I can confirm that my experiences at Google is similar, as someone who both went through the application process as an applicant and was an interviewer (however, I was never on a hiring committee or explicitly responsible for hiring decisions). Including the parts about slowness, about intentionally not knowing how the candidate did in earlier stages (I believe we’re technically barred from reading earlier evaluations before submitting our own), and the part about being trained to be very strongly forbidden from giving candidate feedback.
Another thing I’ll add:
However, Givewell’s application process assumes that people work entirely in isolation.
[...]
There is no instruction to e.g. cover issue x, or focus on area y, despite the fact that in a real workplace those instructions would be provided (or at least discussed before the exercise).
Hence, despite Givewell’s claims that the exercises reflect work tasks, that clearly is not the case as they do not reflect how work is actually conducted in a well-functioning organisation. (And if it reflects how work is conducted in Givewell, then that just proves that Givewell is not a well-functioning organisation.)
I wonder if this is just a workplace cultural difference. In almost every job I’ve had, being able to independently come up with an adequate solution for tightly scoped problems given minimum or no additional task-specific instructions is sort of the baseline expectation of junior workers in the “core roles” of the organizations (e.g. software engineers at a tech company, or researchers in an EA research org). Now it’s often better if there’s more communications and people know or are instructed to seek help when they’re confused, but neither software engineering nor research are inherently very minute-to-minute collaborative activities.
I personally agree with the assessment with the OP that EA orgs should give feedback for final-round applicants, and have pushed for it before. However, I don’t think Google’s hiring process is particularly dysfunctional, other than maybe the slowness (I do think Google is dysfunctional in a number of other ways, just not this one).
I can confirm that my experiences at Google is similar, as someone who both went through the application process as an applicant and was an interviewer (however, I was never on a hiring committee or explicitly responsible for hiring decisions). Including the parts about slowness, about intentionally not knowing how the candidate did in earlier stages (I believe we’re technically barred from reading earlier evaluations before submitting our own), and the part about being trained to be very strongly forbidden from giving candidate feedback.
Another thing I’ll add:
I wonder if this is just a workplace cultural difference. In almost every job I’ve had, being able to independently come up with an adequate solution for tightly scoped problems given minimum or no additional task-specific instructions is sort of the baseline expectation of junior workers in the “core roles” of the organizations (e.g. software engineers at a tech company, or researchers in an EA research org). Now it’s often better if there’s more communications and people know or are instructed to seek help when they’re confused, but neither software engineering nor research are inherently very minute-to-minute collaborative activities.
I personally agree with the assessment with the OP that EA orgs should give feedback for final-round applicants, and have pushed for it before. However, I don’t think Google’s hiring process is particularly dysfunctional, other than maybe the slowness (I do think Google is dysfunctional in a number of other ways, just not this one).