Google Interview Warmup
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My mind literally goes blank. The pressure of sitting down with someone you've just met and they are testing your memory.
I don't remember times, I remember the lessons. Kind of like I can't remember any source material unless I have an intuitive understanding of it.
Ask me about what I learnt when x happened - or what lessons you've learnt previously that apply.
You might suggest that's what they're asking - but not in my experience. They want the actual story.
Basically I now prepare fake stories before hand. Seems pointless. Give me hypothetical scenarios any day of the week.
It's a me problem for not optimising for interviews, but the thought of gaming the system feels dishonest.
Basically, these interview warm up questions would be incredibly useful for people like me. If I ever go for an external interview, I would make use of this. Practising for something that is useless.
The problem with just asking about lessons learned is that anyone can memorize and rattle off a set of best practices they found in a blog post somewhere. That doesn't tell me whether they have relevant experience or not. Asking to tell me about a time when X happened and how they dealt with it cuts right to the chase, and I'm afraid there's a big difference in a response that comes straight from memory and one that's fudged or invented. The initial story might be great, but most people visibly struggle to keep inventing answers to probing follow-up questions about what happened. ("Did you consider Y as a solution? Would it have worked in this case?")
I sympathize, though - it's not like our brains have all our work experience indexed and readily available. The interviewer's choice of X is crucial. If the prompt is too specific, most candidates genuinely won't have a good answer. Too general and it won't help select for this role in particular.
An incidental nice thing about this type of question for candidates is that it can give them a sense of what this role at this company is actually like without their having to ask. I often even phrase it as "One of the challenges we're facing as a team is X. Can you tell me about a time when you faced something similar?" The discussions that follow tend to tell me loud and clear whether the candidate is a fit for the role.
Now, although I'm claiming fake stories are easy to spot, I don't know what I don't know. It's possible someone has taken me for a ride and I ended up giving them the 'strong yes'. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you're able to craft a sufficiently detailed fake story and talk about it off the cuff for a while in depth, then you probably have enough relevant experience anyway!
This has been exactly my experience with questions like this. My brain just doesn't archive memories in that way at all and feels totally backwards to me.
To answer questions like those, I'd have to sit down and think for some minutes to re-index all my past experiences to fit the framework of that specific question.
I don't know if this is a shortcoming of my memory or character, but all this has done in the past was to make me sit down and prep examples for every possible "tell me about a time when..." question, which I find an absolutely grueling exercise.
It's not that I'm not an introspective person or learn from my past experiences; I just don't frame them in my mind in a way that I'd be able to single out specific past situations for an immediate retelling, especially during an interview.
I would go as far as to guessing that most people are probably like that, but we've accepted this is how interviews work, hence all the interview prep for questions like that.
I ended up just making up a fake story on the spot that was uninteresting and barely coherent. That was the first question I was asked in the interview, and made me nervous for the rest of it. Didn’t get the job.
Clearly I should have taken an improv class in preparation.
But yeah, I learned the same lesson as you: prepare and rehearse a bunch of fake stories in advance. Completely stupid waste of time, but necessary.
It could be an interesting part of the interview that reveals a lot about the candidate, but realistically it’s going to favor the people with rehearsed fake stories. What are the chances that your genuine real-life experience is more interesting than someone else’s fake one specifically crafted to be as interesting as possible?
They don't really care what the most interesting bug is anyway, they just want to have a conversation surrounding bugs. You can also turn it to "well, in general [..]".
Also don't be afraid to say "ehm, let me think for a second", instead of feeling obliged to answer right away.
Edit: I say something along the lines of "Oof you put me on the spot now haha. What was one of yours? Maybe something comes back to me when I hear you"
I think people generally ask that in hopes to break the ice or to connect with the other person. So, either they will answer and it might nudge a memory (if they prepared/remember) or they'll blank as well and you'll have a laugh over the question and move on.
It's an interview, not an interogation! I know your livelihood depends on it, but being natural/relaxed helps your odds IMO; as it's less likely you'll get flustered or tilted. I realise this is easier said than done as I'm also plagued with anxieties and phobias, but I never saw interviewing as a stressful situation. At best, you get a job, at worst you forget about eachother in a few days lol.
Surprise, your boss' boss just decided to drop in and is asking your new guy some pointed questions about the deadline. ~Tada~, the IRS is sending someone over who wants to interview a few people. Oops, that lawyer that your clients hired are going around and subpoenaing previous employees.
"So, uh, we need you to tell us your biggest weakness. And bonus points if by the end of your story the entire interview team is crying from laughing so hard."
So ideally, the most interesting bug story response would be a story about how awesome you are at finding bugs that are introduced by other organizations than the one you were working in AND make the listener like you.
* Look this candidate can fix bugs. * Look this candidate knows not to talk about the dirty secrets of the org they are (were) a part of. And is able to defect blame to another entity. * Look this candidate makes questioners like them which will hopefully keep too much scrutiny from being applied to them.
Like write down 5-10 of these questions and answers that are somewhat common.
Write down some anecdote and more or less use the same all the time.
The same with telling about yourself write down 5-10 sentences and use that every time. Of course you probably have to update it from time to time but remember that you don't have to come up with everything on the spot.
You might not get exact same questions but if you have some things written down you can still start by rehearsed anecdote to get yourself going. Because if it is open ended question it might be more important to keep conversation going than "being correct" on your answer.
Was a shame. But I guess I should really rehearse my "STAR" stories :-|
Like yeah, there have been some incidents during my background as a software engineer, good and bad, but they were pretty straight forward events. Incidents were simple to correct. The further I got into my career, the less often anything memorable has happened. I'd struggle to remember the last time I had to put out a fire or struggle to implement a novel solution. As you say, I have lessons I've learned, but my memory doesn't linger on a lot of individual events.
I think I've gotten pretty good at handling said interview questions, but internally I'm shrugging my mind's shoulders.
So, I did. I tried to remember every question every recruiter had asked me (and started taking notes from then on). I wrote down 1-2 paragraph answers for each question. I found that just the act of writing down these answers and reviewing them later helped even when the interviewer would ask questions that were not on my practice sheet. It would nudge my memory and keep things fresh and a lot of things could be used for related topics.
Hypothetical scenarios are just that, hypothetical. Competencies are much better evaluated through evidence, rather than speculation.
A classic example here would be conflict resolution: if you ask someone “how would you solve a conflict at work” you typically get a very standard - and often rehearsed - answer, whereas if you ask “tell me about a conflict you had at work” you end up with something much rawer and more revealing. The way we imagine we deal with conflict is often not how we actually behave.
Of course, not everyone has an answer to these questions. If I’m interviewing someone who’s only a year or so out of college they’re unlikely to have a wealth of work related stories to pull from.
A good interviewer recognises this, and adapts the questions to fit the background. Perhaps you’ve never experienced a conflict at work, but you definitely will have elsewhere (perhaps, for a college grad, at a student group or team project).
"Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker"
==
"I know you have some stories about great things you've done in your career. I want to hear those stories - that's the whole point of this interview - but I don't know what to ask, so I am giving you a very open-ended prompt, on the assumption that at least one of your stories included some kind of disagreement with a coworker."
edit to add: don't make something up. Besides dishonesty being generally bad for a variety of reasons, it's very likely that the interviewer is better at spotting liars than you are at lying.
Telling stories about the things you've done is an essential part of human communication, not some weird "game" that hiring managers have come up with to mess with you.
In a very practical sense, if you can't explain things that happened to you it's going to be really hard for you to communicate issue involving solving problems with software.
What does make sense is plan old interview anxiety. Rather than make up stories walk though your resume and just refresh your memory of how projects went, what lessons did you learn from the projects, what was surprisingly easy, surprisingly hard etc.
If I'm talking about these things in an interview, I just repeat stories I've told before but with toned down profanity. On the flip side, I'm super skeptical if I'm interviewing someone and say "tell me about a time when a project didn't go well" and they insist that all of their projects have always gone smoothly, even after I prompt that they to go far back as high school group projects.
I had one of these questions tossed at me in an interview last year. Something a long the lines of a “time I faced a difficult technical challenge and how I managed to solve it”, but I didn’t have any.
Well… ok not exactly true. In my professional career I’ve done more sitting around staring at the screen while bureaucrats debates than I have working on challenging technical problems. Any true difficult problems I’ve faced professionally have been predominately organizational.
However I’ve been programming in general for a lot longer, and in recent years, despite finding a continuous lack of interest in programming, I am very interested in things that end with me writing code and that’s created some of the work I’m most proud of l. Ofc the interviewer wasn’t interested in any of that, as they wanted something from a position off my resume.
If I was the interviewer I would love to hear that story.
Much like in political debates, answering the question asked is not required to persuade the voters. And in an interview, the end goal is to convince the voters.
I really recommend preparing for them; think hard about your projects, things you've done, why you did what you did, and so on. If you need prompts, I found Amazon's leadership principles (cringy though they may be) to be a good starting point. In fact, having prepared for Amazon's, everyone else's was easy.
Now I ask these questions and it's super obvious when people haven't prepared for them. I feel bad sometimes. I personally prefer them to the hypotheticals, but people do tend to freeze up.
I'm with you on this, as I find on-the-spot recall pretty hard too, especially depending on my mental state. I've just started doing a career retrospective before every job hunt, with an eye towards extracting communicable takeaways that can be communicated in interviews. It's actually a very useful exercise, excluding the part where I have to find a way to articulate the takeaways.
But I've found that, surprisingly, getting decent coverage of the stuff I learned from my job makes it a lot easier to answer arbitrary recall questions
Understandable, given that you are a mere human being.
But if it's helpful, what they're really telling you is: "Look, we're just ticking boxes here. Go home and think up, or just use our search engine to look for a sufficient number of fake, but expected answers to this question. Then re-apply in 6 months."
I think interviews these days expect you to do prep before the interviews. Reciters even give you a list of these before hand. People practice (semi)fake answers to these and get the job.
The recommendation for interviewers is to select a mix between past stories and hypothetical scenarios.
The purpose of these behavioral questions is to get you to produce details about how you actually act at work in challenging circumstances.
If we reject these models I think we’d be stuck with contract-to-hire as our evaluation model which seems more stressful for both sides.
I think the idea is not that these are low-signal, but that the _recall_ of stories like these is not a given. I think the whiteboard example is apt, as both are nonzero-signal exercises that can be torpedoed by a lack of preparation that has nothing to do with your actual problem-solving ability.
It's universally-known that you need to practice for whiteboard-style coding questions, but I guess it hasn't yet seeped into our cultural knowledge that you need to do the same for behavioral-style questions. I'm currently in the middle of a jobhunt and I feel like I just independently discovered it.
The execution of this page is so perfect that it gives me dystopian vibes. I think this might actually be just a tech demo for demoing speech capabilities :)
- bullshitters who have a prepared answer that sorta sounds good
- nervous people who cannot think of anything
- nervous people who will start listing off their worst qualities
Honestly the best response when faced with this is to joke about the cliche "I'm a perfectionist" response and hope that everyone is happy to move on
I feel a bit bad at the "bullshitters" comment, I was trying to show the worst case scenario and didn't factor in "normal nice people who have a prepared answer" :)
As I see it, it helps to filter out some of the kinds of places or teams I wouldn't want to work with in the long term, or at all.
That would gauge whether they're introspective, self-aware, and self-critical.
It was interesting because it actually got us in a different discussion on how employees are evaluated at their company. My personal take though is that the candidate should be self-critical enough to be able to tell me what their weaknesses are and how they are mitigating them.
I have a hard time staying enthusiastic about a project I don't understand the value of, for example. It makes me a bad candidate for teams that are siloed and jobs that highly compartmentalized, and I want to make sure the teams I'm working on have the tools they need to get value to the customer.
It would suck if I took a job like that, and my theory is by stating that out loud I can avoid roles that have those kinds of environments.
Example: I am super focused and stay on something until it is done. I am also super focused and follow problem rabbit holes all the way to the bottom.
I hope people who built this were more aware of the various reputations the Google interview process has had, and made it clear it's not for covering the peculiarity.
(A Google employee, knows nothing about this.)
sign up today get your first hundred hours for free!
Totally unacceptable and shameful.
In this particular case it might not be a Chrome specific thing but it gives me goosebumps when I see I'm directed to use a particular browser. Most of the times, its "Use Chrome for full experience".
You might dislike Chrome for its privacy concerns, but it's a damn solid browser.
The bad parts of IE happened when Microsoft dropped the ball but users had to use it anyway because everything was already made for IE the non-standart way and the developers had to keep making things for IE because everyone used IE. Catch-22.
I don't want make people stop using Chrome, it's a solid browser. I simply want me having the option not use it.
Today Chrome is very good but what happens if Google mismanages it like Microsoft or abuses its position because an MBA looked at it and had an idea? Some already argue that Chrome is not what used to be and Google already does some sketchy things.
I think Its vital to keep our way out intact.
00's Microsoft stopped IE development when they had a monopoly because they wanted everyone on Windows. The web was a competitor, they tried to stifle it.
Google makes all of their money on the web. They want everyone on their browser and for the experience to be as good as possible.
I would not say that Google’s incentives are aligned with the rest of the participants. Google may very well take defensive actions against anything that challenges the status quo.
Having said that, phishing attacks sometimes use google ads, so it's not even black and white picture, but it's a lesser evil option :)
But no, the whole main content is blocked for non supported browsers (side pages like FAQ stay available)
Perhaps if you look at it as an imperfect game, that might give you the mindset of doing the best at the game to get the job you want.
As a consequence of hiring being an imperfect game, in my experience many questions in an interview don't relate to the actual job or qualifications needed to perform the job. It seems that often questions are based on "Company X (or HR guru, etc.) did this in their hiring process, so lets do the same!" or "We don't really know what the candidate will do, so lets ask questions about X instead." The end result is that hiring people think they're doing a great job weeding out poor candidates when really their biasing the hiring pool for candidates that don't fit the intended job.
The IT one is at least learnable in a couple of months, which is much less time than I've had to put into many of my college exams.
[0]: Of course, most places don't apply them correctly.
I feel like the only way to properly answer these types of questions is to make up some BS scenario and talk about how you worked to see the other person's perspective, added your thoughts and came to an even better solution than you could have done on your own.
Do people really disagree so much in workplaces? These questions feel like they're training people how to be sociopaths...
I think the correct answer to this is to get on their ass about it or rat them out to their manager. In reality, what I have done is just do their work myself so it gets done.
Pretty sure this is why I failed my Amazon interview.
But there are cases where they may not. I've told my manager that they should probably have a conversation with some people, or even let them go. I don't think that's "ratting" really. Like you already said: it's you who has to pick up the slack, and a lot of the time "underperforming" also means more stress and work for me (usually in the form of cleaning up after them, fixing their bugs, etc.) With some coworkers I genuinely wished they would just stay at home. This gets even worse if the quality (and thus, revenue) of the company gets affected by their underperforming, which also affects your salary, or even the company's survival!
I also try to explicitly praise people in 1-on-1s btw.
This did not play well during an interview. But idk, am I supposed to pretend I persuaded my boss to my side? Sometimes you gotta do what your boss asks even if you're not super jazzed about it.
There was a time my manager ended up convincing me and we did things their way.
There was a time we just couldn't agree and I ended up doing things their way because "they're the boss".
There was a time we ended up putting it to a sort of "vote" for the entire team.
There was a time we made a compromise we could both live with.
There was a time another team member jumped in with an even better solution that either of us thought of.
There was a time I ended up quitting my job because we didn't agree and he was a gigantic dick about it for no reason.
---
All these things actually happened over my career, and no single one accurately describes how I'd deal with a situation where I disagree with my manager. I'd generally answer it like that, although I'd leave that last one out for obvious reasons (there was also a lot of build-up/context to that one that would take ages to explain, and is hard to explain in the first place).
Granted, it's hard to very any of that is true in an interview. 90% of people will disagree, then allow themselves to be overruled and then every chance they get rehash the arguments they lost anytime something tangential to it comes up. That's easy to hide in an interview.
I whiffed the Amazon interview more on pure algo problems iirc. It's been a while and I just haven't tried again.
Wish there was a better way.
1) We had a dev on the team who was adamant that we prefix all testing library functions in tests with their namespace. I argued that it in my experience it was pointless - no team I'd been on in the past ever had an issue with not prefixing them. He wouldn't budge on his stance. When he was on leave I changed all tests in the project, removing the namespace prefix. When he came back he seemed not too bothered by it, he got used to it and never brought it up again. We're still in contact now.
2) I was once brought in as a partner in a startup. They'd failed to make a product and I came in and built what they couldn't do from scratch into a working product in about 6 months. As more people used it the CEO started to become more active in the project. I was creating a new piece of functionality when he told me he wanted it another way. We didnt agree. I suggested taking it to users and getting their thoughts on it, he refused. We ended up disagreeing and then he pulled the "I am CEO card". Following the meeting I tried to understand why he wanted it the way he did and why I wanted it the way I did. I determined that my approach presented three separate bits of information in the graph, and his approach lost one of those pieces of information. I redesigned the UI to include all three parts of info but to look more like he wanted. I ended up essentially being pushed out of the business, he didn't give me any stock that was promised, and he ended up running that project into the ground. His company ended up failing and he's now a PM in some other company I believe...
3) I'm sure there are other instances but these are the two that pop into my mind. Most places I've worked people have discussions - perhaps there are disagreements, but they don't burn into my memory like the last two examples. Emotionally distressing events are much easier to remember.
Not sure how people would take those stories in an interview...
I don't know who thought this was a good idea to write, but I'm a professional who provides services for a fee, and that's the mentality that I find appropriate in a business exchange, not creating an air of worship culture.
No need to go through the interactive part to see these questions.
Google, BMW, Target, Barclays, Sky, CERN, Amazon, Fujitsu, Progressive, TravelersInsurance... All kinds of companies have registered them now[2]. Not too many are actively in use though.
It should definitely be messaged in the UI, but firefox unfortunately wouldn't support this webapp at the moment.
> What devices does this work on?
> You can practice with Interview Warmup on the latest versions of Chrome on OSX, Windows, and Android, as well as the latest version of Safari on iOS devices. Firefox and iOS 14.4 are not currently supported.
That is extremely weird for them to not be intelligent enough to make this firefox compatible.
I think whether or not it's intelligent depends their actual goal
The only one I see using this is Google on their search website. This is fucked up.
See Google, cross-browser compatibility is important.
I am disappointed in myself that I wasted small period of my life falling for recruiter/social hype of these companies. Worst mistake you can make while looking for a job is to prepare for one specific company, web is full of this garbage content to answer specific company questions.
"Yes, be a good trained puppy! Make a reservation to be able to get into the restaurant. Read the menu, then order an entree. Then eat the food the chef made just for you. Chew it allllll up." I guess you can make any banal activity seem misanthropic with this tone?
but very obedient though, very obedient
they even have dog whistles attached to them, aka. a pager that will call them whenever the corporation needs them
> Practice answering interview questions.
> Get comfortable answering questions from industry experts. Just talk and your answers are transcribed in real time.
> Get insights about your answers.
> No grades, just insights about what you said. See job-related terms you used, your most-used words, and talking points you covered.
> Keep improving.
> Use what you’ve learned and jump back in for another round. Keep building your confidence in a judgement-free zone.
It was undoubtedly more work to implement "Sorry, your browser isn't supported" with user agent checking and whatnot than it would have been to support firefox, because in all likelihood, that site would Just Work without any real modifications(modulo styling).
Source: working on a transcription service that has, among others, a webapp that runs fine on any browser.
I did a search from Internet Explorer in Mac OS 9 a couple of years ago. I put in a term and a list of results came up. That's really all I could ask for.
search for: general.useragent.override
set it to: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/102.0.5005.63 Safari/537.36
website then works a charm.
Using the latest version of Firefox on the latest version of Debian Linux. Fuck this page and fuck Chrome.
Sigh. Closes tab.
"Do you really want to exit?"
What do you think?
I suppose a spoken answer gives more realism to an interview simulation, but a simple "Your browser doesn't support speech recognition. You can use Chrome, Safari, or manually type your answers", would have sufficed.
> Firefox currently has a media.webspeech.recognition.enable flag in about:config for this, but actual support is waiting for permissions to be sorted out.
Once again, Google out in front of user permissions and protections getting finalized in standards bodies.
Yes, I realize the HN Guidelines say "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
But good grief, the last I heard, I thought Google was a web company.
Isn't having a web page that Just Works part of that?
On to something more substantial (as if breaking something as fundamental as the PgDn key isn't substantial).
> Get insights about your answers. No grades, just insights about what you said. See job-related terms you used, your most-used words, and talking points you covered.
I am sorry, but this is really freaking me out. My job-related terms, most-used words, and talking points?
Maybe I should just call it a night and admit I'm not good enough for Google.