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Very few interviews I’ve done had a real technical component. Most have been talk about what you’ve done, how it brought value, how I approach problems, etc.

This is for data science, data engineering and cloud architecture positions.

I sometimes think problem set focused technical interviews are an American thing. Even when applying at google in Europe I didn’t have a technical test.

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I'm working for Google in Europe.

What position in Google were you interviewing for? I thought any engineering position requires around 4 technical interviews. There is no difference between Europe and the US in this regard.

10 years ago.

Something like a customer success engineer. What I was told was my technical interview consisted entirely of thinking of reasons why an imaginary customers AdWords weren’t showing. I didn’t move on from that so maybe there were leet code waiting for a more suitable candidate.

I do hardware design in the midwest US and my experience tracks yours. I've done maybe 10 technical interviews over the last 10 years. They typically want to talk about problems I've had and how I've handled them, some basic level of technical understanding (i.e. explain this circuit, or show how you would change X parameter of this design), and in the better interviews they ask questions to see how I communicate with people.

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