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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I have friends in the local Google office, and once long ago I interned there. A few years ago I decided to stop telling off the recruiters and give it a go.

I had 4 interviews where I needed to be exceedingly clever very quickly. I was for two of them, and wasn't for two of them, and so I was a no-hire. Given a few days to think through the problems again, I was able to solve them all in my head- just not in 45 minutes. None of the interviews asked about my ability to design systems, how to test or manage large-scale applications, how to gather requirements and work with customers.

My conclusion is that Google is primarily looking for people who either have every algorithm and problem memorized and ready to regurgitate, or exceedingly clever people who can solve tricky problems on the spot. I guess this works for them, as they're a very valuable company. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it works despite this process they have.

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"None of the interviews asked about my ability to design systems, how to test or manage large-scale applications, how to gather requirements and work with customers."

No company will ever ask such questions, which is mind boggling. They will all ask minute questions about sorting algorithms which you will never code instead of asking questions related what you will be doing day to day or stuff that is actually critically important.

No one asks design questions, perhaps because it is an open-ended question. But aren't those the best question for a role that often requires coming up with new solutions?

EDIT: perhaps I was too harsh by saying "never". In my experience, companies have occasionally asked about design, but very few and very little in terms of the ratio with algorithm questions. Part of the problem is the "new interviewer every 45/60 minutes" style of interviewing. They all come in and start off with an algorithm question. Each and every one (at least the technical ones).

No company will ever ask such questions

Once you get outside the bubble where development process is a dirty word and/or meme cargo culted from a blog, they often do. Especially companies with immutable external quality standards to design and test towards.

> No company will ever ask such questions

Not true in my experience, and the company that did ask such questions turned out to be a great place to learn a lot in a hurry. It also turned out not to be a good long-term fit, but I'm a much better dev for the experience, and I don't regret it at all.

My interview for Google as an SRE in late 2009 consisted of well over half design questions around improvements of a system with lots of users.

One of the best series of questions I've ever gotten in an interview. We probably spent close to an hour just on one major aspect of the service.

Ironically I've found that non-software companies are a lot better about this than software companies when hiring programmers. They are much more likely to ask questions along the lines of "here's a typical problem we might have, give us a high level overview about how you might help us solve it".

That's not true very much. Both Facebook and Amazon are asking systems design questions.

Replying 11 days later so maybe you never see this but...

I'm an interviewer (and SDE) at Amazon and (at least in my division) we won't do a hire loop for a non-entry level engineer that doesn't include a design interview. It can make or break a candidate, but if you've been in the industry for a few years we expect you have some ideas beyond "Get a bigger database server" when we ask how you'd scale a solution.

I solved everything with time to spare and they still rejected me. So it doesn't really matter, they can find some other reason to reject you.

For me, they said my C++ wasn't "neat enough" which really pissed me off because we had several minutes at the end of each session where I could have cleaned it up if they had asked.

Anyways it was a complete waste of time.

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