On 06/23/2010 09:51 PM, Phil Pennock wrote: > On 2010-06-16 at 11:45 +0200, Aleksandar Ivanisevic wrote: >> Incidentally, thats the first question you will be asked in a Google >> phone screen. Not the technical screen, the answer is so simple they've >> put it in their recruiting drones' scripts ;) > > A couple of notes on this; note that anything I've written below should > be fairly obvious to someone who's a skilled sysadmin who spends a bit > of time thinking about it (except the count of phone-screens). I'm not
I'm sorry but it isn't at all obvious to me, and I've spent a fair bit thinking about it, having to screen and interview people myself, not very often but it happens. > (2) Many of the Google interview questions have leaked, this is known. > The pre-screen which you mention, carried out by very nice people > with far more interpersonal skills than I have (they're hardly > drones) has questions geared for "is there a sufficiently clear They are trying to solve a problem they know nothing about using a script, therefore they are drones. One of them had a really nice Indian accent, I really felt like calling a support hotline ;) > correct answer that someone not skilled in the art can assess the > answer given and mostly figure out if it's adequate?" Unfortunately there are no such questions. Unless you are actually trying to find someone skilled in the art of interviewing ;) > (3) The actual technical phone-screen interview may very well choose to > ask the same question, but would(/should) then start to drill down > into more detail, asking about the Why not just the What. The What > can be memorised (see point above re questions having leaked), the > Why is much harder to learn. Explaining the 3WHS and what state is > held by whom, how TCP cookies might affect this, etc ... that's more > interesting. Now you are giving away the questions, exactly the same thing you are accusing me of ;) > If you have a Google technical interview where everything is factoid and > you're confident you answered okay, then you didn't get the best > interview; there are typically at least two *technical* phone-screens > though, and at least one of those will be from someone experienced and > known to drill down well. Believe me, the candidates who've gotten hold > of a list and learnt enough factoids become painfully evident very > quickly. I know exactly how it works, having experienced the whole process myself. > And back to the point of pain which led to my posting: if you are > thinking of leaking questions, please do *at least* refrain from leaking > the pre-screens -- because they're designed to have simple answers and > not to be assessed in depth, leaking those questions means people can > easily get past the first round of filtering. This means the actual > SREs (sysadmins) have to spend at least two hours (prep work, interview, > feedback write-up) dealing with a candidate who shouldn't have made it Sorry, but I must call bullshit here. When I was interviewing at Google, 2 out of five interviewers were late, one didn't show up at all so they just picked a random unfortunate guy from the hallway to do the interview. None of the interviewers were prepared, there were all reading my CV on the spot. Most of them were visibly annoyed by the fact that they have to do this, looking constantly at the watch, one of them even openly complained that all the "good" questions have already been asked. Others were not even bothered by the fact, they just asked it again and again. By the third time I was asked the same question I already knew the answer they wanted to hear. Moreover, all of my questions about how it is working for Google and what an SRE *actually* does were brushed off with a "you are not initiated" kind of smirk. At the end I've started asking technical questions, to at least get something out of the whole ordeal. And it worked, I really got some useful pointers about some stuff that has been marginally bothering me for some time ;) > that far, will be grumpier in their next phone-screen and there will be > fewer windows available for them to interview the candidates who would > have made it through without the assistance of the leak. Which means > that anyone clueful enough to be interested in things like SAGE has > *more* competition for the same role. That's exactly what the problem is. You are interviewing experienced sysadmins. Most of the experienced sysadmins don't have to beat anyone, they already have a job *and* a few permanent job offers in the queue. I'm not even sure anyone has to beat anyone in the interview. You seem to treat the interview as a college exam, where the objective is to beat the system by knowing tons of technical factoids combined with gotchas. None of the questions I was being asked were related to what I think makes a good sysadmin like fundamental troubleshooting skills, importance of the change and time management, documentation, etc. I have to admit that I have actually fallen to the Google propaganda (do no evil, make the internet better, yadda yadda), but after that interview, a lot of things seem to be much clearer. > People who *need* the question ahead of time to make it past the > recruiters' pre-screens still won't get hired, but it just wastes > everyones' time and eventually leads to having to find new questions > which recruiters can ask - a surprisingly hard task. Were you *really* expecting that the questions won't leak? You are allegedly all smart guys there, have you ever heard that security through obscurity works only for some time, the time being shorter the bigger the target is? And I guess you are one of the biggest targets, so better think of something else other than relying on obscurity. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
