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I'm a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection. I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open s

I'm a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection. I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews, culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it as good interview practice and moved on. A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the blue and asked if I'd be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for another on-site. Soon after, I was hired! It's actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won't count you out after one try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers took you seriously as a candidate. If you've decided that you would really like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a free trip to London.

yukichan 13y ago
But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&E I wouldn't be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I'd be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back. The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it's silly and personally I don't plan at working at companies that interview this way. Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page's whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don't want it?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  > Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. It takes you a while to get to this mindset as a technology worker. Everyone's motivation is different though. I'm 31, have 13 years of experience, and keep getting rejected by SpaceX for a Linux Admin job at launch operations Cape Canaveral. Yes, I'm overqualified. Yes, I'd be taking an enormous paycut. But I want to help send rockets to Mars damn it. It's not always about the money, nor about the work. Sometimes, you're simply irrational about it.
  - shaneofalltrad 13y ago
    I believe they want to create this atmosphere if Google being hard to get in, and hopefully it will make the smart people feel prestigious if they do get in. Psychology 101. I would not be surprised if they targeted him because he was an active blogger, and would get this out to the world. Just think about it, our community is doing well because we are an open community working together online and what better way to control this group than injecting persuasion into the community. Don't get me wrong, I would likely work for Google if I had the opportunity, but I would go anti-google if they did this to me.
  - nawitus 13y ago
    There's nothing irrational about that. Rationality is about maximizing your utility function. If you care about sending rockets to Mars, then it can indeed be rational to take a paycut.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Thank you!
      - noir_lord 13y ago
        If I was financially independent I'd work for SpaceX for free. They build rockets!. I'm not remotely in their league though as a programmer. I build web apps.
iDemonix 13y ago
I'm asking this question of all SRE's in this thread: How did you develop the necessary skills required for an SRE role? It's my dream job but I feel I'll never be intelligent enough. My current job in an ISP NOC doesn't give me tons of room to develop the skills required for an SRE role, I script/code and create small projects outside of work, but the entry level for SRE just looks so high compared to what I feel I could ever achieve.
- aiiane 13y ago
  Reading is a good place to start. Find places where people describe their system architecture, and work your way through it, trying to understand why they make the choices they do. If you come across concepts you're not familiar with, look them up on Wikipedia or Google and keep digging until you do understand them. Ask questions if you need to - StackOverflow and ServerFault are good for this.
nerfhammer 13y ago
The fact that the same person going through the same process twice gets a completely different result strongly suggests that luck and randomness is a large factor, despite the apparent thoroughness and time investment. I've advised people on a job search that the way it works with tech hiring is they ask you a few questions and either you'll happen to be able to get the answer quickly or you won't, and if you go on enough interviews eventually you'll get one where you get all the answers quickly and you will look really smart as a result. Consequently, you can't pin your hopes on or predict whether you would be able get hired by any particular company.
- aiiane 13y ago
  Randomness is a factor whenever you have social interaction; as it turns out, people are subjective to the core. Trying to gauge someone's ability to deliver results is educated guesswork at best. You can only be so objective about it; there's going to be some measure of variance. Google errs on the side of rejection because one bad hire has a much bigger impact than one good hire.
- gaius 13y ago
  Yes, I've said it before, Google is what you get if you hire essentially at random and then tell all those people that the process that hired them is infallible.
  - Cookingboy 13y ago
    I work for Google, and no, we do not think our process is infallible since we understand there is a large chance for false negatives and even a small chance for false positives. We do not hire at random, each hiring goes through multiple interviews and the results of each of those interviews are also reviewed by multiple people (interviewers are required to record all notes/code produced during the interview). Then a decision is made. If we feel not super certain we err on the cautious side and turn down the candidate, even though we know there is a good chance for false negatives. As far as I can tell, our false positives rates are very low, and everyone I've worked with here at Google are incredibly qualified at their job. Are there people who don't perform? For a company this size that's an obvious yes, but I think if you judge interview's goal of eliminating false positives at the expense of producing false negatives, then we've been pretty successful.
bostik 13y ago
I was contacted right after the Elopcalypse, when all Nokia engineers and subcontractors were fair game and easy pickings. Had one recruiter phone screen with some easy questions, a technical phone interview and then was informed they decided to skip the second phone interview. Got called on-site in Dublin directly instead. My experience from there pretty much resembles what the author describes. First interview was about my knowledge of C, memory mappings and the related security implications. Let's just say that it helped I had experience from both little-endian and big-endian architectures. The second one was the fairly well known python interview. The problem is devious but really interesting. I botched that one, because I failed to follow my instinct and sketch a visualisation out first. That caused my attempts to derail pretty badly and by the time I realised I would need to rethink and simplify much of the logic, we were out of time. Third one was a fascinating trouble-shooting problem. It was not just about the technical problem or the symptoms, but also about how to deal with people who may have these kinds of problems due to being frightfully clever at getting themselves set up with the problems in the first place. I think I nailed that one. We had a nice chat about the history of the problem with the interviewer because we had some time to spare. Fourth one was a system design problem, and it was a true pleasure. The interviewer wasn't as much asking me questions, as he was more laying out the problem and the proposed architecture. We went through the requirements, limitations and he even showed me one neat trick which I hadn't ever thought before. (The actual architecture in question was effectively a DHT with an interesting twist. I thought it was brilliant.) The fifth one was basically about how well I understood the system internals of unix and linux. However, the approach chosen was not the off-the-shelf one I've seen elsewhere - the dive into internals started with task_struct. Yes, the one which nobody is supposed to understand completely. (At least according to Robert Love in Linux Kernel Development.) I got it right, evevntually. I was, of course, rejected due to "not good enough at coding". I don't hold that against the interviewers or the process. I know I'm a slow starter with any code - and I seem to suck at whiteboard coding. Whiteboard is great for doing visualisations and writing down short snippets where they are relevant, but for actual programming it just doesn't work for me. My most important design tools to this day are a large paper pad and a good pencil. After that it comes down to debug logs... What may sound strange, is that the on-site day remains one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. The interviews were designed to keep my brain spinning at overdrive, and the interviewers themselves were good enough not to actively mislead (they did keep me asking questions and stating the reasons for my approaches, which was crucial). Loved it. I've told all this to my hacker-type friends and still remain convinced that any engineer worth his title should experience the Google on-site day. It's a challenging, but also extremely satisfying experience. Some of them have tried, and at least one has been actively courted. I'm convinced he would ace the interviews without a hitch. The requirement to move is the one thing keeping him away.
23david 13y ago
Google's SRE team will continue to get people coming straight out of college, but for people with startup industry experience I don't see how it's an awesome opportunity. Most of the interesting SRE work and innovation that I see today is happening at startups. If Larry or Sergei call up personally and give you a blank check to start your own team/project, (and let you open-source your work...) maybe that'd be a different story. But otherwise, seems like working elsewhere will be the better option if you care about experience/skills over climbing the corporate ladder and having an easy paycheck.
- philsnow 13y ago
  > Most of the interesting SRE work and innovation that I see today is happening at startups. Can you give some examples of some pieces of interesting SRE work that is happening at startups ? I'm curious. I think the SRE role is still misunderstood a bit outside Google. Few startups that I'm aware of (there are a few, mind) care enough about "Reliability" to make a dedicated reliability engineer among the first 50 employees.
omegote 13y ago
Lots of comments already here, but anyway I'll try. I interviewed for a SRE position in Dublin half a year ago, I made it to the on-site interviews but after that I didn't get hired. I agree with pretty much everything the article says, specially the concerns about the interview about Large Scale Design. That one is pretty weird, it's the only one I couldn't really prepare. The only thing I don't agree with are the ending conclusions. First, I wasn't told anything about where I had failed. It'd have been great to know it, so I could prepare better for the (unlikely) next time. Second, maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't feel like _I can compete on this very top level of computer engineering_. I feel more like I was quite lucky to get where I got. Maybe (in fact, I hope) it has something to do with the Dunning-Kruger effect...

yukichan 13y ago

But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&E I wouldn't be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I'd be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back. The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it's silly and personally I don't plan at working at companies that interview this way. Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page's whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don't want it?

toomuchtodo 13y ago
> Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. It takes you a while to get to this mindset as a technology worker. Everyone's motivation is different though. I'm 31, have 13 years of experience, and keep getting rejected by SpaceX for a Linux Admin job at launch operations Cape Canaveral. Yes, I'm overqualified. Yes, I'd be taking an enormous paycut. But I want to help send rockets to Mars damn it. It's not always about the money, nor about the work. Sometimes, you're simply irrational about it.
- shaneofalltrad 13y ago
  I believe they want to create this atmosphere if Google being hard to get in, and hopefully it will make the smart people feel prestigious if they do get in. Psychology 101. I would not be surprised if they targeted him because he was an active blogger, and would get this out to the world. Just think about it, our community is doing well because we are an open community working together online and what better way to control this group than injecting persuasion into the community. Don't get me wrong, I would likely work for Google if I had the opportunity, but I would go anti-google if they did this to me.
- nawitus 13y ago
  There's nothing irrational about that. Rationality is about maximizing your utility function. If you care about sending rockets to Mars, then it can indeed be rational to take a paycut.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Thank you!
    - noir_lord 13y ago
      If I was financially independent I'd work for SpaceX for free. They build rockets!. I'm not remotely in their league though as a programmer. I build web apps.

iDemonix 13y ago

I'm asking this question of all SRE's in this thread: How did you develop the necessary skills required for an SRE role? It's my dream job but I feel I'll never be intelligent enough. My current job in an ISP NOC doesn't give me tons of room to develop the skills required for an SRE role, I script/code and create small projects outside of work, but the entry level for SRE just looks so high compared to what I feel I could ever achieve.

aiiane 13y ago
Reading is a good place to start. Find places where people describe their system architecture, and work your way through it, trying to understand why they make the choices they do. If you come across concepts you're not familiar with, look them up on Wikipedia or Google and keep digging until you do understand them. Ask questions if you need to - StackOverflow and ServerFault are good for this.

nerfhammer 13y ago

The fact that the same person going through the same process twice gets a completely different result strongly suggests that luck and randomness is a large factor, despite the apparent thoroughness and time investment. I've advised people on a job search that the way it works with tech hiring is they ask you a few questions and either you'll happen to be able to get the answer quickly or you won't, and if you go on enough interviews eventually you'll get one where you get all the answers quickly and you will look really smart as a result. Consequently, you can't pin your hopes on or predict whether you would be able get hired by any particular company.

aiiane 13y ago
Randomness is a factor whenever you have social interaction; as it turns out, people are subjective to the core. Trying to gauge someone's ability to deliver results is educated guesswork at best. You can only be so objective about it; there's going to be some measure of variance. Google errs on the side of rejection because one bad hire has a much bigger impact than one good hire.
gaius 13y ago
Yes, I've said it before, Google is what you get if you hire essentially at random and then tell all those people that the process that hired them is infallible.
- Cookingboy 13y ago
  I work for Google, and no, we do not think our process is infallible since we understand there is a large chance for false negatives and even a small chance for false positives. We do not hire at random, each hiring goes through multiple interviews and the results of each of those interviews are also reviewed by multiple people (interviewers are required to record all notes/code produced during the interview). Then a decision is made. If we feel not super certain we err on the cautious side and turn down the candidate, even though we know there is a good chance for false negatives. As far as I can tell, our false positives rates are very low, and everyone I've worked with here at Google are incredibly qualified at their job. Are there people who don't perform? For a company this size that's an obvious yes, but I think if you judge interview's goal of eliminating false positives at the expense of producing false negatives, then we've been pretty successful.

bostik 13y ago

I was contacted right after the Elopcalypse, when all Nokia engineers and subcontractors were fair game and easy pickings. Had one recruiter phone screen with some easy questions, a technical phone interview and then was informed they decided to skip the second phone interview. Got called on-site in Dublin directly instead. My experience from there pretty much resembles what the author describes. First interview was about my knowledge of C, memory mappings and the related security implications. Let's just say that it helped I had experience from both little-endian and big-endian architectures. The second one was the fairly well known python interview. The problem is devious but really interesting. I botched that one, because I failed to follow my instinct and sketch a visualisation out first. That caused my attempts to derail pretty badly and by the time I realised I would need to rethink and simplify much of the logic, we were out of time. Third one was a fascinating trouble-shooting problem. It was not just about the technical problem or the symptoms, but also about how to deal with people who may have these kinds of problems due to being frightfully clever at getting themselves set up with the problems in the first place. I think I nailed that one. We had a nice chat about the history of the problem with the interviewer because we had some time to spare. Fourth one was a system design problem, and it was a true pleasure. The interviewer wasn't as much asking me questions, as he was more laying out the problem and the proposed architecture. We went through the requirements, limitations and he even showed me one neat trick which I hadn't ever thought before. (The actual architecture in question was effectively a DHT with an interesting twist. I thought it was brilliant.) The fifth one was basically about how well I understood the system internals of unix and linux. However, the approach chosen was not the off-the-shelf one I've seen elsewhere - the dive into internals started with task_struct. Yes, the one which nobody is supposed to understand completely. (At least according to Robert Love in Linux Kernel Development.) I got it right, evevntually. I was, of course, rejected due to "not good enough at coding". I don't hold that against the interviewers or the process. I know I'm a slow starter with any code - and I seem to suck at whiteboard coding. Whiteboard is great for doing visualisations and writing down short snippets where they are relevant, but for actual programming it just doesn't work for me. My most important design tools to this day are a large paper pad and a good pencil. After that it comes down to debug logs... What may sound strange, is that the on-site day remains one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. The interviews were designed to keep my brain spinning at overdrive, and the interviewers themselves were good enough not to actively mislead (they did keep me asking questions and stating the reasons for my approaches, which was crucial). Loved it. I've told all this to my hacker-type friends and still remain convinced that any engineer worth his title should experience the Google on-site day. It's a challenging, but also extremely satisfying experience. Some of them have tried, and at least one has been actively courted. I'm convinced he would ace the interviews without a hitch. The requirement to move is the one thing keeping him away.

23david 13y ago

Google's SRE team will continue to get people coming straight out of college, but for people with startup industry experience I don't see how it's an awesome opportunity. Most of the interesting SRE work and innovation that I see today is happening at startups. If Larry or Sergei call up personally and give you a blank check to start your own team/project, (and let you open-source your work...) maybe that'd be a different story. But otherwise, seems like working elsewhere will be the better option if you care about experience/skills over climbing the corporate ladder and having an easy paycheck.

philsnow 13y ago
> Most of the interesting SRE work and innovation that I see today is happening at startups. Can you give some examples of some pieces of interesting SRE work that is happening at startups ? I'm curious. I think the SRE role is still misunderstood a bit outside Google. Few startups that I'm aware of (there are a few, mind) care enough about "Reliability" to make a dedicated reliability engineer among the first 50 employees.

omegote 13y ago

Lots of comments already here, but anyway I'll try. I interviewed for a SRE position in Dublin half a year ago, I made it to the on-site interviews but after that I didn't get hired. I agree with pretty much everything the article says, specially the concerns about the interview about Large Scale Design. That one is pretty weird, it's the only one I couldn't really prepare. The only thing I don't agree with are the ending conclusions. First, I wasn't told anything about where I had failed. It'd have been great to know it, so I could prepare better for the (unlikely) next time. Second, maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't feel like _I can compete on this very top level of computer engineering_. I feel more like I was quite lucky to get where I got. Maybe (in fact, I hope) it has something to do with the Dunning-Kruger effect...