questions asked during network engineer interview

Thu Jul 23 22:26:02 UTC 2020

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 6:33 AM Michael Douglas
<Michael.Douglas at ieee.org> wrote:
> One time I got asked in an interview how to estimate the number of manholes in a city.  I replied that I would google 'pretentious interview questions' for a problem solving methodology.

Many moons ago, I interviewed at Google. During one of the afternoon
sessions the interviewer and I spent about half an hour spitballing
approaches for system monitoring problem at scale. I no longer
remember the details. With a little over 15 minutes remaining he
handed me a marker and said, "Okay, now write code for that on the
whiteboard." For an abstract problem without foundation that I had
never considered prior to that discussion. I said, "I really don't
think I can do a credible job of that in the time we have." He says,
"Well it's okay to use pseudocode. Don't you want to try?" I think
you're missing the point dude. It's still an abstract problem and
after half an hour's discussion I might be ready to draw boxes and
arrows. I'm certainly not ready to reduce it to code.

I said, "No," and needless to say I didn't get an offer. And I'm okay
with that. I really didn't fancy making a career of competing to be
the first to write poorly considered software.

The booby prize for failing the interview was a Google coffee mug. I
still have it in storage somewhere.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin
bill at herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/