Some Google Interview Questions

Google is standardizing interview questions (finally?) so I am forced to retire my bootleg interview questions. In honor of the great service they’ve done over 200+ PM interviews, I’m going to do a thread that I expect no one to read but I have no other way to memorialize them. 

“Describe a product you worked on that didn’t succeed as you hoped”  #

This is my favorite ice breaker question - for reasons I don’t understand at all, almost nobody comes prepared to talk about setbacks. I love having a moment to see how the candidate introspects and how much they learn from the past. 10/10 recommend this to a friend. 

People mostly break three different ways - 1) the deniers, who describe a failure that’s really a success in disguise, 2) the shallow, who can describe a setback but don’t have good ideas what happened, and 

3) the enlightened, who can talk about failures openly, lessons learned, and how they are addressing those going forward. 10/10 I love this. 

“Design the user interface of a time machine”  #

This one is quirky and I love it, and I bet I get some hate for this, but it’s a great question because you immediately weed out surface-level thinkers: every one of them designs a delorean every time. I freaking love it. Input time/date and boom that’s it, what more could it be? 

But the real answer hinges on what the candidate wants to use the machine for? Is it for learning about the past? Time/date selector is like the worst design option. A lot of these design explorations end up looking more like a discover/explore feed. 

And of course I get to feel morally superior in that we built a time machine into Google Photos (albeit a sparse one!) which is a great analog if people pick up on it. 

“Build a framework for determining the estimated lifetime cost of a new Drive user”  #

How much does it cost Google to offer every new Google acct 15gb of memory? I make it clear that I don’t want a real answer, I want a framework - how does the candidate break out intractably difficult analytical problems? 

This is also amazing b/c about a third of people cannot think theoretically, they MUST deliver a numeric answer, and it’s always 100% nonsensical. “Well 15gb of storage costs about $10 to buy so it must cost Google $10” -> I’ve never quite gotten that, but it’s been close. 

There’s all sorts of fun nuance in this question to examine, and nobody ever takes the same path, so you can explore the question from many different angles over years. 

And I’m always surprised that maybe 50% of people don’t realize without prompting that Google doesn’t just buy an empty 15gb hard drive every time someone signs up… 

Okay I need to go back to work. I have a bunch of other less fun questions, but here I mourn the passing of my favorites. At least until I quit and do my own thing, and some future prospective employee digs this up and is super prepared for our interview ;) 

Oh, and a big thanks to everyone who has interviewed with me over the years! I always start every interview telling the candidate I want them to succeed and have the best interview they possibly can, and I mean it!