I was asked to come up with a sorting algorithm that would run on 4 computers with more data than could fit on any one computer. I was then asked to do a complexity analysis on my algorithm.
The only thing I think that really tested was how long it had been since I took an algorithms course in college.
[0] Two Kinds of Judgment http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html
Then I was given interview questions of a type that nobody else would give for a position at the level I interviewed for, and I quickly lost interest again as to me the interview questions advertised a lack of understanding of the skills required for the position, or a fundamental disagreement about how technical management should be carried out.
And pleading from the recruiter was not sufficient to get me to do another interview (after she got the result of the initial interview thrown out because she agreed with my assessment). The last recruiter I dealt with was good, but the impression I got of the interview process put me off for a long time.
It took several months, and in that time they'd still not been able to find anyone else. I've never, ever spent that long on a recruitment process before, and the only reason I bothered was out of curiosity and because I wasn't really looking. If I had been looking, I'd have found and taken another job long before Google would've managed to get their act together.
I make an effort to sell myself for positions I badly want, but Google doesn't seem to be interested in selling itself in the recruitment process whereas most other companies I've interviewed for are, and they certainly isn't even top 10 of list of places I want to work.
But every time I've dealt with Google recruiters, I've had to waste time dragging information out of them that I'd normally expect the recruiter to be eager to present to me.
I'm not going to make an effort if they've not gotten me to really want the job first.
Recruiters I've spoken to all tells me the people they take out of Google are very often disillusioned and thought it would be very different to their actual experience, and that dislodging Google employees have gotten much easier as it's no longer so much the pinnacle of cool places to work in the eyes of a growing number of engineers, so I think that's going to become a bigger and bigger issue for them when hiring.
One question that annoyed me in particular was "what is stored in an inode?". First problem: Lots of file systems don't have inodes, and those that do store different information in them. Ok, explained that and asked for clarification. He wants the inodes in UFS. I told him I have no idea - I've never had any reason to look into the on-disk structure of UFS. Why would I? BSD is specifically not on my resume, though I've used it now and again. I offered up the description of ext2fs instead, since I happen to roughly remember that, and talked around differences with other filesystems. But he was clearly not happy.
This was one of a series of similar
The recruiter was annoyed to no end, and managed to get the interview result thrown out, but by then I'd gotten so annoyed about the whole process (which had dragged out for weeks) that I just wasn't interested any more.
That said, I work on distributed systems for a living and have actually had to do similar things (manipulate data sets larger than a single machine's main memory across a cluster of machines).
On the other hand, that's not a skill 37signals needs. It's insane to think that Google, 37signals, and a random startup could and should use the same interview process.
