Reading 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 successfully) running a SaaS platform with tens of thousands of users, so maybe I'm not that clueless after all.
Using google products has made me certain that being able to solve math/algorithmic problems and being able to make good software really aren't connected in most cases.
Yep! To be fair, Google software is usually technically very good (e.g. their security is second to none), but they have no product vision, and often very bad UX/DX.
Clock hand question is painfully obvious once you look at actual analog clock face.
All of the questions were easy bordering on trivial as long as your background lines up with target position. The problem is not the questions, but the culture of gotcha interviewing. Haha we got you doing off by one by offering the C option on whiteboard, haha you didnt initialize one variable on whiteboard, haha I have bad mood therefore you fail, etc.
>I recently came across your name as a _possible world class Engineer_
> Clock hand question is painfully obvious once you look at actual analog clock face.
You see, intuitively I thought this would involve some kind of radian maths (just because it's about angles and a circle) and I don't remember any of that - never had any use for it.
But yes, it is a lot more easy than that. Not sure I would have discovered the trivial approach in an interview situation when it didn't even occur to me at home on the couch.
It's established that the Google-style interview questions bear no semblance to real world performance or software engineering skills. All they test is the ability to memorize leetcode style questions and regurgitate them during interviews.
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.
2. For the interviewer to feel better about already having a job at Google. I remember one guy bragging about how much he made.
It's really not to find out if you're good at something. I have been offered jobs at some of the FAANMG companies so I'm not talking out of jealousy or whatever.
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.
Well, when you work at Google, at least you must have passed that kind of an interview at one point - which is something I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be able to do.
One of Google's HR groups did a test where they gave the hiring review team their own interview packets (anonymized, from when each team member originally interviewed). None of them were hired.
I can say with 100% certainty that my coworkers ask questions in interviews that they wouldn't be able to answer themselves. It's kind of ridiculous IMO and I try to call it out when I see it (in the nicest possible way of course)
The issue with impostor syndrome is that your brain is good at finding excuses such as "I was lucky", "They did not catch me", and so on.
Personally, I had a lot of fun doing my interviews and learnt a lot while preparing them. I would recommend you to try them, it's gonna be interesting, even if you don't get the job.
I have done interview training twice in my 8.5 years at Google, and both times it only made my impostor syndrome far far worse. I simply can't do interviews here, I wouldn't pass the ones I had to give.
Clearly the interviewing Googler with a 250k salary doesn't value a decent wrist watch where whole minutes and hours tick over nicely in a single movement. ;-)
> Clearly the interviewing Googler with a 250k salary doesn't value a decent wrist watch where whole minutes and hours tick over nicely in a single movement. ;-)
I've never seen a watch where the hour ticks over in a single movement. Do those exist? I imagine it'd be very confusing to see the minute hand at 59 and the hour hand still at 0100 when it's 0159.
I have a great video of my kids trying to figure out what a pay phone is back in ~2014. Not rotary, but a similar sort of "wow, I'm old" sort of experience.
Actually I (never took an algorithms class, so I would definitely have to brush up on execution of the basics there) thought this questions were not that bad, the newer reports seem much harder (or are plain exaggeration by the "leet"code community).
I'm also a bit puzzled about the trick question being mentioned at that. That's just primitibe (maybe I'm a little bit burned by that as in 5th grade or so, our teacher did a test, writing times on a sheet and making us calculate the angle between clock hands (and it was a lot of numbers on that sheet))
I was good before but i did excersize for google interview for 2-3 month.
I actually overdid the learning as i assumed that the coding questions can't be that easy.
But at the end of the day, i'm still not working for google because yes the coding questions are not that hard but you have to convince 5 different people that you are a good fit.
Suddenly you excersize for learning how to know what the interviewer wants from you.
Is that wasted time? Definitly not. Loved the more focus learning approach.
Also, i'm now 10 years working in that industry, you don't stop looking for a new job. That interviewing skill is critical.
I feel the same way, except I think the clock-hand question is quite straightforward. Except for that one, just like every other time this sort of thing is posted almost every question is either:
1. About fairly low-level details of computer networking, or
2. What would you do if your data doesn’t fit in memory?
I’ve been a successful developer for years and never had to deal with either of those problems.
It's been the same experience for me. I've been successful as a developer and yet have never encountered many of these problems that interviews in the past demanded I know.
Ultimately if I end up encountering a problem like that in my career, the honest answer is to pick up a book or begin reading through articles on solutions. Sadly that kind of answer seems to be frowned upon because it's better for you to lie about what you know than to admit you don't know the solution and figure out ways to rectify it.
Google employs the very elite of the elite. If you're working there you're probably at the very top of your field. Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.
I feel a little sorry for Google's developers. They're told they're brilliant but asked to write software to deliver adverts and track people. They could literally be curing cancer and putting people on Mars if they wanted, and yet they sit in Mountain View working out new things to do with the data about what I clicked on today. It's a huge waste of talent.
People who dedicate their lives to curing cancer and putting people on Mars are titans for making verrry verrry wee little dents in those problem areas.
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.
I'm not sure what the intention of the OP was but I read it as those engineers could help push those efforts forward by doing what they do best -- writing software. Not all of those involved in the effort to cure cancer are studying chemicals and making drugs. There's also people who have to run some matrix calculations with MATLAB code, or who have to transcribe experiments into excel sheets. It's hard to think that if we took the pool of talent that makes the information-collecting products that Google makes, it wouldn't have any difference in the amount of progress made
I'll explain why it sounds preposterous to me, and why the idea that google could change the fate of cancer research or missions to mars if not for its profit motives is patently unrealistic to the point of being insulting to everyone involved in this counterfactual.
1. Why cancer?
Number one cause of death is heart disease. Why not that? Surely the #1 problem is good enough for people currently working on adtech if the #2 problem is.
You said curing cancer, not "applying the numerical optimization expertise of a tiny fraction of google's workforce to the occasional omics problem in collaboration with a research lab" or "headhunting the PI of a lifesci research program to build an initiative at Google" or "throwing google infra at something other than Stadia". Even something far more obvious like "applying deep learning to diagnostics / early detection / etc."
These are the things Google can actually do, and they are the things Google already does. Examples: DeepMind for breast cancer screenings, Public Datasets program support for selected research. Still no cancer cure. So if you'd said that, well, they're doing it, to whatever extent they deem worth the prestige bump.
Unless they decide to become Microsoft and buy out entire sectors of applied biotech, they're not going to radically improve their hands-on involvement in lifesci relative to what they're already doing.
More, just ballpark the numbers. Google has 100k employees — "98771" in 2018-12 as per their SERP infobox. "A lot" of those employees absolutely do not by any stretch of the imagination possess the skillsets required to assist in meaningful ways on high-end cancer research, unless that work is conducted like some kind of wartime effort and the assistance is largely of a clerical nature.
And in the event that Google employees were being unilaterally drafted into this effort as grunts, the very first thing they'd do would be to crowdsource/outsource the bulk of the menial work to cheaper labor sources beyond Google. So their main contribution would undoubtedly be in building the scaffolding required to pass the buck.
2. Why Mars?
This constitutes a complete diversion of Google's autonomous driving and robotics people to an out of the blue project that they're out of position to handle. It would merely sabotage a division where Google is a market leader for the sake of starting up an incoherent, laggard mess in an area defined by maddening bottlenecks and complexity. Google has no substantial preexisting expertise in this area, afaik.
At one point they put up 30M USD in sponsorship prize money for a lunar lander competition, but that's about all that comes to mind. It also went pretty dismally. They had to repeatedly extend the deadline. Eventually the comp ran 11 years and ended in one launch -> one crash on the lunar surface. They threw a mil at the team as a consolation prize.
That project was more of an exercise in reifying the moonshot metaphor than anything else.
One far more recent indicator of how hard it is to make strides in this area is the DARPA Launch Challenge, intended to accelerate radical improvements to launch pipelines. It just closed without a winner. One team barely made it to the launchpad then scrubbed.
In terms of both social good that Google can do with its nearest preexisting R&D and profitability, it's clear that redirection would be disastrous. Autonomous vehicles are the play for them. This has nothing to do with the adtech people either way.
All in all, the relevance of Google to either of these problem areas is about what would be expected, cet par: not a lot. Modern work with any technical bent is hyper-specialized. There's no jump from literal cancer like adtech to actual cancer.
On top of that, adtech is largely a house of cards. You can't ever assume that 'data science' coupled to business requirements and marketing is in any way rigorous or indicative of the current state of the art in independent research. A lot of this work is pure smoke and mirrors operating on greater fool theory. To specialize in that sector is to specialize in window-dressing falsity. So it's not like you'd want adtech data jockeys touching subject matter that actually matters.
They are working on things that interest them. What is wrong with that? That is also a little insulting to the researchers that are actually studying how to cure cancer.
Google has at least 50K employees, spread all over the world. I guess it is quite possible to gather and recruit 50K employees who are much better developers than most others outside but I would not (rather cannot) call each one of them elite of the elite !
Look, a great deal of valuable software has been created by Google and other FAANGs. But I reckon most of that value has actually been created by the first or the best 5000 or maybe 10K employees at most. Most of the others in Google are enjoying the fruits of their genius, and they don't really have to perform any greater miracle than moving protocol buffers around. Still, no doubt that they are highly competent software developers and passed tough interviews. Not to imply that Google interviews can even distinguish between a genuinely talented programmer from a diligently-practicing-over-a-year leetcoder.
> I guess it is quite possible to gather and recruit 50K employees who are much better developers than most others outside but I would not (rather cannot) call each one of them elite of the elite !
There are other companies besides Google. Who's to say, for starters, that any of the engineers at the members of FAAN, or Microsoft, or the unicorns, are any less elite?
> Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.
There's an interesting implication in your statement. The inherent assumption is that the metrics which Google uses to hire interviews would be the definition of the best. In other words, if you'd use Google's interview process in the whole world - the filter of that would lead you to the "best of the best" and "not so the best".
I don't know the answer to it but you may want to consider this aspect before reaching the conclusion.
No. We laugh at this stuff. All sorts of internal memes about "hiring the best engineers in the world to move protobufs around."
There are definitely personalities around the company who think of themselves this way, but certainly not the majority. I think this kind of language in fact hurts us, because it creates a pronounced impostor syndrome around us, as we all _know_ we're mere mortals.
The reality of a SWE job at any BigCorp is quite mundane, and is more politics than coding most of the time.
Honestly our interview process should be more testing people how to write and comment on design docs and fill out a performance review, because that's what they seem to want the most out of us.
EDIT: Oh, also filtering through 2 pages of new emails, mostly automated, to find the two things that are relevant to your job.
Is this still true? I know they strove for this 15 years ago, with much success. From what I've seen in the past decade, I highly doubt that this is still true. And I'm not speaking of Google's products, but other aspects like their culture, the opinions of academics, media reports, etc.
Then I probably have to remind myself that I'm (halfway successfully) running a SaaS platform with tens of thousands of users, so maybe I'm not that clueless after all.
Maybe Google scale isn't for me.