the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough.
thanks for a clear headed view on it all.
- You want to hire someone with a competency of 100 units
- A bad hire is expensive, and you definitely don't want one slipping in.
- There is a noise floor in the interview process of 50 units
- This means you need to set the hiring bar at 150 units to be sure no one below 100 units slips in
This means the vast majority of qualified people won't be hired (which is okay; the cost of a lost hire is low), but you're very unlikely to get the person who can't pass fizzbuzz.
The flip side is that the job applications are saturated with idiots. Consider this model:
- You have 100 people in a work force.
- 95 are qualified, and quickly find jobs after 1-6 interviews. They stay in those jobs until they get bored, typically 3-10 years.
- Five can barely tie their shoelaces. They send out hundreds of resumes until they get hired, and then stay in jobs until they're found to be incompetent and fired, typically 3-6 months.
Although there are O(20x) as many qualified people as unqualified, they'll send out at most 100 resumes per year, and so job applications are dominated by the unqualified ones. This means hiring needs a very high noise floor, indeed, and a few idiots will still sneak in.
This is oversimplified in a millions ways, but it's why you probably won't get a Google offer no matter how good you are. Interviews have a huge noise floor, and to be hired, you need to be qualified AND have a good day. How good a day depends on how qualified you are, but that's why you see twitter posts from world-famous developers about not qualifying for this job or the other.
Maybe you’re just being too kind.
This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.