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I'm curious why you think this is a bad thing. Doesn't SA stand for sysadmin? If you were hired for a sysadmin role, doesn't it make sense to reinterview you fo

I'm curious why you think this is a bad thing. Doesn't SA stand for sysadmin? If you were hired for a sysadmin role, doesn't it make sense to reinterview you for a software development role? More specifically, if the situation were turned around and you where asked a bunch of software development questions when interviewing for a sysadmin role, wouldn't you criticize Google for asking questions irrelevant to the job?

rachelbythebay 15y ago
I think it's a bad thing because I lived it. I was stuck in their little SA mold, unable to transfer onto various interesting-looking projects because of it. I wound up being stuck in this limbo for over a year until I finally got the internal transfer to go through. Note that nobody was willing to pull rank and Just Fix Things. That was a sign to me that things had turned pretty bad -- forcing people to jump through hoops like that? Come on. BTW, for SRE, the interviews are supposed to hit a range of things: sysadmin stuff, coding stuff, debugging/troubleshooting, and so on. At least, the ~100 or so I gave over the years I was there certainly did. Note that none of the things I asked were "round manhole" type questions. I hate that stuff.
- Locke1689 15y ago
  Sure. I'm a SWE intern right now but I'm going through the conversion process right now so I've done the SWE interviews. All I'm saying is that I would have been pretty pissed if I got a dynamic programming question when applying for an sysadmin position. I'm not saying that Google's hiring process makes complete sense (I work for you writing prod code for 3 months and that gets me out of one out of five interviews? Really? One?) but this isn't exactly the biggest problem I see. It would probably be better if they gave higher priority to transfer requests so you could get it done quickly, but I see no reason why I wouldn't have to reinterview if I wanted a different job position. P.S. This is one reason why I'm glad they don't ask sysadmin questions to SWEs. I'm a really shitty sysadmin.

rachelbythebay 15y ago

I think it's a bad thing because I lived it. I was stuck in their little SA mold, unable to transfer onto various interesting-looking projects because of it. I wound up being stuck in this limbo for over a year until I finally got the internal transfer to go through. Note that nobody was willing to pull rank and Just Fix Things. That was a sign to me that things had turned pretty bad -- forcing people to jump through hoops like that? Come on. BTW, for SRE, the interviews are supposed to hit a range of things: sysadmin stuff, coding stuff, debugging/troubleshooting, and so on. At least, the ~100 or so I gave over the years I was there certainly did. Note that none of the things I asked were "round manhole" type questions. I hate that stuff.

Locke1689 15y ago
Sure. I'm a SWE intern right now but I'm going through the conversion process right now so I've done the SWE interviews. All I'm saying is that I would have been pretty pissed if I got a dynamic programming question when applying for an sysadmin position. I'm not saying that Google's hiring process makes complete sense (I work for you writing prod code for 3 months and that gets me out of one out of five interviews? Really? One?) but this isn't exactly the biggest problem I see. It would probably be better if they gave higher priority to transfer requests so you could get it done quickly, but I see no reason why I wouldn't have to reinterview if I wanted a different job position. P.S. This is one reason why I'm glad they don't ask sysadmin questions to SWEs. I'm a really shitty sysadmin.