FAILED My Google Interview: Here's What To Do After

I completely bombed my interview with Google to make matters worse the feedback that I got from the recruiter just really didn't sit well with me hi my name is Nick centino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft Microsoft not Google but in all seriousness I'm very happy with the fact that I ended up at Microsoft and I have absolutely no regrets about that I wanted to put this video together to talk about what it's like to go through the interview process to totally bomb it and to be able to reflect and make progress on things going forward and I wanted to do this because I think there's a lot of resources out there about how to go through interviews things you should be doing but I don't think that we talk enough about these failure moments and how we can reflect and grow from them the reality is that interviewing is just like any other skill and if we're not practicing it there's going to be things we're not good at and of course there's always opportunities for us to improve I wanted to remind you that my friend Ryan Murphy and I are launching a course on dome train about nailing the behavioral interview in big Tech so when that is released I'll have it in the comments pinned below and in the description of this video but now I think it's important to set the stage and give you some context for my interview process this is going back over four years now it's not like it was a very recent thing but I wanted to talk about this because it really stuck out to me it's a pretty significant interview for my experience at that point in time in my career I hadn't interviewed in 8 years and that meant that getting prepared for interviews I was trying to practice Elite code in my kitchen which I suck at because I don't think it's really representative of what we're doing as software Engineers that's my personal take on it I needed to practice my system design questions because I know that with big tech companies we're focused a lot on distributed systems and I had been spending over the last eight years at least building desktop applications and things that weren't really massively scal so I wanted to make sure I was brushed up on that and of course on the behavioral interview side of things I was practicing all sorts of questions but as a software engineering manager and at that time I was doing uh individual contributor work as a software engineer and my software engineering management responsibilities I felt like I had the behavioral part down pretty good and that's just because I was spending a lot of time doing that kind of work I needed to make sure that I had those stories ready and available to talk about but overall that was probably my strongest area my interview with Google is like any typical big Tech interview and if you're not familiar with this process generally you're going through multiple rounds of interviews with different individuals at this point in time it was all remote because of the lockdown that was occurring so they didn't fly me in or I didn't go visit an office and do it in person totally remote the way that these usually break down is that you have some type of coding question you'll have uh some type of system design questions and then you'll have behavioral uh style questions as well and depending on your level and the role that you're going for these will adjust right so if you are let's say a very Junior programmer applying to a big tech company often what you'll notice is that you'll have more coding questions probably fewer system design questions just because you might not be expected to have all that experience yet and then the behavioral interview questions will be geared towards someone who may not have a ton of experience in the field a lot more coding questions Upfront for more Juniors as you're getting more senior as a software engineer you will find more system design questions you'll probably notice that they don't spend as much on like aite code style question you'll probably get some of those but they want to make sure that you are you know graded in formal leadership that you have great collaboration skills and that you really understand how systems come together now for me as a software engineering manager I did apply to a bunch of big tech companies at the time and almost all of them I think except one had coding style questions even for me as a manager which is totally fine because I had been coding at that point in time I've been programming almost every day for 17 years professionally it was about 10 years so I very familiar and comfortable with coding what I'm not comfortable with is lead code style questions so we'll come back to that in my setup I only had one programming question I had a couple of system design questions I think there were two for for Google in this case and then the rest were behavioral interview questions and this was split up over I think five different interviews it could have been four though but it was certainly no less than for to kick things off during my interview loop I had to start with my coding question and I was super nervous about this even though I have a lot of experience as a programmer it's just that I know the styles of questions that we're going to get and I can't remember the exact question in this case but I remember it felt like a pretty typical lead code question I don't even think that it was that difficult and I remember asking the interviewer for some clarification to make sure that I was understanding the requirements this is something you should be doing in your interviews especially big tech companies you'll often find that they are pretty vague with some things and if you just go into it and start coding things you might be making assumptions that they were expecting you to clarify so I wanted to make sure that I have the API right that I have the expectations around the inputs and outputs and the performance characteristics wanted to make sure I understood that and I remember getting kind of okayish answers from the interviewer it felt like I still had a you know a bit of a gap in exactly what I was supposed to do but I think I had enough to start coding up my answer so I went ahead and did so and I knew that as I was coding this I'm going oh crap I think I only have sort of like a what we'll call like a naive implementation like it's definitely not going to be the fastest it's not going to be the most efficient but I think I have something that will work and I remember saying to the interviewer okay here's how I'm going to approach this acknowledging that I don't think it's going to be the most performant but I would rather have a solution in place before trying to go and optimize it started coding it up started explaining it going through and making sure that I could prove that it was working and when that was all done I remember there was only a little bit of time left and I was trying to say okay here's how I think I need to focus on the optimizations and where the sort of drawbacks were coming about but I did not have enough time to go code it up at the end of that particular interview to set the whole stage for everything I felt like I had totally failed that question which sucked because that was probably one of my opportunities to shine as an engineering manager because I think there are a ton of engineer managers that don't code all of the time that was one of my superpowers I felt and I couldn't demonstrate it so I started the day off feeling like I was with a big score of zero so far my first system design question after that was pretty generic in nature I had to make sure that I had different parts of a system communicating together so I was able to explain the database structure that I wanted to use I had to talk about eventual consistency I don't feel like it was anything too crazy little bit of caching here and there to talk about performance optimizations and then we got into some of the schema of the database but overall this was your pretty typical like someone has to go make a purchase you have a distributed system with multiple users databases different regions and how are you going to make sure that you don't have something like a payment going through and then accidentally being kicked off again and that kind of thing so overall that that question wasn't so bad I don't know if I nailed it but I feel like I had a pretty good answer and I was able to kind of navigate it with the interviewer pretty clearly my next question was probably the worst one that I had in the entire interview this third question was also a system design question and it had to do with networking in data centers I remember when the interviewer asked me this question my first thought was man I have no idea how to answer this but all of my practice leading up to this in this particular interview I remember thinking it's okay because what you should be doing is asking clarifying questions trying to explain your thought process getting something down in front of you I thought that I would do just that I tried clarifying what the interviewer was asking for making sure I could take a couple of notes about the requirements of this question and then from there I started trying to say okay here's what I understand so far and making a little a little bit of progress and what this had to do with was communicating between different computers in a Data Center and how to effectively route things between them because we're trying to look for the shortest distance in terms of reducing latency and that kind of thing we had to make sure that we were talking about the different computers in the data center to optimize for this in this question though I remember being like I don't know how to answer it right so I needed to go back to the interviewer and say Here's as far as I think I can get and from this point on I am a little bit stuck so is there anything else that you can offer up to kind of Unblock Me so that we can navigate this and he gave me a little bit of a hint and again I said okay thank you and started making a little bit more progress but this felt like I was walking through molasses trying to answer this question I feel like the interview was about 45 minutes to an hour and it felt like it was a whole week long of me just trying to make sure that I could get through this question I knew like 5 minutes into answering it this was not going to be a good question for me so at the end of that I remember saying uh you know here's here's my best thoughts around this here's I think the answer that I have and I don't have anything further to add and I remember him saying still like not quite and you're still missing some things so I said okay great like would you mind sort of enlightening me could you explain to me kind of what you were looking for in this question and it's because we had a little bit of time left in the interview and I remember him explaining to me that he was expecting me to talk about some of the network card interfaces in the machines and the data centers and at that point I just remember thinking to myself there was no way that I was ever going to know that I was a little bit frustrated but we're going to continue on with the interview this point I had done a coding question I had done two sort of system design questions and then the remaining questions I had were all behavioral interview style questions and this again this is where I was like okay my time to shine I feel like I can talk to people very easily about tons of different scenarios for my career and and that's because I had worked at a startup that had grown rapidly I had seen all sorts of different things whether that was challenging employees challenges between different teams being able to help get people promoted anything like that I felt like okay I got this covered and surely going through all that I'm not going to go into the behavioral interview part in this video but I feel like I had no challenges going through it any question they threw my way I had a good scenario for it but I don't want to talk about all of the good stuff in this I want to talk about how everything kind of that went bad and what I had to do about it after going through all of these rounds it was time for me to get the feedback from the recruiter I can't remember how far after the you know they responded to me but I remember getting on the call with them and they said unfortunately we're not going to be moving forward with you okay like I kind of figured that based on how a couple of those interviews went right the coding one at the beginning didn't feel good and that system design one with the networking especially having to know about the hardware inside of the data center absolutely bomb that one wasn't totally shocked and then the interviewer said to me we think that you did an excellent job on the behavioral side so we think that we can tell you're really good working with people and projects and things like that but we just don't think that you're technical enough and this is the part that really bothered me because like I said I had been programming for 17 years at this point I had been you know developing software professionally for 10 years I was coding all of the time at the digital forensics company that I was working at at that time I had built all sorts of their products from the ground up and I'm not claiming that I'm responsible for all of their success I just mean that I had literally worked on a lot of their products from inception and got to see them grow and be part of that for me hearing not technical enough I just feel like was maybe the wrong phrasing and this is where kind of like start going through all of these different emotions that I want to talk about with you because I think that it's totally normal so this was my rejection call not technical enough we thought you're good with people thanks okay I was happy to at least have some type of feedback and again even from that interview that I had about the the networking card interfaces that was at least some feedback for me to learn from now that I have been finished with Google my interview was totally crap and I'm sitting at home and I'm frustrated I kind of go through all these range of emotions right I'm sad that it didn't work out I think anyone who was trying to do something and you didn't get there you'd be sad about it so that's okay to have that kind of emotional response I was frustrated because I wanted to prove myself in the coding question and that totally did not work out right that was my one opportunity I felt like to really stand out separate from the behavioral stuff and I butchered it so no good I was pretty frustrated but then I was also kind of angry and I was kind of angry that I had a system design question where the person was expecting me to understand networking cards and the interfaces on the networking cards in the data center and I'm not even applying for a job where I need to understand sort of the physical networking card Concepts that's totally separate from me is that something that I could go learn about sure but I'm kind of angry that they were expecting me to know that for the job that I was applying for again I'm going through all of these different emotions but I had to remind myself look there are a lot of things that we don't have control over when we're going through interviews and not just interviews I mean in life too but specifically we're talking about interviews here so what things can I not control and let's make sure that I can identify those and not spend all of my energy trying to figure out why I'm so mad at these things why I'm so sad you know blaming other people for it I have to accept those are outside of my control when I start thinking hey I'm angry that interviewer for that question I can't control that no more energy into it if I'm sad that I didn't get it that's okay I don't need to keep putting more energy into being sad it's already happened if I'm frustrated from that coding question again I can't go back and change my answer so no more point in being frustrated with the result of that so those are things that I have to go set aside and not put any more energy into now it's time for me to reflect on the things that didn't go so well in this case the first one that came to mind is that those lead code style questions I'm still nowhere near good enough to be able to do those comfortably I think people that practice them a lot they can do really well in coding interviews where these styles of questions come up because you see a lot of these tricks and patterns and you can identify them so I think that if you are the kind of person that enjoys doing these it's great because especially in an interview context that can go really well for you but like I said I hadn't interviewed in eight years so I'm trying to play catchup trying to learn some of these so for me it was a reminder I need to spend more time practicing those styles of questions and I do keep calling this out whether it's this video or other content I produce I think that lead code style questions can be great if you're interested in that kind of thing if you want to practice for interviews if you want to just you know kind of challenge yourself and think through complex problems that's totally cool I don't think that El code style questions you know for the amount of time and effort that you put into them translate as well to real world software development so just wanted to clarify that I'm not trying to say lead code sucks no one do it and I'm not trying to say that the only context is during interviews but at least from my experience I need to catch up on lead code style stuff for my interviews so that was one part the next part was that going through the system design questions I just remember feeling like okay the one question I felt like I could do okay the network card one that's one where I could have just had an interviewer and luck of the draw that's what they picked so again instead of focusing on that I just said I don't think my comfort level was quite where it needed to be and especially if there's going to be an expectation that I have more of an understanding about these distributed systems not just from a theoretical or conceptual level but truly from a practical level like what do these things look like in real life if going to be more of an expectation I have to spend more time reading about that kind of thing watching videos on it and then trying to relate these sort of conceptual setups to real world applications so I spent more time reading about that and watching videos it also meant that I had to practice more of those types of questions so at the end of this process for me the things that I had to spend more time on were more Elite code style questions more system design questions again with a bit more of a a practical twist to them and then at least on the behavioral side I did not have to invest as much time and we only have so much time right so I could dial back that part of the practice it felt like it was coming pretty natural to me in the interview context so don't stop practicing it just reduce the amount that I'm focusing on it at the end of the day I didn't apply back to Google but I applied to other big tech companies I ended up Landing my job here at Microsoft and I've been very happy with the results of that but I wanted to share all of this with you because again when we're going through interviews sure they're going to be awkward they're going to be high stress they're not really this natural thing that we're used to unless you just like to interview a lot which is totally cool but for many of us it's sort of just unnatural to go through that type of thing there are going to be many different factors during your interview that we just don't have control over and I should also mention that on any given day you could go into interview somewhere and you could totally rocket you could Ace all of your coding questions your system design you could totally surprise them with amazing answers for your behavioral interview questions and still not get the job and then you might feel like you know you feel totally defeated from this but the reality is on any given day someone else could have also interviewed and just done better that's just something else that's not really in your control I'm not telling you this to make you feel like there's no chance that you're ever going to land job I'm simply telling you this because it means that we have to keep moving forward the only thing that we can do is focus on what we can control so if it doesn't work out for this one time that's totally okay what can we learn from it how can we practice getting better at it and then how can you make sure that you have all of the tools and systems you need to be able to put in the effort for that practice and that just might mean interviewing more to get that Hands-On practice that is my experience with bombing my Google interview I hope that that helps you understand that yes many of us you know fail at interviews it's totally okay don't beat yourself up over it you will be able to move on and find that job so I totally believe in you and you have to believe in yourself so I'm wishing you the best of success in your job search take care