> people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview
My experience of that was that Google asked me to interview, I did, my recruiter congratulated me on passing the interviews and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the hiring cycle, and then at the end of the hiring cycle she informed me that, although I'd passed the interview, my interview performance was too poor to be considered for hiring.
1. Weeding out the people you surely don't want... that is it answers: does this candidate meet the minimum bar for working here?
2. Providing enough information about a candidate to give them a score... that is it answers: how good is this candidate?
You can "pass" an interview - that is the answer to question 1 is "yes, this person meets our qualifications", but fail in question 2 under conditions where there are more qualified candidates than there are positions. It's really common actually to wait until there are a few qualified candidates before making a hiring decision, rather than just hiring the first person that meets the minimum standards. This bit of hedging allows for making better teams from the available hiring pipeline (on average anyway).
I've never this at Google, but at my company, if you pass the technical screen you're offered to hiring managers. If they don't want you on your team because they want more leadership (or less leadership), or if there were 5 senior python roles and you were the 6th person to pass the interviews, you still won't get hired.
Unironically yes. Although it's arguably a win-win. Google constantly keeps its pipeline of candidates open which means that if you're looking for a job and you clear the resume bar, you'll get an interview. Meanwhile teams are constantly hiring so they'll want a steady stream of candidates.
The alternative would mean that unless your timing for a job search is perfect, you won't even get a foot in the door and teams within Google will also struggle to fill open positions since it would take a while to interview the candidate pool.
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People still line up for their purported incentives, despite these stories.
The reason why nerds nevertheless apply at MAANG companies is thus the same reason why "ordinary" people buy lottery tickets - nerds are not that different. :-)
The company changed mind on how many people it wants to hire during the interview process. Of course they wouldn't admit "I just got news from the higher-ups that we're not actually hiring because shit is on fire", so they came up with some lame excuse that puts the blame on the candidate. I solved the interview question for Uber, but then there was news that Uber stops hiring company-wide. I solved the interview questions for Microsoft, but then got feedback that I didn't.
You should try again, there's a lot of variation on interview performance. Also, Google is a bit unique in that they put a lot of emphasis on what your thought process is, compared to other FAANGs. If you just code a working solution and didn't ask enough questions, that might only get you a mediocre score.
> You should try again, there's a lot of variation on interview performance.
Read the comment again. This is not a story about interview performance. My interview performance didn't change after I completed the interview.
If Google doesn't want to hire you, they won't, and your interview performance is irrelevant enough that they feel free to revise it retroactively. Perhaps they aren't willing to state their actual reasons.
Studying is not a sensible approach to this problem. You would have to address something they actually cared about.
There are hundreds of teams and hiring managers in Google, and an almost infinite number of possible reasons why you weren't hired or why the HM changed their mind. Treating any large company like a monolith is not gonna help you get a job there...
Also, not sure what your recruiter was talking about - there's no concept of "passing" an interview at Google - you're rated on a scale from "strong do not hire" to "strong hire", and the folks doing the selection are provided that rating along with a ton of notes about the interviews.
My 2nd Google interview was a guy that played a lot of chess, and I never played chess, and all of his questions were about it, nothing to do with you know, coding, algorithms, problem solving, etc.
Was not offered a job. Mildly disappointing considering the other two interviews went pretty well.
My experience of that was that Google asked me to interview, I did, my recruiter congratulated me on passing the interviews and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the hiring cycle, and then at the end of the hiring cycle she informed me that, although I'd passed the interview, my interview performance was too poor to be considered for hiring.