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Ask HN: What Is the Google 'Software Engineer, Machine Learning' Interview Like?
Is it any different from the normal SE interview ? Also how is that role different from normal SE, if at all ?
- brianwawok 9y agoi would hope it has a few questions about Machine Learning.
- eggie5 9y agoin my experience only 1/5 of the interviews will touch on ML
- acconrad 9y agoGiven they've acquired Kaggle, I would imagine if you can solve Kaggle questions you're getting a solid preview of the ML-specific questions they might ask you in addition to the standard data structure/algo and unix questions they'll ask you.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cableshaft 9y agoThey put a bunch of machines in a room and ask you to stand in front of them and teach them something on the whiteboard. So pretty much no difference from a standard Google interview.
- praneshp 9y agoGood shot, but this doesn't really add anything to the post, does it?
- MegaButts 9y agoIt adds humor.
- pfarrell 9y agoWelcome to Hacker News. Take your humor elsewhere.
- monksy 9y agoHacker news voters are very harsh about humor.
- dasil003 9y agoThe original comment has positive rep because it's actually pretty good. What HN doesn't like is a wall of memes and in-jokes that are actually pretty repetitive and boring. Without a high bar for humor that is what all tech communities will devolve to, witness Slashdot, Reddit, etc.
- mack73 9y agoWhat all HN readers know and need is a good balance of humourous as well as serious content. Humor is not easy. We should cut humor-aspirers some slack and never vote while angry.
- MegaButts 9y agoI agree with you in principle, but even as someone who regularly gets downvoted trying to make jokes, I understand the derision towards humor here. The problem is people just aren't as funny as they think they are, and at the same time jokes often derail the conversation. While HN isn't perfect, I think overall it's extremely well moderated. Although I have to admit (and I have other accounts which are much older, so I'm not new here), it does seem to be slowly slipping in the wrong direction as it becomes more popular.
- gberger 9y agoIt humorously states that it is no different than a standard Google interview, which does add value to the post.
- cableshaft 9y agoMore seriously, I was brought in for an iOS app development job interview and I was asked all algorithm questions and nothing about iOS. I also tried doing the whiteboard questions in my strongest language at the time, Objective-C, which in hindsight was a huge mistake (Objective-C is ridiculously wordy, I kept running out of space on the whiteboard). A couple of the interviewers said they weren't too familiar with Objective-C either, so I clearly wasn't getting interviewed by their iOS teams. If I were to do it again I'd probably use a much more terse language like Python.
- thearn4 9y ago> I was brought in for an iOS app development job interview > A couple of the interviewers said they weren't too familiar with Objective-C either, so I clearly wasn't getting interviewed by their iOS teams. Google's onboarding process is such an enigma to me. I went through a few of the remote interviews for SWE a few years back (I didn't commit to an on-site one in mountain view though). It seemed very odd to me that, near as I could tell, they don't really give an indication about what you would be working on until after you are hired and oriented.
- ptasci67 9y agoI actually prefer the way Google does it. They are really looking for generalists and the process is optimized for that. Once they have determined you have met the hiring bar, then they proceed with a "matching" process which is awesome. You get to list of your interests and get placed on a team in the company that aligns with your preferences and skills. This is way better IMO to the reverse which is applying to ten different interesting positions at another big tech company and having to speak to individual hiring managers for each position.
- surrey-fringe 9y agoI like you, you have interesting opinions.
- tomc1985 9y agoHow does this add anything to the discussion either? This place is turning into /r/AskHistorians
- gumby 9y agoI thought it was funny enough to deserve having been posted, since it implied a nice misreading (or perhaps even a garden path sentence). You could also consider it a wry social comment on the Rise of the Robots. (I notice your comment has been downvoted. I will up vote it -- I disagree with it, but it's also reasonable question as questioning the standards and practices of the group are a way to converge on good practice. Every team should be doing that).
- eggie5 9y agoI interviewed at all the big bay companies (and the seattle one) for machine learning earlier this year and few of the questions were classical machine learning questions. Most of the questions were programming an computation.
- notyourwork 9y agoWould love examples if you have any.
- eggie5 9y agoEach company does the 5 interview format and some of them, an Apple data science group for example, ask or a presentation of your research. Random people from the team, group or larger org will interview you, seemingly to remove any bias. Consequently, you get a large variety of interviewers w/ different backgrounds. On average I would say only 1 out of 5 five interviewers had machine learning background and asked those questions. Most of the interviews were traditional software engineers (or Data Engineers) and asked the typical "Cracking the coding interview" questions. Sad state of affairs :(
- jlarocco 9y agoWhy don't you just ask them?
- JabavuAdams 9y agoThis is not an unreasonable suggestion. Google seems to have taken the Yegge stuff and Cracking the Coding Interview to heart and published a lot of info on the interview experience.
- BrandonY 9y agoWe have. In addition, some offices offer interview coaching sessions for candidates who are scheduled for an on-site, which are basically rehashes of the material we publish plus some Q&A time with an interviewer. I would encourage OP to ask their recruiter about them, if they think it'd be helpful.
- longhairedhippy 9y agoPurely a personal anecdote and single data point, however I would not recommend going to the coaching sessions in order to gauge the type/difficulty of the questions you will be asked in the interview. I've done this before and it was not representative whatsoever. If anything, it gave me a false sense of confidence because the questions were so simplistic.
- skuzye 9y agoMy personal experience was that the recruiter actually gave very good answers to these kind of questions. So, not a bad idea.
- praneshp 9y agoFrom what I've seen with friends, the recruiter is very helpful pre-interview, so might make sense to ask them.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- theDoug 9y agoYes, your recruitment manager is your #1 resource and a coach of sorts. Absolutely bring up questions with them and make sure you are clear on what may come up in the interview. Don't bring perceptions of joke answers online into your real job interview! (Google Cloud Employee)
- praneshp 9y agoCoach is a good word, at least with the experience my wife had. She felt she was talking to a "friend" that wants you at Google, vs someone on the other side.
- kcorbitt 9y agoEh, when I interviewed my recruiter was definitely friendly and willing to answer questions, but didn't really have any actionable information about what to expect in the interview. Answers on Quora/blog posts were actually a lot more useful. However, later on in the process during team matching and negotiating an offer the recruiter was much more helpful.
- onewland 9y agoNot an employee, but I'm pretty sure that the interview is the same for all engineering roles, unless you're very senior/specialized. I doubt that your interviewers will even know that you're up for a ML position specifically.
- throwaway9475 9y agoThey ask you to reverse a linked list then politely ask if you have any questions when you don't do it to their liking.
- cheeze 9y agoIf you can't study to reverse a linked list efficiently... You're gonna have a bad time... I ask 'reverse a linked list' when the interview is going so poorly that there is no chance the candidate will be able to answer my 'normal' questions.
- joeletizia 9y agoI think that's kind of the point. If you have to study for an interview, the interview is most likely not representative of real work one would find on the job. Let's face it. "Big Co" interviewing is about passing an arbitrary bar that they have set. It's not representative of the actual work post hire.
- pavement 9y agoFunny, because whenever I get asked questions like that, I just start nesting for loops to an arbitrary depth, until that trolls my way out of the interview. Then I wrap the outer-most closure in an exception that swallows the error, and bid good afternoon.
- kelvin0 9y agoThe ideal scenario: They give you an assignment to complete at your pace for a few days, and review your solutions and implementation with a group of your (future?) peers. This takes the form a small Q&A presentation and allows to assess your technical and communication skills. Then, you spend another week as a paid 'freelancer' to do some actual work and interact with your team. At the end of the week you are assessed by your peers and are presented with an offer, in case all went 'well'. The reality is certainly much grimmer (to me anyways). Good luck!
- marssaxman 9y agoIdeal scenario? Are you seriously suggesting that it should be reasonable for a potential employer to expect you to burn a week's worth of vacation time on the possibility of going to work for them? No way!
- p1esk 9y agoCompared to the current situation, where you have to study for a month to answer "Cracking the coding interview" questions, yes, this would be a much better scenario.
- marssaxman 9y agoIs that something people actually do? I've always taken that sort of remark as hyperbole.
- khedoros1 9y agoI spend a few minutes a day reading through some problems for a week or two before an interview that I suspect will be challenging. Less if I've been interviewing a lot lately. Who the heck studies for a month for an interview??
- p1esk 9y agoI'm at grad school currently, and all recent graduates I know who wanted to get a job at top SV companies studied really hard for SE interviews. And even after all that studying, most of them didn't pass technical interviews at big 4. We are talking about solid knowledge of algorithms and data structures. If you haven't just gotten an A in that class you will need a while to really hammer it down.
- Pica_soO 9y agoWe lost control(reliability of the Algo, understand-ability of the Algo, reproduce-ability of the Algo) on the P in Input Processing Output. Can you write Data filters and Automated Tests to Abstract that problem away?
- jj12345 9y agoAs someone going into the field, can you explain what this means? Specifically, I'd assume we're trying to isolate some outliers that are causing a funky bias in the learner. In what way would you automate their discovery (what does it mean to "discover" the outliers in this scenario?)? Just looking for clarification because I feel like I should know this. Trying to couch the problem in terms I'm more familiar with.
- meric 9y agoThe machine learning generates the algorithm so we don't know what it is. Now how do we test it. I think that's what he means. I'm not in machine learning either.
- aparvinash 9y agoI might be wrong but 3 General White board coding rounds by SWEs(with some emphasis on data processing appropriate data structures, computations etc) 1 or 2 rounds specific to machine learning with some one working in that research area ( 1 or 2 based on the level you are coming in probably) But as someone in the comments thread pointed out recruiter would be the best source
- geofft 9y agoI attended a Google interview coaching session yesterday (if you get in touch with a recruiter, they'll send you an link to RSVP for one in session, and I think they're all recorded). It was led by, if I remember correctly, a fairly senior manager whose team was working on machine learning for recruiting, so he had some fairly specific experience with this. Two things he mentioned that stand out for your question: first, Google attempts to hire generalists, or at least "fungible specialists". Three of your five SE interviews will be general CS algorithms questions; the other two are likely to be specialized if you're interviewing for a specialized role. I don't think that it's likely to be different from the other "Software Engineer, Foo" interviews (e.g., "Software Engineer, Front End" or "Software Engineer, Mobile"), where at least one of the remaining two interviews will probably be specific to Foo. Second, he specifically complained about people who show up and say "I want to do machine learning" and then say they have no machine learning experience / background. There are apparently a very small number of teams who will train a bright person how to do ML, but in general you're expected to have some background with it. This seems like the sort of thing you should ask your recruiter (after getting in touch with one) and perhaps ask at a coaching session, if there's one in your city. I am a little genuinely confused that they seem to think their interviews need a coaching session, but hey, at least it's progress.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoI wonder why if Google aims to hire generalists, then why do they go after so many PhDs, who, by definition, are specialists?
- dragonwriter 9y agoPh.D.'s are not, by definition, specialists; they have, of course, demonstrated depth in at least one narrow specialty, but that is not inconsistent with also having breadth (and I think Google's preference isn't for breadth instead of depth, but for both together.)
- zeroxfe 9y agoJust because you specialize in a field doesn't mean that you can't be a good generalist.
- bitL 9y agoYou get one TopCoder problem and the automated DeepCoder robot with q=0 is your first opponent. Once you beat it, they increase q to 1. You have 6 rounds with 1 hour lunch break where they tweak DeepCoder to respond to your thinking better. Once you beat all DeepCoder levels, they hire you and your task is to improve DeepCoder so that it beats you every single time.
- MarkMMullin 9y agoPurely by inference based on ML/MV interactions with various bits of teh Googz, it will depend very much who is asking these questions - the closer you get to the tensor processing unit and its enclosing code, the more you're going to have to really know your stuff - further away in some of the ex-moon shots struggling to survive, I'd personally be surprised if the staff runs a reliable enough A* alg in their own heads to actually get to the room you're seated in - in short, googz is big - closer you get to the core the more hard core I would expect it to be, conversely as you move to the fringes, well that might be what you get :-)