I like the concept, but the amount of uncompensated time candidates have to give to the company is excessive and a lot of non-Google companies couldn't get away with it.

Yes, I had the smug joy of getting to tell my Google recruiter to f off back in 2014 because of a number of red flags in their interviewing process, very early in my career. I don't regret it at all, and actually my decision to simply take a short-term research internship at a DoE lab instead (and surprisingly) opened a number of doors in the startup world for me that I wouldn't have even known exist otherwise.

In my case one major red flag was "having to fly somewhere before I have an official offer", and I can only imagine the new zoomer crowd leans much more in that direction. FANG doesn't respect your time or effort at all, they think you should be honored just to be in their presence. That shit doesn't fly anymore.

Had somewhat similar experience... 2014/2015 maybe. Unsolicited call out to me, asking me to interview. I had a couple of questions - one of which included salary range. I was being expected to go take days off and fly to them, but they wouldn't give me even a basic range. Nothing. I declined to go further.

I told someone who then said "well... that's not the way you get a job!" And I said "but... I didn't want a job. They called me. They wanted a worker, but wouldn't do me the courtesy of basic information before I was to drop whatever I was doing and come running to them on their timetable".

On-site interviews are done by most companies. They require you to fly if you don't live in the area. This isn't a red flag for most people.

It's unheard of in the startup world. I don't even know anyone outside of the startup world anymore so I can't speak to whatever FANG and the remaining crumbling enterprise companies are still doing at this late hour.

Getting a free all-expenses-paid weekend in Mountain View is a perk to a lot of people

If I weren't busy with the familoids at home I'd love a free plane trip and fancy hotel stay. Er, in non-pandemic times at least

It can be nice but at the end of the day can be a massive inconvenience to people with dependents. Single parents, unless they have a good support network, might find it especially difficult.

I think the point is that many people _are_ busy with familoids. I took them up on this offer early in my career when I had less "adult" responsibilities, but as those tend to increase it makes this increasingly hard to deal with.

> If I weren't busy with the familoids at home

That + never ending pandemic + etc

But also, it's really shitty to fly somewhere only to get rejected. Been there, done that.

The length of Google's hiring process is absolutely screwing them in this market. Seems like they don't really feel like competing for hot candidates anymore.

Google told me recently that their process typically takes 6-8 weeks! They are absolutely losing candidates but they must have enough applicants to still be ok.

I think it matches that Google salaries are trending relatively downwards compared to the competition. They only want people who are Google obsessed.

That sounds awful. By the time you've accepted the offer and started at Google, you have very little leverage to ensure you end up on a team/project that you like. I would never accept an offer without knowing what I'd be working on.

It gives awesome cover to slackers though. "Yeah I don't think I was put on an appropriate team..."

I can vouch this is a terrible process. Unless you interview ONLY at Google, you almost always won't work there. When you are actively looking, you usually want all your interviews to be close to each other (within weeks) to evaluate offers and make the best decision.

It's extremely unhelpful if one company is still in the "screening" phase because they take months to progress, while others are already extending offers. The options then are that you wait and risk letting go of other offers, let go of Google, or join a new company and leave within months. All of these options look terrible to me.

The other option is that you strategically queue up those Google interviews well in advance of all others. I did that and they still managed to keep dragging their feet when I wrapped up the rest. Oh well.

Wait, what? You get 'approved' to look for an actual job?

The hiring committee approves your 'packet' and agrees you should be hired for a particular job family and level within that family.

Then the recruiter will help connect you with teams that have open head count. If there's a mutual fit, the company will make a formal offer.

So, in the initial interview rounds you're not interviewed by the teams with open head count? Seems inefficient to me. How long does it normally take to find a team with a 'mutual fit'?

It's done that way to align incentives. The hiring manager's incentive is always to fill a role; if they didn't have more work than they can do, they wouldn't have open headcount. This biases them toward hiring fast and lowering the bar - not so much that they can't work with the person, but enough to overlook minor red flags in the interest of filling the position. In other words, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug: the company doesn't want to hire fast if it means sacrificing quality.

It also has the added benefit of improving internal cooperation, trust, and mobility. Many big companies suffer from the attitude of "Oh, those doofuses in department X can't be trusted to get anything done right". [1] When you have a common hiring process, you know that everybody in the company passed the same bar you and your teammates did, and your baseline assumption should be that they're as competent. And similarly, transfers get pretty easy because everybody has already passed a common hiring bar, so you know that the candidate is already qualified technically, you just need to judge if they're a good fit for your team.

Time to find a mutual fit can vary a lot. It was really quick (like a couple days) my first time around, because I was early enough in my career to be pretty adaptable, had a very in-demand skillset (Javascript), and had multiple teams - Search, GMail, Docs - all vying for me. It was a lot slower (month+) my second time around, because I interviewed in April 2020 as the world was falling apart from COVID and teams kept disappearing as they got canceled or their headcount got cut.

[1] https://i.insider.com/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000000?width=589&for...

I initially thought like this as well, but after second thought I'd like if all large corps did this. It eliminates "Bro-Hires", and sets certain standard for all employees.

Of course it doesn't make any sense for small companies.

My process with Google a couple of years back took something like 2 months before I bowed out. It included fun activities such as a hiring manager change, a re-interview of a slot, a down-level, and a resulting request to re-interview for things that weren't required at the higher level. Meanwhile Facebook went from first interview to offer in 2 weeks.

Can confirm that this is how it worked out for me just a few weeks ago. Interviewed for SWE II for a day, was told that feedback was trending positive, and spent ~4 hours of personal time prepping for and participating in fit calls.

Then got and excited call from my recruiter and was told I'd get an offer and that there was a match for one of the teams I interviewed for. The catch? Downleveled to SWE I, despite saying earlier in the process that I would not take it for career development and salary range reasons.

They were willing to set up another round of interviews to get more data, but at some point you just have to call it. End-to-end, this took around a month and a half. This was with my positive references allowing me to skip the phone screen.

I've had positive experiences interviewing with Microsoft and Amazon, no experience with other big tech.

I recently did this and it took ~1 month with me doing around 15 calls with various teams. I think I was atypically slow and most people find a team within 5 calls or so. The really unfortunate part is that you don't get any offer numbers until after this is done. That means lots of people will go through with the team matching even if they aren't really planning to go through with Google just to get offer numbers.

This is about maintaining quality. At a large company it’s easy for one manager to lower the bar, or have the bar fall out of entropy.

Several companies fight this with a standard interviewing pipeline, of course most candidates will be displeased if they spend 1 month interviewing and then get dropped into a random team.

I think they do so to avoid culture split - giving individual team hiring decision from the get go can create culture bias, people would only give opportunity to people they "like" or that match the current culture, leading to inbreeding of sort.

Just look at what was happening at Cisco with caste based hiring.

In my case it took about a week. I had a few phone calls with hiring managers over 2, then requested a follow-up with one manager which took another day or two to set up. Then once I gave the recruiter my preference, she got back to me the next day to let me know that it lined up with a manager who reciprocated

The time can vary. In my case (for a product manager role) it took a few weeks. But I was in China so there were only a couple of options.

You're not interviewed by teams with open headcount. I never met my interviewers again.

The philosophy at Google is that the hiring bar is high enough that anyone who passes it should theoretically be able to fill any open position at their level. This is somewhat less true for higher levels, but it is also much harder to pass the bar at those levels. There are typically a lot of unfilled positions, because there just aren't enough people who pass the hiring bar (so there is plenty of demand for people).

You don't really expect any new hire SWE to be able to do the job on day 1 - Google has so much bespoke internal technology that it takes months to become productive. So the fit conversations aren't really just another round of interviews - they are more of a "mutual fit" assessment (interests and background). Often it's more of a sales pitch ("here's why you should join our team").

> They invert the job/approval process.

Do any of the other FAANGs (MAGMAs??) do the same now?

Meta usually doesn't even bother finding you a team before hiring you, at least at L5 (senior) level... they hire based on a standardized interview process, you start with a 6 week bootcamp to get familiar with their systems, and then you have two weeks to find a team. There are a few cases where you're hired for a specific team and skip the 2 week team-matching period, but this is the general pattern.

So wait, you basically start on a 8 week contract? Is that how that works?

Not a contract, in most cases, you're hired into the company rather than a specific team. To be clear it's not just two weeks to find a team, you spend the entire length of bootcamp (6-10 weeks) evaluating teams (you evaluating them, not the other way) to pick one. I preferred that much more to Google's approach, where passing the interview loop leads to the tedious team selection process - before an offer is extended.

And to answer a question from a neighboring comment, it's exceedingly rare for a match to not happen. There are way more teams with open headcount than candidates looking, so teams and managers go out of their way to woo the incoming folks. I don't know exactly what happens if one spends two months fruitlessly, presumably somebody from the bootcamp program would have a long conversation with them about their general fit at the company.

> you evaluating them, not the other way

Ehhhh...you say that, but it definitely goes both ways. It's not meant to, but hiring managers at Meta absolutely do evaluate the bootcampers who reach out to join, especially for more popular teams.

Sure, I believe it happens in pockets, though it's very clearly spelled out company policy that this process is not a second interview. But people are people and supply/demand rules apply here as well. It also more often took took the form of who a hiring manager might reach out to vs not. As a hiring manager, I and my peers engaged in good faith AFAIK with bootcampers that reached out directly. Given the many openings in our growing teams, doing otherwise would've been foolhardy.

Ah, this is much more reasonable. I interpreted it as another whittling of people where they would hire a pile House MD style and see which ones are actually desired.

No, you start with a fulltime offer, it's just called "bootcamp". It's our way of doing all the HR stuff (paperwork, medical, legal, etc) + you taking some courses on areas you're interested in specific to fb + you exploring teams and finding one that you will work at.

And if you don't get a match in those two weeks?

It's not a strict two weeks, and the process is much more about being pursued than finding a team. For example, a typical bootcamper in NYC will hear from 40+ teams.

Is that still the case? I left earlier this year, but they had instituted a max on the number of reachouts a team/manager can make to minimize the "spray and pray" tactics and bootcamper overload.

Definitely still the case. There are so many teams looking for people, anyone with a pulse gets spammed.

Anecdotal, but my experience at Microsoft and Amazon is that you interview with the team who has open headcount, and (simplifying here) the manager you would be reporting to makes the decision on whether to offer you a specific position on a specific team.

It's like this for all levels of SWE as well based on my experience