In years since past, the foobar challenge first appeared. 5 levels of ever harder coding challenges, and if you bested the first three you’d be given the option of providing your details to Google. There was a decent chance you’d be sent an interview request sometime later or , if you applied to them yourself, you’re application would be given extra weight. Recently, I got the challenge from Google and after getting to the last problem of level three, I wondered “do they even hire people using this thing anymore”? Some quick searches on medium blogs, quora and hackernews later, I was left with the impression that they don’t but no one could cite a source for this.
So does anyone have any info, definitive or otherwise, that would tell me and other lost souls whether Google still hires using this thing?
Edit: changed the name
I don’t think so. I’ve also done the foobar challenge in the last year or so, and got nada from them.
Googler here—I have no idea what happens to people who pass the challenge, but it’s been widely reported that Google is in a hiring slowdown right now. So I would expect the response rate from Google to be lower now than 6 months ago, and probably lower than it will be in 6 months.
Is this a seasonal thing? Or does Google hire people in batches? If not, together with joseph_c’s answer this suggests the odds are a worse than I thought.
It’s a strategic decision to hire fewer people for the moment: https://tech.co/news/googles-hiring-freeze-continues
What Christian said. It’s evidently a response to the current macroeconomic environment.
(I don’t speak for Google in this and have no special knowledge about it.)
I got the challenge a few days before you posted this and haven’t heard anything yet, but I also haven’t finished the level 5 problem yet.
I got in via it in 2018; not sure about recently.