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White Board interviews.

server down

Do google Ireland do that? I am a principal engineer and tech lead in the company I work for and one of my GitHub projects is used by Google. So a recruiter called me up.

Before I continue with the process I wonder if I should bother. Life is a bit short to relearn algorithms I never used much or at all in my time ( questions about system design etc I am ok with). I find the writing code on white boards just odd, and it doesn't look to me like the interviewers even seem to know your CV. The CV gets you to the interview but they don't look at it. According to Quroa anyway.

Has anyone done that? I know that they don't really hire that many Irish folk anyway.

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BrokenArrows

server down wrote: »

Do google Ireland do that? I am a principal engineer and tech lead in the company I work for and one of my GitHub projects is used by Google. So a recruiter called me up.

Before I continue with the process I wonder if I should bother. Life is a bit short to relearn algorithms I never used much or at all in my time ( questions about system design etc I am ok with). I find the writing code on white boards just odd, and it doesn't look to me like the interviewers even seem to know your CV. The CV gets you to the interview but they don't look at it. According to Quroa anyway.

Has anyone done that? I know that they don't really hire that many Irish folk anyway.

Best option would be to ask the recruiter what is the interview process and whether or not it will include a whiteboard test.

Seems unlikely they will be hiring a principal and testing them with a basic algorithm on a whiteboard.

14ned

server down wrote: »

Do google Ireland do that? I am a principal engineer and tech lead in the company I work for and one of my GitHub projects is used by Google. So a recruiter called me up.

Before I continue with the process I wonder if I should bother. Life is a bit short to relearn algorithms I never used much or at all in my time ( questions about system design etc I am ok with). I find the writing code on white boards just odd, and it doesn't look to me like the interviewers even seem to know your CV. The CV gets you to the interview but they don't look at it. According to Quroa anyway.

Has anyone done that? I know that they don't really hire that many Irish folk anyway.

Yes, you'll definitely whiteboard.

I've done many interviews at Google, mainly to keep fresh my interviewing skills and Google are nice and let you practice at their expense.

The format for all engineers, including principle, is the standard five hour, six segment interview. At Google Dublin, most of the engineering roles will be in SRE. You'll need to study hard if you have any chance of passing. For Google, you need to pass all five segments, fail any one of them and they reject.

You'll need to buy the Google interview study books from Amazon and a practice whiteboard. Practice, practice, practice. The key to passing is speed and accuracy, you need to roll the stuff out fast, fast, fast and always remain accurate.

For a Principle role, you'll have at least one "management" interview where you won't whiteboard, but will instead scenario plan. For example, some correct translation outage occurs in Google Estonia. What steps do you take? What measures do you take to ensure it doesn't happen again? (tip: talk about early discovery of outage, you can't prevent servers going down, just reduce the probability per minute of outage)

The interview is very draining. You'll do well before lunch, after lunch I always find myself flagging, and I end up failing one of the post-lunch segments because my mind goes blank.

Even if you have intention of accepting an offer, it's worth doing for the practice and the challenge. Good luck!

Niall

Talisman

Yes they use whiteboards.

They go over simple algorithms and data structures to warm you up before they try to crush you. They will expect you to know the time and space complexity of your algorithms. You will be asked to code (C++ / Java / Python) at least one data structure and algorithm on the whiteboard.

The code you write needs to be testable, don't worry about minor syntax errors like semicolons but if you use an API they will expect you to know it i.e. have the correct arguments and return types for calls.

They will ask you to solve a real world problem. The key thing is to break the problem down into sub problems and solve those. If you tease your way through the issues you might find that they will actually ask you to solve a sub problem in code. Diving straight into coding on the whiteboard is suicide - once you go into code there is no getting back out to a higher level. They want to see you reason out a plan for your solution.

Part of the process is to stress you and see how you react to the situation - ask plenty of questions to clarify the problem and think out loud - they are deliberately vague because they want to see your communication skills in action. They will ask you why you chose one method of solving the problem over another.

Part way through solving the problem you may be given an additional piece of information which will cause you to rethink your solution and refactor it - they want to see how you approach this.

At some point the discussion will get very low level focusing on concurrency and also security. Having a handle on operating systems theory and how the internet works is what they are looking for.

NP-complete problems like the Knapsack Problem and the Travelling Salesman will feature somewhere and it will be up to you to recognise them.

A friend successfully went through the process and has been a slave to the machine for a few years now.

Pelvis

Are the interviews this intense for all levels?

server down

Sounds tough. My position isn't an SRE, but thats still a lot to learn. It seems I have to learn the entire CS courses again.

Anyway the interview is scheduled a bit soon, Ill probably spend a few weekends on this and train with a white board.

Or apply to jobs that so normal technical tests, or CV reviews

server down

The funny thing about these tests is that the CV apparently doesn't matter. You might as well leave it at home. "Oh, you are using some code of mine which is open sourced because you find it helpful" would in previous eras just got you an offer.

14ned

Pelvis wrote: »

Are the interviews this intense for all levels?

Yes. Google employ the same five hour, six segment engineering interview as all the big tech multinationals have. I've interviewed at Bloomberg and Microsoft before, exact same format, but very different content. Google, by the way, is the easiest and least intense of those three. Bloomberg wanted you to memorise all the algorithms in the C++ standard library. And I mean, memorise.

If I remember rightly, about 60% of candidates are not asked to return to interview after lunch.

Niall

14ned

server down wrote: »

The funny thing about these tests is that the CV apparently doesn't matter. You might as well leave it at home. "Oh, you are using some code of mine which is open sourced because you find it helpful" would in previous eras just got you an offer.

Not quite true. Last time I interviewed at Google they waived two of the five/six slots on the basis of me being one of the C++ leadership. I spent those two hours simply chatting with various Google Dublin engineers who had heard I was interviewing there, and wanted to meet me in person. They showed me some of the stuff they'd been working on, and quizzed me on various gossip.

So CV may not matter, but service to engineering does. If your name is widely recognised, you'll be treated appropriately for those specific slots. Doesn't help you in the other slots of course, I failed the management/org behaviour slot last time. I was, to be honest, absolutely zonked by that point (I never sleep well in a hotel, even one as nice as The Marker) and it was the last interview of the day.

Niall

server down

14ned wrote: »

Not quite true. Last time I interviewed at Google they waived two of the five/six slots on the basis of me being one of the C++ leadership. I spent those two hours simply chatting with various Google Dublin engineers who had heard I was interviewing there, and wanted to meet me in person. They showed me some of the stuff they'd been working on, and quizzed me on various gossip.

So CV may not matter, but service to engineering does. If your name is widely recognised, you'll be treated appropriately for those specific slots. Doesn't help you in the other slots of course, I failed the management/org behaviour slot last time. I was, to be honest, absolutely zonked by that point (I never sleep well in a hotel, even one as nice as The Marker) and it was the last interview of the day.

Niall

Interesting. Not sure what slots I would be passed on. Is it a violation of your NDA to mention it?

I intend to do this but not next week. Sounds like weeks of prep are needed.

14ned

server down wrote: »

Interesting. Not sure what slots I would be passed on. Is it a violation of your NDA to mention it?

It was the first and third slot. I can't remember their titles. I don't even know if they're given in the same order to every candidate, I can see that it'll depend on scheduling for the interviewers.

Also, I'm fairly sure that they're not supposed to waive slots like that. Everybody is supposed to be treated equally. There is a funny, and probably untrue, story of Dennis Richie going through the standard Google interview which he dismally and utterly failed, and they were about to shoo him out the door at lunchtime when thankfully someone who actually knew who he was intervened.

Now I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know it's true that they put him through the standard Google engineering interview because well, everybody gets treated the same. Doesn't matter if you invented C or Unix or Plan 9 or any of that. Besides, I can see he'd not object, and probably would have thought it would be fun. He was a nice and kind man, I wish there were more of his type in software engineering.

Niall

Elessar

Sounds absolutely insane. Is it even worth it? I mean, yeah, free food and all the perks but, there are many other companies that will pay well and wont take a day (or several) of your life grilling you about problems you'll probably never see again and expect on the spot answers. I thought 2 hours was a lot for a past interview. In fact in my current place, the length of the interview process is a problem for the department, it takes too long between rounds and for HR to get their ass in gear, so much so we're losing people we would have hired to other places where they were quickly made an offer.

Also, I cant speak for engineering, but some others I know who worked at Google in Dublin were up to their eyes in stress at ever expanding targets to meet. Doesn't sound all that great tbh.

server down

Elessar wrote: »

Sounds absolutely insane. Is it even worth it? I mean, yeah, free food and all the perks but, there are many other companies that will pay well and wont take a day (or several) of your life grilling you about problems you'll probably never see again and expect on the spot answers. I thought 2 hours was a lot for a past interview. In fact in my current place, the length of the interview process is a problem for the department, it takes too long between rounds and for HR to get their ass in gear, so much so we're losing people we would have hired to other places where they were quickly made an offer.

Also, I cant speak for engineering, but some others I know who worked at Google in Dublin were up to their eyes in stress at ever expanding targets to meet. Doesn't sound all that great tbh.

I’m going to do it as a test of whether I can do it. I don’t really want to work for them either.

It looks like they are interviewing for cookie cutter candidates in google.

14ned

Elessar wrote: »

Sounds absolutely insane. Is it even worth it? I mean, yeah, free food and all the perks but, there are many other companies that will pay well and wont take a day (or several) of your life grilling you about problems you'll probably never see again and expect on the spot answers.

There aren't many places in Ireland which will pay you 150k+ in salary for a purely engineering role, without going into management. Now, very few in Google Dublin earn that, but there are some, and that's rare in Ireland.

Plus, the five hour interview is absolutely normal amongst the big tech companies nowadays. I totally agree it's a daft design with an enormous false negative rate, Google's own internal numbers agree. But its biggest benefit is that to pass, it requires you to demonstrate just how much commitment you are making to get in. It proves that you really want to work there.

And ultimately, that's what they really value. Not so much the talent. They seek proof of future loyalty.

Also, I cant speak for engineering, but some others I know who worked at Google in Dublin were up to their eyes in stress at ever expanding targets to meet. Doesn't sound all that great tbh.

SRE at Google Dublin is a pretty nice place to work. Unlike in almost anywhere else in software, you are never rushed because rushing means outage. So you get to plan years in advance, and slowly and methodically build out change with proper testing and proper planning and high quality development. Very different to software development in most parts of Ireland.

Against that, sure you get put on rota to be pinged if anything goes wrong, and you must get online within three minutes of getting pinged to fix whatever it is (they assign many of you per shift). But it's rare enough to be honest, they're an above average talent at SRE Dublin. They're competent, though not rock star talent like at other places. If I remember, they are about 75% non-Irish, quite a few North Americans, lots of French.

If it weren't for the dismal pay on offer, I would seriously consider working there. But they've never offered me more than a 100k, and that's a huge pay cut for me as a contractor if I'm not stuck in a mini-recession for my skillset like now. Plus I'd have to work in Dublin

Niall

14ned

server down wrote: »

It looks like they are interviewing for cookie cutter candidates in google.

The official term is "googliness".

They're no worse than the other tech multinationals. They all hire a certain type of person, and won't hire other types. And then complain a lot about the lack of the certain type of person they all hire.

As I mentioned in the other post, the single most important thing for googliness is ample demonstration of future loyalty. Even better if you drink the Google kool aid, but don't look too obvious about it. So imply that Google is the single greatest force for good on the planet, but never state that explicitly.

And again, it's no different in the other tech multinationals. They all have their particular formulation of cult-like indoctrination. Amazon, Apple, Bloomberg, Facebook, Microsoft, HP, IBM. They all like their workers to really believe. Once you're actually working there, of course you end up doing the exact same drudgery as at anywhere else. Software development is software development after all. Plenty of legacy codebases to maintain, etc etc

Niall

server down

I know Apple (in Cupertino I mean) have per team interviews though. The CV matters. A kernel team interview is markedly different from the Siri team, who have different requirements from the standard OS team, who have different requirements and interviews to the Icloud team. Obviously you would think.

Elessar

14ned wrote: »

There aren't many places in Ireland which will pay you 150k+ in salary for a purely engineering role, without going into management. Now, very few in Google Dublin earn that, but there are some, and that's rare in Ireland.

Plus, the five hour interview is absolutely normal amongst the big tech companies nowadays. I totally agree it's a daft design with an enormous false negative rate, Google's own internal numbers agree. But its biggest benefit is that to pass, it requires you to demonstrate just how much commitment you are making to get in. It proves that you really want to work there.

And ultimately, that's what they really value. Not so much the talent. They seek proof of future loyalty.

SRE at Google Dublin is a pretty nice place to work. Unlike in almost anywhere else in software, you are never rushed because rushing means outage. So you get to plan years in advance, and slowly and methodically build out change with proper testing and proper planning and high quality development. Very different to software development in most parts of Ireland.

Against that, sure you get put on rota to be pinged if anything goes wrong, and you must get online within three minutes of getting pinged to fix whatever it is (they assign many of you per shift). But it's rare enough to be honest, they're an above average talent at SRE Dublin. They're competent, though not rock star talent like at other places. If I remember, they are about 75% non-Irish, quite a few North Americans, lots of French.

If it weren't for the dismal pay on offer, I would seriously consider working there. But they've never offered me more than a 100k, and that's a huge pay cut for me as a contractor if I'm not stuck in a mini-recession for my skillset like now. Plus I'd have to work in Dublin

Niall

I still wouldn't bother. I guess if I was desperate for 150k...Nah, forget it, life is too short :P