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I interviewed with Google once around the same time frame. The position I interviewed for was something along the lines of datacenter operations. I did my inte
by bityard 5y ago
I interviewed with Google once around the same time frame.
The position I interviewed for was something along the lines of datacenter operations. I did my interview from a local Google sales office and interviewed with three other employees via video call. This was around the time that Skype was fairly new, but whatever software they were using was clearly internal to Google.
Anyway, I ended up talking with 3 engineers. The first one asked me about stuff on my resume, my Linux experience, some hardware, software, and network questions, etc. He seemed pretty nice and I thought that session went well.
The second guy was a different story. It started off well enough but then he asked me how I would go about repairing a server that wouldn't boot. I asked him a few preliminary questions (does it have power, did anyone touch it recently, does it POST, etc) and then talked about which components I would swap out and in what order and why. After every piece of hardware, he would say, "it still doesn't boot, what do you do next?" I ran out of hardware to think of swapping and he eventually got visibly annoyed and began to lecture me on the troubleshooting process. Now, I was young but I wasn't green and probably got flustered and defensive in response. I'm certain that cost me the job or at least my chances of advancing to the next round of interviews.
The next guy I talked to noticed my military record and only wanted to talk about airplanes and helicopters. I humored him while attempting to steer the conversation back to the position but he wasn't having it. I'm sure he knew the previous guy gave me a strike against and was just killing time.
A few days later I got an email from Google saying that they had passed on me. Which as it turns out was probably a good thing because A) Google turned into a much different company in the years following that, and B) they never actually built the datacenter that I would have worked in anyway.
- genewitch 5y agoso, what was the answer, from the lecture? what had you missed? Realistically if i was in datacenter ops and a server wouldn't boot i'd unrack it and rack a new one and let the dev/ops whatever team reprovision. Heck, i did this when i was just a cloud engineer, unracked from a local (non-cloud) facility and brought back machines to the office, to be RMA'd, just to help out. I get the idea that the interviewer had a very specific problem in memory and wanted that answer. After all, if there's some issue with the motherboard, it doesn't matter how many parts you swap out, and an issue with the motherboard could be in the infinite range from "tin whiskers" to "bad capacitor" to "cold solder joint".
- phnofive 5y agoYep, seems more like a cattle vs. pets question as retold. That may have been a newer concept at the time, so no amount of Socratic reasoning would get you there.
- FatalLogic 5y agoYes, exactly. If quick obvious troubleshooting isn't making progress immediately, then unrack it is the smart real-world answer, which is different from the fantasy interview-world answer. A service outage can be a lot more expensive than new hardware costs. The team can troubleshoot the hardware later, offline, when they have time.
- bityard 5y ago> so, what was the answer, from the lecture? what had you missed? He never told me and I was too flustered at the time to ask. Which was agonizing because I replayed that damn interview in my head for weeks afterward wondering where I went wrong. (Aside from slightly losing my cool, obviously.) I didn't get the sense that the answer he was looking for was, "find someone else who can help," or, "bin the whole server and rack a new one," because I remember it being either stated or strongly implied that the hypothetical server did have some problem that could be resolved by a tech at my level. But I could be mis-remembering things, it was a long time ago. But like I said, in the end it turned out to be a good thing that I didn't get that particular job. At least the interview itself was a very valuable learning experience and I'm grateful for that.
- genewitch 4y agoDon't beat yourself up, interviewing is hard, for all parties - usually.
- donalhunt 5y agoex-hwops engineer here... The question server repair question served 2 purposes: 1) can you identify a minimum bootable state / repeatable failure case? Can you think of obscure corner cases like the metal tray that all the components sit on being the problem? 2) How quickly do you give up and ask for help from humans / other sources. Both were core to the role. Changes in hardware and firmware often resulted in issues needing to be escalated back to manufacturers / internal platform team. The volume/scale of work also meant that being able to concisely convey what you had observed / tested and hypothesised helped the team identify trends / larger issues that were occuring. Datacenter automation and tooling was very much in its infancy. Around that time, the org was growing rapidly (doubling in size yearly) so most people ended up doing interviews. Not everyone is cut out to interview so sorry if your experience was sucky. Side note: I once spent most of an interview slot talking to a candidate about snowboarding. Turned out to be one of the best hires we made (thankfully the other interviewers actually asked some role related questions).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wodenokoto 5y agoI had a similar interview question at google for about a clients who’s ads didn’t show up or something and I had to troubleshoot. The process just seemed to be “keep asking what else it could be indefinitely” Didn’t get it. “Not a cultural fit”, or something. Kinda wished they’d told me more detailed what the problem was.