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My Job Interview at Google (2008)
- threetwoone321 6y agoThis is from 2008 it seems.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mnd999 6y agoSo how much of that stuff do you actually do day-to-day?
- cbanek 6y agoYeah seriously, it seems like a lot of the questions revolve around the TCP stack. Maybe it was a more networking type job?
- Lammy 6y agoCompanies like Google have hundreds of thousands of machines and nothing they do will ever run on just one box. I can see why they'd select for networking knowledge.
- pansa2 6y agoIt doesn’t seem unreasonable for an SRE position. Presumably the focus of the interview would be quite different if you were applying to work on, say, V8 or the Go compiler.
- itronitron 6y agoApparently Google SREs spend a lot of time watching the clock.
- fzeroracer 6y agoThe irony of the clock brain teaser is that it operates on two assumptions. One being that the person asked has experience with analog clocks (which, given that it's 2020 has become less relevant) and the second being that said clock behaves according to standard specifications. If the clock was instead a jump hour clock for example, then that tosses the trickery out of the window. Which is really what that brain teaser is about; testing that your cultural understanding of how an analog clock functions is correct.
- jrockway 6y agoI think getting the correct answer in code is easier than solving the "trick question" about 3:15. If I were the interviewer here, I would make sure the candidate states their assumptions and that the code they wrote follows those assumptions. You can make the hour hand stick right at the number for the entire hour, or you can have it smoothly sweep as the minutes (or seconds) increase. I would not care and consider both to be reasonable interpretations (but I've never seen a clock that sticks at the hours; it is harder to implement in hardware). I honestly wouldn't even ask this question because it's too simple. It's two divisions, a subtraction, and then a modulo 360. It is awkward when your interview question only takes 5 minutes and you have to awkwardly fill 55 minutes with follow up questions ("and how would you test that?").
- praptak 6y agoRanging from none to "whatever you happen to know about this stuff is not enough". Quickly building mental models for unknown stuff is the top skill. I'm afraid nobody even tries to assess this in the interviews.
- zapnuk 6y agoI'm probably not as driven as most people here. But I wouldn't want to have SEVEN technical interviews for what seems to be a relatively average opening.
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- p1esk 6y agoFor many people the opportunity to double their salary is worth spending a couple of months solving programming puzzles.
- anon7683213 6y agoI’ve passed the exact same SRE interview, well enough to be offered follow up interviews for a higher level. I’m not saying that to boast, I’m saying this to remind people that the celebrity developers, whose blogs and tweets we share here, are just as good as you, and more importantly, you can be just as good as them.
- jcahill 6y agoSingle-purpose account. You are neither a nym nor a Real Name™. You are immaterial to any discussion.
- Rockslide 6y agoReading that stuff always makes me feel incredibly stupid (or rather clueless). I wouldn't be able to answer most of those questions off the top of my head. Including this weird clock hand question (which is probably some trivial math that might or might not have been taught to me more than a decade ago and which I never ever actually applied since). Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfully) running a SaaS platform with tens of thousands of users, so maybe I'm not that clueless after all. Maybe Google scale isn't for me.
- cheez 6y agoThe purpose of these interviews is to: 1. Find people who fit the current culture 2. For the interviewer to feel better about already having a job at Google. I remember one guy bragging about how much he made. It's really not to find out if you're good at something. I have been offered jobs at some of the FAANMG companies so I'm not talking out of jealousy or whatever.
- praptak 6y agoMany people who work at Google feel the same. The impostor syndrome is a recurring motive in in the internal communications.
- Rockslide 6y agoWell, when you work at Google, at least you must have passed that kind of an interview at one point - which is something I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be able to do.
- antoinealb 6y agoThe issue with impostor syndrome is that your brain is good at finding excuses such as "I was lucky", "They did not catch me", and so on. Personally, I had a lot of fun doing my interviews and learnt a lot while preparing them. I would recommend you to try them, it's gonna be interesting, even if you don't get the job.
- daenz 6y agoAh, interview hazing, where having an encyclopedic knowledge that you can regurgitate on command trumps all. What a phenomenal waste of time.
- MattGaiser 6y agoWhen I first started down the path to becoming a software engineer, I never suspected that flashcards would be part of my interview prep as though it were a history course.
- Traster 6y ago>At first I thought I would be applying for a software developer position but after we went through my skillset, the recruiter concluded that I would better fit as an SRE. I've got to say, I've been contacted by recruiters for Google a few times, and it has always been for SRE roles. I got the distinct impression that it's less about whether my skillset fitted being an SRE, but more that they need lots of SREs and have trouble pursuading people to take that job. I'm sure some people want to be SREs, but Google seems to want Software Engineers to become SREs.
- Aeolun 6y agoBecause a SRE is just a software engineer that’s always on call?
- nickysielicki 6y agoWhy do you feel like it's less glamorous/whatever to be an SRE?
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- Karupan 6y agoJust reading this post triggered my anxiety. I don’t think I’ll ever make it though a single one of these FAANG interviews if at all I want to work for one.
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- rossmohax 6y agoFor the reference, thats from 2008
- jpistell 6y agoSeven interviews seems a bit... abusive?
- cassalian 6y ago> Unfortunately, I just learned that I'm not getting hired. Seems like a ton of effort to go through to not get hired. I'm curious as to why he wasn't hired; IMO it seems kinda strange to go through 8 interviews only to be rejected.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- StreamBright 6y agoGoogle is notoriously bad with these interviews. Most famous case is the Homebrew guy. I got turned down once because I haven't had a degree in CS. They knew that in advance yet they did the whole round.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> I got turned down once because I haven't had a degree in CS. This doesn't make any sense - the employ I'm sure thousands of people without degrees in CS.
- StreamBright 6y agoAmazon took me and others, in fact, during my time one of the most senior engineers did not even finish high school. They don't care.
- jedberg 6y agoGetting rejected by Google turned out to be great for the author. He ended up founding a successful company instead. (Browserling)
- kureikain 6y agoDid anyone notices these questions aren't hard on algorithm sides(all algorithm questions in this post are common/trivial) but more about understanding Network(TCP) and Distributed System(Map-Reduce problem). And the issue about forgoting to initalize data. Is the interview at Google really looking for that perfect solution on a whiteboard? In an interview, it's easy to forgot those thing like. I'm sure we have that moment when debug something and miss some trivial thing Anyone has done similar SRE interview recently care to share some questions?
- robinduckett 6y agoI recently had an interview at a taxi firm that followed this format. One two three pre-interviews followed by a day of 5 grueling 1 hour interviews. I didn't get the role. Apparently the frontend guy I had the first interview of the days five was concerned about my technical skills. I mean, I find it insulting, having worked for the last 12+ years as a developer to be told that there were "concerns about your technical competency" I hate interviews. I hate take home coding tests and have failed every single one I've had. Apparently this is a sign that I don't do well under pressure. I've been building working software for years, and the main problem I have is convincing people that I can actually do the job. I don't have a degree, and I don't have prestigious companies on my CV, and I don't have the time or energy to chase around roles like this, so I have to settle for unfulfilling and underpaid roles
- httpsterio 6y agoI find that the interviewing style of a company is often very telling of its' general work culture. You've missed our on opportunities and had to settle in less prestigious jobs, but are you sure they would've fulfilled you any better.
- ssss11 6y agoI tend to agree with this view - if the interviewing experience (for you) was awful you probably dont want to work there.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thiagocesar 6y agoI understand your frustration, but it seems clear to me that there is difference in what you consider high level technical skills, and what others might perceive as such. In a highly paid position, both selling yourself and your ideas, and smoothing out differences such as this one, are expected from the employee. While I believe that with your experience, you have accomplished a high degree of strong delivery... You still need to be able to manage this whole dealing with people thing. Because that’s why you get paid a high salary, to get any issues out of the way in a skilled manner.
- cdent 6y agoThese sorts of interviews do not find good software developers, they simply remove a certain kind of bad (not really) software developers along with a whole host of very good software developers that don't fit a very specific mold (perhaps people who write cheery blog posts about how fun it was? ...weird). Which is fine if you're the company doing the interviewing, but completely time wasting for the interviewee. In aggregate it sounds like abuse and disrespect. It's dismissive of experience, accomplishment and aptitude in favor of training to the test. People say that Google has changed their tune somewhat over the years, but their creed has had impact throughout the industry. It's a shame.
- rwmj 6y agoI'm not going to defend this style of interviewing, but I think it's useful to have tests which filter out people who cannot program at all. If you do any hiring you'll know that a surprising proportion of interviewees who make it to an on-site interview for software positions simply know nothing about the subject. When I did interviews at my start-up we'd have a Linux machine connected to a projector for interviewees to use (this is for Linux programmer and sysadmin positions), and a small but significant proportion of the candidates had no idea what to type into the terminal to list files, or what an absolutely trivial program (like loop to 10 printing numbers) did.
- cdent 6y agoSure, can't dispute what you say. There has to be some amount of "you must be this high to ride this ride" but you don't need to measure 7 times or whatever before thinking the first measure was accurate. I've been on both sides of the interviewing tables many times and the processes that worked the best were the ones that involved telling stories to another another and seeing how the other reacted. You know, actually interviewing, humans having a conversation.
- andreareina 6y agoHow is "What's the angle between clock hands when it's 3:15?" a trick question? It's not 0.
- kureikain 6y agoI was asked that question 2 times in different companies. At the first time I apparently forgot the the Hour stick will move a little bit when the Minute stick move to 15. I guess it's a trick question when we can easily forgot that fact. My brain is train that way that when it's 3 then the Hour stick is at 3...
- andreareina 6y agoWow it had not even occurred to me that anyone would not remember that the hour hand ticks forward a bit every minute. Blind spots and all that. Also just reinforces how much I dislike trivia and trick questions.
- ardit33 6y agosome clocks do that though (move the clock hand in discrete steps)
- Lewton 6y agoIt's kind of a trick question because it's trivial unless you forget that the hour clock hand doesn't move?
- zozbot234 6y agoIt's a trick question because it depends on the clock. :-P
- andreareina 6y agoAnd I'd probably be surprised at just how common it is to forget that. Not that forgetting (or remembering) provides any information as to whether someone's a good SWE or not.
- known 6y agoSounds like a Quiz, not Interview :)
- newbie578 6y agoAh screw it, I'll be the boy in "the emperor's new clothes". Google sucks! They try to put themselves on cloud9 and look at us "mortals" like we should be grateful for 8 interviews, LOL. Age has caught up with them, they just refuse to acknowledge it. They are no longer the "hottest" company on the planet yet they keep behaving like they are. To me personally, Google has become tne old IBM, a giant tech behemoth who cannot move normally and is riding on a single product and old glory. I would rather work at Microsoft right now than at Google (although I am aware I don't have "qualifications" for neither"
- bauerd 6y agoWhenever I read about people's interview experience with Google it sure sounds more stressful than my actual day job. I understand investing the time when youre a new grad, but I have no idea how already employed people find the time to prepare for these interviews …
- c0l0 6y agoMy interview process for SRE in Dublin in 2012 went pretty much exactly the same (procedure-wise - content was different though), and passing the on-site interview felt hard enough that I'm kinda proud of it to this day... But I also had to agree to not ever talk about the questions presented, in case I ever wanted to work for them. Now I wonder if that provision was alreay in place when that article was written initially, and the author just doesn't and didn't care - or if it had to be installed after such articles started popping up, and Google engineers and recruiters felt like running out of questions people couldn't prepare for :)
- soygul 6y agoI like how they asked a map-reduce question. If your previous experiences didn't involve working over massive datasets with distributed computing, you wouldn't have a clue. But if you did your search about your prospective position, you could find and study for the potential interview topics. They are effectively selecting candidates who have spot-on experience for the position in hand or are willing to put the time to study for it. Is it too much to ask? Probably not for what you would be getting in the next couple of years if you were to keep it up.
- dijit 6y agoI'm going to copy my response from a related thread 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22405372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22405372 --- I interviewed at Google for an SRE:Systems role around a month ago; I can share my anecdotes. The first interview put me in contact with a recruiter who would basically be my guide throughout the process, at first he asked me some basic questions to feel out where I was weak and then told me to prepare those weaknesses for the next round. The next round was 2 phone interviews, lasting about an hour each and over different days, one focused on my programming skills (of which, I have little because sysadmins don't typically do anything relating to data structures) and the second one was surrounding linux internals and debugging (which I was very strong on). I spent roughly 2 working days worth of time preparing for them. Preparing for the on-site was pleasant, I was put in touch with another google recruiter who ensured I knew where I was going and what I was doing, they told me that I'd be there the whole day and while they couldn't tell me what I would be asked/who I would meet/what to prepare; they gave me an approximation of the _kind_ of questions, very broadly. I spent roughly 18 working days preparing in my weak areas, including leetcode/data structures and reading comp-sci papers (paxos and ilk). On the day, I went through about 5, 1-hour long interviews that focused on various aspects of SRE (one of them being 'googliness'), some were about distributed systems (where the interviewer got hung up on the fact that I said I would use postgres instead of making my own database) and others were heavily programmer focused (linux internals was more about knowing the implementation of 'ls', scripting was all about the kinds of questions you get on leetcode). I'm not going to lie, it was gruelling, and I'm typically pretty comfortable interviewing; I thought I'd be fine with these interviews because I'm considered to be "shit hot" in sysadmin/writing glue by my peers, but I guess not, as I'm not a Google-SRE. :) (sidenote: everything in TFA rings true, including the tips, google recruiters are quite transparent about your process. But they also said that the last stage is not the interview, it's roughly 5 hiring committees that are looking at your application "package" through different lenses)
- pansa2 6y ago> ‘googliness’ What does this mean? How do they evaluate whether someone is sufficiently, um, Googley?
- jstewartmobile 6y agoI doubt they do the eight-separate-interviewer hazing to people with public achievements. Who would stand for it? "Go calculate the angle, Linus."
- rsanek 6y agoIf you consider homebrew a public achievement, then yes: https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?la...
- googlempl2020 6y agoI work at Google as an SRE, joined a few years ago. I am approaching 40, worked in a bunch of other companies before. My degree is is in the humanities, from a third world university you never heard of. I don't have any open source contributions. I speak lousy accented English (but I am a man and "white" if we are counting privileges.) I got contacted by a recruiter. I had a couple of phone interviews which felt like sanity checking that I knew what I claimed to know. I was asked to grade myself in a bunch of areas. I chose makes around 5-6 for the stuff I think I know well, and zero or one for the rest. I was given some recommended reading list that I ignored. I did browse Skiena's book on algorithms to get in the zone. I didn't study it or implement anything. I am very stressed during interviews and would forget anything that isn't in long-term memory already so there was no point. (know yourself...) I went to the onsite interview. Year, it's ~5 hours of being interviewed by people who have done dozens of interviews before. Everybody was unfailingly nice. I was panicing, not because "omg Google" but "omg humans I don't know for years already". Some algorithms, some Python, more troubleshooting and Unix. I had to estimate some numbers, so I announced I would use my cell phone calculator to not get anything wrong. I multiplied even low numbers by two on the calculator. Most interviewers are poker-faced about whether they liked the interview or not (now that I am an interviewer I understand - they probably try to put some distance between the interview and their rating, as they should). I could see that one was happy. I could see that one was not. I was hired. Large team, three sites. I did a reasonable amount of C++ (not a language I ever claimed to know) fixing bugs and performance issues. Most of my work has to do with low-level synchronization in x86 - I picked a small "specialty" first and applied it to a number of problems. I like it. I feel that I actually write more code than my peers in the product teams, as they do too much design-docing, design-reviewing, meeting, etc. (they are SWEs, I am a SE). The design doc culture at Google is excessive and silly. I am exposed to that too. I earn slightly more than my similarly-leveled peers on the SWE side /before/ accounting for oncall. Oncall rarely pages on weekends. I feel very able to fix any problem while oncall, or to escalate if not in my area. It doesn't stress me. I mostly consider it free money. My peer SREs actually know far more about all the nice Google architectural stuff than our peers in SWE-land, who are mostly implementing features on top of huge abstraction layers and typically are only exposed to one particular facet of the infrastructure. Google's infrastructure is impressive and something of a marvel. It doesn't mean it's perfect. SRE is the better point of view to observe it. Google employees are better than in any other large company (a few boutique shops are better on average, of course, at a smaller scale). Some of them like to pretend that they are better than they are to the outside world. Internally, nobody goes far being arrogant, and showing vulnerability or gaps in knowledge is not a problem. There is also someone smarter and nicer than you anyway. I interview people. The immense majority of people I interview are really good. It's not possible to get to the point of onsite interviews unless you are good, you just know the person you are talking to is a potential peer. Interviewers are happy when their candidates do well. The committee ends up rejecting most, though, out of hyper-conservatism. I have no idea how I was hired. I suspect there is a large amount of randomness between "invited for an onsite" and "hired".
- southphillyman 6y agoMy take away from this is that the bar may have been lower in 2008 when the headcount was lower than it is now despite the headcount having exploded recently. You still get the in-depth system design questions and "tech trivia" that requires a review of the spec for whatever language/technology you interview on, but the algo questions are harder now. Finding the unique set and implementing a binary tree would be "lay up" questions now to most prepared candidates. At the very least those caliber of questions have limited ambiguity and don't require knowledge of any tricks to get optimal solutions.
- sys_64738 6y agoThere are three types of developer. Those who never worked at Google, those who currently work there, and those who used to work there. The third kind are the ones to avoid if you're interviewing for your company.
- rsanek 6y agoSo you can interview current Google employees, but not former ones? Why?
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoMy job interviews at Amazon (2008). [0] [0]: https://medium.com/@simon/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-314ee8634da9 https://medium.com/@simon/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com...