
Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer - blackmac
http://blog.lambda-startup.com/2014/03/recruitment-process-for-google-job-sre.html?m=1
======
tmhedberg
I'm a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be
not to sweat the rejection.

I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had
contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews,
culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about
my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that
broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it
as good interview practice and moved on.

A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the
blue and asked if I'd be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an
abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for
another on-site. Soon after, I was hired!

It's actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time
around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more
false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume
of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers
starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize
this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won't count you out after one
try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers
took you seriously as a candidate. If you've decided that you would really
like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a
year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a
free trip to London.

~~~
yukichan
But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got
rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&E I wouldn't be thinking to myself well
in one more year I can try again. I'd be thinking about the next place to
apply and never go back.

The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him
because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I
guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did
better it makes sense, but it's silly and personally I don't plan at working
at companies that interview this way.

Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that
marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it
doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You
wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page's whims and integrate Google+
into more places users don't want it?

~~~
asdfologist
Right, being a company filled with some of the best and brightest engineers in
the industry working on technical challenges of massive scale makes Google
just like any other company.

~~~
bane
Well, let's not blow this out of proportion. Google is basically a big
advertising agency. The principle problem they're working on is click through
rates.

If that's what floats the boats of the best and brightest, I feel kind of
sorry for the direction of the species.

Sure they have lots of cool feeder technologies to support this singular goal,
but getting people to click paid links is not exactly the same as colonizing
Mars.

~~~
minwcnt5
Ah, the old "Google is just an advertising company" cliche. This is just a
small step from the Reddit hipster memes that say things like "oh, self
driving cars are not that interesting, they're just a way to get your
attention off the road and onto their ads".

The vast majority of engineers at Google have never worked on click through
rates in their lives. Downplay it as a "feeder technology" all you want, but
I'm pretty sure Google search, for instance, has had a huge impact on
humanity. One that some people might consider just as important as sending a
robot to Mars.

~~~
bane
People have a habit of assigning altruism to things to they like that they
don't pay for -- and without connecting those things to the costs.

SV and the greater Startup ecosystem has taken this to heart and turned it
around, trying to "change the world" with photo sharing apps or weather
reporting toasters or whatever. The fact of the matter is, this messaging is a
hack to get people to feel good about using the service or buying the device.
It's psychological slight of hand because people don't like it when a nameless
gray haired white man in a suit says he's looking to maximize revenue growth
the next 3 quarters.

Why is Google in search? To deliver ads. They can deliver better ads by having
better search, no? They can deliver better ads by providing locational
service. They can deliver better ads by getting your face stick to a mobile
screen playing matching games that serve up ads. They can deliver better ads
by...<insert method>.

Let's say google develops and licenses technology for self driving cars to all
the automakers in the world. What do you think people are going to be doing in
those vehicles? Surfing the internet and probably looking at ads.

Do you think Sergey Brin, when he's travelling to his private vacation island,
bought with ad revenue, in his private jet, paid for with ad revenue, going
over the quarterly report, about ad revenue, is thinking to himself, "I'm
really satisfied with how many people found trivial information about pop
stars with our technology" or is he thinking, "how can I get even more people
to click the top-most served ads?"

It's great that I can get global turn by turn directions on my phone, it's
improved my life, but google hasn't provided that to me because they think I'm
a nice person and want to make my life better. I could have just kept buying
Garmins after all. They want me to search for "restaurant" and have a top paid
advertisement for "Bob's Pancake House" show up in the list and have me click
that so Bob transfers a little money to Google's bank account.

Helping humanity is simply a fortunate side effect of Google's work. But it's
not the focus.

~~~
pwnguin
> Do you think Sergey Brin ... is thinking to himself, "I'm really satisfied
> with how many people found trivial information about pop stars with our
> technology" or is he thinking, "how can I get even more people to click the
> top-most served ads?"

He's probably scared shitless that he has exactly one revenue stream worth
talking about, and has no idea how to supplement it.

------
DigitalSea
This is ridiculous. I understand Google is a big company and thus needs to
implement a concise recruitment process because understandable they get a lot
of applicants, but the amount of tests and ways of which you were asked to
solve problems is ridiculous.

When is the last time you heard of a system administrator writing down
problems on a whiteboard as opposed to asking a colleague or Googling the
answer? I think the real test after the initial phone call interviews and
Google docs one is to sit you down in-front of a computer and make you solve
real problems, not theoretical & made-up problems in which they ask you to
solve them in impracticable and unrealistic ways.

This is a flaw in the corporate hiring process almost everywhere in the
software world. It's not the 70's any more, people rarely solve problems on
whiteboards and paper. They solve them on the computer, sometimes through
knowledge and their skill-set and other times through luck and Googling.

Don't feel too bad for being rejected, it just means something else could come
along that's better.

~~~
curun1r
Having heard numerous accounts of the Google hiring process, both successful
and unsuccessful, I'm convinced that it serves a dual role. In addition to
brining in qualified employees, I believe it's intent is to reject qualified
candidates. Those qualified candidates will end up being engineering leaders
in companies that Google interacts with and the more that they can maintain
the impression that Google engineers are the best of the best, the easier
those interactions will be and the better received Google products will be. It
also means that when Google calls and invites someone to interview, they
almost never get turned down.

~~~
hueving
>they can maintain the impression that Google engineers are the best of the
best

This is not true for everyone. I see it as more of a failure on Google's
behalf to create a good selection process. The flawed assumption you're making
is that, since they have a noticeable false positive rate (i.e. good people
getting rejected), they don't have false negatives (i.e. unqualified
candidates getting offers). There is no guaranteed correlation between false
negatives and false positives.

To carry this a little further, I would argue that it's very likely that some
bad engineers get into Google because, by definition, their selection process
is not correctly picking good engineers - just a rough approximation of what
they think makes a good engineer.

~~~
curun1r
I don't doubt that some bad engineers get into Google...I've met quite a few.
I met one engineer who believed that you should avoid interfaces in Java
because it makes it difficult to click through source code in an IDE. I've
interviewed ex-Googlers who were completely lost answering the interview
question, "how do you write maintainable code?" From what I've seen, Google
isn't testing for being able to write maintainable code and is, instead,
testing almost exclusively for problem solving and being able to apply
algorithms/data structures. That, alone, is going to lead to hiring some bad
engineers.

But you have to look pretty hard to find those engineers...much harder than
you do to find quality engineers that have been turned down by Google. And I
believe it's intentional...that those false positives are about seeding the
rest of the industry with people rejected by Google. I believe they interview
more candidates than they need to bring in to fill their open positions in
order to feed the perception (not the reality) that Google's engineers are the
best of the best. That's the perception they care about, not the perception
that their interview process is good at choosing employees.

------
B-Con
Neat, I _just_ interviewed for Google for the SRE position as well. This
described my experience very closely.

> I found it amazing that for each of the interviews I was given enough
> information in advance to actually be able to prepare myself.

I had the same thought. To me, Google seemed 100% concerned with evaluating
engineering skills and they wanted to do the _opposite_ of hitting my weak
points or quizzing me on trivia. I got a pretty good amount of detail on what
to expect, loads of links, book recommendations, practice exercises, and even
a video SRE interview coaching session by a couple SREs (all of which I combed
through, yes, I even bought two of the books). Personally, it was a great
interview experience.

I also interviewed with another large software-oriented tech company, but
Google put more effort into providing preparatory material.

> So the fourth interview (1:30 PM) on that day was the large systems design
> interview. Unfortunately, I was a blockhead on this one, then got nervous
> more and more and thus failed it.

It's also the area I felt the weakest in. It was the hardest to prepare for
and they gave the least amount of prep material.

(Disclaimer: I start with them in 3 weeks.)

~~~
driverdan
I don't understand the prep part. If you have to do a lot of prep for the
interview doesn't that mean your current skills aren't a good fit? And if they
don't want to test your skills but your ability to solve problems wouldn't
they want to test something you're already skilled at?

~~~
raldi
If you were casting actors for a play, would you rather hit each candidate
with a surprise audition five minutes after they got out of bed, or give them
time to review the lines and stretch their vocal cords?

~~~
driverdan
That's not a fair comparison at all. Interviewees know well in advance of when
the interview will happen. A more apt comparison would be telling an actor
what script to use for the audition vs giving them a script they've never seen
before at the time of auditioning. This still isn't a fair comparison though
because they're testing acting talent, not the specific script. A good actor
can learn the script.

------
rjdagost
I've been contacted several times by Google recruiters and the interactions
have always left a bad taste in my mouth (and I've never even agreed to go
forward with the interview process). They won't tell me what projects /
products I'd be working on at Google if hired, which right off the bat is a
non-starter for me. They want me to spend weeks studying puzzle coding
problems for the interviews, which is also a non-starter. It seems like the
entire process is centered around me proving to them that I am willing to go
along with whatever they say. It's not a two way street at all.

As an experienced engineer who is happy in his current job, what is my
motivation to jump ship? Google recruiters act like the chance of working at
Google is by itself sufficient incentive. Google's entire process seems to
geared towards selecting people who really want to work for Google and who
will jump through whatever hoops Google sets up. Long-term, it is probably
dangerous for Google to be so chock full of corporate confirmation bias.

~~~
pbnjay
I've had this exact same experience 3 times in the past year. I echo your
thoughts entirely. I've told them multiple times what kind of position at
google would ACTUALLY interest me and yet I still get matched to nothing even
close. Each time I've turned them down I get the same feeling of "Ok! So --
wait you said no? What? Are you sure? ... but we're google!?"

I'm also an experienced engineer, happy in my current job.

Glad to see someone else with the same thoughts!

------
ryguytilidie
I used to recruit for Google SRE, I can confirm that this is pretty much
exactly the process and that bombing a single interview will often be a death
sentence.

~~~
raldi
By "death sentence", are you suggesting that the candidate will never again be
considered for a role at Google, or are you just saying that they're not going
to space _today?_

~~~
laureny
Being rejected at an interview at Google means you have a one year cool down
period. You can try again then (or they might call you back themselves).

~~~
cronos
They called me back 6 month after first rejection. Going for on-site to London
in a week.

------
patmcguire
I've been on a few interviews with the "not-a-test" lunch, and it always made
me grateful to be in this industry. I talk to people applying for law jobs,
where it seems that lunches and dinners during the process are very much a
test. Associates fill out scorecards for candidates later, on how good a
conversationalist the candidate was! On a one to five scoring system, across
multiple categories!

From a certain point of view it makes sense - how are they going to schmooze
with clients if they can't schmooze with you, but... _shudder_

~~~
mhurron
Those lunches are a test. They're for 'culture fit' questions.

~~~
tmhedberg
The Google lunches are emphatically not a test. It's very rare for the lunch
"interviewer" to provide any feedback at all. That usually only happens if the
candidate starts spouting racist comments or punches someone in the lunch
line, etc. The real purpose is to answer any questions the candidate has about
culture, perks, etc. and to give them a chance to relax, catch their breath,
and feel at ease in the middle of a stressful day of interviews. If the
candidate was referred by a Googler, then often that person will be the one to
take them to lunch, which would obviously create a conflict of interest if
real feedback was expected.

~~~
jlees
I've found that some of the folks I took to lunch interviews were reluctant to
ask certain questions because despite assurances that the lunch has no
feedback, they didn't _quite_ believe me (natural cynicism, I suppose). It was
a shame.

~~~
namelezz
Yeah, especially when your company has been doing some dirty works behind
users' back and you think that users are bunch of idiots that never learn from
their lessons and keep believing in whatever you say. What's a lame
expectation.

------
logicallee
The artcle mentions one interview out of 3+ phone interviews 5+ personal ones,
that didn't go so well.

It leaves me with the following impression:

What a ridiculous waste of this guy's time. Why on Earth do recruitment
processes need to be so capricious? Of course the guy's going to get nervous
when he fouls up, given the HUGE amount of his time that has already been
wasted, and how much you are putting on the line for every single moment to be
perfect. maybe if the stakes weren't ridiculous and so capricious, it wouldn't
take you two recruiters, three phone interviews, and a day of wasting
everyone's time, only to reject a perfect employee.

Makes me glad not to work for a huge organization. What a travesty. I have no
idea why people feel it's okay to waste other people's time like that.

~~~
gergles
Multi-stage interview processes like this are calibrated that you simply must
pass every step of them to do the job. There's no fluff, there's no
duplication; each module tests a specific component that the company feels is
necessary. If you can't deliver on one component, then you aren't qualified.
Harsh, but if you wanted to include an allowance for failing one module, you'd
have to add even more modules and duplicate content in them so that you could
still feel confident they could do the job. A false positive in the interview
process is immensely painful for everyone involved and every effort should be
made to prevent that.

------
mml
I had 3 interviews with google about 9 years ago. totally failed the on-site
in mountainview. sorting a balanced tree on a whiteboard is tricky (quiet
you!).

In hindsight, I'm not sure why I was excited to work at a post-ipo cube farm,
even if it says "google" on the side.

edit: I believe it was also for SRE, which (at the time) means you do two
interviews: the sysadmin interview, and the developer interview.

~~~
zerr
Can anybody confirm that it is still the case? That this kind of questions are
still given to non-fresh-graduate (i.e. experienced) candidates? (sorting a
balanced tree... ridiculous).

------
octonion
How come only programmers and data scientists are treated to such a ridiculous
process? Why aren't managers and marketers given pop quizzes and domain-
relevant puzzles to solve?

~~~
skj
Lower-level management is drawn from the same pool as the engineers.

For upper-level, Google does not have the luxury of getting one thousand
credible and serious applicants every week, so the process necessarily
differs.

~~~
judk
That's begging the question. The eng interview process is an artifact of how
they choose candidates. So is the VP interview process.

~~~
skj
Could you explain more what you mean? I'm tempted to dismiss it, but I don't
actually understand your point so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt until
I do.

------
calinet6
Google's interview process in short is laser-focused. Whether this is good or
bad is up to them and their goals (and clearly something is working), but
personally I find it incredibly narrow-minded and inhuman. Wouldn't want to
work there.

------
laurenstill
That meshes with the interview process my SO went through, at Google, for an
SRE role. Similarly, they said he could code in any language (his preference
is C) but the interviewer preferred python. 45 min to whiteboard in C, you
better have a backup set of markers.

His feedback after all was said and done was "brush up on your scripting
languages."

~~~
judk
Google recruiters give famously nonsensical feedback, sadly.

By comparison, Facebook recruiters give very specific feedback tired to reach
specific interview hour.

------
aosmith
Hate to say it but this is why I said "thanks but no thanks" to google, and
amazon. You can learn a lot more about a person and their skills from a few
conversations than from a grilling against a white board.

------
theboss
I have an interview with Google this week. I've expressed my interest in
security to the recruiter 3-4 times and I have been told I will be
interviewing as a software engineer (aka....a data structures and algorithms
interviewing...)....

Doesn't make sense to me, the things they do. I've had bad experiences with
several of the big tech guys now...

Too bad you were denied but I'm sure it will all work out for you. In my
opinion computer science is really cool because if you want to be really good
you don't have to work at a big tech company. You can learn in your cube,
learn at home, learn wherever. It is so easy to network and be with other
smart people that you don't need them and they need you.

------
thecolorblue
Google's hiring process seems very intense and extensive. Are there other tech
companies that go to these lengths to find the right people? I completely
understand their reasoning, but I have never applied at a company that had
four interviews.

~~~
vidarh
I had 6 on site interviews when I joined Yahoo Europe back in 2003 for an
engineering manager position. Developers back then would usually go through
fewer, but still 3-4 wouldn't have been unusual depending on team - when I
hired for my team at Yahoo, typical process would've been phone screen, then
3-4 on site interviews with a selection of people including my manager,
someone from the product team, one of my developers, and me.

It's a function of size, frankly - companies above a certain size tends to
tack on more interviews largely because they can, and it doesn't hurt to get
feedback from one more person. They also have the luxury (and problem) of a
much larger pool of interested candidates to hire from.

------
BorisMelnik
Excellent write-up. I love your attitude about the whole thing.

One part I found interesting and note I have not interviewed for anything in
probable 10 years is the fact that they would not attempt to place you into
another position being that you passed the majority of the questions with
flying colors. Actually my only criticism is you used a ton of ;)'s :-0

So you are an excellent coder, scripter, and network admin. You also know all
the OSI layer stuff but aren't good at "large scale" sysadmin functions? If
this were my company I would try to have you placed in some other department
and postiion.

Either way, thank you so much for sharing your experience!

~~~
aiiane
Sometimes that does happen - interviewers can always provide feedback that
they think someone should be jumped over to a different track and re-
interviewed.

------
dclowd9901
I recently interviewed for a position at twitter as a front end engineer (API
stuff, HTML, CSS, etc). I failed out as well, but it was on, I think, much
more nuanced terms.

The interviewer had me write a client jsonp API interface, that is a
controller that would handle calls to and from a jsonp API. Embarrassingly, I
knew little about jsonp except for that it has a callback parameter that
correlates with a global function you have defined in the javascript of your
page.

So as I was literally learning how JSONP worked during this interview, I also
had to write an interface that would gracefully fail and queue multiple calls.
I did pretty well, at that, having completed the essence of the exercise.
Toward the end, I got mentally hung up on a scope issue and my brain was
pretty much fried at that point so I ended up crashing out (it was the end of
the interview time, anyway, so it's not like there was then 10 minutes of
awkward silence).

Anyway, this sma hiccup, which in no way indicated I didn't know my craft, and
opposing my seemed to indicate I was an extremely quick study, still managed
to keep me from moving on in the process.

I'm not miffed or anything. In fact, out of that experience, I wrote a really
cool lazy loading geolocation API that uses promises in conjunction with JSONP
to deliver a really smooth API consumer experience, something I wouldn't have
thought to do at my previous level of understanding.

------
lostcolony
I keep coming back to this, wondering whether it's effective or not. It feels
like an SAT, or really any other form of academic standardized testing, except
not so objective.

"Here's a list of things to know, go study it, then come in and solve problems
with it in an artificial environment so that we may grade you". So you cram in
preparation, and then if you don't pass the test, you plan to retake it in a
year.

I'd think the best and brightest would be the ones whose working knowledge,
without cramming, allows for innovative, interesting, clever solutions. Even
better if you can get away from the artificial feeling of interviews, into a
"here's an actual, and unsolved, problem, let's figure out how to solve it
together so I can see how you tick", rather than "here's a fake question, one
with a well known, posted on the internet, solution, that if you ever faced in
real life you'd solve in 5 minutes of Googling and move on, and which I expect
you to recognize as a (X) problem, and regurgitate the solution from the
selected readings". (That said, one or two stages of the interview seemed like
they ~might~ be that).

Maybe the intent isn't really to hire the best and brightest (that's hard to
test for), but really the people who want to work at Google the most; are you
willing to devote hours to the mere possibility?

------
voidptr
Hi, I am the author of that blog post at [http://blog.lambda-
startup.com](http://blog.lambda-startup.com) .

I just want to say that I appreciate the overwhelming feedback and all the
positive and encouraging statements to not take that rejection too seriously.

Furthermore, I'm glad that my little article causes these mostly constructive
discussions on here, and that sharing my experiences seems to be appreciated.
Thanks.

~~~
cunac
out of curiosity; do you get paid for one day you miss work or it is implied
you should take a day off ?

------
marinhero
Wow! thank you for sharing your experience, I've just started the interview
process for Google SRE and I found this very valuable. It looks like a tough
road but I'll do my best. Thank you!

------
YesThatTom2
Former Google SRE here.

From the outside it looks like Google's strategy is to hire people that have
the skills that people can only get from already working at Google. i.e. They
have forgotten that they themselves did not have those skills when they were
hired.

Sadly blog posts like this make me think they are suffering an unintended side
effect from doing this: [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-
lake-wobeg...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-
strategy.html)

------
iDemonix
This has long been my dream job and I have alerts setup for when they're
interviewing - but I don't feel I'll ever be smart enough or well rounded for
this specific job. I left university a couple years ago and have been working
in my first job (an ISP NOC) for about a year, but I just can't see myself
ever getting to the skill level required for an SRE. That and I have crippling
anxiety when it comes to interviews.

Ah well...

~~~
aiiane
Something that not many people realize: interviewing is a skill that can be
practiced and directly improved. The more interviews you do, the easier they
get. You can also do dry runs - even just grabbing yourself a small 20"
whiteboard and writing code and diagrams on it helps.

~~~
iDemonix
That's good advice, I always tend to focus on the skills and see an interview
as something that is done ad-lib. I forget how much of it is prep and the
actual practicing of interviews.

------
raverbashing
So, yes, Google hasn't changed a bit. Curious about where the interview took
place (I don't think there's a hotel across the street from Google in Dublin)

I'll just point them to this article whenever this kind of questioning happens
again:
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373310)
\- questioning is the first comment)

~~~
michaelmior
> Around a week later the recruiter called and once again reported "very good"
> feedback, so I could go on and have an on-site interview in London.

> The hotel was right across the street of the Google building, which I really
> liked a lot, since it meant I didn't have to find my way through London in
> the morning before the interview.

Seems like it was in London.

~~~
raverbashing
Oh Well, I missed it. I blame it on it being in the very end of paragraphs.

------
yeukhon
Are you interviewing for the system engineer or software engineer on the SRE
team? The 2nd phone interview covering three types of tasks seems unexpected
to me. I am also preparing for SRE interview and I now feel chicken out... I'm
interviewing for SE on SRE. I have been expecting just algorithm/codeval type
of questions until onsite.

~~~
B-Con
IIRC, SW and SE interviews in SRE are about 80% the same, the primary
difference is that one of the 5 on-site interviews is on a different topic and
the phone screens may emphasize slightly different topics. But the tracks for
the two positions are very similar.

------
zobzu
it was some years ago [actually, a lot of years ago now..], but when i got
interviewed for an SRE google interview i certainly wasn't given any indicator
of what to prepare for ;-)

I also think many of the recruitment questions were above the skills of the
employees asking the questions. they just had a checklist and basic
understanding.

Now i would probably do smth similar if i was google and a got a lot of
applicants, but it felt weird.

I think what was the weirdest tho, was how they made me feel like the SRE job
was very stressing and more of a throw away tool used so that, luckily, i
could switch to another position after 13month (1 cycle).

That sealed the deal the wrong way for me. I just told the guy we should stop
the process now so that nobody wastes their time and went home.

------
BlackJack
This Jobvine infographic describes the hiring process pretty well imo:
[http://www.jobvine.co.za/what-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-
at-g...](http://www.jobvine.co.za/what-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-at-google/)

~~~
aiiane
The "crazy questions" there are completely wrong - Google interviews do not
contain questions like these (and any interviewer that tried to use them would
be run out on a rail).

~~~
nawitus
Google used have those, but recently stopped asking them. The infographic is
old.

------
dorfsmay
FWIW, the linkedin interview process is eerily identical, same multi phone
calls filtering, travel arrangements, meeting with 5 or 6 SREs for interviews,
range of topics, trainee interviewers, friendly lunch, even the rejection
process.

------
justinhj
I don't think one should be surprised when they focus on the things you claim
to be good at. They probably have a large pool of interviewers, so they can
choose one with a deep knowledge in your specialist areas to chat with you.

------
darksim905
Does anyone know if this process holds true for the Sysadmin SRE side?

~~~
k3oni
There is no such thing as a "Sysadmin SRE" , it is just SRE. Went through it
and was the same, granted i didn't make it to the on-site interviews as i
screwed up on the last call after a really bad day at work.

~~~
gergles
This is not true - there definitely are 2 SRE tracks[1] and one is more code
focused and one is more operational focused. They do not tell you this while
you are being screened but it is absolutely the case.

1:
[http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/22/caste/](http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/22/caste/)

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k3oni
Looking through the materials for the interview you can see that they focus on
two different positions which looked a bit odd to me but i split those two
into SRE and SWE looking at each of the requirements. Thanks for the link btw.

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graycat
The job apparently was not 'reliability engineering'.

In an auto analogy, Google was trying to hire narrowly experienced, self-
taught auto mechanics and not mechanical engineers.

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Theodores
Well if there are any Google people reading this: ask HR to give the guy a
job! He went through all that and he came out positive about it all.

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skj
So, it seems likely that culture fit was not a problem.

In general if you get one interview that results in a weak no-hire, you need a
couple strong-hires to balance it out. If you get one with a confident no-
hire, that's it.

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pkinsky
How does google feel about non [Java, Python, C] languages? Could I use Scala
to solve interview questions?

