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Reading 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. Inc
by Rockslide 6y ago
Reading 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.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI have done interview training twice in my 8.5 years at Google, and both times it only made my impostor syndrome far far worse. I simply can't do interviews here, I wouldn't pass the ones I had to give. It doesn't help I came in as an aqui-hire.
- itronitron 6y agoOne of Google's HR groups did a test where they gave the hiring review team their own interview packets (anonymized, from when each team member originally interviewed). None of them were hired.
- derangedHorse 6y agoI can say with 100% certainty that my coworkers ask questions in interviews that they wouldn't be able to answer themselves. It's kind of ridiculous IMO and I try to call it out when I see it (in the nicest possible way of course)
- fiblye 6y agoUsing google products has made me certain that being able to solve math/algorithmic problems and being able to make good software really aren't connected in most cases.
- logicchains 6y agoGoogle products and Google libraries. Tensorflow, Angular, GWT, the Android development experience....
- GlennS 6y agoIt's funny, because I seem to remember the original Google homepage, Google Maps, and Gmail all being pretty good. Then, somehow, little annoyances crept in and accumulated over time. And now everything they make is like treacle.
- nicoburns 6y agoYep! To be fair, Google software is usually technically very good (e.g. their security is second to none), but they have no product vision, and often very bad UX/DX.
- funny948 6y agoI was good before but i did excersize for google interview for 2-3 month. I actually overdid the learning as i assumed that the coding questions can't be that easy. But at the end of the day, i'm still not working for google because yes the coding questions are not that hard but you have to convince 5 different people that you are a good fit. Suddenly you excersize for learning how to know what the interviewer wants from you. Is that wasted time? Definitly not. Loved the more focus learning approach. Also, i'm now 10 years working in that industry, you don't stop looking for a new job. That interviewing skill is critical.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- apta 6y agoIt's established that the Google-style interview questions bear no semblance to real world performance or software engineering skills. All they test is the ability to memorize leetcode style questions and regurgitate them during interviews.
- JoeSmithson 6y agoIs this established? What I've heard is that while it bears no relation to the actual job, it does correlate with real world performance at that job. I've only heard this anecdotally, but it is their best hiring indicator which is why they persist with it, despite it being very expensive.
- derangedHorse 6y agoI think you would find a better correlation of interview-job performance if you looked at the interviewers involved in the hiring process
- BerislavLopac 6y agoThe clock should be simple -- the hour hand is a quarter of its way to 4 o'clock, so: 360*((1/12)/4) = 7.5 degrees.
- thom 6y agoIs the trick that some people think it’s zero or something?
- MattGaiser 6y agoYou need to remember that the hour hand slightly moves.
- rasz 6y agoFirst you need to know/remember how analog clocks looked like back in the day.
- killjoywashere 6y agoI have a great video of my kids trying to figure out what a pay phone is back in ~2014. Not rotary, but a similar sort of "wow, I'm old" sort of experience.
- raverbashing 6y agoBack in the day? https://www.amazon.com/s?k=analog+clock https://www.amazon.com/s?k=analog+clock Though I was surprised the autocomplete suggests "analog clock for kids learning"
- mrslave 6y agoClearly the interviewing Googler with a 250k salary doesn't value a decent wrist watch where whole minutes and hours tick over nicely in a single movement. ;-)
- chrisseaton 6y ago
- StreamBright 6y agoThese interview are notoriously hard to pass. Less than 5% gets in. You should not feel bad about it. Being an SRE at Amazon or Google scale require that you know what is going on in every layer of the infrastructure, including data structures in code, so that you can pinpoint the exact problem in the stack. I think some of these question are overkill and have nothing to do with how good you are going to be at the job though. Writing a binary tree certainly one of those. You are not going to write one because there are tons of libraries in every language that is in production. Knowing that DNS can use TCP is much more valuable. This falls into the category of questions that you are likely to run into when debugging an issue. If you want to get a job at Google you have be willing to be put up with these questions (both the ones make sense and the ones do not) just to show your dedication. I usually prep for such interviews roughly 3 months and I have worked as an SRE for a long time. Do not assume that we know all of these things on the top of our heads and do not feel stupid.
- itronitron 6y agoOne thing that struck me is that the interviewers are asking the same questions to many different candidates, so they are going to know all the slip-ups that people make.
- pansa2 6y agoI feel the same way, except I think the clock-hand question is quite straightforward. Except for that one, just like every other time this sort of thing is posted almost every question is either: 1. About fairly low-level details of computer networking, or 2. What would you do if your data doesn’t fit in memory? I’ve been a successful developer for years and never had to deal with either of those problems.
- fzeroracer 6y agoIt's been the same experience for me. I've been successful as a developer and yet have never encountered many of these problems that interviews in the past demanded I know. Ultimately if I end up encountering a problem like that in my career, the honest answer is to pick up a book or begin reading through articles on solutions. Sadly that kind of answer seems to be frowned upon because it's better for you to lie about what you know than to admit you don't know the solution and figure out ways to rectify it.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> Maybe Google scale isn't for me. Google employs the very elite of the elite. If you're working there you're probably at the very top of your field. Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.
- 2ion 6y ago> Google employs the very elite of the elite Do all people with a @google.com email address keep telling themselves that?
- chrisseaton 6y agoI’ve never worked at Google. Have you done one of their interviews? How do you think the world leading research results that they do without world leading people?
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoNo. We laugh at this stuff. All sorts of internal memes about "hiring the best engineers in the world to move protobufs around." There are definitely personalities around the company who think of themselves this way, but certainly not the majority. I think this kind of language in fact hurts us, because it creates a pronounced impostor syndrome around us, as we all _know_ we're mere mortals. The reality of a SWE job at any BigCorp is quite mundane, and is more politics than coding most of the time. Honestly our interview process should be more testing people how to write and comment on design docs and fill out a performance review, because that's what they seem to want the most out of us. EDIT: Oh, also filtering through 2 pages of new emails, mostly automated, to find the two things that are relevant to your job.
- fock 6y agoActually I (never took an algorithms class, so I would definitely have to brush up on execution of the basics there) thought this questions were not that bad, the newer reports seem much harder (or are plain exaggeration by the "leet"code community). I'm also a bit puzzled about the trick question being mentioned at that. That's just primitibe (maybe I'm a little bit burned by that as in 5th grade or so, our teacher did a test, writing times on a sheet and making us calculate the angle between clock hands (and it was a lot of numbers on that sheet))
- rasz 6y agoClock hand question is painfully obvious once you look at actual analog clock face. All of the questions were easy bordering on trivial as long as your background lines up with target position. The problem is not the questions, but the culture of gotcha interviewing. Haha we got you doing off by one by offering the C option on whiteboard, haha you didnt initialize one variable on whiteboard, haha I have bad mood therefore you fail, etc. >I recently came across your name as a _possible world class Engineer_ That right here is the cancer.
- Rockslide 6y ago> Clock hand question is painfully obvious once you look at actual analog clock face. You see, intuitively I thought this would involve some kind of radian maths (just because it's about angles and a circle) and I don't remember any of that - never had any use for it. But yes, it is a lot more easy than that. Not sure I would have discovered the trivial approach in an interview situation when it didn't even occur to me at home on the couch.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoGoogle can afford a lot of false negatives because many people want to work there (well, here, as I work there). What makes no sense is small companies copying this process and then griping about finding talent.
- tydok 6y ago> which is probably some trivial math... The clock hand problem can be solved with the Rule of Three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-multiplication#Rule_of_Three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-multiplication#Rule_of_T...