Decent shift away from assuming by default that decisions made by large organizations are reasonable.
I’m in the process of interviewing with Google for a programming job and the recruiter initially told me they do the interview in a Google Doc, and to practice coding in the Google Doc so I’m familiar with the environment for the interview.
I tried doing so and found it very frustrating. The vertical space between lines is too large. Page breaks get in the way. There is just a lot of annoying things about trying to program in a Google Doc.
So then, why would Google choose to have people use it for interviews? They’re aware of these difficulties, and yet they chose to use Google Docs for interviews anyway. Why? They’re a bunch of smart people, so surely there must be things in the trade-off calculus that make it worthwhile.
I looked around a little bit because I was curious and the only good thing I found was this Quora page on it. There wasn’t much insight. The big thing seemed like it was because it was easier for hiring committees to comment on what the candidate wrote and discuss it as they decide whether or not to pass the candidate. That makes sense as an upside, but it doesn’t explain why they’d use Google Docs, because you could just have the candidate program in a normal text editor and then copy-paste it into Google Docs afterwards. And I know that I’m not the first person to have thought of that idea. So at this point I just felt confused, not sure whether to give Google the benefit of the doubt or to trust my intuitive sense that having a candidate program in a Google Doc is an awful idea.
Today I had my phone interview, and they’re using this interviewing.google.com thing where you code in a normal (enough) editor. Woo hoo! My interviewer was actually in the engineering productivity department at Google and I asked him about it at the end of the interview (impulsive; probably not the most beneficial thing I could have chosen to ask about). We didn’t have much time to talk about it but his response seemed like he felt like this new approach is clearly better than using Google Docs, from which I infer that there wasn’t some hidden benefit to using Google Docs that I was overlooking.
I also interpret the fact that they moved from using Google Docs to using the normal editor as evidence that the initial decision to use Google Docs wasn’t carefully considered. I’m having trouble articulating why I interpret this as evidence. In worlds where there is some hidden benefit that makes Google Docs superior to a normal editor for these interviews, I just wouldn’t have expected them to shift to this new approach. It’s possible that the initial decision to use Google Docs was reasonable and carefully considered, and they just came across new information that lead to them changing their minds, but it feels more likely that it wasn’t carefully considered initially and what happened was more “Wait, this is stupid, why are we using Google Docs for interviews? Let’s do something better.” And if that’s true for an organization as reputable as Google, I’d expect it to happen in all sorts of other organizations. Meaning that the next time I think to myself, “This seems obviously stupid. But they’re smart people. Should I give them the benefit of the doubt?”, I lean a decent amount more towards answering “No”.
That makes sense as an upside, but it doesn’t explain why they’d use Google Docs, because you could just have the candidate program in a normal text editor and then copy-paste it into Google Docs afterwards.
It’s plausible that they not only care about the final code but also the process of writing the code. Simple copy pasting might not give them that data. On the other hand their custom build editor for interviewing.google.com might provide it.
Credibility of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2 is related but to me it belongs to a reference class that is at least moderately different. 1) Because of it being in the arena of politics. And 2) because they have an incentive to lie to the public for infohazrd reasons; regardless of whether or not you agree with it. What I’m trying to discuss with the Google example above is the reference class of an organization “getting it wrong” for “internal” reasons rather than “external” ones.
It’s pretty simple, I think; The cost of the problems of Google Doc fall on you, with a small cost on Google itself, and negligible cost on the decision makers in Google responsible.
PS: Couldn’t you just copy the code you wrote in an editor to the Doc? If not, this might be hidden upside: They can watch as people code on Google Doc (as far as I remember), but doing this with an editor is somewhat harder. (VSCode’s liveshare or using a TUI editor in a shared tmux session seem better solutions to me, but Google optimizes for the lowest common denominator.)
It’s pretty simple, I think; The cost of the problems of Google Doc fall on you, with a small cost on Google itself, and negligible cost on the decision makers in Google responsible.
Wouldn’t it hurt the signal-to-noise ratio in evaluating candidates?
PS: Couldn’t you just copy the code you wrote in an editor to the Doc?
Yes. To me the implication of this is that it’d make sense to do so. I’m not sure how it relates to your follow up point.
They can watch as people code on Google Doc (as far as I remember), but doing this with an editor is somewhat harder.
Decent shift away from assuming by default that decisions made by large organizations are reasonable.
I’m in the process of interviewing with Google for a programming job and the recruiter initially told me they do the interview in a Google Doc, and to practice coding in the Google Doc so I’m familiar with the environment for the interview.
I tried doing so and found it very frustrating. The vertical space between lines is too large. Page breaks get in the way. There is just a lot of annoying things about trying to program in a Google Doc.
So then, why would Google choose to have people use it for interviews? They’re aware of these difficulties, and yet they chose to use Google Docs for interviews anyway. Why? They’re a bunch of smart people, so surely there must be things in the trade-off calculus that make it worthwhile.
I looked around a little bit because I was curious and the only good thing I found was this Quora page on it. There wasn’t much insight. The big thing seemed like it was because it was easier for hiring committees to comment on what the candidate wrote and discuss it as they decide whether or not to pass the candidate. That makes sense as an upside, but it doesn’t explain why they’d use Google Docs, because you could just have the candidate program in a normal text editor and then copy-paste it into Google Docs afterwards. And I know that I’m not the first person to have thought of that idea. So at this point I just felt confused, not sure whether to give Google the benefit of the doubt or to trust my intuitive sense that having a candidate program in a Google Doc is an awful idea.
Today I had my phone interview, and they’re using this interviewing.google.com thing where you code in a normal (enough) editor. Woo hoo! My interviewer was actually in the engineering productivity department at Google and I asked him about it at the end of the interview (impulsive; probably not the most beneficial thing I could have chosen to ask about). We didn’t have much time to talk about it but his response seemed like he felt like this new approach is clearly better than using Google Docs, from which I infer that there wasn’t some hidden benefit to using Google Docs that I was overlooking.
I also interpret the fact that they moved from using Google Docs to using the normal editor as evidence that the initial decision to use Google Docs wasn’t carefully considered. I’m having trouble articulating why I interpret this as evidence. In worlds where there is some hidden benefit that makes Google Docs superior to a normal editor for these interviews, I just wouldn’t have expected them to shift to this new approach. It’s possible that the initial decision to use Google Docs was reasonable and carefully considered, and they just came across new information that lead to them changing their minds, but it feels more likely that it wasn’t carefully considered initially and what happened was more “Wait, this is stupid, why are we using Google Docs for interviews? Let’s do something better.” And if that’s true for an organization as reputable as Google, I’d expect it to happen in all sorts of other organizations. Meaning that the next time I think to myself, “This seems obviously stupid. But they’re smart people. Should I give them the benefit of the doubt?”, I lean a decent amount more towards answering “No”.
It’s plausible that they not only care about the final code but also the process of writing the code. Simple copy pasting might not give them that data. On the other hand their custom build editor for interviewing.google.com might provide it.
That makes sense as an alternative hypothesis.
Credibility of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2 is related but to me it belongs to a reference class that is at least moderately different. 1) Because of it being in the arena of politics. And 2) because they have an incentive to lie to the public for infohazrd reasons; regardless of whether or not you agree with it. What I’m trying to discuss with the Google example above is the reference class of an organization “getting it wrong” for “internal” reasons rather than “external” ones.
It’s pretty simple, I think; The cost of the problems of Google Doc fall on you, with a small cost on Google itself, and negligible cost on the decision makers in Google responsible.
PS: Couldn’t you just copy the code you wrote in an editor to the Doc? If not, this might be hidden upside: They can watch as people code on Google Doc (as far as I remember), but doing this with an editor is somewhat harder. (VSCode’s liveshare or using a TUI editor in a shared tmux session seem better solutions to me, but Google optimizes for the lowest common denominator.)
Wouldn’t it hurt the signal-to-noise ratio in evaluating candidates?
Yes. To me the implication of this is that it’d make sense to do so. I’m not sure how it relates to your follow up point.
There are options. http://collabedit.com/ is my goto.