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What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews At Google – Moishe Lettvin

Posted on April 15, 2021April 15, 2021 by Chuck Conway

Interview question

  • Favorite interview question: "Find all the words on a Boggle board"

"You could interview the same candidate twice with the same set of interviews and come to different conclusions each time."

Steve Yegge has an idea that each candidate at a perfect slate of interviews and a perfect slate of anti-slate of interviewers.

Google’s philosophy is "Missing someone who is good, is ok, compared to hiring someone who is bad." A false positive is much worse than a false negative.

Interviewing is a team effort, you might have one person that goes deep in one area, the other person doesn’t need to ask the same questions.

The hiring committee was cross teams. No one person had the power to say yay or nay.

Be prepared. Have a set of questions that you plan to ask, have an idea of your follow-up questions.

An interview is a conversation, you’re both humans, treat it as such.

Good interviewers are generous, they teach and even if the candidate isn’t the right fit.

Good questions are like onions

  • i.e. Conway’s law

Strive for higher bandwidth

  • prefer video to phone
  • prefer in-person to video

Strive for more signal to less noise, you job is to get them to show their best work.

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