Google employees are revolting against the company’s twisted interview process.
An insider says the interviews are led by misguided administrators asking irrelevant questions.
A disgruntled Google employee posted a warning for all would-be applicants to the anonymous corporate message board Blind.
In a post titled “I hate Googlers” the author divulged Google’s peculiar strategy of asking interview questions that could only be answered by seasoned teams of experts.
“Why are you asking interview questions that require space partitioning trees or 4d dynamic programming?” the post scornfully pleaded.
Google was thought to have abandoned its atypical interview strategy.
Fortune flagged a 2013 New York Times article that quoted a Google executive saying their interview process needed a pivot after they realized “that brain teasers are a complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
But, according to the Blind post, condescension and aimless questions are still present in interviews.
“These morons who write hard interview questions don’t even come up with the right answer,” they wrote.
“Worse, these people will have a ‘know it all’ attitude and will become visibly annoyed with you if you try to convince them that they’re wrong, guaranteeing an instant failure.”
Quirky interview strategies are a long-standing part of Silicon Valley culture.
Peter Thiel, a billionaire and Silicon Valley legend, deployed brain teasers as a hiring strategy at PayPal.
Steve Jobs ripped people from assignments at Apple to join him on other internal endeavors if they showed that they could stand up to him – Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs includes an anecdote about an award for employees who best held their ground against Jobs.
These criteria are not analytical of a potential employee’s computing abilities but the strategy is ingrained in Silicon Valley’s fixation with outside-the-box thinking.
The Google employee racked up over 400 likes on Blind – and concluded with a cathartic “Thanks for coming to my TED talk.”
Coincidentally, TED posts field guides for acing and administering interviews of all types.
This story originally appeared on The Sun and has been reproduced here with permission.
