Seven interviews seems a bit... abusive?
My Job Interview at Google (2008)
21–30 of 169 posts
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#22> Unfortunately, I just learned that I'm not getting hired.
Seems like a ton of effort to go through to not get hired. I'm curious as to why he wasn't hired; IMO it seems kinda strange to go through 8 interviews only to be rejected.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#23Ah, interview hazing, where having an encyclopedic knowledge that you can regurgitate on command trumps all. What a phenomenal waste of time.
When I first started down the path to becoming a software engineer, I never suspected that flashcards would be part of my interview prep as though it were a history course.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#24So how much of that stuff do you actually do day-to-day?
Ranging from none to "whatever you happen to know about this stuff is not enough". Quickly building mental models for unknown stuff is the top skill. I'm afraid nobody even tries to assess this in the interviews.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#25> Unfortunately, I just learned that I'm not getting hired. Seems like a ton of effort to go through to not get hired. I'm curious as to why he wasn't hired; IMO it seems kinda strange to go through 8 interviews only to be rejected.
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Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#26Reading that stuff always makes me feel incredibly stupid (or rather clueless). I wouldn't be able to answer most of those questions off the top of my head. Including this weird clock hand question (which is probably some trivial math that might or might not have been taught to me more than a decade ago and which I never ever actually applied since). Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfull…
The clock should be simple -- the hour hand is a quarter of its way to 4 o'clock, so: 360*((1/12)/4) = 7.5 degrees.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#27Reading that stuff always makes me feel incredibly stupid (or rather clueless). I wouldn't be able to answer most of those questions off the top of my head. Including this weird clock hand question (which is probably some trivial math that might or might not have been taught to me more than a decade ago and which I never ever actually applied since). Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfull…
These interview are notoriously hard to pass. Less than 5% gets in. You should not feel bad about it. Being an SRE at Amazon or Google scale require that you know what is going on in every layer of the infrastructure, including data structures in code, so that you can pinpoint the exact problem in the stack. I think some of these question are overkill and have nothing to do with how good you are going to be at the job though. Writing a binary tree certainly one of those. You are not going to write one because there are tons of libraries in every language that is in production. Knowing that DNS can use TCP is much more valuable. This falls into the category of questions that you are likely to run into when debugging an issue.
If you want to get a job at Google you have be willing to be put up with these questions (both the ones make sense and the ones do not) just to show your dedication. I usually prep for such interviews roughly 3 months and I have worked as an SRE for a long time. Do not assume that we know all of these things on the top of our heads and do not feel stupid.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#28Reading that stuff always makes me feel incredibly stupid (or rather clueless). I wouldn't be able to answer most of those questions off the top of my head. Including this weird clock hand question (which is probably some trivial math that might or might not have been taught to me more than a decade ago and which I never ever actually applied since). Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfull…
One thing that struck me is that the interviewers are asking the same questions to many different candidates, so they are going to know all the slip-ups that people make.
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#29Getting rejected by Google turned out to be great for the author. He ended up founding a successful company instead. (Browserling)
Re: My Job Interview at Google (2008)
#30> Unfortunately, I just learned that I'm not getting hired. Seems like a ton of effort to go through to not get hired. I'm curious as to why he wasn't hired; IMO it seems kinda strange to go through 8 interviews only to be rejected.
Google is notoriously bad with these interviews. Most famous case is the Homebrew guy. I got turned down once because I haven't had a degree in CS. They knew that in advance yet they did the whole round.