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.
I can confirm that no one asked me a brainteaser or gotcha question. They did, however, ask me irrelevant questions. My system design question involved a web based system. I am an embedded guy with no web experience who was interviewing for an embedded job. I would have been happy to design something in or near my skillset, but I have rarely worked with load balancers, backends, schemas, etc. I did my best and tried to have fun with it, but my interviewer was clearly not amused and seemed slightly annoyed that I didn't know anything about his domain. I was given preparation materials which did not mention anything about web architecture or design, only things relevant to my skills.
The opposite happened to me at triplebyte. There was a whole section on embedded systems and C. My interviewer let me know the section was coming up and I asked if I could just say "I know nothing about embedded systems or C" so we could just explore my web dev knowledge further, but no go. Very weird. I have nothing about either on my resume, and no desire to target any jobs that need me programming anything other than webapps in JavaScript for at least the first couple months...
Triplebyte is supposed to be resume-neutral, so it is reasonable they would try to ask you about it. Surprising they didn't take your word for "I know nothing about embedded systems or C" though... Maybe the interviewer has to go through the motions of asking you everything so that Triplebyte has a complete profile on everyone's performance on every question for their internal data analyses.
My link from Glassdoor has feedback from interviewees from as recently as days ago. You can see the types of interview questions Google is asking right now.
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.
"If you browse my link you'll see that Google continues to ask off-topic questions, even if they aren't riddles or brainteasers.
"
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.
The problem is off topic questions, especially for more senior developers who have specialized extensively. For example, I haven’t used or seen used dynamic programming since college because my area doesn’t really use it. If I didn’t cram in interview prep for these questions, I’d be toast.
I wish programmers were treated more like designers with a portfolio review. I’ve implemented so many cool things, yet somehow I’m judged based on some esoteric programming problem. It’s like I’m an interchangeable cog who is being evaluated on how well I can be a cog....heck, HR and often even interviewers often don’t bother looking at your CV. Dammit, I do compilers, not chatbots!
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.
> Why don't they ask questions relating to the job?
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. ?
But it’s not anymore. For all we know it was just a single early downvote, but your comment criticised the whole community. The guidelines ask us not to make comments about downvoting, as they make for boring, shitty discussions like this, and because a downvoted state on a comment is often temporary, whereas a discussion about it is permanent.
See comment from gedy elsewhere in the thread. Multiple people have pointed out these kinds of questions being asked well past 2006.
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.
But what's the incentive for a large number of Google engineers to surreptitiously ask questions of a style that's explicitly banned?
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.
The most persistent critique I have heard about Google is that the experience can be very uneven in everything from recruitment and workload to even salary for the same job. Even if Google entirely stopped with brain teasers, people certainly seemed to have expected them on account of unpredictability up until a few years ago.
The incentive is just not having to come up with and calibrate new questions. It takes a lot of effort to do that, and if you've been asking a "banned" question for a while and are comfortable with it, it's easy to just keep using it until someone explicitly tells you not to (reverse feedback from hiring committee to interviewer wasn't a thing for a while). Most engineers don't really enjoy interviewing and want to put minimal effort into it.
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.
I've certainly met people who believed that anything other than (for example) an android ui question with open book stack exchange was a dumb brainteaser with no relevance to the actual job...
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.
I have a much higher faith in the capacity of the Internet to produce liars, trolls and delusionals than you apparently have.
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.
