring proccess is perfect.
So about rejecting a super talent to avoid hiring an incompetent person. It seems that statistically, a minority of people produce a majority of the value. Google hires in bulk, and I doubt their Cal Tech manufactured Mc Engineers are all elite people, so I'd guess they have the same problem as anyone else.
That problem is hunting for these people who will drive your buisness forward. Like YC and startups, you need to hire a bunch of bad bets for the big payoff.
>It's hard to square that with the whole 10x engineer thing.
That's because Google doesn't particularly ascribe to this idea. With good infra, tooling, and environment (management, mentorship, etc.) anyone can be "10X".
>manage out inadevertantly hired incompetent people, because no hiring proccess is perfect.
I'm not sure I've ever met an engineer at Google who I would call incompetent. Certainly some who are less competent than me, certainly some who are more. Certainly some who have made singular technical decisions are think are wrong or bad, but none who are incompetent. The hiring process is the system you describe.
If they keep screening out A level candidates and are forced to hire C level candidates because they studied the prescreen questions and are the only group left. You will find competent employees but you are not getting the best anymore.
Why are A level candidates incapable of studying the questions?
Someone who's A level in my book knows how to get the tasks in front of them done. If half the steps to getting them done are beneath them, they do so anyway. If one of the steps is stupid political nonsense, they do so anyway. Someone who is amazing at hard technical problems and refuses to do anything else on principle is not a worthwhile hire.
That matches my observations from dealing with Googlers: So far I've met quite a few very nice and clever people and none that made me questions their competence. Quite the opposite.
That's totally fine. The problem is this way is a dumb way of doing it. Send out screener coding questions and have an engineer quickly review the responses rather than someone with a business degree that has no idea how to speak the same language an engineer would.
>this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process
I wouldn't call it a "false negative" if your recruiters are completely incapable of filtering correctly.
It's a false negative if someone has an off day. It is an error in your hiring process if it purposefully filters out people who get their hands dirty and can talk nuance.
They mean false negative from a statistics point of view, which is what this literally is (if we take the author's assumption that they're qualified at face value). A false negative is an error in the process.
madamelic is saying that the described interview process would select against qualified candidates because some of the items on the answer sheet are flat-out wrong.
Analogy would be if we were evaluating a blood-pressure drug, but our BP-measurement cuff was miss-calibrated and all readings were -10 from reality.
>This is the pre-screen, very likely conducted by a poorly-trained (or incompetent) recruiter.
Which is embarrassing. Their brand means that they can hire the best people. They have the money to hire the best people. There's literally nothing stopping them from hiring recruiters who have an ounce of competence except themselves.
It's not even like this can be blamed on the recruiter in question - they clearly have a systemic problem.
The pre-screens are act as first-pass filters before the actual interviews (conducted by engineers.) Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process.