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Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer

224 points by blackmac 13y ago

laurenstill 13y ago
That meshes with the interview process my SO went through, at Google, for an SRE role. Similarly, they said he could code in any language (his preference is C) but the interviewer preferred python. 45 min to whiteboard in C, you better have a backup set of markers. His feedback after all was said and done was "brush up on your scripting languages."
- judk 13y ago
  Google recruiters give famously nonsensical feedback, sadly. By comparison, Facebook recruiters give very specific feedback tired to reach specific interview hour.
TempleOSV2 13y ago
I am in charge of the Apollo program. I hire people. God says... you_don't_say special_case delightful Yawn Zzzzzzzz vote that's_your_opinion oh_no prosperity I_veto_that What_I_want manufacturing fer_sure Wow commanded whoop_there_it_is That's_my_favorite rich I'm_gonna_smack_someone rubbish oh_oh what_have_you_done_for_me_lately ehh_a_wise_guy frown honesty bickering ahh angel look_out nevada yep are_you_sure no_way_dude big_fish news_to_me well_I_never Venus failure_to_communicate so_let_it_be_done impossible car geek hang_in_there holier_than_thou study like_like left_field joker as_a_matter_of_fact to_infinity_and_beyond bad_ol_puddytat that's_no_fun I_see_nothing Dad insane how_do_I_put_this be_quiet_bird I_forgot oh_oh class__class__shutup
B-Con 13y ago
Neat, I just interviewed for Google for the SRE position as well. This described my experience very closely. > I found it amazing that for each of the interviews I was given enough information in advance to actually be able to prepare myself. I had the same thought. To me, Google seemed 100% concerned with evaluating engineering skills and they wanted to do the opposite of hitting my weak points or quizzing me on trivia. I got a pretty good amount of detail on what to expect, loads of links, book recommendations, practice exercises, and even a video SRE interview coaching session by a couple SREs (all of which I combed through, yes, I even bought two of the books). Personally, it was a great interview experience. I also interviewed with another large software-oriented tech company, but Google put more effort into providing preparatory material. > So the fourth interview (1:30 PM) on that day was the large systems design interview. Unfortunately, I was a blockhead on this one, then got nervous more and more and thus failed it. It's also the area I felt the weakest in. It was the hardest to prepare for and they gave the least amount of prep material. (Disclaimer: I start with them in 3 weeks.)
- WestCoastJustin 13y ago
  > I got loads of links, book recommendations, and practice exercises beforehand (all of which I combed through, yes, I even bought two of the books). Would you be willing to share some of their/your recommendations?
  - mden 13y ago
    I imagine they (Google) doesn't consider this information private so here's the bulk of an email I got listing prep material and topics: http://pastebin.com/iXGzfkBL http://pastebin.com/iXGzfkBL Edit: To clarify, this is for SE, not SRE.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - B-Con 13y ago
      Yep, I got a very similar e-mail before the on-site. There was some more in some e-mails before the phone interviews, like links to man pages, some (public on YouTube) Google videos, and some sample coding problems. FWIW, I bought "Programming Pearls (2nd Edition)" and "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment (3rd edition)". "Programming Pearls" was definitely a good choice.
      - philsnow 13y ago
        My problem with APUE is that it includes so much detail about platforms I'm not likely to be exposed to. It's probably a great reference for that stuff (it's almost a rosetta stone for unix programming), but it could probably be half as long without the "extraneous" stuff.
    - wyclif 13y ago
      Thank you for this; it's quite helpful.
  - BorisMelnik 13y ago
    yes also would be interested in this. Also even a vague example of what one of the questions might look like (not asking for an exact interview question)
Theodores 13y ago
Well if there are any Google people reading this: ask HR to give the guy a job! He went through all that and he came out positive about it all.
- skj 13y ago
  So, it seems likely that culture fit was not a problem. In general if you get one interview that results in a weak no-hire, you need a couple strong-hires to balance it out. If you get one with a confident no-hire, that's it.
yeukhon 13y ago
Are you interviewing for the system engineer or software engineer on the SRE team? The 2nd phone interview covering three types of tasks seems unexpected to me. I am also preparing for SRE interview and I now feel chicken out... I'm interviewing for SE on SRE. I have been expecting just algorithm/codeval type of questions until onsite.
- B-Con 13y ago
  IIRC, SW and SE interviews in SRE are about 80% the same, the primary difference is that one of the 5 on-site interviews is on a different topic and the phone screens may emphasize slightly different topics. But the tracks for the two positions are very similar.
darksim905 13y ago
Does anyone know if this process holds true for the Sysadmin SRE side?
- k3oni 13y ago
  There is no such thing as a "Sysadmin SRE" , it is just SRE. Went through it and was the same, granted i didn't make it to the on-site interviews as i screwed up on the last call after a really bad day at work.
  - gergles 13y ago
    This is not true - there definitely are 2 SRE tracks[1] and one is more code focused and one is more operational focused. They do not tell you this while you are being screened but it is absolutely the case. 1: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/22/caste/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/22/caste/
    - k3oni 13y ago
      Looking through the materials for the interview you can see that they focus on two different positions which looked a bit odd to me but i split those two into SRE and SWE looking at each of the requirements. Thanks for the link btw.
- aiiane 13y ago
  The process itself is essentially identically whether you're on the SRE-SE or SRE-SWE track. The specific topic areas focused on will vary slightly, but the process is the same. (SE = Systems Engineering, SWE = Software Engineering. People hired from both tracks wind up doing the same work; it's mostly just about what background you're coming from.)
ryguytilidie 13y ago
I used to recruit for Google SRE, I can confirm that this is pretty much exactly the process and that bombing a single interview will often be a death sentence.
- laurenstill 13y ago
  Thanks. I've turned down a couple interviews knowing I'd bomb at least one, didn't want that on my perm Google Record. It's nice to know it's not just me, and also there's redemption.
  - skj 13y ago
    This is a bad strategy. One thing that actually helps you tremendously is evidence of growth. The easiest way for the hiring committee to see this is for you to show improvement from a previous interview. I guess it'd be possible to game this signal, but that's a lot of effort and still just one signal. My real point is that it absolutely does not count against you.
    - laurenstill 13y ago
      Fair enough, and I agree to an extent. But when I got that packet of prep material, I froze. I may go down that road again in the near future, but I want to be mindful of thresholds.
- raldi 13y ago
  By "death sentence", are you suggesting that the candidate will never again be considered for a role at Google, or are you just saying that they're not going to space today?
  - laureny 13y ago
    Being rejected at an interview at Google means you have a one year cool down period. You can try again then (or they might call you back themselves).
BlackJack 13y ago
This Jobvine infographic describes the hiring process pretty well imo: http://www.jobvine.co.za/what-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-at-google/ http://www.jobvine.co.za/what-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-at-g...
- aiiane 13y ago
  The "crazy questions" there are completely wrong - Google interviews do not contain questions like these (and any interviewer that tried to use them would be run out on a rail).
  - nawitus 13y ago
    Google used have those, but recently stopped asking them. The infographic is old.
tmhedberg 13y ago
I'm a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection. I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews, culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it as good interview practice and moved on. A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the blue and asked if I'd be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for another on-site. Soon after, I was hired! It's actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won't count you out after one try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers took you seriously as a candidate. If you've decided that you would really like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a free trip to London.
- yukichan 13y ago
  But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&E I wouldn't be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I'd be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back. The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it's silly and personally I don't plan at working at companies that interview this way. Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page's whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don't want it?
BorisMelnik 13y ago
Excellent write-up. I love your attitude about the whole thing. One part I found interesting and note I have not interviewed for anything in probable 10 years is the fact that they would not attempt to place you into another position being that you passed the majority of the questions with flying colors. Actually my only criticism is you used a ton of ;)'s :-0 So you are an excellent coder, scripter, and network admin. You also know all the OSI layer stuff but aren't good at "large scale" sysadmin functions? If this were my company I would try to have you placed in some other department and postiion. Either way, thank you so much for sharing your experience!
- aiiane 13y ago
  Sometimes that does happen - interviewers can always provide feedback that they think someone should be jumped over to a different track and re-interviewed.
DigitalSea 13y ago
This is ridiculous. I understand Google is a big company and thus needs to implement a concise recruitment process because understandable they get a lot of applicants, but the amount of tests and ways of which you were asked to solve problems is ridiculous. When is the last time you heard of a system administrator writing down problems on a whiteboard as opposed to asking a colleague or Googling the answer? I think the real test after the initial phone call interviews and Google docs one is to sit you down in-front of a computer and make you solve real problems, not theoretical & made-up problems in which they ask you to solve them in impracticable and unrealistic ways. This is a flaw in the corporate hiring process almost everywhere in the software world. It's not the 70's any more, people rarely solve problems on whiteboards and paper. They solve them on the computer, sometimes through knowledge and their skill-set and other times through luck and Googling. Don't feel too bad for being rejected, it just means something else could come along that's better.
- uhno 13y ago
  >It's not the 70's any more, people rarely solve problems on whiteboards and paper. They solve them on the computer, sometimes through knowledge and their skill-set and other times through luck and Googling. This isn't universally true. Anecdotally, I often find I'm much better able to think through tough problems if I step away from the keyboard and spend some time sketching out ideas on paper or on a whiteboard. I also keep the on-paper results in a notebook, which is occasionally useful to refer back to later in a project. Sometimes just introducing some distance between you and the problem is enough to give you a key insight. That said, the interview environment is still nothing like this. There, you're under great pressure on the whiteboard, something which is probably not true in your day-to-day.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I'd like to think this is true, because I enjoy working in that manner, but I've generally found going totally offline and solving problems gives me satisfyingly worked-out-by-myself solutions to problems that... I could've solved more quickly if I'd done more reading for half that time instead. If something really, truly has never been done before, nor even anything similar enough to be useful to me, then yes, this is the right way to work. But it's more common that someone has actually worked on something at least related (even if not quite the same), and that I could solve the problem more quickly if I looked for what they said about it first. That might take a bit of searching and reading to discover, sometimes even a few hours of it. But usually not as much time overall as re-solving it myself does... especially taking into account re-discovering all the edge cases. My hypothesis is that many people don't realize this because they never follow up later to check if their solution was really novel, or was just lurking behind a keyword they didn't think to try. If you do that a bit and adapt your habits to miss things less often in the future, you can get better at finding and adapting existing solutions, rather than re-inventing things from scratch. But that's sometimes a bit deflating, because then you realize you weren't inventing so many new things before, either...
patmcguire 13y ago
I've been on a few interviews with the "not-a-test" lunch, and it always made me grateful to be in this industry. I talk to people applying for law jobs, where it seems that lunches and dinners during the process are very much a test. Associates fill out scorecards for candidates later, on how good a conversationalist the candidate was! On a one to five scoring system, across multiple categories! From a certain point of view it makes sense - how are they going to schmooze with clients if they can't schmooze with you, but... shudder
- mhurron 13y ago
  Those lunches are a test. They're for 'culture fit' questions.
  - tmhedberg 13y ago
    The Google lunches are emphatically not a test. It's very rare for the lunch "interviewer" to provide any feedback at all. That usually only happens if the candidate starts spouting racist comments or punches someone in the lunch line, etc. The real purpose is to answer any questions the candidate has about culture, perks, etc. and to give them a chance to relax, catch their breath, and feel at ease in the middle of a stressful day of interviews. If the candidate was referred by a Googler, then often that person will be the one to take them to lunch, which would obviously create a conflict of interest if real feedback was expected.
    - jlees 13y ago
      I've found that some of the folks I took to lunch interviews were reluctant to ask certain questions because despite assurances that the lunch has no feedback, they didn't quite believe me (natural cynicism, I suppose). It was a shame.
      - namelezz 13y ago
        Yeah, especially when your company has been doing some dirty works behind users' back and you think that users are bunch of idiots that never learn from their lessons and keep believing in whatever you say. What's a lame expectation.
raverbashing 13y ago
So, yes, Google hasn't changed a bit. Curious about where the interview took place (I don't think there's a hotel across the street from Google in Dublin) I'll just point them to this article whenever this kind of questioning happens again: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373310 - questioning is the first comment)
- michaelmior 13y ago
  > Around a week later the recruiter called and once again reported "very good" feedback, so I could go on and have an on-site interview in London. > The hotel was right across the street of the Google building, which I really liked a lot, since it meant I didn't have to find my way through London in the morning before the interview. Seems like it was in London.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    Oh Well, I missed it. I blame it on it being in the very end of paragraphs.
theboss 13y ago
I have an interview with Google this week. I've expressed my interest in security to the recruiter 3-4 times and I have been told I will be interviewing as a software engineer (aka....a data structures and algorithms interviewing...).... Doesn't make sense to me, the things they do. I've had bad experiences with several of the big tech guys now... Too bad you were denied but I'm sure it will all work out for you. In my opinion computer science is really cool because if you want to be really good you don't have to work at a big tech company. You can learn in your cube, learn at home, learn wherever. It is so easy to network and be with other smart people that you don't need them and they need you.
justinhj 13y ago
I don't think one should be surprised when they focus on the things you claim to be good at. They probably have a large pool of interviewers, so they can choose one with a deep knowledge in your specialist areas to chat with you.
octonion 13y ago
How come only programmers and data scientists are treated to such a ridiculous process? Why aren't managers and marketers given pop quizzes and domain-relevant puzzles to solve?
- skj 13y ago
  Lower-level management is drawn from the same pool as the engineers. For upper-level, Google does not have the luxury of getting one thousand credible and serious applicants every week, so the process necessarily differs.
  - judk 13y ago
    That's begging the question. The eng interview process is an artifact of how they choose candidates. So is the VP interview process.
    - skj 13y ago
      Could you explain more what you mean? I'm tempted to dismiss it, but I don't actually understand your point so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt until I do.
- raldi 13y ago
  What are you referring to by "pop quizzes"?
- FLUX-YOU 13y ago
  Puzzles simply aren't in fashion for those industries.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 13y ago
  Because nobody else would put up with it in sufficient numbers, and then spend ages discussing it in places equivalent to HN afterwards. It would make it impossible for them to hire. A large segment of potential tech hires salivates at the prospect of being hired by Google as some sort of intelligence test or proof of their self worth, and the convoluted hiring process serves to reinforce that impression. While it puts some people off, it draws others in. For higher level management positions, marketing and other types of roles, Google does not have nearly the same draw. And for higher level positions the pool of potential candidates is much smaller too.
marinhero 13y ago
Wow! thank you for sharing your experience, I've just started the interview process for Google SRE and I found this very valuable. It looks like a tough road but I'll do my best. Thank you!
thecolorblue 13y ago
Google's hiring process seems very intense and extensive. Are there other tech companies that go to these lengths to find the right people? I completely understand their reasoning, but I have never applied at a company that had four interviews.
- philwelch 13y ago
  A full day interview loop is standard procedure at most large tech companies you would have heard of.
- vidarh 13y ago
  I had 6 on site interviews when I joined Yahoo Europe back in 2003 for an engineering manager position. Developers back then would usually go through fewer, but still 3-4 wouldn't have been unusual depending on team - when I hired for my team at Yahoo, typical process would've been phone screen, then 3-4 on site interviews with a selection of people including my manager, someone from the product team, one of my developers, and me. It's a function of size, frankly - companies above a certain size tends to tack on more interviews largely because they can, and it doesn't hurt to get feedback from one more person. They also have the luxury (and problem) of a much larger pool of interested candidates to hire from.
calinet6 13y ago
Google's interview process in short is laser-focused. Whether this is good or bad is up to them and their goals (and clearly something is working), but personally I find it incredibly narrow-minded and inhuman. Wouldn't want to work there.
zobzu 13y ago
it was some years ago [actually, a lot of years ago now..], but when i got interviewed for an SRE google interview i certainly wasn't given any indicator of what to prepare for ;-) I also think many of the recruitment questions were above the skills of the employees asking the questions. they just had a checklist and basic understanding. Now i would probably do smth similar if i was google and a got a lot of applicants, but it felt weird. I think what was the weirdest tho, was how they made me feel like the SRE job was very stressing and more of a throw away tool used so that, luckily, i could switch to another position after 13month (1 cycle). That sealed the deal the wrong way for me. I just told the guy we should stop the process now so that nobody wastes their time and went home.
iDemonix 13y ago
This has long been my dream job and I have alerts setup for when they're interviewing - but I don't feel I'll ever be smart enough or well rounded for this specific job. I left university a couple years ago and have been working in my first job (an ISP NOC) for about a year, but I just can't see myself ever getting to the skill level required for an SRE. That and I have crippling anxiety when it comes to interviews. Ah well...
- aiiane 13y ago
  Something that not many people realize: interviewing is a skill that can be practiced and directly improved. The more interviews you do, the easier they get. You can also do dry runs - even just grabbing yourself a small 20" whiteboard and writing code and diagrams on it helps.
  - iDemonix 13y ago
    That's good advice, I always tend to focus on the skills and see an interview as something that is done ad-lib. I forget how much of it is prep and the actual practicing of interviews.
graycat 13y ago
The job apparently was not 'reliability engineering'. In an auto analogy, Google was trying to hire narrowly experienced, self-taught auto mechanics and not mechanical engineers.
mml 13y ago
I had 3 interviews with google about 9 years ago. totally failed the on-site in mountainview. sorting a balanced tree on a whiteboard is tricky (quiet you!). In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was excited to work at a post-ipo cube farm, even if it says "google" on the side. edit: I believe it was also for SRE, which (at the time) means you do two interviews: the sysadmin interview, and the developer interview.
- zerr 13y ago
  Can anybody confirm that it is still the case? That this kind of questions are still given to non-fresh-graduate (i.e. experienced) candidates? (sorting a balanced tree... ridiculous).
aosmith 13y ago
Hate to say it but this is why I said "thanks but no thanks" to google, and amazon. You can learn a lot more about a person and their skills from a few conversations than from a grilling against a white board.
voidptr 13y ago
Hi, I am the author of that blog post at http://blog.lambda-startup.com http://blog.lambda-startup.com . I just want to say that I appreciate the overwhelming feedback and all the positive and encouraging statements to not take that rejection too seriously. Furthermore, I'm glad that my little article causes these mostly constructive discussions on here, and that sharing my experiences seems to be appreciated. Thanks.
- cunac 13y ago
  out of curiosity; do you get paid for one day you miss work or it is implied you should take a day off ?
logicallee 13y ago
The artcle mentions one interview out of 3+ phone interviews 5+ personal ones, that didn't go so well. It leaves me with the following impression: What a ridiculous waste of this guy's time. Why on Earth do recruitment processes need to be so capricious? Of course the guy's going to get nervous when he fouls up, given the HUGE amount of his time that has already been wasted, and how much you are putting on the line for every single moment to be perfect. maybe if the stakes weren't ridiculous and so capricious, it wouldn't take you two recruiters, three phone interviews, and a day of wasting everyone's time, only to reject a perfect employee. Makes me glad not to work for a huge organization. What a travesty. I have no idea why people feel it's okay to waste other people's time like that.
- gergles 13y ago
  Multi-stage interview processes like this are calibrated that you simply must pass every step of them to do the job. There's no fluff, there's no duplication; each module tests a specific component that the company feels is necessary. If you can't deliver on one component, then you aren't qualified. Harsh, but if you wanted to include an allowance for failing one module, you'd have to add even more modules and duplicate content in them so that you could still feel confident they could do the job. A false positive in the interview process is immensely painful for everyone involved and every effort should be made to prevent that.
- yhager 13y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. I guess they do it because they can, and the candidates are willing to go through this.
dclowd9901 13y ago
I recently interviewed for a position at twitter as a front end engineer (API stuff, HTML, CSS, etc). I failed out as well, but it was on, I think, much more nuanced terms. The interviewer had me write a client jsonp API interface, that is a controller that would handle calls to and from a jsonp API. Embarrassingly, I knew little about jsonp except for that it has a callback parameter that correlates with a global function you have defined in the javascript of your page. So as I was literally learning how JSONP worked during this interview, I also had to write an interface that would gracefully fail and queue multiple calls. I did pretty well, at that, having completed the essence of the exercise. Toward the end, I got mentally hung up on a scope issue and my brain was pretty much fried at that point so I ended up crashing out (it was the end of the interview time, anyway, so it's not like there was then 10 minutes of awkward silence). Anyway, this sma hiccup, which in no way indicated I didn't know my craft, and opposing my seemed to indicate I was an extremely quick study, still managed to keep me from moving on in the process. I'm not miffed or anything. In fact, out of that experience, I wrote a really cool lazy loading geolocation API that uses promises in conjunction with JSONP to deliver a really smooth API consumer experience, something I wouldn't have thought to do at my previous level of understanding.
dorfsmay 13y ago
FWIW, the linkedin interview process is eerily identical, same multi phone calls filtering, travel arrangements, meeting with 5 or 6 SREs for interviews, range of topics, trainee interviewers, friendly lunch, even the rejection process.
pkinsky 13y ago
How does google feel about non [Java, Python, C] languages? Could I use Scala to solve interview questions?
rjdagost 13y ago
I've been contacted several times by Google recruiters and the interactions have always left a bad taste in my mouth (and I've never even agreed to go forward with the interview process). They won't tell me what projects / products I'd be working on at Google if hired, which right off the bat is a non-starter for me. They want me to spend weeks studying puzzle coding problems for the interviews, which is also a non-starter. It seems like the entire process is centered around me proving to them that I am willing to go along with whatever they say. It's not a two way street at all. As an experienced engineer who is happy in his current job, what is my motivation to jump ship? Google recruiters act like the chance of working at Google is by itself sufficient incentive. Google's entire process seems to geared towards selecting people who really want to work for Google and who will jump through whatever hoops Google sets up. Long-term, it is probably dangerous for Google to be so chock full of corporate confirmation bias.
- pbnjay 13y ago
  I've had this exact same experience 3 times in the past year. I echo your thoughts entirely. I've told them multiple times what kind of position at google would ACTUALLY interest me and yet I still get matched to nothing even close. Each time I've turned them down I get the same feeling of "Ok! So -- wait you said no? What? Are you sure? ... but we're google!?" I'm also an experienced engineer, happy in my current job. Glad to see someone else with the same thoughts!
YesThatTom2 13y ago
Former Google SRE here. From the outside it looks like Google's strategy is to hire people that have the skills that people can only get from already working at Google. i.e. They have forgotten that they themselves did not have those skills when they were hired. Sadly blog posts like this make me think they are suffering an unintended side effect from doing this: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg...
lostcolony 13y ago
I keep coming back to this, wondering whether it's effective or not. It feels like an SAT, or really any other form of academic standardized testing, except not so objective. "Here's a list of things to know, go study it, then come in and solve problems with it in an artificial environment so that we may grade you". So you cram in preparation, and then if you don't pass the test, you plan to retake it in a year. I'd think the best and brightest would be the ones whose working knowledge, without cramming, allows for innovative, interesting, clever solutions. Even better if you can get away from the artificial feeling of interviews, into a "here's an actual, and unsolved, problem, let's figure out how to solve it together so I can see how you tick", rather than "here's a fake question, one with a well known, posted on the internet, solution, that if you ever faced in real life you'd solve in 5 minutes of Googling and move on, and which I expect you to recognize as a (X) problem, and regurgitate the solution from the selected readings". (That said, one or two stages of the interview seemed like they ~might~ be that). Maybe the intent isn't really to hire the best and brightest (that's hard to test for), but really the people who want to work at Google the most; are you willing to devote hours to the mere possibility?

224 points by blackmac 13y ago

That meshes with the interview process my SO went through, at Google, for an SRE role. Similarly, they said he could code in any language (his preference is C) but the interviewer preferred python. 45 min to whiteboard in C, you better have a backup set of markers. His feedback after all was said and done was "brush up on your scripting languages."

judk 13y ago
Google recruiters give famously nonsensical feedback, sadly. By comparison, Facebook recruiters give very specific feedback tired to reach specific interview hour.

TempleOSV2 13y ago

I am in charge of the Apollo program. I hire people. God says... you_don't_say special_case delightful Yawn Zzzzzzzz vote that's_your_opinion oh_no prosperity I_veto_that What_I_want manufacturing fer_sure Wow commanded whoop_there_it_is That's_my_favorite rich I'm_gonna_smack_someone rubbish oh_oh what_have_you_done_for_me_lately ehh_a_wise_guy frown honesty bickering ahh angel look_out nevada yep are_you_sure no_way_dude big_fish news_to_me well_I_never Venus failure_to_communicate so_let_it_be_done impossible car geek hang_in_there holier_than_thou study like_like left_field joker as_a_matter_of_fact to_infinity_and_beyond bad_ol_puddytat that's_no_fun I_see_nothing Dad insane how_do_I_put_this be_quiet_bird I_forgot oh_oh class__class__shutup

B-Con 13y ago

Neat, I just interviewed for Google for the SRE position as well. This described my experience very closely. > I found it amazing that for each of the interviews I was given enough information in advance to actually be able to prepare myself. I had the same thought. To me, Google seemed 100% concerned with evaluating engineering skills and they wanted to do the opposite of hitting my weak points or quizzing me on trivia. I got a pretty good amount of detail on what to expect, loads of links, book recommendations, practice exercises, and even a video SRE interview coaching session by a couple SREs (all of which I combed through, yes, I even bought two of the books). Personally, it was a great interview experience. I also interviewed with another large software-oriented tech company, but Google put more effort into providing preparatory material. > So the fourth interview (1:30 PM) on that day was the large systems design interview. Unfortunately, I was a blockhead on this one, then got nervous more and more and thus failed it. It's also the area I felt the weakest in. It was the hardest to prepare for and they gave the least amount of prep material. (Disclaimer: I start with them in 3 weeks.)

WestCoastJustin 13y ago
> I got loads of links, book recommendations, and practice exercises beforehand (all of which I combed through, yes, I even bought two of the books). Would you be willing to share some of their/your recommendations?
- mden 13y ago
  I imagine they (Google) doesn't consider this information private so here's the bulk of an email I got listing prep material and topics: http://pastebin.com/iXGzfkBL http://pastebin.com/iXGzfkBL Edit: To clarify, this is for SE, not SRE.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - B-Con 13y ago
    Yep, I got a very similar e-mail before the on-site. There was some more in some e-mails before the phone interviews, like links to man pages, some (public on YouTube) Google videos, and some sample coding problems. FWIW, I bought "Programming Pearls (2nd Edition)" and "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment (3rd edition)". "Programming Pearls" was definitely a good choice.
    - philsnow 13y ago
      My problem with APUE is that it includes so much detail about platforms I'm not likely to be exposed to. It's probably a great reference for that stuff (it's almost a rosetta stone for unix programming), but it could probably be half as long without the "extraneous" stuff.
  - wyclif 13y ago
    Thank you for this; it's quite helpful.
- BorisMelnik 13y ago
  yes also would be interested in this. Also even a vague example of what one of the questions might look like (not asking for an exact interview question)

Theodores 13y ago

Well if there are any Google people reading this: ask HR to give the guy a job! He went through all that and he came out positive about it all.

skj 13y ago
So, it seems likely that culture fit was not a problem. In general if you get one interview that results in a weak no-hire, you need a couple strong-hires to balance it out. If you get one with a confident no-hire, that's it.

yeukhon 13y ago

Are you interviewing for the system engineer or software engineer on the SRE team? The 2nd phone interview covering three types of tasks seems unexpected to me. I am also preparing for SRE interview and I now feel chicken out... I'm interviewing for SE on SRE. I have been expecting just algorithm/codeval type of questions until onsite.

B-Con 13y ago
IIRC, SW and SE interviews in SRE are about 80% the same, the primary difference is that one of the 5 on-site interviews is on a different topic and the phone screens may emphasize slightly different topics. But the tracks for the two positions are very similar.

darksim905 13y ago

Does anyone know if this process holds true for the Sysadmin SRE side?

k3oni 13y ago
There is no such thing as a "Sysadmin SRE" , it is just SRE. Went through it and was the same, granted i didn't make it to the on-site interviews as i screwed up on the last call after a really bad day at work.
- gergles 13y ago
  This is not true - there definitely are 2 SRE tracks[1] and one is more code focused and one is more operational focused. They do not tell you this while you are being screened but it is absolutely the case. 1: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/22/caste/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/22/caste/
  - k3oni 13y ago
    Looking through the materials for the interview you can see that they focus on two different positions which looked a bit odd to me but i split those two into SRE and SWE looking at each of the requirements. Thanks for the link btw.
aiiane 13y ago
The process itself is essentially identically whether you're on the SRE-SE or SRE-SWE track. The specific topic areas focused on will vary slightly, but the process is the same. (SE = Systems Engineering, SWE = Software Engineering. People hired from both tracks wind up doing the same work; it's mostly just about what background you're coming from.)

ryguytilidie 13y ago

I used to recruit for Google SRE, I can confirm that this is pretty much exactly the process and that bombing a single interview will often be a death sentence.

laurenstill 13y ago
Thanks. I've turned down a couple interviews knowing I'd bomb at least one, didn't want that on my perm Google Record. It's nice to know it's not just me, and also there's redemption.
- skj 13y ago
  This is a bad strategy. One thing that actually helps you tremendously is evidence of growth. The easiest way for the hiring committee to see this is for you to show improvement from a previous interview. I guess it'd be possible to game this signal, but that's a lot of effort and still just one signal. My real point is that it absolutely does not count against you.
  - laurenstill 13y ago
    Fair enough, and I agree to an extent. But when I got that packet of prep material, I froze. I may go down that road again in the near future, but I want to be mindful of thresholds.
raldi 13y ago
By "death sentence", are you suggesting that the candidate will never again be considered for a role at Google, or are you just saying that they're not going to space today?
- laureny 13y ago
  Being rejected at an interview at Google means you have a one year cool down period. You can try again then (or they might call you back themselves).

BlackJack 13y ago

This Jobvine infographic describes the hiring process pretty well imo: http://www.jobvine.co.za/what-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-at-google/ http://www.jobvine.co.za/what-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-at-g...

aiiane 13y ago
The "crazy questions" there are completely wrong - Google interviews do not contain questions like these (and any interviewer that tried to use them would be run out on a rail).
- nawitus 13y ago
  Google used have those, but recently stopped asking them. The infographic is old.

tmhedberg 13y ago

I'm a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection. I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews, culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it as good interview practice and moved on. A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the blue and asked if I'd be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for another on-site. Soon after, I was hired! It's actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won't count you out after one try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers took you seriously as a candidate. If you've decided that you would really like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a free trip to London.

yukichan 13y ago
But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&E I wouldn't be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I'd be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back. The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it's silly and personally I don't plan at working at companies that interview this way. Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page's whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don't want it?

BorisMelnik 13y ago

Excellent write-up. I love your attitude about the whole thing. One part I found interesting and note I have not interviewed for anything in probable 10 years is the fact that they would not attempt to place you into another position being that you passed the majority of the questions with flying colors. Actually my only criticism is you used a ton of ;)'s :-0 So you are an excellent coder, scripter, and network admin. You also know all the OSI layer stuff but aren't good at "large scale" sysadmin functions? If this were my company I would try to have you placed in some other department and postiion. Either way, thank you so much for sharing your experience!

aiiane 13y ago
Sometimes that does happen - interviewers can always provide feedback that they think someone should be jumped over to a different track and re-interviewed.

DigitalSea 13y ago

This is ridiculous. I understand Google is a big company and thus needs to implement a concise recruitment process because understandable they get a lot of applicants, but the amount of tests and ways of which you were asked to solve problems is ridiculous. When is the last time you heard of a system administrator writing down problems on a whiteboard as opposed to asking a colleague or Googling the answer? I think the real test after the initial phone call interviews and Google docs one is to sit you down in-front of a computer and make you solve real problems, not theoretical & made-up problems in which they ask you to solve them in impracticable and unrealistic ways. This is a flaw in the corporate hiring process almost everywhere in the software world. It's not the 70's any more, people rarely solve problems on whiteboards and paper. They solve them on the computer, sometimes through knowledge and their skill-set and other times through luck and Googling. Don't feel too bad for being rejected, it just means something else could come along that's better.

uhno 13y ago
>It's not the 70's any more, people rarely solve problems on whiteboards and paper. They solve them on the computer, sometimes through knowledge and their skill-set and other times through luck and Googling. This isn't universally true. Anecdotally, I often find I'm much better able to think through tough problems if I step away from the keyboard and spend some time sketching out ideas on paper or on a whiteboard. I also keep the on-paper results in a notebook, which is occasionally useful to refer back to later in a project. Sometimes just introducing some distance between you and the problem is enough to give you a key insight. That said, the interview environment is still nothing like this. There, you're under great pressure on the whiteboard, something which is probably not true in your day-to-day.
- _delirium 13y ago
  I'd like to think this is true, because I enjoy working in that manner, but I've generally found going totally offline and solving problems gives me satisfyingly worked-out-by-myself solutions to problems that... I could've solved more quickly if I'd done more reading for half that time instead. If something really, truly has never been done before, nor even anything similar enough to be useful to me, then yes, this is the right way to work. But it's more common that someone has actually worked on something at least related (even if not quite the same), and that I could solve the problem more quickly if I looked for what they said about it first. That might take a bit of searching and reading to discover, sometimes even a few hours of it. But usually not as much time overall as re-solving it myself does... especially taking into account re-discovering all the edge cases. My hypothesis is that many people don't realize this because they never follow up later to check if their solution was really novel, or was just lurking behind a keyword they didn't think to try. If you do that a bit and adapt your habits to miss things less often in the future, you can get better at finding and adapting existing solutions, rather than re-inventing things from scratch. But that's sometimes a bit deflating, because then you realize you weren't inventing so many new things before, either...

patmcguire 13y ago

I've been on a few interviews with the "not-a-test" lunch, and it always made me grateful to be in this industry. I talk to people applying for law jobs, where it seems that lunches and dinners during the process are very much a test. Associates fill out scorecards for candidates later, on how good a conversationalist the candidate was! On a one to five scoring system, across multiple categories! From a certain point of view it makes sense - how are they going to schmooze with clients if they can't schmooze with you, but... shudder

mhurron 13y ago
Those lunches are a test. They're for 'culture fit' questions.
- tmhedberg 13y ago
  The Google lunches are emphatically not a test. It's very rare for the lunch "interviewer" to provide any feedback at all. That usually only happens if the candidate starts spouting racist comments or punches someone in the lunch line, etc. The real purpose is to answer any questions the candidate has about culture, perks, etc. and to give them a chance to relax, catch their breath, and feel at ease in the middle of a stressful day of interviews. If the candidate was referred by a Googler, then often that person will be the one to take them to lunch, which would obviously create a conflict of interest if real feedback was expected.
  - jlees 13y ago
    I've found that some of the folks I took to lunch interviews were reluctant to ask certain questions because despite assurances that the lunch has no feedback, they didn't quite believe me (natural cynicism, I suppose). It was a shame.
    - namelezz 13y ago
      Yeah, especially when your company has been doing some dirty works behind users' back and you think that users are bunch of idiots that never learn from their lessons and keep believing in whatever you say. What's a lame expectation.

raverbashing 13y ago

So, yes, Google hasn't changed a bit. Curious about where the interview took place (I don't think there's a hotel across the street from Google in Dublin) I'll just point them to this article whenever this kind of questioning happens again: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373310 - questioning is the first comment)

michaelmior 13y ago
> Around a week later the recruiter called and once again reported "very good" feedback, so I could go on and have an on-site interview in London. > The hotel was right across the street of the Google building, which I really liked a lot, since it meant I didn't have to find my way through London in the morning before the interview. Seems like it was in London.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  Oh Well, I missed it. I blame it on it being in the very end of paragraphs.

theboss 13y ago

I have an interview with Google this week. I've expressed my interest in security to the recruiter 3-4 times and I have been told I will be interviewing as a software engineer (aka....a data structures and algorithms interviewing...).... Doesn't make sense to me, the things they do. I've had bad experiences with several of the big tech guys now... Too bad you were denied but I'm sure it will all work out for you. In my opinion computer science is really cool because if you want to be really good you don't have to work at a big tech company. You can learn in your cube, learn at home, learn wherever. It is so easy to network and be with other smart people that you don't need them and they need you.

justinhj 13y ago

I don't think one should be surprised when they focus on the things you claim to be good at. They probably have a large pool of interviewers, so they can choose one with a deep knowledge in your specialist areas to chat with you.

octonion 13y ago

How come only programmers and data scientists are treated to such a ridiculous process? Why aren't managers and marketers given pop quizzes and domain-relevant puzzles to solve?

skj 13y ago
Lower-level management is drawn from the same pool as the engineers. For upper-level, Google does not have the luxury of getting one thousand credible and serious applicants every week, so the process necessarily differs.
- judk 13y ago
  That's begging the question. The eng interview process is an artifact of how they choose candidates. So is the VP interview process.
  - skj 13y ago
    Could you explain more what you mean? I'm tempted to dismiss it, but I don't actually understand your point so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt until I do.
raldi 13y ago
What are you referring to by "pop quizzes"?
FLUX-YOU 13y ago
Puzzles simply aren't in fashion for those industries.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 13y ago
Because nobody else would put up with it in sufficient numbers, and then spend ages discussing it in places equivalent to HN afterwards. It would make it impossible for them to hire. A large segment of potential tech hires salivates at the prospect of being hired by Google as some sort of intelligence test or proof of their self worth, and the convoluted hiring process serves to reinforce that impression. While it puts some people off, it draws others in. For higher level management positions, marketing and other types of roles, Google does not have nearly the same draw. And for higher level positions the pool of potential candidates is much smaller too.

marinhero 13y ago

Wow! thank you for sharing your experience, I've just started the interview process for Google SRE and I found this very valuable. It looks like a tough road but I'll do my best. Thank you!

thecolorblue 13y ago

Google's hiring process seems very intense and extensive. Are there other tech companies that go to these lengths to find the right people? I completely understand their reasoning, but I have never applied at a company that had four interviews.

philwelch 13y ago
A full day interview loop is standard procedure at most large tech companies you would have heard of.
vidarh 13y ago
I had 6 on site interviews when I joined Yahoo Europe back in 2003 for an engineering manager position. Developers back then would usually go through fewer, but still 3-4 wouldn't have been unusual depending on team - when I hired for my team at Yahoo, typical process would've been phone screen, then 3-4 on site interviews with a selection of people including my manager, someone from the product team, one of my developers, and me. It's a function of size, frankly - companies above a certain size tends to tack on more interviews largely because they can, and it doesn't hurt to get feedback from one more person. They also have the luxury (and problem) of a much larger pool of interested candidates to hire from.

calinet6 13y ago

Google's interview process in short is laser-focused. Whether this is good or bad is up to them and their goals (and clearly something is working), but personally I find it incredibly narrow-minded and inhuman. Wouldn't want to work there.

zobzu 13y ago

it was some years ago [actually, a lot of years ago now..], but when i got interviewed for an SRE google interview i certainly wasn't given any indicator of what to prepare for ;-) I also think many of the recruitment questions were above the skills of the employees asking the questions. they just had a checklist and basic understanding. Now i would probably do smth similar if i was google and a got a lot of applicants, but it felt weird. I think what was the weirdest tho, was how they made me feel like the SRE job was very stressing and more of a throw away tool used so that, luckily, i could switch to another position after 13month (1 cycle). That sealed the deal the wrong way for me. I just told the guy we should stop the process now so that nobody wastes their time and went home.

iDemonix 13y ago

This has long been my dream job and I have alerts setup for when they're interviewing - but I don't feel I'll ever be smart enough or well rounded for this specific job. I left university a couple years ago and have been working in my first job (an ISP NOC) for about a year, but I just can't see myself ever getting to the skill level required for an SRE. That and I have crippling anxiety when it comes to interviews. Ah well...

aiiane 13y ago
Something that not many people realize: interviewing is a skill that can be practiced and directly improved. The more interviews you do, the easier they get. You can also do dry runs - even just grabbing yourself a small 20" whiteboard and writing code and diagrams on it helps.
- iDemonix 13y ago
  That's good advice, I always tend to focus on the skills and see an interview as something that is done ad-lib. I forget how much of it is prep and the actual practicing of interviews.

graycat 13y ago

The job apparently was not 'reliability engineering'. In an auto analogy, Google was trying to hire narrowly experienced, self-taught auto mechanics and not mechanical engineers.

mml 13y ago

I had 3 interviews with google about 9 years ago. totally failed the on-site in mountainview. sorting a balanced tree on a whiteboard is tricky (quiet you!). In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was excited to work at a post-ipo cube farm, even if it says "google" on the side. edit: I believe it was also for SRE, which (at the time) means you do two interviews: the sysadmin interview, and the developer interview.

zerr 13y ago
Can anybody confirm that it is still the case? That this kind of questions are still given to non-fresh-graduate (i.e. experienced) candidates? (sorting a balanced tree... ridiculous).

aosmith 13y ago

Hate to say it but this is why I said "thanks but no thanks" to google, and amazon. You can learn a lot more about a person and their skills from a few conversations than from a grilling against a white board.

voidptr 13y ago

Hi, I am the author of that blog post at http://blog.lambda-startup.com http://blog.lambda-startup.com . I just want to say that I appreciate the overwhelming feedback and all the positive and encouraging statements to not take that rejection too seriously. Furthermore, I'm glad that my little article causes these mostly constructive discussions on here, and that sharing my experiences seems to be appreciated. Thanks.

cunac 13y ago
out of curiosity; do you get paid for one day you miss work or it is implied you should take a day off ?

logicallee 13y ago

The artcle mentions one interview out of 3+ phone interviews 5+ personal ones, that didn't go so well. It leaves me with the following impression: What a ridiculous waste of this guy's time. Why on Earth do recruitment processes need to be so capricious? Of course the guy's going to get nervous when he fouls up, given the HUGE amount of his time that has already been wasted, and how much you are putting on the line for every single moment to be perfect. maybe if the stakes weren't ridiculous and so capricious, it wouldn't take you two recruiters, three phone interviews, and a day of wasting everyone's time, only to reject a perfect employee. Makes me glad not to work for a huge organization. What a travesty. I have no idea why people feel it's okay to waste other people's time like that.

gergles 13y ago
Multi-stage interview processes like this are calibrated that you simply must pass every step of them to do the job. There's no fluff, there's no duplication; each module tests a specific component that the company feels is necessary. If you can't deliver on one component, then you aren't qualified. Harsh, but if you wanted to include an allowance for failing one module, you'd have to add even more modules and duplicate content in them so that you could still feel confident they could do the job. A false positive in the interview process is immensely painful for everyone involved and every effort should be made to prevent that.
yhager 13y ago
Exactly my thoughts. I guess they do it because they can, and the candidates are willing to go through this.

dclowd9901 13y ago

I recently interviewed for a position at twitter as a front end engineer (API stuff, HTML, CSS, etc). I failed out as well, but it was on, I think, much more nuanced terms. The interviewer had me write a client jsonp API interface, that is a controller that would handle calls to and from a jsonp API. Embarrassingly, I knew little about jsonp except for that it has a callback parameter that correlates with a global function you have defined in the javascript of your page. So as I was literally learning how JSONP worked during this interview, I also had to write an interface that would gracefully fail and queue multiple calls. I did pretty well, at that, having completed the essence of the exercise. Toward the end, I got mentally hung up on a scope issue and my brain was pretty much fried at that point so I ended up crashing out (it was the end of the interview time, anyway, so it's not like there was then 10 minutes of awkward silence). Anyway, this sma hiccup, which in no way indicated I didn't know my craft, and opposing my seemed to indicate I was an extremely quick study, still managed to keep me from moving on in the process. I'm not miffed or anything. In fact, out of that experience, I wrote a really cool lazy loading geolocation API that uses promises in conjunction with JSONP to deliver a really smooth API consumer experience, something I wouldn't have thought to do at my previous level of understanding.

dorfsmay 13y ago

FWIW, the linkedin interview process is eerily identical, same multi phone calls filtering, travel arrangements, meeting with 5 or 6 SREs for interviews, range of topics, trainee interviewers, friendly lunch, even the rejection process.

pkinsky 13y ago

How does google feel about non [Java, Python, C] languages? Could I use Scala to solve interview questions?

rjdagost 13y ago

I've been contacted several times by Google recruiters and the interactions have always left a bad taste in my mouth (and I've never even agreed to go forward with the interview process). They won't tell me what projects / products I'd be working on at Google if hired, which right off the bat is a non-starter for me. They want me to spend weeks studying puzzle coding problems for the interviews, which is also a non-starter. It seems like the entire process is centered around me proving to them that I am willing to go along with whatever they say. It's not a two way street at all. As an experienced engineer who is happy in his current job, what is my motivation to jump ship? Google recruiters act like the chance of working at Google is by itself sufficient incentive. Google's entire process seems to geared towards selecting people who really want to work for Google and who will jump through whatever hoops Google sets up. Long-term, it is probably dangerous for Google to be so chock full of corporate confirmation bias.

pbnjay 13y ago
I've had this exact same experience 3 times in the past year. I echo your thoughts entirely. I've told them multiple times what kind of position at google would ACTUALLY interest me and yet I still get matched to nothing even close. Each time I've turned them down I get the same feeling of "Ok! So -- wait you said no? What? Are you sure? ... but we're google!?" I'm also an experienced engineer, happy in my current job. Glad to see someone else with the same thoughts!

YesThatTom2 13y ago

Former Google SRE here. From the outside it looks like Google's strategy is to hire people that have the skills that people can only get from already working at Google. i.e. They have forgotten that they themselves did not have those skills when they were hired. Sadly blog posts like this make me think they are suffering an unintended side effect from doing this: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg...

lostcolony 13y ago

I keep coming back to this, wondering whether it's effective or not. It feels like an SAT, or really any other form of academic standardized testing, except not so objective. "Here's a list of things to know, go study it, then come in and solve problems with it in an artificial environment so that we may grade you". So you cram in preparation, and then if you don't pass the test, you plan to retake it in a year. I'd think the best and brightest would be the ones whose working knowledge, without cramming, allows for innovative, interesting, clever solutions. Even better if you can get away from the artificial feeling of interviews, into a "here's an actual, and unsolved, problem, let's figure out how to solve it together so I can see how you tick", rather than "here's a fake question, one with a well known, posted on the internet, solution, that if you ever faced in real life you'd solve in 5 minutes of Googling and move on, and which I expect you to recognize as a (X) problem, and regurgitate the solution from the selected readings". (That said, one or two stages of the interview seemed like they ~might~ be that). Maybe the intent isn't really to hire the best and brightest (that's hard to test for), but really the people who want to work at Google the most; are you willing to devote hours to the mere possibility?