Former Google employees were rejected because they didn't memorize the Bayesian formula

Why software engineers can't find a job. I want to share four "horror stories."

Editor's note: As a programmer, if you do not receive the right job offer, you will not lose confidence in yourself. Coderfit.com founder of the website of docking entrepreneur and programmer Iwan think you need not worry. He shared four "horror stories", telling us that the reason why the powerful engineers were rejected was probably irrelevant to their level of business or cultural fit. This article is compiled from 36 krypton.

When people don't get an offer, they tend to think it's their fault: "I was shut out of three companies, so I could be a bad engineer." "After working in the tech recruiting industry for a while, I can assure you that random and disruptive factors also play an important role." The reason you are often rejected is likely to be accidental or unreasonable.

Horror Story One: The candidate was rejected for adopting a new framework

An enterprise raised the front end recruitment requirements, so I introduced them to a front-end engineer, he made a great contribution to ECMAScript, and wrote a lot of open source code. It took me weeks to find this person and spent several hours evaluating him correctly, including a video interview (something we liked to do on coderfit.com). But. One of the agency's engineers, after browsing through his submitted code for just 10 minutes, decided not to hire him. The candidate was not even rejected in a respectable way because the company sent him a "possible" reply:

Hello Although your resume and cover letter are very competitive, unfortunately, due to limited positions, our recruiting team has not included you in further consideration after further review of your application. ......“

This is a very bad answer, because the candidate has never even submitted a knowledge letter. When I saw the letter, I immediately dropped the matter at hand and drove to their office to talk to an interview engineer who had turned down the best front-end engineer candidate I had interviewed in 2017.

First of all, the interview engineer could not even really tell me why he turned down the candidate, and the reason he gave was simply that "the code was overly designed", although in fact the structure of the purchase was completely correct and all the ES6 operators and short functions were correct and effective. After 10 minutes of arguing with him, the reason for the candidate's rejection became clearer: He used an unknown MVC framework in his code, and the interviewer just didn't know it. In fact, I was so impressed with the framework that the candidate used in the coded interview that I couldn't understand the series of problems that might follow.

Again, I can provide some background information to explain why our candidate used such an unknown MVC framework: The company that hires the front end is an organization looking for repeatable processes, and the chief Engineer (not the interviewer in the previous article) complained to me that each time they had to "reinvent a mechanism for each client" ”。 The candidate I nominated used his free time to build a customized framework that solved some of the problems facing the organization.

Because the interviewer who refused the candidate didn't read my notes or my video interview record, he didn't take into account why the candidate used the frame, but just pressed the "Deny" button. And, more unfortunately, the company's leaders (who support the candidate) are on vacation, unable to intervene in the outcome of the interview.

Tip: In general, it's a bad idea to look at what others think of him or her before you evaluate an interviewer. But in some cases, it does make sense to add some extra background knowledge to yourself. At least not as the interviewer in the story misses a very good candidate.

This story is especially sad considering that the CEO of this company has given me some extra pay to bring them the "best people". I've made an extra effort to find a candidate, but, with the complicity of the recruiting team and the interviewer, they didn't really evaluate the candidate I nominated. The engineer who rejected the candidate even told me, "recruiting is the most important thing for us." "If you're a recruiter, you'll be more proud of the company, but if you don't know exactly what kind of talent your team needs, then the value of the job is very small."

To make things worse, the front-end engineer, after being treated like this, refuses to associate with any other Swiss employer (he has been rebuffed by human resources for not handing in his cover letter, has not received any feedback for a long time, and has submitted the code for two weeks before being viewed, etc.).

Horror Story Two: Former Google employees were rejected because they didn't memorize the Bayesian formula

A start-up company looking for a Python engineer interviewed a programmer who had worked at Google-Zurich for four years. In the process of recommending this candidate to a start-up, I encountered some problems because everyone thought he would ask for equivalent compensation (almost twice times the average wage in the industry) with Google-Zurich.

However, his actual expectations for the next job are not that high-he just wants a harmonious team that solves a variety of interesting technical challenges. As a result, he accepted every interview invitation and made a deep impression on most of the people he had spoken to. A start-up company got him through four rounds of interviews, and in the end, he had a one-on-one conversation with everyone on the team.

However, at the end of the interview, a person on the team stood up and made it clear that the candidate could not be hired because he did not know and could not explain the Bayes formula.

Everyone in this room does not seem to care, except the technical director. He is the one who has been in the overall interest of the team and will be the one to report directly to the chief executive, who has not hired anyone for months. This time, he exercised his veto and made it clear that rejecting good candidates for not knowing something trivial was a rather foolish reason. They hired the former Google engineer. The result showed that the engineer was the biggest contributor ever made by the company.

It turned out that the technical director's decision was correct: the candidate installed his development environment at a faster rate than recorded, and solved three bugs on the first day. In the end, everyone is deeply moved by the fact that HR employs this person.

It is understandable that Google and its rival companies use some highly skilled questions or algorithmic questions to screen candidates, because big international companies like this can afford the "false negative" results of hiring, and they can reject a lot of actually very good candidates, Because there are a steady stream of talented people who want to step into these companies (Google receives 3 million job applications every year). But startups can not afford to take such risks, inadvertently, may be the most suitable candidates to miss the best. As Erin Ptacek says, if you're going to define madness, "It's in Google's style, and it looks like it will bring you success." ”

Horror Story Three: programmers are forgotten by human resources department

I usually keep a close eye on the entire recruiting process for my nominated candidate. When I was on vacation, a CEO told me that they would hire an engineer I nominated. However, the Human resources department, which worked remotely in another country, did not follow up. As I was on vacation, I didn't follow up, and the candidate thought he'd been rejected for a couple of weeks because no one was communicating with him. This is a very typical mistake.

Two months later, I communicated with the candidate again and asked him what had happened. Neither he nor the Human Resources department understood why no one had ever kept in touch with him. So I wrote to all the relevant people and asked if we could complete the recruitment process.

The human resources department is usually one such existence-the salary, the lack of organization. Internal recruiters are usually responsible for other administrative tasks rather than recruiting. Worse, some startups don't even have human resources, and those from the front desk are responsible for evaluating, rejecting or passing the building. These people usually do not know much about the requirements of technical posts. They just listen to the hiring manager's 15-minute briefing on "The people they're looking for" and make what they call appropriate "filtration." Lack of background knowledge and understanding of the position often lead to the company can not recruit the right people.

Horror Story Four: The candidate was rejected because of the level above the interviewer ...

Don't laugh, it's not a joke. I've seen a candidate who has exceeded the interviewer's level. The candidate, a 22-year-old "prodigy" Open-source programmer, was rejected by an interviewer at the resume screening stage. Let's call the interviewer "Jon" and I was shocked that such a good candidate was rejected by Jon, so I made a phone call for the tripartite talks.

Jon explains why he turned down the candidate on the phone, but it sounds ridiculous, and I don't know if Jon is serious. I must say, this Jon is very weak either in terms of code level, GitHub contribution, or other ability points, but he is responsible for the resume screening, so I have to listen to his feedback.

Jon points out some of the questions in the candidate code he sees on the shared screen. All the questions he mentions are, in fact, better choices, not so-called problems. His other criticisms seem to be problematic for unprofessional people, but in practice there are good reasons. Then I lost my temper. These criticisms made me wary and suggested that the quality of the candidate's code on the GitHub was better than that of Jon. Here, I have done things that run counter to my job. Luckily, HR stopped me and told me, "We're not evaluating Jon." I feel unable to continue to communicate, so hurriedly change the topic, hang up the phone.

Summary

In short, hiring is more complicated than you might think. If you are rejected, this does not mean that you are an unqualified engineer, because there may be many reasons behind the rejection.

Public number 1 to bring you into the fan base.