I'm surprised, my first big question from them wasn't listed: You have search results coming in from a thousand servers, as a big stream. How do you sort them by Pagerank and send it down to the client? How do you do this on a page-by-page basis? (This was for a software engineering position on the build tools team, about a month ago.)
FYI, I believe interview questions are covered under the NDA, so if you did interview (and presumably had to sign an NDA at the time) you shouldn't actually be talking about the questions you were asked.
I only ever had a phone screen (was going to go for an on-site, but accepted a job elsewhere beforehand) and never signed anything.
Edit: For the record, I really dislike NDAs on interview processes. I signed one when I went for my on-site with Bloomberg a little while back. I would've loved to talk about the process without using vague generalizations, as I think they hit on effectively every bad interviewing technique out there, but alas I can't. I believe they do little to actually help make the hiring process better.
Their NDA does not state that the interview process itself is "confidential". It only states that as a part of the hiring process Google may disclose certain information to the candidate that it considers "confidential", and that you as the receiver are only to use this information for the purpose that Google disclosed it to you (i.e., your hiring).
It would be quite a stretch to interpret this as meaning that the questions asked as a part of the interview, or Google's process itself, is "confidential".
At the rate Google interviews, it'd be quite an effort to make sure that no candidate shared information about their interview questions, the format, etc.
Also, this type of agreement during the hiring process is pretty standard for medium-to-large size companies.
> It would be quite a stretch to interpret this as meaning that the questions asked as a part of the interview, or Google's process itself, is "confidential".
As far as I've heard from anyone here, that's the interpretation. Questions are not to be shared, otherwise we'd spend all our time generating new interview questions and never actually getting any work done.
Sorry, how is that evil? If questions are known they can't be used anymore, and often confidential information can come up in interviews, so it seems only sensible. I don't remember hearing of it ever being used against someone, so it's really just a precaution against someone finding out and then disclosing something really important. I suppose I could have said that not discussing people's questions is only polite, for all the weight it carries.
I understand Google has reasons why they might want to NDA their process, but from the perspective of a potential employee, being asked to sign an NDA for the interview is only a liability. Interviews can be unreasonable (and sometimes even abusive) environments, and I want to know about that before walking into that. Barring that, I want to warn people about bad interview experiences.
If people cannot talk about their interview experiences, there's no opportunity for employers to receive censure for bad interview practices.
Besides, an interview is not the SATs. If this really is the logic for the interview process, then Google interviews are even more broken than I thought.
An NDA would not and could not cover abuse, and I highly doubt it covers your impressions either (e.g. "it was terrible and the interviewers were all rude!"), so I don't really agree with your first point. For your second I can see where you're coming from, although at least in this case I don't see droves of people interviewing and then saying the process was terrible. But there should be (and perhaps is?) an easy way to complain about bad interview practices companies have without running afoul of their NDAs.
For your third point, I don't understand what you're getting at. What logic are you referring to that is broken?
Buy me a beer and I'll tell you the story of my worst interview ever. I'm nice enough to the founder of that company not to name them here, but it was incredibly bad.
In fact, it was so bad I later got a written apology for what happened.
