If it takes months to hire an employee, then it speaks volumes about their processes generally.

But then I'm just a curmudgeony old fart with a decaying brain. Google is for bright young things in their 20's.

Google doesn't really hire great engineers. It hires people who had the time to cram leetcode.

Source: me, crammed leetcode.

Agree that on behavioral front, there is not much new signal after a few hours of conversation. Some evidence for this is a well-known study [1]. Unsure if the study has been validated, but the idea has stuck with me.

Regarding cognitive decay: I like to think time is simply pruning the weak and lazy neurons. At least that's what my remaining grey matter is telling itself. Your comment made me laugh. Thanks.

[1] https://kevin.burke.dev/pdf/30_seconds_teacher_quality.pdf

Thanks. I'm glad someone got a laugh, at least.

I can't give citation, but someone was talking about an assessment unit in the army that tried to identify candidates to fast-track to more senior command positions. What they found was that there was no reliable way to determine such candidates. Unpromising candidates went on to great things, and the so-called promising ones didn't. The assessor wryly noted that despite the failure, enthusiasm for assessment didn't abate.

One thing that struck me years (decades) ago was when I was working for a company as a programmer. I happened to see the CVs of the candidates. On the basis of less than 15 minutes, I came to the conclusion that they were all likely to be as good as the other. There was perhaps one lemon in the group.

Some companies are very successful, and obviously employ bright people. There's a mindset of "manifest destiny", and of course a certain conceit.

I think that there was a talk at Google about how companies rise and fall. He said that Google will eventually fall. Nothing lasts forever. (Although I will say that a company like Microsoft has beaten a lot of history as to how long the edge can last). One Google employee raised a hand and asked how it could be prevented. You could tell it in their eyes and manner of speech that they thought that the sheer brilliance of their minds would prevent such a thing from happening. I can't remember what the response was, but I think it was along the lines of "you can't". Time and tide happen to all men.

I thought about this, and I did come to one interesting idea: spinoffs. Google may do better for their shareholders if they explored the idea of spinoffs. How so? Well, we've seen the sheer volume of projects that have been started and abandoned by Google. Presumably the logic behind this is that they'll encounter, by chance, another project that will propel them to the next level.

The idea is good, but there's a snag: Google is too successful. This leads them a lot of dilettantism. They try this, they try that, they try the other. Then they get bored, and go back to their ad revenues.

Let's take Google+. At one point, people speculated that it would usurp Facebook. There was even an animated gif where a bus with the Google logo above it smashes into a car with the Facebook logo above it. As we now know, Google+ disappeared and Facebook is still strong. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to spin off the Google+ division, retaining only a 20% stake. This has two effects: 1) it creates a smaller division with less diseconomies of scale, 2) the new division is pot-committed. Failure is not an option. Success is by no means guaranteed, of course, but success is more likely when there's a gun at your head.

I’m an old fart too (48).

I stayed at one company for 9 years and by 2008 at 34, I was the epitome of an “expert beginner”. I changed jobs four times between 2008 and 2016 and I was just your regular old enterprise “full stack developer”.

In 2016, I was the lead developer at a medium size non tech company and looking at where I wanted to be in four years after I my youngest (step)son graduated and we could move anywhere the money took us.

I looked around at the landscape and saw that my salary was going to plateau with one more job hop locally unless I became a manager. I looked at what it would take to get into $BigTech as a software engineer and I was neither interested in “grinding leetCode” or even working as a software engineer at a large company with a bunch of 20 something’s.

I kind of put the idea to the side and started working on the skills it would take to become a consultant (not a contractor doing staff augmentation who calls themselves a consultant).

Out of the blue, while I was a working as a de facto “cloud architect” at a startup in 2020, BigTech cloud provider recruiter sent me a message about a role in the consulting department. So there I was at 46 with my first job in $BigTech - making about what a 26 year old who was promoted to a mid level engineer was making. But I do get to work remotely.

> working on the skills it would take to become a consultant

Curious to know what you were doing to make this happen. Did you have a guide?

I yada yada yada’d over a lot. I was first exposed to consultants when I was the newly hired lead at a company in 2016 brought in to design an on prem project. At the last minute, they decided to “move to the cloud”.

They brought in two sets of consultants. One set that was suppose to know about AWS. But they ended up just treating AWS like an overpriced Colo and I didn’t know any better at the time and the other set who in hindsight were just following a cookie cutter script who were “helping” the business manage integrating a bunch of recent acquisitions.

Once I started belated learning about all the services that AWS had to offer developers and for “DevOps”, I knew I wanted to specialize in consulting in that area and set myself apart from the old school network folks who got one certification and called themselves “cloud architects”.

I figured I could bring more to the table from a software engineering standpoint.

I changed jobs in 2018 where the then new CTO wanted to be “cloud native”. He was trying to build out an internal engineering department. He knew I had no hands on experience with AWS. But he liked my proposals.

Two years and a lot of projects later, I had the technical side down pat. It took me a couple of years at AWS to get good enough at the soft skills/customer interaction side.

My original plan was to get a job at one of the big consulting agencies to hone my craft. I got lucky to skip over that part.

From the perspective of someone who accepted a competing offer after passing the interview: Google's reputation for senior++ engineers isn't what it once was, and the friction of the hiring process wasn't worth it for average total compensation.

Tip: you should always be looking. Doesn't mean you should put up with spending several months in the process with Google, but keeping your skills sharp and offers flowing is a good way to navigate your career on your own terms.

Sure. I am always looking. But my time is incredibly valuable to me and I simply won’t put up with that kind of process. I have plenty of alternative options. I worked for a large (not google large but still large) multinational company in a previous job on the back of a single 45 minute video call. Prior to that I worked at another multinational on the back of them inviting me out for lunch and then an hour chat in their office at a later time. In both cases, I had offers 2 to 3 days later.

Why would I put up with a multi month process when many of my alternatives are so much less stress? It just feels like Google doesn’t value my time.

It can be reduced to ~3-4 weeks from first contact to offer if you are in a rush.

It's as easy as saying like "I just got an offer from $competitor".

The process may take months because candidates usually ask for time to prepare, and some latency once the offer is accepted (background check, etc). If you are actively looking for a job, you are most likely already prepared.

> It can be reduced to ~3-4 weeks from first contact to offer if you are in a rush.

That’s still terrible by industry standards. We lost many candidates because they did have competing offers and couldn’t sit on them for a month while the hiring committee waited until the next blood moon to gather.

Is it really?

I'm sure there are plenty of candidates giving up because they received a competing offer and wouldn't wait, but I think it's reasonable to expect a hiring process to take a month, even in small companies.

Edit: I also have anecdotal evidence of cases where an offer would be made withing 2-3 business days after the interviews at both Google a Facebook.

>Is it really?

Yes. It’s fucking terrible. That pace isn’t acceptable for things with significantly more at stake (buying a house, getting married, donating an organ). Google just abused its position as a desirable place to work while I was there to take time to hire candidates.

I think it all depends on the candidate's motivation to join a particular company. Candidates are more inclined to wait for offers from tier-1 companies (e.g. FAANG) but will have less patience for lower tier companies.

Google is way worse than the rest of FAANG though. The Facebook recruiters would explicitly warn you that if you wanted to wait for a Google offer to not even start with Facebook until you passed the interviews and were waiting on team matching.

A month is really slow. When I last interviewed every place gave me an offer within a week, and they would informally tell me I was getting one usually within 24 hours.

Even a weekly hiring committee will eventually prove to be too slow, because there will be competitors making hiring decisions within 2 business days or just after the interview.

Onsite to offer is just one part. The process starts earlier and ends later. Even a startup with 2 day onsite to offer can have a 3-4 week process. Recruiter chat, recruiter screen, tech screen, take home, onsite, references, meet and greets, offer, waiting for other offers, negotiating offers, acceptance, and then finally waiting for the 2 weeks and the start date.

Do you want to optimize to hire people who accept whatever offer comes first? Isn't it worth waiting a couple weeks to get the right job that you will spend the next few years of your life at?

I would gladly spend the time. Also, having some time between interview stages allows you to prepare well. It doesn't seem that unreasonable to me but moving to Google would be a big step up in my career. If you have alternatives that are similar enough, then it makes more sense to be picky about their hiring process.

How old are you, if you don't mind me asking? The process may span over months but obviously most of that is waiting, so if you are happy with your job (enough to stay a few more months) but would be happier with Google (enough to interview with them), I don't see the intrinsic problem.