The Key To Interviewing At Google

Nerval's Lobster writes Wired has an excerpt from a new book of Google-centric workplace advice, written by Laszlo Bock, the search-engine giant's head of "People Operations" (re: Human Resources). In an interesting twist, Bock kicks off the excerpt by describing the brainteaser questions that Google is famous for tossing at job candidates as "useless," before suggesting that some hiring managers at the company might still use them. ("Sorry about that," he offered.) Rather than ask candidates to calculate the number of golf balls that can fit inside a 747 (or why manhole covers are round), Google now runs its candidates through a battery of work-sample tests and structured interviews, which its own research and data-crunching suggest is best at finding the most successful candidates. Google also relies on a tool (known as qDroid), which automates some of the process—the interviewer can simply input which job the candidate is interviewing for, and receive a guide with optimized interview questions. It was only a matter of time before people got sick of questions like, "Why are manhole covers round?"

Comments

Re:Drink the kool aide

[swillden]

The key to interviewing at Google is to drink the kool aide before you arrive. Download and use the core software they make available. If you're not enthusiastic enough about their tool chain to do that, mere competence won't carry you over the finish line.

(I interview software engineers at Google)

This really isn't true. I mean, certainly some level of interest and enthusiasm is important, but the interview process doesn't really focus on that. SWE questions are pretty much all technical, about algorithms, data structures and coding. Not to test your knowledge of those topics (Google isn't really concerned with what you know, but with how smart you are) but to see how well you can solve problems on your feet. There is a significant component of the interviewer's report that covers "Googliness" which probably partially covers enthusiasm, but is much more about whether your personality is a good fit for the culture -- are you a nice person, friendly, interested in technology and solving problems, etc.