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(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.) I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straight
by asuffield 11y ago
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)
I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straightforward: you tell us what your strongest areas are, we'll give you interviews that line up with those areas. There's no strict guarantees and you should expect a spread of different questions, but whatever it is that you're good at, expect us to offer you a chance to show us that you're good at it.
It's probably only a useful technique at companies which are big enough and flexible enough to find a use for you, whatever your skill set happens to be. For a company that only has one job opening and needs a specific sort of person to fill it, this sort of pick-your-interview-subject approach doesn't help them.
(Trick questions are useless: they primarily serve to make the interviewer feel clever, not to demonstrate the abilities of the candidate)
- rdtsc 11y agoOk makes sense. I should also apologize, Google didn't really give me trick questions when I talked to them 4 years ago or so (but other companies did), so didn't mean to imply they did as well. Google had a list of technoliges as you described, and I was asked to rate myself on each one. I think it would have been slightly better if they explain why or how it is used.
- vonmoltke 11y ago> I can't tell you about other companies, but ours is pretty straightforward: you tell us what your strongest areas are, we'll give you interviews that line up with those areas. There's no strict guarantees and you should expect a spread of different questions, but whatever it is that you're good at, expect us to offer you a chance to show us that you're good at it. My one experience with getting to a Google onsite is that, despite repeatedly telling various recruiters my strongest areas, they ended up interviewing me for what they wanted me to do rather than what I was good at. In fact, one of my interviewers literally had to throw out all his prearranged questions and make shit up as he went because my background and experience were so misaligned with what he had been added to my loop to ask me about.
- asuffield 11y agoSorry that happened, it's not perfect and sometimes things go wrong. If this was several years ago, things have improved a lot since then.