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I had a disastrous phone interview this week throughout which I remained calm and focused but immediately after putting the phone down I emailed the recruiter t
by eterm 11y ago
I had a disastrous phone interview this week throughout which I remained calm and focused but immediately after putting the phone down I emailed the recruiter to say I wasn't interested.
The "Technical" part was just trivia. Never-mind that I was sat in front of a computer and could have googled everything asked, I chose not to do that.
So yes, I stumbled when asked "what does the using keyword do". I explained how it relates to IDisposable, disposeing the object at the end of the block scope and avoids needing try/finally blocks.
But clearly that wasn't the script, because they kept asking "Are you sure it doesn't do anything else? Are you sure isn't used anywhere else?".
Eventually I realised they were talking about "using System.Linq" etc, and all they wanted to hear was the word "namespaces".
Talk about interviewing by numbers, had I wanted to I could have googled every question and given them perfect descriptions.
What could they possibly have learned from that interaction? I learned I didn't want to work there, so it helped me I guess.
But I find implementation things more helpful (in person, not by phone!), because it's not about whipping out the right answer, it's about watching how the candidate thinks and approaches problems. It's about how they work not the end result.
I like the "write a function to multiply" because it can be extended to any level. If someone aces the positive numbers case you point out negative numbers, if they ace that you can talk about efficiency, or bounds checks, exception handling, efficiency or whatever else you think they'd like to talk about.
- illumin8 11y agoThe first Google phone screen for SRE candidates is so scripted that you can probably Google the questions and get exact answers. It's been years since I've had it, but I remember it being the exact same questions, about UNIX internals and TCP/IP. This type of recruiting seriously turns me off because you can tell they're hiring minimum wage call center workers to read a script and filter out the 9/10 candidates that can't answer a few administrivia questions. It makes me think of them more as an industrialized recruiting center than a company that actually cares about their workers, which is probably the wrong message to send to potential employees.
- ionforce 11y agoBut maybe they encounter so much noise in their hiring process that this actually is the correct process at scale. It may minimize "humanity" for potential interviewees, but it optimizes for lack of heart ache on their end. Is my guess.
- Morgawr 11y agoThe first Google phone screening for SRE candidates is usually done by a technical recruiter who doesn't have extensive technical knowledge but at least knows the basics and is able to talk with you about the answers you give (albeit not in as much detail). It's supposed to be easy and it's to filter out people who lie on their CV or really don't have broad superficial knowledge. The follow up phone interviews are what really matters (before the onsite of course) with actual engineers and go more in-depth with coding questions (among other things) at least. I remember my recruiter was a really knowledgeable guy and he knew his stuff even though he wasn't an engineer. We had a nice chat and he was able to keep up with my (basic, obviously) responses of how TCP works, how to implement inode-based filesystems or whatever information you can read out of a stat call... Nothing too fancy but still it didn't sound like rehearsed script to me.
- havetocharge 11y agoIn my opinion Google absolutely does care about their employees. However, if you are turned off at the first contact, this company might just not be for you. At the end of the day, it is not about what the company can do for you, it is about what you can do for the company.