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Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

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Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#81

Post by periferral »

I interviewed for a Product Manager role at Google and my experience was awful. Put this things in perspective, I was a Director of PM managing a team at my current role and working a lot with customers, presenting in speaking engagements etc as part of my day to day.

I get into the interview and the person on the other side seems to know very little of my background. He says he is a PM and starts with how much is google's spend on storage for youtube on an annual basis. Knowing very well, I walk through assumptions like the average youtube video size, no of formats based on screen res and video quality etc etc and give him the logic. He pauses and says give me a dollar value. He doesnt want to understand the logic behind the calculations. Anyway, next few questions are more of the same.. code optimizations etc etc. After 3 or so questions, we were done. No, do you have any questions for me. No customer related discussions. No what I have done in the past and how I've been successful.

I feel like these kind of interviews are not judging what the person brings to the table, rather do you know what I'm gong to ask you and that's all that matters.

I always look for 2 things in any interview. Are you smart and motivated because nothing we do is rocket science. If you are smart and motivated, you will succeed. The other is, will I (and the rest of the team) get along with you. Teams need to work together and people who lack tact in personal skills end up being very difficult to work with.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#82

Post by truncate »

In theory yes, probably that's the intention. Several other companies claim the same. Interviewers are nice and everything, however this whole process is flawed, and the post nowhere depicts the reality.

Practically, interviewers more often don't care anything other than solving the problem. Some are checking their emails while the candidates solve the problem, some are just trying to give the most obscure problems using exotic data structures, and some are simply too lazy to pay attention. So, I would say whatever the procedure is, there is an enforcement problem.

It is what it is with most companies. So we leetcode like hell, and hope for the best.

EDIT: I've had much better interview experience when the interviewers belong to the team I will work for. I think there is more clear incentive for interviewers to be more interested.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#83

Post by babesh »

tytso wrote: post #48
ben_jones wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me OP seems to assume a competent, unbiased, and well meaning interviewer: always giving hints, knows exactly what they want, will field and answer questions comprehensively. At Google's scale with hundreds of thousands of interviews on the books, thousands of interviewers who like all human beings have good days, sick days, angry days, and depressed days, this will not always happen. What happens when its the int…

What happens is the hiring committee will disregard the interview report, and send feedback to the interviewer, saying "don't do that". (There are generally 4-6 interviewers on an interview panel, so if one interviewer does a bad job, there are other interviewers who will be providing signal to the hiring committee. A single bad interview report won't sink a candidate.) Google's interview training is pretty specific…

Asking a question well takes skill. It is possible that an interviewer screwed up asking the question rather than that the candidate screwed up.

Most interview systems don't have a systematic, ongoing way for accounting for this especially given that interviewers are self reporting.

In my opinion, most interviewers are undertrained/underskilled at asking specific questions and at interviewing in general. They don't invest the resources to systematically improve but rather treat interviewing as a burden to be minimized.

There is still a lot play in systems that allow for borderline smart ass behavior. Do you think an interviewer will write up that they sneered at the candidate?

The interview process is a factory. The company is mostly concerned with reaching outputs. The candidate is just a happenstance casualty.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#84

Post by foobarbazetc »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #69
starpilot wrote: post #24

Yet another "trust the system" message from the authority figure who enables the system. Similar: - Police officer: Just follow our instructions, be cooperative. - Car salesman: Just be upfront with what you want. Tell us about yourself, and we'll earnestly try to help you. The message is the same; the authority "just wants to help," but in reality the relationship is adversarial to a larger degree than it is coopera…

Yeah, I call bullshit as well. Try getting to the onsite if you don't solve the phone screen question exactly as expected. I have a friend who solved/memorized ~600 leetcode questions and got offers from Google, Facebook, etc. He was average, not dumb but not well above average. When I apply to both, I will definitely be leetcoding as many question as possible as well, to maximize my chances.

If that’s all it took maybe those interview funnels aren’t actually that great.

IME, my worst interview process ever was at Google. All I remember from it was some question about burning a piece of string. The coding part was relatively easy.

The best interview process I ever did was at Yahoo in 2008. Everyone was very friendly but the questions were tough. I found the “expert” level of the people interviewing me higher than at Google at the time. It was grueling though - 9am to 7pm. Got an offer to “join any team I wanted”. Turned it down for a startup.

Good decision in hindsight.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#85

Post by fro0116 »

When searching for jobs, I actually find the interview process of a company to be an extremely useful filter/signal.

I tend to outright reject companies who have interview processes like Google's.

At its best, it filters for a set of qualities that have little correlation with qualities of people whom I tend to enjoy working with professionally, and at its worst, can be easily gamed by anyone who's willing to play the interview prep game, which further reduces the quality of candidates that the process lets through.

This means even if I end up getting the job at a company with an interview process like Google's, I'm unlikely to be surrounded by people who I enjoy working with.

Even if I somehow get lucky and everybody at the company turns out to be amazing at the moment I join, the fact that their interview process is essentially a crapshoot means that wont stay true for very long as the company scales up and the law of large numbers kicks in.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#86

Post by yongjik »

ben_jones wrote: post #54
tytso wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens is the hiring committee will disregard the interview report, and send feedback to the interviewer, saying "don't do that". (There are generally 4-6 interviewers on an interview panel, so if one interviewer does a bad job, there are other interviewers who will be providing signal to the hiring committee. A single bad interview report won't sink a candidate.) Google's interview training is pretty specific…

So self reporting by the interviewer?

Can you imagine how much effort you'd need to fabricate a convincing account of you asking reasonable questions, after you assaulted the candidate with ego-tripping trivia questions...

Besides being wrong and pathetic, why would anybody want to do that? The goal of maybe 90% of Google engineers is to spend as little time as the company allows on interviewing and writing feedbacks, and instead spend time on actually working on their projects.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#87

Post by yaacov »

jaypaulynice wrote: post #79

That was probably how her interviews went as a pretty lady. It’s quite possible. On the other hand, the normal guy probably had an adversarial interview process. So obvious! This is also true if the interviewee is buddy with a lot of the interviewers’ friends.

I’m an average looking dude and my interview experience at Google and comparable companies has been pretty similar to the one described in the article

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#88

Post by vincentmarle »

tarr11 wrote: post #52
dyu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in California, the employer is now required by law to disclose salary range.

What law is this? I’ve only heard about the law that says employers are no longer allowed to ask candidates about salary history in California.

Same law.

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#89

Post by halflings »

hydroreadsstuff wrote: post #59

I've interviewed three times in the last five or so years there, and I don't get the feeling the depth is as claimed in the article. Perhaps, it's also the interviewers not implementing it as intended. If these points were indeed important, I'd expect feedback addressing them. All feedback I received was about doing well or not well on certain questions. No meta whatsoever. I didn't make it for good reasons, but I fe…

FYI, the reason one of your interviewers was typing is that they need to submit notes about the interview, and it's recommended to take notes ASAP (to avoid any bias post-interview).

No excuse for typing loudly + not stopping after you addressed it however. Sorry you've had a bad interview experience!

For what it's worth, I interviewed with Google twice, and got rejected the first time. One of my on-site interviewers asked me a simple question that has a large number of complex answers. I gave at least 4 different methods (all valid, with different pros/cons) to solve the problem, and they were not impressed at all...

Re: Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

#90

Post by plesner »

I conducted many interviews while I worked at google and I wouldn't trust anyone who tells you the interview situation as one particular, well-defined, thing. Individual interviewers have their own style, approach, goals. Even if people start from the same place because they go through the same interview training they inevitably drift in goals and interpretation of what the guidelines mean over the years. What your interview experience is going to be like depends on the particular people interviewing you.

By all means write a blog post telling what you yourself is like as an interviewer at google. But if you want to say something broader really ask yourself, what's your evidence that you understand how other people at google, on other teams and in other offices, do it.

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