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I have been putting off a Google interview for a whole year now. I have real experience building Cluster Filesystems, Distributed Caches, TCP/IP Control plane

I have been putting off a Google interview for a whole year now. I have real experience building Cluster Filesystems, Distributed Caches, TCP/IP Control plane software and low latency Ad platform for more than a decade. Sounds good on paper, but I can guarantee I cannot solve most of these puzzles without actually solving them beforehand. Why? Because I do not have cycles or time to solve these on my own. I have a system to build, Engineers to help and a product to ship. Family obligations do not help. Seriously, Is this normal? What does this tell me? I should not appear for Google interview and waste their and my time. Some of the replies here suggest that Googlers just push protobufs? Damn, that is one hell of an interview to push protobufs around :(. Glad, atleast they are upfront about puzzles, so that's good.

izacus 8y ago
Googlers push protobufs around the same way you just push packets around with all your expertise. It's very easy to be reductive when you decide to ignore the complexity that pushing around packets / protos hides in real world.
linza 8y ago
I don't work for Google and i haven't interviewed with them. In our company (low level systems engineering) we ask similar question, with the following rationale: I don't want to test if you can build systems, your resume already says so and there is but enough time to assess this properly anyway. But, can you be bothered to try to solve problems outside of your comfort zone? Will you humor me as an interviewer for one hour with something that is maybe new to you? If you rise to the challenge and attempt to solve these problems,i extrapolate to the systems engineering part.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  I find this amusing because lots of people put bullshit on their resumes that one has to filter them out. I already have my hands full trying to filter out the posers and assessing for culture fit. I don't have time to ask a candidate for some questions that aren't related to the role at hand. But hey, you do you.
  - linza 8y ago
    Fair enough, maybe we (rather small company in central Europe, but with gift profile customers) are an outlier here but I'm my hiring experience there weren't really any imposters. Usually they come from companies we know well, it are new grads in which case the question of experience is moot anyway.
Joky 8y ago
There are no “puzzles”, but problems to solve. I expect that things like this string search are entry level / new grad kind of question. Someone more senior with more experience should have different kind of problems to solve. I certainly didn’t have a bad experience when interviewing at Google and Facebook. One question were not very concrete, but it was interesting to walk through and solve. I didn’t just “know” the answer, I had to explore a few directions before getting the right one, but I’m sure that explaining my thought process, interacting with the interviewer, validating and debugging my algorithm in a principled way and fixing my bugs were all the elements they are looking to see.
- acroback 8y ago
  You give me hope.
webmaven 8y ago
> Family obligations do not help. You've put your finger on it right there. These type of interview questions are biased toward candidates with plenty of free time and few obligations. This effectively has ageist, sexist, and classist[0] consequences. [0] Racist as well, to the extent (which is considerable) that class is entagled with race.
- oculusthrift 8y ago
  yes anything that requires competence has those consequences. you could say the same for not learning anything.
  - webmaven 8y ago
    > anything that requires competence has those consequences. Not true. Are you in the "prioritizing diversity means lowering our hiring standards" camp?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    That inevitably seems somehow biased (I'm trying not to use a worse word) at its root. Hiring non-white non-men does not lead, inevitably, to worse hires. To imagine so is to paint entire demographics as inferior?
imaginenore 8y ago
I'm in a similar situation. In addition, I participated in many programming competitions (ACM qualification rounds, TopCoder, 2 or 3 CodeJams, tons of local ones), I even won some. But every time I look at Google interview questions, I'm like - NOPE. It's all about luck. You can get a simple question that you know the answer to, or not. In that case there's rarely enough time to solve a problem, and they usually want the best solution. And the odds of you coming up with a good solution to a hard problem are very close to zero.

izacus 8y ago

Googlers push protobufs around the same way you just push packets around with all your expertise. It's very easy to be reductive when you decide to ignore the complexity that pushing around packets / protos hides in real world.

linza 8y ago

I don't work for Google and i haven't interviewed with them. In our company (low level systems engineering) we ask similar question, with the following rationale: I don't want to test if you can build systems, your resume already says so and there is but enough time to assess this properly anyway. But, can you be bothered to try to solve problems outside of your comfort zone? Will you humor me as an interviewer for one hour with something that is maybe new to you? If you rise to the challenge and attempt to solve these problems,i extrapolate to the systems engineering part.

arvinsim 8y ago
I find this amusing because lots of people put bullshit on their resumes that one has to filter them out. I already have my hands full trying to filter out the posers and assessing for culture fit. I don't have time to ask a candidate for some questions that aren't related to the role at hand. But hey, you do you.
- linza 8y ago
  Fair enough, maybe we (rather small company in central Europe, but with gift profile customers) are an outlier here but I'm my hiring experience there weren't really any imposters. Usually they come from companies we know well, it are new grads in which case the question of experience is moot anyway.

Joky 8y ago

There are no “puzzles”, but problems to solve. I expect that things like this string search are entry level / new grad kind of question. Someone more senior with more experience should have different kind of problems to solve. I certainly didn’t have a bad experience when interviewing at Google and Facebook. One question were not very concrete, but it was interesting to walk through and solve. I didn’t just “know” the answer, I had to explore a few directions before getting the right one, but I’m sure that explaining my thought process, interacting with the interviewer, validating and debugging my algorithm in a principled way and fixing my bugs were all the elements they are looking to see.

acroback 8y ago
You give me hope.

webmaven 8y ago

> Family obligations do not help. You've put your finger on it right there. These type of interview questions are biased toward candidates with plenty of free time and few obligations. This effectively has ageist, sexist, and classist[0] consequences. [0] Racist as well, to the extent (which is considerable) that class is entagled with race.

oculusthrift 8y ago
yes anything that requires competence has those consequences. you could say the same for not learning anything.
- webmaven 8y ago
  > anything that requires competence has those consequences. Not true. Are you in the "prioritizing diversity means lowering our hiring standards" camp?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  That inevitably seems somehow biased (I'm trying not to use a worse word) at its root. Hiring non-white non-men does not lead, inevitably, to worse hires. To imagine so is to paint entire demographics as inferior?

imaginenore 8y ago

I'm in a similar situation. In addition, I participated in many programming competitions (ACM qualification rounds, TopCoder, 2 or 3 CodeJams, tons of local ones), I even won some. But every time I look at Google interview questions, I'm like - NOPE. It's all about luck. You can get a simple question that you know the answer to, or not. In that case there's rarely enough time to solve a problem, and they usually want the best solution. And the odds of you coming up with a good solution to a hard problem are very close to zero.