Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google
Why Hacker News recommends it
Linked often in hiring-process threads for the anecdote about Google's committee refusing to hire itself, as evidence interviews are noisy.
What it is
Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2016 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends umbs · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: Why does Google get away with such bad recruiting practices?”
Like with any BigCo, there are always bad apples (recruiters) and things slip through cracks. But compared to other similar sized companies, Google is quite focused on improving their interview processes. You can find lots of resources online from Google employees explaining it. The one I found very enlightening is from Moishe Lettvin given at Etsy: [this video] My own personal experience couple of years ago was good. I failed the interview though.
Recommends ubernostrum · 2018-09 · on “Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions”
I like this video: [this video] The speaker formerly worked at Google, and around 8:55 in the video relates the story of being on a hiring committee that was known for being tough on candidates. And a recruiter once forwarded a set of interview packets to them, and they voted "no hire" on all of them. The recruiter then revealed to the committee that they'd been given their own packets, slightly anonymized, from when they were interviewed, and had just voted against hiring themselves.
Recommends iooi · 2021-07 · on “Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team”
I think this is half the problem when people interview at FAANGs -- they think it's like preparing for olympics and you truly have to be in the top 1%. It's really not. There's thousands and thousands of engineers, from mediocre to truly great. With the right preparation, a lot of it just comes down to getting lucky with who interviews, how they're feeling that day, etc -- luck. You might find this interesting: [this video]
Recommends gregors · 2024-07 · on “Re-Imagining Technical Interviews: Valuing Experience over Exam Skills”
As someone who interviews and hires engineers I'm not even remotely convinced live code exercises lead to better hiring than any other signal such as a CS degree. I remember when the the coding horror fizz buzz article came out and honestly things have just gotten worse since then. I always like to link the talk where the speaker mentions google hiring committee refused to hire themselves [0]. I suggest that this outcome isn't rare. [0] [this video]
Cites inevitable2 · 2016-10 · on “Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test”
Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google [this video] He tells a story where the hiring committee gets like 10 candidate packets, and they refuse to hire a single one of them. Turns out the packets were of the hiring committee members themselves:) [this video] So yeah, the system is broken.
Cites famil · 2017-05 · on “What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies”
[this video] In this video, a Google hiring committee were given their own anonymized hiring feedback and wouldn't even hire themselves.
Cites tomnj · 2020-02 · on “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”
Here’s an Xoogler talking about how he was given his own hiring packet to review (without knowing it was his) and rejected it: [this video]
Cites akshat_h · 2020-10 · on “Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders”
If anyone is curious, it might be this talk. Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google. It is on Etsy Eng channel Youtube url with the relevant time frame [this video]