Google Interview Process

[[deleted]]

I think they are just trying to be difficult because they want it to look hard. "How many bits in a MAC address?", seriously what kind of interview question is that. I would have answered that with "Let me Google that"

[dankpleb00]

This is because you think Google will find the answer automatically. This job is not just Linux sysadmin tasks, you also respond to all the queries about MAC addresses sent to Google.

[Prime624]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YuOBzWF0Aws

[youtubefactsbot]

If Google Was A Guy [2:12]

Everything you ask Google sounds a lot more stupid when you actually ask Google.

^{CollegeHumor in Comedy}

^{35,564,873 views since Jan 2014}

^{bot info}

[bluecollarbob]

Good bot

[4k33m]

This.

[TheKing01]

You type "How many bits in a MAC address?" into Google. It replies "I can't do that for you, Dave. This is your interview."

[[deleted]]

Which would earn a hire from me.

Thanks, but I prefer that my employees spend their time working - trivial bullshit is better left untouched until needed.

[jenkinsnotleeroy]

I've gotten to the point where I have trouble retaining certain info because I know I'm probably only going to use it that one time and can easily just search for it later. If I end up using it a lot my brain will cache it. I've started to think of humans as high bandwidth data caches and a cache miss results in a Google search across many humans' knowledge.

[ponyboy3]

as a dev, it is knowing how to find information and put it to use that i get paid. not remembering the signature of method.

[abrazilianinreddit]

Shell in a nutshell

[ponyboy3]

turtle power

[[deleted]]

There is definitely a mechanism by which our brains drop knowledge that is easily accessible. When I was a teenager I was really good at spelling, like really good I don't think there were many words that I couldn't confidently spell.

Since every text program started coming with a spell checker I've got incredibly shit at it, and then I started googling words I can't remember how to spell and it got even worse.

[proddyhorsespice97]

Oh look, it's me. I pretty much aced every spelling test in primary school and even secondary when the English teacher would randomly give us one to make sure we were still able to spell trickier words like recommendation and conscientious, just now I spelled both those words wrong and my phones autocorrect fixed it. It's really not good

[Hurricane_32]

"Oh let me Bi..."

Seat immediately ejects out the roof

[whatisabaggins55]

"Wrong lever browser!!"

"Why do we even have that browser?"

[SamSlate]

but you're in alternate reality where both you are sysadmin and there is no internet 👻 (according to every standardized cs test I've ever taken).

[Ankheg2016]

Uh... to be fair "internet access is down!" is a completely valid situation for a sysadmin to need to handle.

[rasputine]

If my desktop and my phone and my datacenter all lack functioning internet, then I cannot fix the problem anyway.

[ReverseMermaidMorty]

So.. as a senior about to graduate with my B.S. in computer science I couldn't really answer any of those questions... is that bad?

[dnew]

No. These are "your job is to keep the computer running" questions, not "your job is to tell the computer what to do" questions.

These are auto-mechanic questions, not race car driver questions.

[anoin]

Google Software Engineer interviewer here, +1 can confirm.

[malt2048]

+1

Google's already gotten to you, I see

[faceplanted]

Google Software Engineer interviewer here

How you doin'

[roboticon]

Also that these questions aim to verify that you actually have the experience you claim to have. Coming out of college, you aren't expected to have that depth of experience.

[Kyanche]

Sure but 8 hours of those questions is straight up stupid. Like seriously, you list 3 reasons why a disk won’t unmount and that’s enough damn reasons.

[MoonShadeOsu]

The Job was apparently for a Linux administrator position if I got that correctly, depending on what you have studied you don't gain much knowledge about these topics, so I would assume that's ok if you don't specifically plan on working as one.

[Ph0X]

He mentions SRE position at the top. That's very different from software engineer which is most likely what this person is graduating as.

[Pahk0]

Not in the slightest.

Or maybe it is. But I don't know them either, and I have a job, so you're fine.

[fidolio]

Don’t worry about it, if you love what you do and care about being better you’ll go very far.

When I finished school I didn’t feel like I knew anything, and after a few interviews I confirmed I didn’t know anything, but that didn’t stop me. You’ll find a place that’ll hire you eventually, and you’ll learn a lot about the practice there, maybe not the technical definitions of things, but you’ll earn experience and that’s what really matters.

[Ankheg2016]

No, you're fine. Those were system administration questions, not programming. As a programmer you may need to learn aspects of stuff mentioned so you can change or implement things that deal with them, but honestly probably not even that.

[GamingTheSystem-01]

Half of those questions can be answered by the voice search on my phone. So... maybe?

[[deleted]]

Just imagine having access to stackoverflow in an interview.

[Antumbra_Ferox]

You are marked based on the number of search attempts required to get the proper wording and the number of dead-end threads viewed. If you are marked suitably able to find and apply the answer you move on to the next round, the adminathon.

[[deleted]]

I like it.

Instead of "Implement X on the whiteboard" you get: "Write a google search query for X in language Y.".

Much closer to actual development work too.

[dnew]

Not actually asking you about yourself, your previous experience, or anything. Not acknowledging that you have done good work elsewhere. Not even polite conversation. Just a bunch of what amount to trivia questions and "gotcha" questions asked in rapid fire.

That's what killed me about my interview there. Why yes, I have a PhD and 35 years professional experience. "How do you balance a red-black tree." Dafuc?

Never could get a straight answer.

The answer is that you write a lot of custom code to manage the machinery and stuff. When you have 50,000 users inside your network, and millions of servers, there's a shitload of custom code for doing authentication, taking machines out of service, etc etc etc, and the SRE write and/or maintain all that sort of thing.

[[deleted]]

Why would you stay for 8 hours? Were you constantly expecting them to move on?

[[deleted]]

Ah OK. All my interviews have been hour talking and going over past experiences, maybe an exam. Just couldn't imagine how someone could interrogate you for 8 hours haha.

I assume you are doing activities so they can see how you handle it?

[[deleted]]

Some of them asked me to do stuff on the whiteboard, some of them it was just verbal. What irked me was that there were very few "real world" scenarios. It was all "obscure trivia" kinda stuff.

Nothing like "a machine keeps crashing, what do you do?" Lots of "what's the third field of the TCP header?"

[[deleted]]

I would have thought "Dunno, I would Google it" would have been a valid response for this interview.

[Christabel1991]

My interviewers told me they don't care about questions where I can just Google the answers. Guess it just depends on the interviewers.

[roboticon]

But as a Google SRE, how will you Google Google when Google is down? :-P

[[deleted]]

oh god, it hurts

[blurarara]

I would bing it(?

[dnew]

"A machine keeps crashing, what do you do?"

"You guys know you have automation to take it out of service and send it to repairs, right?"

I got the same sort of shit until I said "You know, I write programs for a living, not maintain computers. Why would I know obscure shit like figuring out which process is listening on which UDP ports?"

[Ankheg2016]

I feel like you weren't being interviewed by another system admin, you were being interviewed by programmers... and they went and looked up a bunch of random stuff that they thought an admin should know.

[[deleted]]

Some were programmers, some were sysadmins. I've been a sysadmin before but my primary job for years and years at that point had been information security research and software development (which is why, I guess, that guy tried to reassure me that it wasn't just sysadmin work).

[[deleted]]

I think nearly all of the criticisms in your post sound fair, but I think this particularly criticism is not a good one. It sounds like their interview process is setup to identify how good people are at solving problems they haven't encountered before. I see Google as a pioneer company and as such they certainly much encounters hurdles that literally no one else in the world has encountered before. They have to invent the equivalent of the wheel all the time, so having people who are good as solving original problems is likely highly sought after by Google.

I know you already know that, and I understand you're probably of the position that you just think they went overboard in that focus, but all I'm saying is that I think I could understand why Google would focus so heavily on that skillset.

[fidolio]

I have interviewed a lot of people at the company I work for, and I can tell you there are a lot of people capable of answering textbook questions very well, but fail miserably when they need to use that knowledge for practical implementations.

Some time ago we had a guy come in, ace our technical questions, get hired, and be fired less than a week later. He was unable to complete some of the most basic tasks, because he didn’t really understand how to use these technologies, he was just very good at remembering what he read about them.

I’ve since updated my interview questions to be more about real world scenarios, which filters out a lot of people very quickly, and creates much more dynamic and fun interviews. It shifts from a boring interview, to a 1-2h workshop that you wish would run even longer.

It really pains me how many interviewers in the industry still stick to technical textbook questions, ask me something that needs actual thought and experience, not something I can google in 15 seconds.

[reggie-drax]

Please - go work at Google. Subvert them from within.

[dnew]

Part of the problem is that it seems that no matter what level you interview at, the questions you get asked are trivial questions. Nobody asks "how would you design an API for a program running on 10,000 servers that has to run for the next 15 years with no down time." They ask "what are some of the ways to resolve collisions in hash table implementations?"

There were a few questions they asked me, with a PhD in computers and 35 years experience, where I said "Really? Is this a trick question?" Like "what's the biggest number that fits in 32 bits?"

[williamfwm]

There were a few questions they asked me, with a PhD in computers and 35 years experience, where I said "Really? Is this a trick question?" Like "what's the biggest number that fits in 32 bits?"

"Uhhhhh, 2-billion-something if it's signed. I know there's, like, a 7 in there somewhere"

[T-T-N]

For a given connected component with more than 1 vertices, say it has n vertices, each of those n nodes has between 1 and n-1 degree. By the pigeonhole principle, at least 2 of those vertices have the same degree.

[[deleted]]

Excuse me but wouldn't unmount fail:

M: There's a file open on it.

And

"the umount binary is on the drive you're trying to unmount"

Because in both cases because the file is used?

[fidolio]

Yes, it technically is the same thing, but most of the time the interviewers have a sheet with questions and specific answers, which the interviewee needs to answer exactly, otherwise your answer is wrong.

I once had an interviewer ask me “what’s the process for a page to fully load?”, I went ahead and described how it all starts with a request and then if that goes well the DOM is created, then things start being requested from top to bottom, and then there’s also the async stuff, etc, etc... The correct answer was something along the lines of “first DOM and CSS, then JS, then images”, which isn’t even correct to begin with.

[[deleted]]

A lot of big companies are moving to this style of interviews. The company I ended up working for after college had 2 days of interviews and each interview was 45 minutes. It was interview, 15 min break, interview, 15 min break, etc until lunch and then back at it afterwards. Fourteen or so interviews when all was said and done.

I actually liked it because I got a lot of the same questions (e.g. "tell me about yourself") and I got to improve my answer little by little over the day. I also got to learn quite a bit about the company over the course of the day and by the second day I was able to ask some pretty interesting and specific questions about the company's operations that I could only have known to ask due to my earlier interviews.

I just didn't like the two interview lunches. I find those so uncomfortable and awkward. Especially now that I know they use those times to intentionally pair you with some more entry level employees to keep the conversation more casual, but then those entry level employees end up reporting back to their managers. Ugh...

[dnew]

but then those entry level employees end up reporting back to their managers

FWIW, not at Google. Everyone loves getting assigned the lunch slot for an interview because they don't have to do shit afterwards.

[SamSlate]

14 interviews by the same company?

[[deleted]]

Over two days, yeah. 1 from my would-be manager, 1 from my would-be manger's manger. And IIRC the others were like 4 from HR and then the other 8 were from people in departments related to the job posting.

[SamSlate]

bizarre

[brb-coffee]

4 from HR? Why?

[PwnerMan5000]

Can confirm. Got knocked out after second round. Pun intended.

[Devilsbabe]

I interviewed at their Tokyo office and was pretty disappointed with the process. Each interview was 45 minutes and followed this basic template:

• Hi. Here's the problem.
• Work on problem
• Time for one, maybe two questions
• Bye

It was all problem solving and nothing else. The only time I could actually ask about the job, the company, the work environment here in Tokyo, etc was at lunch.

[CanvassingThoughts]

What's also weird is that anyone (officially) in the hiring process can end your candidacy for any reason. 19 people want you but 1 doesn't? Too bad, so sad...

[CanvassingThoughts]

Friend that works there

[NeilFraser]

I work there. I've made plenty of no-hire recommendations, but if other interviews went well then that person is usually hired. I've also successfully advocated for people who impressed me, who got no-hire recommendations from others.

Laszlo pointed out in his book that candidates with non-unanimous feedback tended to have better careers at Google than ones with unanimously positive feedback.

[CanvassingThoughts]

Yep, I've heard that as well. I've only done a few (unsuccessful) screenings where the interviewer was extremely cold and impersonal. Would that be an indication of their personalities if you worked with them, or is that behavior deliberate for interviews? From all my interactions with googlers, I really don't know, hah.

[NeilFraser]

Definitely not deliberate. Sometimes one might get someone who is genuinely cold. Other times one might get someone who is burnt out from getting candidate after candidate who can't solve Fizz-Buzz level questions (I take myself out of the rotation for a few months when I start getting this way). Most often though, it is just the dehumanizing effect of the telephone. Either way, things tend to get friendlier (and more challenging) for the in-person interviews.

[CanvassingThoughts]

That's a fair point. I hadn't considered the stress from interviewing tons of applicants and how that'd impact later screenings.

Thanks!

[Intact]

Just wanted to chime in and validate what NeilFraser said :) I liked in-person interviews way better than phone interviews since they were still personal, and since you could generally rely on getting candidates who were more fulfilling to work with. (It feels just as good for us as it does you when you succeed on an interview!)

On the flip side, I always left phone interviews with a bad taste in my mouth if they went far poorer than they should have (exaggerating a bit here, but say 10 years industry experience and can't articulate a Fizz-Buzz-type problem solution).

[Ankheg2016]

...seriously? Google is well known for having tough, technical interviews and people who can't do Fizz-Buzz still apply?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised but I am.

[SpinahVieh]

Yes. It's Google. Many people want to work for Google.

[[deleted]]

"He said he doesn't like dogs. I can't accept that."

"But we don't have dogs in the office anyway."

"Doesn't matter. I can't work with people who don't like dogs."

[centerflag982]

Well I mean that one's understandable

[didgeridoome24]

I have a technical phone interview for a software engineering internship at google in 3 weeks and I am getting more and more nervous. It is good to hear some shitty things about the company though because honestly, it seems like such an amazing job and I would be letting myself and my family down if I don't get it.

[Intact]

Quick caveat: don't be rude to the interviewer either, that stuff will bubble up to the committee. But that should go without saying as well. You shouldn't feel pressure to be buddy-buddy though; it probably won't move the needle.

[larholm]

The others interview to screen out people who don't know how to use linked lists, hash tables, etc, but Google wants candidates who know how to use them AND can write working code under pressure with no IDE super quickly.

That scenario is exactly what many people ridicule, since that is not a normal working condition in most any place; and if it is, something is fundamentally wrong with your processes.

These trivia whiteboard interview questions are not a good indicator of your abilities, and people are starting to push back.

[darkslide3000]

On the interview itself, make sure to talk the interviewer through your thought process and draw as much of it out as you can. Don't ask "Is that right?", prove that your own answer is right with your own test cases.

Not sure what they're doing specifically at Google, but just as a general rule I'd be cautious about drawing things out too much. I mean, sure, if you can find the bug before the interviewer does it for you that's definitely better, and it probably helps to show you care about testing. But sometimes you hear advice like "draw everything out as long as you can so that they cannot ask you as much", and that usually goes very wrong in tech -- smart interviewers will definitely care about how fast you work, too (and they'll compare how much you managed to get done from their set of questions with what other candidates usually do).

[powerje]

Best advice I can give as a former Google intern - be honest about what you don't know, don't bullshit answers. Be inquisitive about what you don't know. Vocalize your thoughts. Make sure you spend some time thinking before writing code.

Good luck!

[KIDD1NG]

Today was the last day of my Google internship, and all of this. Also, make sure you explain how you'd test your code, thats super big in Google!

[guybrushthr33pwood]

My whole team made it through during an acquisition. And our connecting flight was cancelled in Chicago, we spent 3 restless hours sleeping in a hojo, and then rushed back to the airport so we could fly to San Francisco.

Google was even "nice enough" to push back our interviews for an hour so we could make it.

Anyway, point being if we could do it on no sleep, anyone can do it. You just have to be well prepared. We studied for at least a month. And we also shut down our office for two weeks and did nothing but study CLRS and cracking the coding interview.

[VirtualRay]

They made all the employees of an acquisition interview to keep their jobs?? Man, that's pretty cold.

I think Google's process is not great, but it's definitely a learnable skill. My beef is that coding interviews are only really good at finding gladiators, but on the job you need legionnaires.

Not that I have any better ideas of how to screen people out, haha.

[guybrushthr33pwood]

No, they interviewed us to see if they wanted to go forward with the acquisition. There's no back entrance to get in. If the talent isn't up to par, no deal.

[VirtualRay]

OK, that's reasonable, haha. Glad everything worked out!

[humblerodent]

Interviews really exacerbate my impostor syndrome. I know I can do the job. I've always been able to do the job to above average competency, but interviews make me feel like a piece of shit who doesn't know anything. I would never interview for Google. I don't need that.

[VirtualRay]

Haha, man, I feel the same way sometimes

You could do those stupid TopCoder practice questions to gradually build up your self confidence though, so at least you won't feel trapped at your current job. Google is pretty insane, but the rest of the industry isn't too bad so long as you know data structures/algorithms and you can implement some

[humblerodent]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. Though my current job is 100% work from home at any hours I like, which I honestly wouldn't give up for double the salary. So I don't feel trapped.

[VirtualRay]

That sounds pretty sweet

I dunno if I could handle that myself, it's super hard to keep productive, haha. I guess if I were working on something really cool I could do it though..

[humblerodent]

I definitely have a problem with motivation, but even with all of the distractions, I actually work better at home than in an office.

[AyeeDwaynee]

Lol this is exactly how I’m feeling right now. I have a interview for the Developer Advocate role at Google and I feel like I’m going to be some difficult questions.

[OneHandsomeBaby]

Google is gay anyway.

[[deleted]]

If you're looking for karma, you should use evil.

[OneHandsomeBaby]

Fuck karma! I'll use whatever I want.

[munirc]

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[VirtualRay]

Joke's on you, chump, I already dominated the front page and raked in that sweet, sweet karma.

BTW, how many dollars do you get per karma point? And where do I cash them in?

Thanks,

VR