I hated interviewing SWEs at Google, and the way I got out with it while still doing my duty was to interview the patent lawyers! They always had one engineer i

I hated interviewing SWEs at Google, and the way I got out with it while still doing my duty was to interview the patent lawyers! They always had one engineer interviewer and I was it. My stock answer for why I did it was, "Hey, who wouldn't enjoy torturing lawyers?" Actually, I loved it. You might not be able to imagine this, but I actually like lawyers, as a rule. Since Google insists on giving candidates a problem, I took a patent from a previous job that I was familiar with, and said, "OK, we're going to pretend I'm the inventor, and I'm going to describe this invention to you. Your job will be to write the first claim." This is pretty similar to their actual job, at least on the patent prosecution side. They have to come up to speed on an unfamiliar technology quickly? Well, that's what patent lawyers do. Most of them did pretty well on the test, too. It was way fun. Unlike in a SWE interview, I never heard anything after I gave my feedback (with a SWE, you would see what the other interviewers said). The only way I even heard if they were hired was to check a few months later. I didn't know if Legal even paid attention to me. Years later, I joined Legal and found out they'd been hanging on my every word.