That's some bullshit. Sorry that happened to you. You would think a company as well-endowed as Google would take the utmost care when selecting their employees. But based on this comment and others I have seen, it's clearly not the case.

This interview system is frustrating. I had 4 calls where I talked to the same recruiter thrice for this company I'm applying to. It doesn't sound like much but when you're in my situation wasting a few minutes is precious time. I'm driving 3 hours down and back to a full-day interview at said company. I had to take PTO. What do you tell your boss? I told em I had a drs appointment, luckily they bought it. I don't want to get harassed for looking for another job, it happens here.

Does it really take a full day to find out whether someone is a good programmer? I'd argue it takes longer. We just hired someone who washed out after 2 weeks without finishing a (significant) ticket.

Maybe instead of these nutty run-the-gauntlet interviews we should focus more on work-to-hire month long programs, with some guaranteed compensation if you fail(so that you are compensated for the risk of switching). I don't know. The current system is stupid.

I have gotten offers from a few major companies. But cramming this stupid Interview shit (What's the difference between an abstract class and an interface in Java?) when I've been running Golang, Python and Ruby for the past 3 years isn't fun. I should stop writing this comment and get back to studying.

> Maybe instead of these nutty run-the-gauntlet interviews we should focus more on work-to-hire month long programs, with some guaranteed compensation if you fail(so that you are compensated for the risk of switching). I don't know. The current system is stupid.

If you think you got shitty candidates with your old system, this would only get you desperate ones.

How do you get to a million lines of code on an open source project? At my full time job, 5k lines in a week would be a lot, and even at that fast pace it would take four years of full time work to get to a million.

A million lines diff yeah, not standing code, over a few years of basically full time as my PhD on a fast moving greenfield project. A lot of refactoring causes churn.

I could see how this might be an issue with someone early in their career who has a low-profile project or two, but your resume would stand out very quickly among the rest so for this to happen is alarming.

Feels like a very similar occurrence to what happened to the homebrew dev who got reject by google (albeit different circumstance to your false feedback)

The homebrew guy was subsequently hired by Apple, but later left, saying in a (now deleted) tweet that big company life wasn't his bag. Link from around that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12276219

There's a non-zero chance that the Google interviewers were able to pick up on this. Those of us not directly involved only ever got one side of this particular story.

Wasnt it the case that he got offended over the fact that he had to go through the same process as other people? Hope I am not mixing him with someone else.

I happened to speak to a recruiter this week about Google. In-house recruiters are an eternally revolving door. They come and go, they aren't incentivized like the externals, and they often aren't well trained. So I can imagine them glossing over your CV and missing the important points.

Is it becoming an unspoken requirement to have a GitHub resume? I don't have any serious code on GitHub -- how screwed am I?

I have a github account, with not much in it. And not much to add to it. I've written tons of code, but it was all under various NDAs and uploading it wouldn't be a good idea.

Projects from when you were a student? I have my undergraduate project on there for example, from well over a decade ago, but it still gets a lot of interest.

Community service projects? I maintain a bibliography I have on there, and I write a local history book on my GitHub. I made a website for a conference on there recently.

Slides, notes and code from conference talks you've given?

Hobbies? I used to have some repositories with things related to the sport I play.

Open source projects you contribute to in the course of your work?

Notes and experiments you make while learning about technology like new languages and libraries?

You must have done at least something like those ideas at some point in your life?

I mean you obviously don't have to if you don't want to and I don't know anything about your personal situation, but if you do want to have a GitHub profile I'm sure there's tons of things you're involved in in your life that you could upload even if you work at the NSA or something.

yeah sure, i have some stuff i did for coursera data science courses up there. and a neat graph algorithm project i did for a take-home interview. i think they’re ok, but i was really asking if google et al want an impressive github resume. based on the comment i replied to, they might.

As an interviewer I've never looked at a candidates github. As an interviewee I've gotten a number of first interviews without having a github. It might help, and my friend at M$ says they look at it, but I don't think it is required.