[jwecker]

I interviewed @ google several years ago as part of some due-diligence they were doing to decide if they wanted to acquire the startup I was working at, [redacted].

It was several hours, with many interviewers one at a time, of academic exercises. Some I could see were relevant to some of Google's projects, but that wasn't the emphasis- it was very much a "how much do you remember from CS courses?" (with a few exceptions- one had me explain why a snippet of C would crash- something more what I would expect a senior engineer to know that was more practical-oriented).

I _think_ I did pretty well (again, it was part of a bigger due-diligence-- another story altogether, so I never heard), but in the end I was struck by the fact that (a) not a single interviewer had looked at or asked about any of my publicly available work, and (b) not a single one even asked something along the lines of "what are your strengths / what do you think your contribution would be" (or weaknesses, for that matter, but that seems less important).

Of course, one of the other guys I worked with lucked out and got interviewed by one of the paypal-mafia, and ended up with a reportedly very stimulating hour long discussion about actual work, strengths, and actual situations that one would hypothetically need to handle at google.

[jpatokal]

Your previous work is what gets you in the door, but interviews at Google are explicitly structured so that you need to demonstrate competence right then and there.

And ye olde "what's your greatest strength/weakness" question sounds like a terrible way to judge an engineer.

[jwecker]

Makes sense for google. And it's not that I didn't appreciate doing all that (and I did do well), it just struck me how they knew nothing else about me afterward except that I could answer academic questions, and how different that was from the startup world- where, at the very least, you want to know what they're passionate about and that they are productive.

Asking an engineer what their strengths are and then to demonstrate or explain in concrete terms is how you find out their unique value proposition. I'm not talking about "I'm a hard worker" type garbage, I mean "my strongest experience is in systems programming on Linux." "How so?" "For example, I wrote a specialized TCP kernel module that works like this..."

Again, not saying that should be the whole interview- but there are some non-academic skills and experience (like managing and leading a critical system used by thousands of people) that are worth more than a few weaknesses in problems that were already solved years ago and that are easily looked up. It's how you should judge people looking to get into a graduate program, but falls short if you're trying to build teams of awesome fury that need more broad experience and even (gasp) unique experience that you don't have a ready-made question for ;-)

[jpatokal]

For broad-spectrum roles like software engineers, Google hires people first and then figures out what team they should join later. If you want a specialist role, then you'll need to find one on their jobs page.

To illustrate, here's the kind of thing Mr. TCP kernel module should be applying for: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=107205...

And here's the kind of generic role they probably shouldn't be: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=34154&

[rbanffy]

> not a single interviewer had looked at or asked about any of my publicly available work

It could be dangerous. Let's say you explain some interesting techniques you used on your GPL'd software and a Google product starts doing something suspiciously like what you showed them. You may even sue and end up making their source public after some litigation.

[belorn]

You can't make anyone making source code public, only stopping them from distributing copies of code which you have authored. Copyright and patents works very differently, and its quite hard (impossible) to copy source code wholesale from a interview by accident.

If they did makes copies of an applicants copyrighted work and distribute it, then they could get sued. Some companies has been know to explicitly ask applicants to bring source code from previous work places (also called industry espionage), and those been clearly intended crimes and not something that just happened to company during the process of an interview.

[jwecker]

Replying to myself- too late to edit. Some other comments in here lead me to believe there would be experience-related questions ideally these days. Again, my experience was a few years ago :-)