You try to help them relax, but you don't have much time, and the whole thing is just so unnatural.
Other places I've since been at, and interviewed with, give you a laptop, a problem to solve, and some time. You can focus on the problem instead of the situation much better, and I think that really helps. As an interviewer, it also helps keep some distance from the interviewer. It's too easy to try to micromanage the interview and keep the candidate uneasy. But there's a natural "don't interrupt someone when working" instinct that keeps interviewers more distant when the candidate's programming.
Coderpads on video conference, I think, are pretty good when the candidate has a good space to work in. They're in comfortable territory and you can see them by their keystrokes. The interviewer feels like they're getting more accurate data about how the candidate really operates. I just wish it could do keyboard shortcuts better -- emacs users like me hate seeing Ctrl-N bring up a new window.
The issue of IDE/compiler/keyboard/keybindings is also there, but that's easier to work with.
The problem is this isn't what gets you the smartest people on the planet. A small number might be interested in DS&A to that level, but most are not. They will learn enough to know how to google what they need and move on to what they are interested in. Smart people are constantly getting job offers from coworkers and bosses who move to other companies if they don't start their own.
The few smart people who do put in the effort necessary to go to the FAANG companies always leave after getting the golden sticker on their resume. They leave behind them a residue of SAT preppers who have PhD's in inversing binary trees.
At Google I've worked with some very humble but also super intelligent awesome engineers, people much smarter than I. Definitely the majority of my interactions. But I've also worked with people who clearly took the "Google hires the smartest people" company line, and their own success at it, a little too personally.
I don't think it's a good message to send. Although to be fair I haven't heard internally in a while.
Also I don't know if it's really a gold sticker anymmore. Nor do I think it's true that the smart people leave. Some do, but honestly, there are some damn brilliant people at Google who have found their brilliant corner and produce brilliance there.
Or some people here who are just brilliant at playing Big Company. Unfortunately there's more of that all the time.
That's what they keep saying. However, it remains to be proven that regurgitating answers on a whiteboard in 45 minutes implies that the candidate is not a false negative, or even a true positive to begin with.
That's the crazy thing about this. FAANG has near-infinite resources, relatively speaking. Google could be A/B testing their interviewing process, experimenting new approaches, experimenting (as the OP study did) with eye-trackers and other tech to try to gain insights on candidate behavior. They have the "engineering for the sake of engineering" and "innovation for the sake of innovation" culture that allows for moonshots and boondoggles. I don't think they're exactly known for following "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", given how many times they kill off products only to recreate them later on, especially their chat apps.
Yet they stick to the traditional whiteboarding method because-- why?
People use this argument often, but is technical competence of engineers- specifically at passing their interview process -the explanation for their economic success? And not market penetration, near-monopoly positions, great UX, etc.?
Not to mention, as we've seen in the high-profile Facebook SDK crashes this past week, share price doesn't necessarily mean product quality.
These events are noteworthy because of how rare they are for such a large software-based company.
It's also noteworthy because of how destabilizing this was for the immense number of apps that depend on that software.
The compensation is much better. The management is much better. The work life balance is much better.
I moved from SEA. Everything is worse there.
I read this and feel like people have unrealistic standard. FAANG isn't good enough? Working there for a year probably put your wealth of life at 0.1% of the world. That's not good enough?
Generally speaking, I think more intelligent people will have an easier time learning the patterns in algorithms.
It's not the best filter, but it's easy to see why it's an attractive option for companies.
Therefore her business interests are orthogonal to her opinions on "interviews." She may still be biased, but I don't think business interests color her bias.
There are other people who always fail those coin tosses
Of course, if the pipeline is massive (whether it's jobs, schools, etc.) this tendency gets amped up even more and anyone who doesn't come across as pretty much perfect on all dimensions--whether they are or not--is going to get dinged.
And sadly, this is common and recognized at Google, was mentioned in interview training, and is just said to be part of the fact that the bar gets higher, or something, mumble mumble.
I find this disturbing.
I wonder now: for every "bad one" not let through by this sort of process, how many other "good ones" look at it and say "no thanks"? How many hear about this sort of hazing and are dissuaded from applying in the first place? How many experience it one too many times and just quit the industry altogether? How many of those "bad ones" are even objectively bad, and not just having a bad day or intimidated by a process rife with both intentional and unintentional hostility? In other words: are we actually assessing what we claim to assess with _any_ predictive accuracy, and is the collateral damage to company reputation and the pool of available candidates - a damage often hidden to the individual companies that impose this process - even worth it?
And that doesn't address the file drawer effect. I'm 54. I can code a binary tree, hash table or what have you, if I have to, but I am not as practiced as somebody fresh out of school, because that heavy lifting is done by libraries, and I'm busy contributing original mathematical algorithms that no one ever asks about because they don't have the background to understand the explanation. So I don't go on FAANG type interviews. I know I will fail, and if I don't my offer will be predicated on that apparently lower performance. At best I will have an utterly miserable experience. So I self select myself out, mostly on age.
This is not good, for so many reasons.
This made me chuckle, because it's absolutely how it is.
Some other comments here talk about how nobody creates new algorithms these days unless they are a researcher. But it's not true at all! Like you I'm creating new algorithms and other tricky techniques all the time, but I'm not fresh on the stuff I learned at school... or so I thought.
I have been really surprised to find some screening interviews recently asked me shockingly trivial questions. So simple that I stumbled over myself trying to simplify the answers, thinking "I know too much about this topic and need to keep it simple", and "can these questions really distinguish candidates?".
I did the TripleByte online test recently and found the questions much simpler than I expected, including those in languages I've never seen before. That is not TripleByte's reputation. I see people writing about how difficult they found the questions. (Admission: I didn't score all 5s, but I can't figure out why unless it's timing as I think I answered them all correctly.)
So I'm thinking, perhaps it's not so bad, people just make it sound bad because there's a wide variation in people's knowledge, abilities and expectations.
If you are thinking you might apply for something like a FAANG or other hard-reputation company, and feeling put off by the horror stories, I would say, just take a look at the old stuff a bit for a refresh, then give it a try and you might be pleasantly surprised to find their reputation is because people less skilled than yourself found it hard. Their "hard" might not be hard for you.
You'll probably still fail the interview if it's a FAANG because they are so selective, but I would bet my dollars to donuts that it would be more refreshing than miserable if you're not attached to passing.
I know your point isn't about yourself, it's about bias in hiring, including bias due to perception by the candidates, but I wanted to address that side point about feeling there's no point applying. That sounds like anxiety to me. (I have it too, I'm trying to get over it.)
Ooohhhh this is frustrating. Nothing is more frustrating than telling an interviewer about something cool you've done, and realizing they don't understand, but also don't care.
Google is basically using anxiety to filter good candidates and eliminate false positives which works in a sense but is still highly illogical.
Why not use a technical filter to filter for technical candidates? Anxiety seems like a pointless filter.... how does that even eliminate false positives?
People without that niggling sense of anxiety always in the background, the folks who are easily going to ace the programming interview because their anxiety levels are so low, those folks, I theorize, are potentially not going to be so careful. Now you could argue that that's a plus in many situations - a startup that needs to get code out the door right away, for example. But it really depends on the domain. For critical systems in applications like healthcare, avionics or robotic control I think the anxious coder is the one you want.
Companies that completely weed out the anxious programmers, as you imply, will have a different culture with perhaps too much emphasis on risky behavior.
Could this be deliberate? As working with people with anxiety problems is often a pain in the ass as they won't report problems for fear of seeming stupid or ask for help.
Confident people are far easier to work on a team with.
E.g. it's acceptable (but not ideal) not to promote talented commanders. It's catastrophic to promote someone to General who isn't ready or is unsuited.
Although as a counterpoint, it's also easier to get work, because part of the value I'm providing is that you "fire" me whenever you want and no hard feelings. So nobody does "leetcode interviews", because it's not like we're getting married, like an employee. So there's much lower risk to hiring someone, because a bad hire doesn't infect anything, because you expected it to be temporary in the first place.
I'm not sure how much engineer skill matters though. One slightly above engineer might be fine. But if half your org is made up of slightly above average engineers, I feel like there will be a knock-on effect.
There exists an incredible amount of arrogance and ego among them by-in-large. The best are humble and curious while maintaining clear and direct communication. To be fair, they are often tasked with making important judgement calls sans complete information, though that's the fault of the leadership/culture as to a poor approach.
The interview started with a bit of small talk, I chatted with one of the guys about Brood War and Starcraft 2. Later during the technical interview they asked me about the difference between private, protected, and public and said I was the only student they had interviewed who had answered correctly which was wild and honestly stunned me for a moment.
They liked how in one of my examples of scripting something I had written some fun dialog and I mentioned I did writing as a hobby which seemed like a plus. I talked about which classes I enjoyed the most and how they were challenging/interesting.
I did not get a job offer and learned from a friend that I had come off as "depressed and disinterested" (I don't think they realized he was going to relay that info to me...) All I can do is guess that it's a combination from showing up completely drenched and sharing how I enjoyed those "challenging" classes made it seem like I would get quickly bored of scripting...
After that, I bombed an interview for a QA role because I went into it completely unprepared for just how much it would differ from a programming interview.
Point being those first two experiences got in my head and I basically had anxiety over anything job-hunt related for the next 2.5 years.
When I did get a job, I was extremely happy with the interview process (even though I felt I did poorly on it). Here's more or less how it was structured (TL;DR):
- Office tour/chat with a programmer who had referred me
- quick 5 minute introduction to senior programmers in charge of the technical interview
- 1 hour alone in a meeting room with a laptop and 4 written questions (a generous amount of time)
- ~15 minutes reviewing my answers with the senior programmers
- importantly, they gave me a chance to talk about my answers and when I got something wrong they would simply state that it had an error and see if I could spot it
- 15 minutes on C++/memory/performance/behavior quirks (important stuff in AAA games)
- ~30 minutes talking about stuff I had worked on
- occasionally they would mention something related I hadn't heard about and explain it while gauging how well I could follow along
The process seemed less focused on where I had gaps in my knowledge and more focused if I had a decent amount of knowledge in general and if I had the ability to recognize and correct the gaps in my knowledge.
Sorry if it's a bit of an info dump, but it's something I think back to a lot.
What's different from you and many other people is that you admit and face your bias rather than justify it.
I'm seriously curious what google interview board members have to say about this study. People like Gayle Laakmaan have been saying things to justify the whole process for years; but now that there's actual science, what do they have to say in the face of science?