I went through the swe generalist interview pipeline 3 times at Google, so that's about 15 interviews. All the questions have been standard , except this one dumb question, which was along the lines of "explain how multithreading works". I suppose he wanted me to follow up with some questions to narrow down the topic, but I was stressed out enough that I just started with the basics, like cores, processes, OS threads, and shared memory, trying to explain it in simple terms. He interrupted me about 5 minutes in and moved on.
Having interviewed people myself, I think that's an overly broad question to ask in an interview and if the candidate starts answering it as asked, then you're not going to get a lot of signal from it.
Otherwise I thought the problems asked weren't that difficult, one was even directly taken from Cracking the Coding Interview - if only I had read that chapter ahead of the interview...
Having interviewed people myself, I think that's an overly broad question to ask in an interview and if the candidate starts answering it as asked, then you're not going to get a lot of signal from it.
Otherwise I thought the problems asked weren't that difficult, one was even directly taken from Cracking the Coding Interview - if only I had read that chapter ahead of the interview...