On 2010-06-16 at 11:45 +0200, Aleksandar Ivanisevic wrote:
> Incidentally, thats the first question you will be asked in a Google
> phone screen. Not the technical screen, the answer is so simple they've
> put it in their recruiting drones' scripts ;)
A couple of notes on this; note that anything I've written below should
be fairly obvious to someone who's a skilled sysadmin who spends a bit
of time thinking about it (except the count of phone-screens). I'm not
writing in any official capacity, yada yada.
(1) Google expects candidates to fail to answer some questions, because
everyone has areas of strength and weakness; the point is to find
enough areas where someone does well, where "enough" depends in part
on claimed experience. Someone with one year sysadmin will know
less than someone with 15+ years, but if you claim 15 years and some
of those were in an ISP environment, you'd better know more than a
little.
(2) Many of the Google interview questions have leaked, this is known.
The pre-screen which you mention, carried out by very nice people
with far more interpersonal skills than I have (they're hardly
drones) has questions geared for "is there a sufficiently clear
correct answer that someone not skilled in the art can assess the
answer given and mostly figure out if it's adequate?"
(3) The actual technical phone-screen interview may very well choose to
ask the same question, but would(/should) then start to drill down
into more detail, asking about the Why not just the What. The What
can be memorised (see point above re questions having leaked), the
Why is much harder to learn. Explaining the 3WHS and what state is
held by whom, how TCP cookies might affect this, etc ... that's more
interesting.
If you have a Google technical interview where everything is factoid and
you're confident you answered okay, then you didn't get the best
interview; there are typically at least two *technical* phone-screens
though, and at least one of those will be from someone experienced and
known to drill down well. Believe me, the candidates who've gotten hold
of a list and learnt enough factoids become painfully evident very
quickly.
There are two reasons for a good phone screen to appear shallow:
* the candidate's answers are always sufficiently wrong that their lack
of knowledge is immediately obvious
* the candidate so clearly knows what they're talking about that
they're outclassing the interviewer :)
If you find Google questions and are trying to prepare for the
interview, don't just learn the answer, learn the *why* too and you'll
be a better sysadmin for it, whether you get the job or not.
Self-directed study is great.
And back to the point of pain which led to my posting: if you are
thinking of leaking questions, please do *at least* refrain from leaking
the pre-screens -- because they're designed to have simple answers and
not to be assessed in depth, leaking those questions means people can
easily get past the first round of filtering. This means the actual
SREs (sysadmins) have to spend at least two hours (prep work, interview,
feedback write-up) dealing with a candidate who shouldn't have made it
that far, will be grumpier in their next phone-screen and there will be
fewer windows available for them to interview the candidates who would
have made it through without the assistance of the leak. Which means
that anyone clueful enough to be interested in things like SAGE has
*more* competition for the same role.
People who *need* the question ahead of time to make it past the
recruiters' pre-screens still won't get hired, but it just wastes
everyones' time and eventually leads to having to find new questions
which recruiters can ask - a surprisingly hard task.
Regards,
-Phil
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