Why are manhole covers round, and similar brainteaser questions have been banned at Google for ~5 years at least. They're only the new normal if you're a decade behind the curve.
The sentence you're referring to was in the context of the FIELD which is why it said as much, and the specific question is a very well known stereotypical example:
> But disrespectful and unprofessional interview questions ("why are manhole covers round?") has become the new normal in this field.
If you browse my link you'll see that Google continues to ask off-topic questions, even if they aren't riddles or brainteasers.
Why don't they ask questions relating to the job? Why don't they do practice tasks that you'd be expected to do on the job? Those are the core issues.
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I have read literally thousands of interviews at Google (both on hiring committees for 10+ years and in the group that reviews hiring committee decisions), and i just don't encounter them much. I can't even remember the last time i read this type of question.
I suspect your definition may be different than mine.
I do see that new grads/folks without a ton of experience get asked more questions to test fundamentals (not riddles), and folks otherwise get asked to just solve problems.
I have also seen occasional a few unscored warmup questions that are more abstract/riddlish for nervous people, but even that's pretty uncommon. It's usually small talk about resume instead.
Interviewers are also deliberately pushed to ask different questions if the candidate is not doing well (though it's slow to change interviewing behavior on this). Rather have signal on more questions than knowing that they really did badly on a single thing.
That means they may change style/abstractness of question depending on how interviewee is doing.
I've seen principal engineers (where this was the top of their ladder) that literally couldn't tell me what a hash table is.
For domain experts, Google actually does target domain specific areas (in at least 1 interview) and weigh it against how good people are generally.
However, I suspect most people think they are specialized experts in things they are not.
The really great jobs I’ve had didn’t really require interviews at all, they knew who I was and knew what I’ve done and what I could do, and that was good enough.
When I hear of this sort of behaviour in interviews, I have to assume that the culture of the dept is such that x% of your job will entail fielding issues that are things that you consider outside your 'job'. If 20% of the time you'll be talking about stuff that you consider tangential, and you don't react well to that, you may self-select out. ?
The rest are paywalled or something. So I'd implore you to be more specific about what kinds of questions you object to.
Since there is no incentive for a large number of engineers to cook up stories about their interview experience at Google, I am calling this smoke as having some fire behind it.
I think there is incentive for failed interviewees to cook up stories - or at least to tell something very one-sided - because none of us like to believe we failed at something and feel better if we persuade ourselves it was stacked against us.
An incentive to maximize the value of their job position and already acquired leetcoding skills?
And in fact there's no need for explicit animosity by the failed interviewee. Someone who misunderstands a question badly enough to call it a brainteaser when it isn't is also likely to have performed badly on it.
For my part, about every few months I hit something that would make a great interview question, and then have a wonderful afternoon coding it up... Ymmv.
This is an open internet forum for anyone to type anything they feel like in. Of course, as far as you know, I might be an Uzbeki 12-year old, so that argument only goes so far...
I can imagine that Google interviews for other roles than Software Engineers can have any kind of wacky questions. But mostly these stories sound so much like the stories that used to go around about Microsoft interviewing, only with the company name switched, that I have to think it has to do with their inherent virality somehow.