I'm a Googler who conducts interviews. > It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based educational systems ask canned questions

I'm a Googler who conducts interviews. > It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated answers. Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled). > I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing) so maybe they just want effective robots? I can't speak for other interviewers directly, but the company really doesn't provide any incentives to do a good job or put in a lot of thought to doing interviews. For example, the coding questions that I ask are not that complex. They mostly involve translating a process that a non-engineer might have to deal with in everyday life into code. This minimizes any kind of selection bias -- if you're giving a general coding interview but the problem involves implementing something domain-specific, e.g. regex, then your results are biased in favor of people who have worked with regex. I don't know if other interviewers at Google have put in that kind of thought to improving the interview experience. > I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience and accomplishments of the team. Don't feel so bad. The quality of engineers and managers varies a lot. I've seen some of the best and some of the worst -- there's a huge range.