29 ms·

> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather tha

> Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is? I'd actually argue that for many companies this post is true (i.e. that getting it "right" is less important than the journey) but I still won't forgive companies that design the most hostile interview questions possible, and are then surprised when interviewees complain. You can read the types of questions Google asks here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer-Interview-Questions-EI_IE9079.0,6_KO7,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Software-Engineer... I'd never interview at Google or any other company that operates this way. If the very first interaction I'm going to have is off-topic trivia, we're done, the company failed MY interview. The questions Google asks are disrespectful and unprofessional. But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field.

ben_jones 8y ago
To me OP seems to assume a competent, unbiased, and well meaning interviewer: always giving hints, knows exactly what they want, will field and answer questions comprehensively. At Google's scale with hundreds of thousands of interviews on the books, thousands of interviewers who like all human beings have good days, sick days, angry days, and depressed days, this will not always happen. What happens when its the interviewer trying to have a "smartness" contest? There are too many testimonials of this happening at Google to just ignore it.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  I agree 100%, there are too many testimonials about people asking about things like linux syscalls and the different bits in TCP headers for me to believe that all Google interviews are conducted without any tech pissing-contest shenanigans.
- tytso 8y ago
  What happens is the hiring committee will disregard the interview report, and send feedback to the interviewer, saying "don't do that". (There are generally 4-6 interviewers on an interview panel, so if one interviewer does a bad job, there are other interviewers who will be providing signal to the hiring committee. A single bad interview report won't sink a candidate.) Google's interview training is pretty specific about what is expected of an interviewer, and the interviewer has to write up fairly comprehensive reports about the questions that were asked, and how the candidate answers them, what hints were given, etc. Most interviewers ask questions that they have asked multiple times before, so they will include things like, "The candidate (TC) took twice as long to code this a very basic warmup question that was designed to motivate a more in-depth distributed computing question; unfortuantely, what a strong candidate could do in ten minutes, TC couldn't get working C code in 45 minutes". (Current best practice is to try to avoid revealing the gender of the candidate in the interview notes, hence the use of TC instead of he or she. The goal is to try to avoid triggering any unconscious bias on the part of the members of the hiring committee.) Now, there are some screening questions that are asked by recruiters as part of an initial phone screen when they are hiring for SRE candidates. Those questions are multiple choice and are really basic questions designed to screen out old-school operators who are quite good at mounting tapes (for example) but don't have any understanding of what TCP might be, and who think an SRE job is no different from a traditional system administrator position. Those are not asked by an engineer, but by a recruiter; the goal is to avoid wasting everybody's time.
  - ben_jones 8y ago
    So self reporting by the interviewer?
    - tytso 8y ago
      I'm not sure what you are asking. Each interviewer on the interview panel writes up a large amount of notes on their interview. The C++/Java/C/Python code written by the interviewee, what hints were given, what blind alleys the candidate might have wandered by, how the candidate tested the code, how long did it take for candidate to find a bug (with or without hints, etc.) For a design question, the interviewer will write up a sketch of the design, what tradeoffs were identified by the interviewee; what hints, if any, were needed, etc. Then the interviewer will rate candidate on various technical dimensions (coding efficiency, design, etc.) and non-technical dimensions (communication, leadership, etc.) For each of these ratings the interviewer has to justify the rating, by pointing at examples from the interview notes. Finally, the interviewer will be asked to score the candidate along a dimension of "strong hire" to "strong no-hire" and again, the score must be justified with a paragraph. For people on the hiring committee, the justification for the scores are often far more important than the actual rating given by the interviewer. The hire/no-hire decision is not up to the interviewers; the hiring committee is composed of a different panel of engineers who review the interview reports from the interview panel; and the members of the interview panel write their interview reports without getting to see or hear from the other members of the interview panel.
joshuamorton 8y ago
Why are manhole covers round, and similar brainteaser questions have been banned at Google for ~5 years at least. They're only the new normal if you're a decade behind the curve.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  My link from Glassdoor has feedback from interviewees from as recently as days ago. You can see the types of interview questions Google is asking right now. The sentence you're referring to was in the context of the FIELD which is why it said as much, and the specific question is a very well known stereotypical example: > But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field. If you browse my link you'll see that Google continues to ask off-topic questions, even if they aren't riddles or brainteasers. Why don't they ask questions relating to the job? Why don't they do practice tasks that you'd be expected to do on the job? Those are the core issues.
  - lowercased 8y ago
    > Why don't they ask questions relating to the job? When I hear of this sort of behaviour in interviews, I have to assume that the culture of the dept is such that x% of your job will entail fielding issues that are things that you consider outside your 'job'. If 20% of the time you'll be talking about stuff that you consider tangential, and you don't react well to that, you may self-select out. ?
    - shawn 8y ago
      Except this line of logic can be used to justify literally anything except illegal activity.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    I see two questions on that page, one about string generation/ds&a and one about "networking stuff". The rest are paywalled or something. So I'd implore you to be more specific about what kinds of questions you object to.
Torwald 8y ago
> The questions Google asks are disrespectful and unprofessional. Yep. This is not the only instance were Google shows a culture of lack of respect for the dignity of the individual.
oculusthrift 8y ago
even if you wont. millions will apply and try to break down the doors to get in
gwbas1c 8y ago
> If that were true then why not simulate those situations Because when you try to simulate those situations in an interview that needs to be conducted in 45 - 60 minutes, the questions become the kind you hate. I regularly interview candidates; and some find my questions weird. The point is that I'm trying to simulate everything in such a short time. Otherwise, each interview would take 16-32 hours, because we'd have to go through a massive onboarding process just to ask basic questions.
akhilcacharya 8y ago
>If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is? I hate this meme so much. I personally have seen situations in my own work several times in the last few months where knowledge of algorithms, even on the leetcode medium level, was immensely helpful in finishing the job. If you can do it quicker and more fluently, you're probably going to be more productive.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Depends on how narrow your specialization is. I remember that there are test patterns built into T1 CSU/DSUs, but not what they are or how to turn them on -- if I need to know, I'll look it up. I remember that there are three QoS bits in the IPv4 header, but not where they are. Probably pretty early, because of hardware implementations. I remember that lots of people look down on Perl 5's object system, but not why. I remember the existence and purpose of lots of Perl modules, but not the interfaces. I edit JSON and YAML every few weeks, but I don't have a conscious recollection of the rules -- they're prompted by looking at what's already there. I can guesstimate Big-O notation on most chunks of code, but I'll be fooled when there's a function that's hidden in a library because I generally don't have those memorized. I can tell you the bandwidth of lots of hardware interfaces, and the relative efficiency of speed and efficiency of storage for a handful of RAID configurations -- the ones that I set up, and the ones that I avoid. I know one firewall configuration tool reasonably well, which means that I look up esoteric bits, and have used so many that I expect to do common things in all of them with a quick examination of the language. I currently know a fair amount about GDPR and why it doesn't apply to my company (and how we can assist customers with their GDPR requirements) and lots about the Massachusetts and Virginia data privacy law. Very little about PCI compliance, but my point is: if my company wanted to do card transactions, I can figure out what I will need to learn to write a good policy and get it implemented in a way that won't embarass anyone. In short: when the job is the same thing over and over again, you memorize the details. When it's always something new, you need a broad overview about what can be done and where to find the details.
akudha 8y ago
5-6 years ago, I went for an interview in a real estate company. The introductions lasted all of 2 mins. Then they took me to a computer, showed me a bug in the code base that I would be working on, if I got hired. Then they said "please fix this". Took me about half hour or so to hunt the bug down and fix (it wasn't hard, but it wasn't a cosmetic bug either). Then they asked me how I found the bug. I explained, they told me I'm hired, and the paperwork will follow in a day or two. No other questions were asked, they didn't look at the resume at all. The entire experience lasted less than an hour - from the time I walked into the reception till I walked out. Best job interview ever! This codebase was probably 0.0000001% as complex compared to Google's (I can only imagine). Still, there is no reason more companies can't follow this style, at least for one of the several "rounds" of interviews, instead of whiteboard, trivia etc.
- kaidax 8y ago
  Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.
  - swypych 8y ago
    Sounds like a pretty inefficient way to fix bugs.
    - WalterSear 8y ago
      My dad used it as a pretty efficient way to avoid accepting that he hadn't done well in an interview.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    People claim this all the time but is there any actual evidence? It would be one of the worst possible grifts of all time.
    - zymhan 8y ago
      I know right can you imagine just deploying patches written by some person that wrote the patches for an interview test? I'll take that module that auto-completes code with Stack Overflow answers first, thank you very much.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
Why do you think "why are manhole covers round?" is "disrespectful and unprofessional "? As compared to say "are you going to have kids - to a woman "
- Someone1234 8y ago
  > As compared to say "are you going to have kids - to a woman" That's not only disrespectful and unprofessional but potentially also illegal. But it isn't a contest to see who can be the most disrespectful or the most disrespected, so I don't follow your point.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    No the OP and your self was being overly sensitive about being asked about manhole covers.

ben_jones 8y ago

To me OP seems to assume a competent, unbiased, and well meaning interviewer: always giving hints, knows exactly what they want, will field and answer questions comprehensively. At Google's scale with hundreds of thousands of interviews on the books, thousands of interviewers who like all human beings have good days, sick days, angry days, and depressed days, this will not always happen. What happens when its the interviewer trying to have a "smartness" contest? There are too many testimonials of this happening at Google to just ignore it.

fenwick67 8y ago
I agree 100%, there are too many testimonials about people asking about things like linux syscalls and the different bits in TCP headers for me to believe that all Google interviews are conducted without any tech pissing-contest shenanigans.
tytso 8y ago
What happens is the hiring committee will disregard the interview report, and send feedback to the interviewer, saying "don't do that". (There are generally 4-6 interviewers on an interview panel, so if one interviewer does a bad job, there are other interviewers who will be providing signal to the hiring committee. A single bad interview report won't sink a candidate.) Google's interview training is pretty specific about what is expected of an interviewer, and the interviewer has to write up fairly comprehensive reports about the questions that were asked, and how the candidate answers them, what hints were given, etc. Most interviewers ask questions that they have asked multiple times before, so they will include things like, "The candidate (TC) took twice as long to code this a very basic warmup question that was designed to motivate a more in-depth distributed computing question; unfortuantely, what a strong candidate could do in ten minutes, TC couldn't get working C code in 45 minutes". (Current best practice is to try to avoid revealing the gender of the candidate in the interview notes, hence the use of TC instead of he or she. The goal is to try to avoid triggering any unconscious bias on the part of the members of the hiring committee.) Now, there are some screening questions that are asked by recruiters as part of an initial phone screen when they are hiring for SRE candidates. Those questions are multiple choice and are really basic questions designed to screen out old-school operators who are quite good at mounting tapes (for example) but don't have any understanding of what TCP might be, and who think an SRE job is no different from a traditional system administrator position. Those are not asked by an engineer, but by a recruiter; the goal is to avoid wasting everybody's time.
- ben_jones 8y ago
  So self reporting by the interviewer?
  - tytso 8y ago
    I'm not sure what you are asking. Each interviewer on the interview panel writes up a large amount of notes on their interview. The C++/Java/C/Python code written by the interviewee, what hints were given, what blind alleys the candidate might have wandered by, how the candidate tested the code, how long did it take for candidate to find a bug (with or without hints, etc.) For a design question, the interviewer will write up a sketch of the design, what tradeoffs were identified by the interviewee; what hints, if any, were needed, etc. Then the interviewer will rate candidate on various technical dimensions (coding efficiency, design, etc.) and non-technical dimensions (communication, leadership, etc.) For each of these ratings the interviewer has to justify the rating, by pointing at examples from the interview notes. Finally, the interviewer will be asked to score the candidate along a dimension of "strong hire" to "strong no-hire" and again, the score must be justified with a paragraph. For people on the hiring committee, the justification for the scores are often far more important than the actual rating given by the interviewer. The hire/no-hire decision is not up to the interviewers; the hiring committee is composed of a different panel of engineers who review the interview reports from the interview panel; and the members of the interview panel write their interview reports without getting to see or hear from the other members of the interview panel.

joshuamorton 8y ago

Why are manhole covers round, and similar brainteaser questions have been banned at Google for ~5 years at least. They're only the new normal if you're a decade behind the curve.

Someone1234 8y ago
My link from Glassdoor has feedback from interviewees from as recently as days ago. You can see the types of interview questions Google is asking right now. The sentence you're referring to was in the context of the FIELD which is why it said as much, and the specific question is a very well known stereotypical example: > But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field. If you browse my link you'll see that Google continues to ask off-topic questions, even if they aren't riddles or brainteasers. Why don't they ask questions relating to the job? Why don't they do practice tasks that you'd be expected to do on the job? Those are the core issues.
- lowercased 8y ago
  > Why don't they ask questions relating to the job? When I hear of this sort of behaviour in interviews, I have to assume that the culture of the dept is such that x% of your job will entail fielding issues that are things that you consider outside your 'job'. If 20% of the time you'll be talking about stuff that you consider tangential, and you don't react well to that, you may self-select out. ?
  - shawn 8y ago
    Except this line of logic can be used to justify literally anything except illegal activity.
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  I see two questions on that page, one about string generation/ds&a and one about "networking stuff". The rest are paywalled or something. So I'd implore you to be more specific about what kinds of questions you object to.

Torwald 8y ago

> The questions Google asks are disrespectful and unprofessional. Yep. This is not the only instance were Google shows a culture of lack of respect for the dignity of the individual.

oculusthrift 8y ago

even if you wont. millions will apply and try to break down the doors to get in

gwbas1c 8y ago

> If that were true then why not simulate those situations Because when you try to simulate those situations in an interview that needs to be conducted in 45 - 60 minutes, the questions become the kind you hate. I regularly interview candidates; and some find my questions weird. The point is that I'm trying to simulate everything in such a short time. Otherwise, each interview would take 16-32 hours, because we'd have to go through a massive onboarding process just to ask basic questions.

akhilcacharya 8y ago

>If that were true then why not simulate those situations rather than riddles, google-able CS trivia, or whatever the interview flavor of the month is? I hate this meme so much. I personally have seen situations in my own work several times in the last few months where knowledge of algorithms, even on the leetcode medium level, was immensely helpful in finishing the job. If you can do it quicker and more fluently, you're probably going to be more productive.

dsr_ 8y ago
Depends on how narrow your specialization is. I remember that there are test patterns built into T1 CSU/DSUs, but not what they are or how to turn them on -- if I need to know, I'll look it up. I remember that there are three QoS bits in the IPv4 header, but not where they are. Probably pretty early, because of hardware implementations. I remember that lots of people look down on Perl 5's object system, but not why. I remember the existence and purpose of lots of Perl modules, but not the interfaces. I edit JSON and YAML every few weeks, but I don't have a conscious recollection of the rules -- they're prompted by looking at what's already there. I can guesstimate Big-O notation on most chunks of code, but I'll be fooled when there's a function that's hidden in a library because I generally don't have those memorized. I can tell you the bandwidth of lots of hardware interfaces, and the relative efficiency of speed and efficiency of storage for a handful of RAID configurations -- the ones that I set up, and the ones that I avoid. I know one firewall configuration tool reasonably well, which means that I look up esoteric bits, and have used so many that I expect to do common things in all of them with a quick examination of the language. I currently know a fair amount about GDPR and why it doesn't apply to my company (and how we can assist customers with their GDPR requirements) and lots about the Massachusetts and Virginia data privacy law. Very little about PCI compliance, but my point is: if my company wanted to do card transactions, I can figure out what I will need to learn to write a good policy and get it implemented in a way that won't embarass anyone. In short: when the job is the same thing over and over again, you memorize the details. When it's always something new, you need a broad overview about what can be done and where to find the details.

akudha 8y ago

5-6 years ago, I went for an interview in a real estate company. The introductions lasted all of 2 mins. Then they took me to a computer, showed me a bug in the code base that I would be working on, if I got hired. Then they said "please fix this". Took me about half hour or so to hunt the bug down and fix (it wasn't hard, but it wasn't a cosmetic bug either). Then they asked me how I found the bug. I explained, they told me I'm hired, and the paperwork will follow in a day or two. No other questions were asked, they didn't look at the resume at all. The entire experience lasted less than an hour - from the time I walked into the reception till I walked out. Best job interview ever! This codebase was probably 0.0000001% as complex compared to Google's (I can only imagine). Still, there is no reason more companies can't follow this style, at least for one of the several "rounds" of interviews, instead of whiteboard, trivia etc.

kaidax 8y ago
Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.
- swypych 8y ago
  Sounds like a pretty inefficient way to fix bugs.
  - WalterSear 8y ago
    My dad used it as a pretty efficient way to avoid accepting that he hadn't done well in an interview.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  People claim this all the time but is there any actual evidence? It would be one of the worst possible grifts of all time.
  - zymhan 8y ago
    I know right can you imagine just deploying patches written by some person that wrote the patches for an interview test? I'll take that module that auto-completes code with Stack Overflow answers first, thank you very much.

C1sc0cat 8y ago

Why do you think "why are manhole covers round?" is "disrespectful and unprofessional "? As compared to say "are you going to have kids - to a woman "

Someone1234 8y ago
> As compared to say "are you going to have kids - to a woman" That's not only disrespectful and unprofessional but potentially also illegal. But it isn't a contest to see who can be the most disrespectful or the most disrespected, so I don't follow your point.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  No the OP and your self was being overly sensitive about being asked about manhole covers.