I've been meaning to write up some tips on interviewing at Google for a
good long time now. I keep putting it off, though, because it's going
to make you mad. Probably. For some statistical definition of "you",
it's very likely to upset you.
Why? Because... well, here, I wrote a little ditty about it:
Hey man, I don't know that stuff
Stevey's talking aboooooout
If my boss thinks it's important
I'm gonna get fiiiiiiiiiired
Oooh yeah baaaby baaaay-beeeeee....
I
didn't realize this was such a typical reaction back when I first
started writing about interviewing, way back at other companies.
Boy-o-howdy did I find out in a hurry.
See, it goes like this:
Me: blah blah blah, I like asking question X in interviews, blah blah blah...
You: Question X? Oh man, I haven't heard about X since college! I've never needed it for my job! He asks that in
interviews?
But that means someone out there thinks it's important to know, and,
and... I don't know it! If they detect my ignorance, not only will I be
summarily fired for incompetence without so much as a thank-you, I will
also be unemployable by people who ask question X! If people listen to
Stevey, that will be everyone! I will become homeless and destitute!
For not knowing something I've never needed before! This is horrible! I
would attack X itself, except that I do not want to pick up a book and
figure enough out about it to discredit it. Clearly I must yell a lot
about how stupid Stevey is so that nobody will listen to him!
Me: So in conclusion, blah blah... huh? Did you say "fired"? "Destitute?" What are you talking about?
You: Aaaaaaauuuggh!!! *stab* *stab* *stab*
Me: That's it. I'm never talking about interviewing again.
It doesn't matter what X is, either. It's arbitrary. I could say: "I really enjoy asking the candidate
(their name)
in interviews", and people would still freak out, on account of
insecurity about either interviewing in general or their knowledge of
their own name, hopefully the former.
But THEN, time passes, and
interview candidates come and go, and we always wind up saying: "Gosh,
we sure wish that obviously smart person had prepared a little better
for his or her interviews. Is there any way we can help future
candidates out with some tips?"
And then nobody actually does anything, because we're all afraid of getting stabbed violently by People Who Don't Know X.
I
considered giving out a set of tips in which I actually use variable
names like X, rather than real subjects, but decided that in the
resultant vacuum,
everyone would get upset. Otherwise that approach seemed pretty good, as long as I published under a pseudonym.
In
the end, people really need the tips, regardless of how many feelings
get hurt along the way. So rather than skirt around the issues, I'm
going to give you a few mandatory substitutions for X along with a fair
amount of general interview-prep information.
Caveats and Disclaimers
This
blog is not endorsed by Google. Google doesn't know I'm publishing
these tips. It's just between you and me, OK? Don't tell them I prepped
you. Just go kick ass on your interviews and we'll be square.
I'm only talking about general software engineering positions, and interviews for those positions.
These
tips are actually generic; there's nothing specific to Google vs. any
other software company. I could have been writing these tips about my
first software job 20 years ago. That implies that these tips are also
timeless, at least for the span of our careers.
These tips
obviously won't get you a job on their own. My hope is that by
following them you will perform your very best during the interviews.
Oh, and um, why Google?
Oho! Why Google, you ask? Well let's just have that dialog right up front, shall we?
You: Should I work at Google? Is it all they say it is, and more? Will I be serenely happy there? Should I apply immediately?
Me: Yes.
You: To which ques... wait, what do you mean by "Yes?" I didn't even say who I am!
Me: Dude, the answer is Yes. (You may be a woman, but I'm still calling you Dude.)
You:
But... but... I am paralyzed by inertia! And I feel a certain comfort
level at my current company, or at least I have become relatively
inured to the discomfort. I know people here and nobody at Google! I
would have to learn Google's build system and technology and stuff! I
have no credibility, no reputation there – I would have to start over
virtually from scratch! I waited too long, there's no upside! I'm
afraaaaaaid!
Me: DUDE. The answer is Yes already, OK? It's an invariant. Everyone else who came to Google was in the
exact same position
as you are, modulo a handful of famous people with beards that put
Gandalf's to shame, but they're a very tiny minority. Everyone who
applied had the same reasons for
not applying as you do. And everyone here says: "GOSH, I SURE AM HAPPY I CAME HERE!" So just apply already. But prep first.
You:
But what if I get a mistrial? I might be smart and qualified, but for
some random reason I may do poorly in the interviews and not get an
offer! That would be a huge blow to my ego! I would rather pass up the
opportunity altogether than have a chance of failure!
Me:
Yeah, that's at least partly true. Heck, I kinda didn't make it in on
my first attempt, but I begged like a street dog until they gave me a
second round of interviews. I caught them in a weak moment. And the
second time around, I prepared, and did much better.
The thing
is, Google has a well-known false negative rate, which means we
sometimes turn away qualified people, because that's considered better
than sometimes hiring unqualified people. This is actually an
industry-wide thing, but the dial gets turned differently at different
companies. At Google the false-negative rate is pretty high. I don't
know what it is, but I do know a lot of smart, qualified people who've
not made it through our interviews. It's a bummer.
But the really important takeaway is this:
if you don't get an offer, you may still be qualified to work here. So it needn't be a blow to your ego at all!
As
far as anyone I know can tell, false negatives are completely random,
and are unrelated to your skills or qualifications. They can happen
from a variety of factors, including but not limited to:
- you're having an off day
- one or more of your interviewers is having an off day
- there were communication issues invisible to you and/or one or more of the interviewers
- you got unlucky and got an Interview Anti-Loop
Oh no, not the Interview Anti-Loop!
Yes, I'm afraid you have to worry about this.
What
is it, you ask? Well, back when I was at Amazon, we did (and they
undoubtedly still do) a LOT of soul-searching about this exact problem.
We eventually concluded that every single employee E at Amazon has at
least one "Interview Anti-Loop": a set of other employees S who would
not hire E. The root cause is important for you to understand when
you're going into interviews, so I'll tell you a little about what I've
found over the years.
First, you can't tell interviewers what's
important. Not at any company. Not unless they're specifically asking
you for advice. You have a very narrow window of perhaps one year after
an engineer graduates from college to inculcate them in the art of
interviewing, after which the window closes and they believe they are a
"good interviewer" and they don't need to change their questions, their
question styles, their interviewing style, or their feedback style, ever again.
It's a problem. But I've had my hand bitten enough times that I just don't try anymore.
Second
problem: every "experienced" interviewer has a set of pet subjects and
possibly specific questions that he or she feels is an accurate gauge
of a candidate's abilities. The question sets for any two interviewers
can be widely different and even entirely non-overlapping.
A
classic example found everywhere is: Interviewer A always asks about
C++ trivia, filesystems, network protocols and discrete math.
Interviewer B always asks about Java trivia, design patterns, unit
testing, web frameworks, and software project management. For any given
candidate with both A and B on the interview loop, A and B are likely
to give very different votes. A and B would probably not even hire each
other, given a chance, but they both happened to go through interviewer
C, who asked them both about data structures, unix utilities, and
processes versus threads, and A and B both happened to squeak by.
That's
almost always what happens when you get an offer from a tech company.
You just happened to squeak by. Because of the inherently flawed nature
of the interviewing process, it's highly likely that someone
on the loop will be unimpressed with you, even if you are Alan Turing.
Especially if you're Alan Turing, in fact, since it means you obviously
don't know C++.
The bottom line is, if you go to an interview at any
software company, you should plan for the contingency that you might
get genuinely unlucky, and wind up with one or more people from your
Interview Anti-Loop on your interview loop. If this happens, you will
struggle, then be told that you were not a fit at this time, and then
you will feel bad. Just as long as you don't feel meta-bad, everything
is OK. You should feel good that you feel bad after this happens, because hey, it means you're human.
And
then you should wait 6-12 months and re-apply. That's pretty much the
best solution we (or anyone else I know of) could come up with for the
false-negative problem. We wipe the slate clean and start over again.
There are lots of people here who got in on their second or third
attempt, and they're kicking butt.
You can too.
OK, I feel better about potentially not getting hired
Good! So let's get on to those tips, then.
If you've been following along very
closely, you'll have realized that I'm interviewer D. Meaning that my
personal set of pet questions and topics is just my own, and it's no
better or worse than anyone else's. So I can't tell you what it is, no
matter how much I'd like to, because I'll offend interviewers A through
X who have slightly different working sets.
Instead, I want to
prep you for some general topics that I believe are shared by the
majority of tech interviewers at Google-like companies. Roughly
speaking, this means the company builds a lot of their own software and
does a lot of distributed computing. There are other tech-company
footprints, the opposite end of the spectrum being companies that
outsource everything to consultants and try to use as much third-party
software as possible. My tips will be useful only to the extent that
the company resembles Google.
So you might as well make it Google, eh?
First, let's talk about non-technical prep.
The Warm-Up
Nobody
goes into a boxing match cold. Lesson: you should bring your boxing
gloves to the interview. No, wait, sorry, I mean: warm up beforehand!
How do you warm up? Basically there is short-term and long-term warming up, and you should do both.
Long-term
warming up means: study and practice for a week or two before the
interview. You want your mind to be in the general "mode" of problem
solving on whiteboards. If you can do it on a whiteboard, every other
medium (laptop, shared network document, whatever) is a cakewalk. So
plan for the whiteboard.
Short-term warming up means: get lots
of rest the night before, and then do intense, fast-paced warm-ups the
morning of the interview.
The two best long-term warm-ups I know of are:
1) Study a data-structures and algorithms book.
Why? Because it is the most likely to help you beef up on problem
identification. Many interviewers are happy when you understand the
broad class of question they're asking without explanation. For
instance, if they ask you about coloring U.S. states in different
colors, you get major bonus points if you recognize it as a
graph-coloring problem, even if you don't actually remember exactly how
graph-coloring works.
And if you do remember how it works, then
you can probably whip through the answer pretty quickly. So your best
bet, interview-prep wise, is to practice the art of recognizing that
certain problem classes are best solved with certain algorithms and
data structures.
My absolute favorite for this kind of interview preparation is Steven Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual.
More than any other book it helped me understand just how astonishingly
commonplace (and important) graph problems are – they should be part of
every working programmer's toolkit. The book also covers basic data
structures and sorting algorithms, which is a nice bonus. But the gold
mine is the second half of the book, which is a sort of encyclopedia of
1-pagers on zillions of useful problems and various ways to solve them,
without too much detail. Almost every 1-pager has a simple picture,
making it easy to remember. This is a great way to learn how to
identify hundreds of problem types.
Other interviewers I know recommend Introduction to Algorithms.
It's a true classic and an invaluable resource, but it will probably
take you more than 2 weeks to get through it. But if you want to come
into your interviews prepped, then consider deferring your application until you've made your way through that book.
2) Have a friend interview you.
The friend should ask you a random interview question, and you should
go write it on the board. You should keep going until it is complete,
no matter how tired or lazy you feel. Do this as much as you can
possibly tolerate.
I didn't do these two types of preparation
before my first Google interview, and I was absolutely shocked at how
bad at whiteboard coding I had become since I had last interviewed
seven years prior. It's hard! And I also had forgotten a bunch of
algorithms and data structures that I used to know, or at least had
heard of.
Going through these exercises for a week prepped me
mightily for my second round of Google interviews, and I did way, way
better. It made all the difference.
As for short-term
preparation, all you can really do is make sure you are as alert and
warmed up as possible. Don't go in cold. Solve a few problems and read
through your study books. Drink some coffee: it actually helps you
think faster, believe it or not. Make sure you spend at least
an hour practicing immediately before you walk into the interview.
Treat it like a sports game or a music recital, or heck, an exam: if
you go in warmed up you'll give your best performance.
Mental Prep
So!
You're a hotshot programmer with a long list of accomplishments. Time
to forget about all that and focus on interview survival.
You should go in humble, open-minded, and focused.
If
you come across as arrogant, then people will question whether they
want to work with you. The best way to appear arrogant is to question
the validity of the interviewer's question – it really ticks them off,
as I pointed out earlier on. Remember how I said you can't tell an
interviewer how to interview? Well, that's especially true if you're a candidate.
So
don't ask: "gosh, are algorithms really all that important? do you ever
need to do that kind of thing in real life? I've never had to do that
kind of stuff." You'll just get rejected, so don't say that kind of
thing. Treat every question as legitimate, even if you are frustrated
that you don't know the answer.
Feel free to ask for help or
hints if you're stuck. Some interviewers take points off for that, but
occasionally it will get you past some hurdle and give you a good
performance on what would have otherwise been a horrible stony
half-hour silence.
Don't say "choo choo choo" when you're "thinking".
Don't
try to change the subject and answer a different question. Don't try to
divert the interviewer from asking you a question by telling war
stories. Don't try to bluff your interviewer. You should focus on each problem they're giving you and make your best effort to answer it fully.
Some interviewers will not ask you to write code, but they will expect
you to start writing code on the whiteboard at some point during your
answer. They will give you hints but won't necessarily come right out
and say: "I want you to write some code on the board now." If in doubt,
you should ask them if they would like to see code.
Interviewers
have vastly different expectations about code. I personally don't care
about syntax (unless you write something that could obviously never
work in any programming language, at which point I will dive in and
verify that you are not, in fact, a circus clown and that it was an
honest mistake). But some interviewers are really picky about syntax,
and some will even silently mark you down for missing a semicolon or a
curly brace, without telling you. I think of these
interviewers as – well, it's a technical term that rhymes with "bass
soles", but they think of themselves as brilliant technical evaluators,
and there's no way to tell them otherwise.
So ask. Ask if they
care about syntax, and if they do, try to get it right. Look over your
code carefully from different angles and distances. Pretend it's
someone else's code and you're tasked with finding bugs in it. You'd be
amazed at what you can miss when you're standing 2 feet from a
whiteboard with an interviewer staring at your shoulder blades.
It's
OK (and highly encouraged) to ask a few clarifying questions, and
occasionally verify with the interviewer that you're on the track they
want you to be on. Some interviewers will mark you down if you just
jump up and start coding, even if you get the code right.
They'll say you didn't think carefully first, and you're one of those
"let's not do any design" type cowboys. So even if you think you know
the answer to the problem, ask some questions and talk about the
approach you'll take a little before diving in.
On the flip
side, don't take too long before actually solving the problem, or some
interviewers will give you a delay-of-game penalty. Try to move (and
write) quickly, since often interviewers want to get through more than
one question during the interview, and if you solve the first one too
slowly then they'll be out of time. They'll mark you down because they
couldn't get a full picture of your skills. The benefit of the doubt is
rarely given in interviewing.
One last non-technical tip: bring
your own whiteboard dry-erase markers. They sell pencil-thin ones at
office supply stores, whereas most companies (including Google) tend to
stock the fat kind. The thin ones turn your whiteboard from a 480i
standard-definition tube into a 58-inch 1080p HD plasma screen. You
need all the help you can get, and free whiteboard space is a real
blessing.
You should also practice whiteboard space-management
skills, such as not starting on the right and coding down into the
lower-right corner in Teeny Unreadable Font. Your interviewer will not
be impressed. Amusingly, although it always irks me when people do
this, I did it during my interviews, too. Just be aware of it!
Oh,
and don't let the marker dry out while you're standing there waving it.
I'm tellin' ya: you want minimal distractions during the interview, and
that one is surprisingly common.
OK, that should be good for non-tech tips. On to X, for some value of X! Don't stab me!
Tech Prep Tips
The
best tip is: go get a computer science degree. The more computer
science you have, the better. You don't have to have a CS degree, but
it helps. It doesn't have to be an advanced degree, but that helps too.
However,
you're probably thinking of applying to Google a little sooner than 2
to 8 years from now, so here are some shorter-term tips for you.
Algorithm Complexity:
you need to know Big-O. It's a must. If you struggle with basic big-O
complexity analysis, then you are almost guaranteed not to get hired.
It's, like, one chapter in the beginning of one theory of computation
book, so just go read it. You can do it.
Sorting: know
how to sort. Don't do bubble-sort. You should know the details of at
least one n*log(n) sorting algorithm, preferably two (say, quicksort
and merge sort). Merge sort can be highly useful in situations where
quicksort is impractical, so take a look at it.
For God's sake, don't try sorting a linked list during the interview.
Hashtables: hashtables are arguably the single most important data structure known to mankind. You absolutely have to know how they work.
Again, it's like one chapter in one data structures book, so just go
read about them. You should be able to implement one using only arrays
in your favorite language, in about the space of one interview.
Trees:
you should know about trees. I'm tellin' ya: this is basic stuff, and
it's embarrassing to bring it up, but some of you out there don't know
basic tree construction, traversal and manipulation algorithms. You
should be familiar with binary trees, n-ary trees, and trie-trees at
the very very least. Trees are probably the best source of practice problems for your long-term warmup exercises.
You
should be familiar with at least one flavor of balanced binary tree,
whether it's a red/black tree, a splay tree or an AVL tree. You should
actually know how it's implemented.
You should know about tree traversal algorithms: BFS and DFS, and know the difference between inorder, postorder and preorder.
You
might not use trees much day-to-day, but if so, it's because you're
avoiding tree problems. You won't need to do that anymore once you know
how they work. Study up!
Graphs
Graphs are, like, really really important. More than you think. Even if you already think they're important, it's probably more than you think.
There
are three basic ways to represent a graph in memory (objects and
pointers, matrix, and adjacency list), and you should familiarize
yourself with each representation and its pros and cons.
You
should know the basic graph traversal algorithms: breadth-first search
and depth-first search. You should know their computational complexity,
their tradeoffs, and how to implement them in real code.
You
should try to study up on fancier algorithms, such as Dijkstra and A*,
if you get a chance. They're really great for just about anything, from
game programming to distributed computing to you name it. You should
know them.
Whenever someone gives you a problem, think graphs.
They are the most fundamental and flexible way of representing any kind
of a relationship, so it's about a 50-50 shot that any interesting
design problem has a graph involved in it. Make absolutely sure you
can't think of a way to solve it using graphs before moving on to other
solution types. This tip is important!
Other data structures
You
should study up on as many other data structures and algorithms as you
can fit in that big noggin of yours. You should especially know about
the most famous classes of NP-complete problems, such as traveling
salesman and the knapsack problem, and be able to recognize them when
an interviewer asks you them in disguise.
You should find out what NP-complete means.
Basically, hit that data structures book hard, and try to retain as much of it as you can, and you can't go wrong.
Math
Some
interviewers ask basic discrete math questions. This is more prevalent
at Google than at other places I've been, and I consider it a Good
Thing, even though I'm not particularly good at discrete math. We're
surrounded by counting problems, probability problems, and other
Discrete Math 101 situations, and those innumerate among us blithely
hack around them without knowing what we're doing.
Don't get mad
if the interviewer asks math questions. Do your best. Your best will be
a heck of a lot better if you spend some time before the interview
refreshing your memory on (or teaching yourself) the essentials of
combinatorics and probability. You should be familiar with n-choose-k
problems and their ilk – the more the better.
I know, I know,
you're short on time. But this tip can really help make the difference
between a "we're not sure" and a "let's hire her". And it's actually
not all that bad – discrete math doesn't use much of the high-school
math you studied and forgot. It starts back with elementary-school math
and builds up from there, so you can probably pick up what you need for
interviews in a couple of days of intense study.
Sadly, I don't have a good recommendation for a Discrete Math book, so if you do, please mention it in the comments. Thanks.
Operating Systems
This
is just a plug, from me, for you to know about processes, threads and
concurrency issues. A lot of interviewers ask about that stuff, and
it's pretty fundamental, so you should know it. Know about locks and
mutexes and semaphores and monitors and how they work. Know about
deadlock and livelock and how to avoid them. Know what resources a
processes needs, and a thread needs, and how context switching works,
and how it's initiated by the operating system and underlying hardware.
Know a little about scheduling. The world is rapidly moving towards
multi-core, and you'll be a dinosaur in a real hurry if you don't
understand the fundamentals of "modern" (which is to say, "kinda
broken") concurrency constructs.
The best, most practical book I've ever personally read on the subject is Doug Lea's Concurrent Programming in Java.
It got me the most bang per page. There are obviously lots of other
books on concurrency. I'd avoid the academic ones and focus on the
practical stuff, since it's most likely to get asked in interviews.
Coding
You should know at least one programming language really well, and it should preferably
be C++ or Java. C# is OK too, since it's pretty similar to Java. You
will be expected to write some code in at least some of your
interviews. You will be expected to know a fair amount of detail about
your favorite programming language.
Other Stuff
Because
of the rules I outlined above, it's still possible that you'll get
Interviewer A, and none of the stuff you've studied from these tips
will be directly useful (except being warmed up.) If so, just do your
best. Worst case, you can always come back in 6-12 months, right? Might
seem like a long time, but I assure you it will go by in a flash.
The
stuff I've covered is actually mostly red-flags: stuff that really
worries people if you don't know it. The discrete math is potentially
optional, but somewhat risky if you don't know the first thing about
it. Everything else I've mentioned you should know cold, and then
you'll at least be prepped for the baseline interview level. It could
be a lot harder than that, depending on the interviewer, or it could be
easy.
It just depends on how lucky you are. Are you feeling lucky? Then give it a try!
Send me your resume
I'll
probably batch up any resume submissions people send me and submit them
weekly. In the meantime, study up! You have a lot of warming up to do.
Real-world work makes you rusty.
I hope this was helpful. Let the flames begin, etc. Yawn.
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