My Job Interview at Google (2008)

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I interviewed at Google for an SRE:Systems role around a month ago; I can share my anecdotes.

The first interview put me in contact with a recruiter who would basically be my guide throughout the process, at first he asked me some basic questions to feel out where I was weak and then told me to prepare those weaknesses for the next round.

The next round was 2 phone interviews, lasting about an hour each and over different days, one focused on my programming skills (of which, I have little because sysadmins don't typically do anything relating to data structures) and the second one was surrounding linux internals and debugging (which I was very strong on).

I spent roughly 2 working days worth of time preparing for them.

Preparing for the on-site was pleasant, I was put in touch with another google recruiter who ensured I knew where I was going and what I was doing, they told me that I'd be there the whole day and while they couldn't tell me what I would be asked/who I would meet/what to prepare; they gave me an approximation of the _kind_ of questions, very broadly.

I spent roughly 18 working days preparing in my weak areas, including leetcode/data structures and reading comp-sci papers (paxos and ilk).

On the day, I went through about 5, 1-hour long interviews that focused on various aspects of SRE (one of them being 'googliness'), some were about distributed systems (where the interviewer got hung up on the fact that I said I would use postgres instead of making my own database) and others were heavily programmer focused (linux internals was more about knowing the implementation of 'ls', scripting was all about the kinds of questions you get on leetcode).

I'm not going to lie, it was gruelling, and I'm typically pretty comfortable interviewing;

I thought I'd be fine with these interviews because I'm considered to be "shit hot" in sysadmin/writing glue by my peers, but I guess not, as I'm not a Google-SRE. :)

(sidenote: everything in TFA rings true, including the tips, google recruiters are quite transparent about your process. But they also said that the last stage is not the interview, it's roughly 5 hiring committees that are looking at your application "package" through different lenses)

What does this mean? How do they evaluate whether someone is sufficiently, um, Googley?

Your typical software engineer slept through the minimum amount of biology coursework required of them and has no special interest in chemistry beyond maybe like, a broscience-level grasp of pharmacology related to research compounds commonly viewed as smart drugs.

If bay area futurism woo is indicative of broader trends among software engineers, this person also has a vague, half-ironic commitment either to superintelligent AI immanentizing the eschaton or brain uploading becoming a hot-swappable replacement for the mortal coil within 20 years. Or both.

A belief that Google's workforce constitutes an addressable vat of brainpower of such raw g that, were it not for the idle concerns of developing adtech, it could turn to curing cancer is a very strange belief.