How Do You Resolve Conflicts Within Teams
If possible, I serve as a mediator between team members who disagree. I focus on giving everyone a chance to speak their minds. And then help them reach the right decision while keeping the companys best interests in mind. If thats not possible, I talk to engineers one-on-one. To see what the root cause is and then walk the team through resolving it. This approach means that theyll have the necessary abilities to resolve the conflicts themselves and feel better about their roles in the long term.
Google Behavioral Questions: General
First up are the general behavioral questions that may come up for any role. Here your interviewer is looking for an overall view of your past experiences and what you will be like as an employee at Google. Youll see that regardless of the role, Google is curious about your resume, your motivations, and why you want to work for them specifically.
These are good questions for you to demonstrate your Googleyness by showing such qualities as comfort with ambiguity or a bias for action. They want to see that youve learned from past mistakes and that youve done your research on Google itself.
Practice demonstrating those values using the questions below.
Example behavioral questions asked at Google: General
Fundamentals Of An Em Interview
Engineering Managers in most tech companies are expected to play this intersectional role between People, Tech, and Product/Business. They are entrepreneurs for their own little startups and are held accountable for its success. The real question every company wants to answer is Can this person drive sustainable, long-term success for this area of the business? So they model the interview process to capture signals that can give them reasonable confidence about the candidates ability to drive that sustainable, long-term success. Obviously, it is impossible to categorically determine that, so companies resort to reasonable proxies. The proxies that Ive seen end up falling into these categories:
- Technical Domain Experience
Lets look at each of these in detail and see how they manifest in various interview formats across different companies:
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Google Behavioral Questions: Leadership/people Management
In addition to a collaborative nature, Google is looking for employees who demonstrate emergent leadership. This is because most roles will involve not only working in teams, but also leading them when appropriate.
As a result, you should expect questions about your approach to developing and retaining team members, your ability to lead teams through difficult situations, how you resolve conflict, etc. Of course, expect these questions to come up more frequently when interviewing for a managerial or leadership position.
Example behavioral questions asked at Google: Leadership/people management
- Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership even though you weren’t the formal manager
- Tell me about a time you lead a team through a difficult situation
- Tell me about a time you developed and retained team members
- Tell me about a time you had to handle trade offs and ambiguity
- Which traits differentiate a manager from a leader, and how do you rank yourself as a leader on those traits?
- How would you deal with a team challenge in a balanced way?
- How would you address a skill gap or personality conflict?
- How would you ensure your team is diverse and inclusive?
What Do Engineers Hate Most About Working With A Manager
It’s hard for engineers to work with managers who don’t have any coding or programming experience. It’s because it’s difficult for them to be able to connect with the work. Understanding “what’s hard” and “what isn’t hard” is fundamental. Having that previous coding experience can really help to be a bridge in terms of communication and when estimating work or practicing SCRUM.
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You Will Be Working On:
- Hire and grow the team
- Execute the product plans and manage delivery commitments
- Mentor the engineers in the team and help them deliver to the best of their abilities
- Set clear career paths for your team members and help every individual pursue their growth path
- Architect a system that can support real time collaboration at scale and support a ton of features that help in conducting interviews
- Work very closely with the product team to develop and curate the product roadmap
- Define clear goals on a quarterly basis for the team and guide the team with the execution
- Own and drive the tech roadmap. Plan and deliver on a quarterly basis
- Manage the day to day activities of the team with in the scrum framework
+ Google Behavioral Interview Questions
Now that youve gotten an idea of what to expect during the Google interview process, lets jump into some example questions.
To help you prepare strategically for your job interview, we have used Glassdoor data to identify the real questions asked in different Google interviews. The questions weve chosen come from our research on five Google tech roles: product manager, software engineer, program manager, account manager, and data scientist. Wed recommend reading one of these comprehensive interview guides if youre applying for one of these roles in particular.
Youll notice that weve divided the questions into the following categories:
- General
- Leadership / people management
- Project management
We’ve added these categories to make the list of questions easier to understand, starting with the general questions that apply to any job. Each category tests a different quality that Google is looking for in its candidates, and the frequency of each question type will vary depending on the role. For instance, interviews for managerial roles will include a higher number of leadership / people management questions.
Note that we’ve edited the language in some of the questions for clarity or grammar. Now lets get into it.
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How Do You Describe The Technical Aspects Of A Project To Individuals Who Don’t Have Technical Backgrounds
Engineer managers work with diverse people across many teams and departments, including clients. Highlight your communication skills by describing how you break down complex topics and explain them to non-technical individuals.
Example: “I try to give examples of the design and engineering elements in a software project in terms that are easy to relate to. For instance, if I’m speaking with a client who requests an e-commerce application, I try to describe the development process in terms of a sales funnel or a transaction to help them understand the complex aspects that go into a feature of the application.
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What Is Your Stance On Code Ownership Should It Be Individual
Code ownership is mainly why Im an advocate of teamwork and collaboration. A single engineer cant finish the project, so I believe that there shouldnt be any individual code ownership. However, recognizing individual engineers contribution is necessary, as well as recognizing the teams achievements. This helps everyone feel more satisfied with the project theyve finished, without the need to state code owners explicitly.
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Acing The Google Interview: The Ultimate Guide
Passing the Google Interview. Every engineers dream.
After all, why wouldnt you want to work at Google with the free food, cushy salary, and credentials that will make you set for life?
The Google Interview is a methodology of technical interviewing that has been widely used and popularized by the tech giant, . It serves as the ultimate test to determine whether you have the coding and algorithmic chops to develop software with the best.
It is a crucial measuring stick by which your technical prowess is assessed and arguably the most important determining factor in Googles decision to go hire or no hire.
If you want to stack the deck in your favor when interviewing at Google you need to develop a strategy for attacking the most critical parts of what you will encounter. In this post, Ill show you how.
As the style of interview that Google uses has been so widely emulated, this post will also help you interview at most other large tech companies. So sit back and lets dig in.
What Is A Personal Habit That Contributes To Your Success
Flexibility. I adjust to different situations and different people I work with. I tend to be open to new ideas, take them, try them and iterate on them. I believe every person in the team is different and I take this opportunity to learn from everyone and adjust to what the team needs. Being flexible is the habit I rely on a lot.
Networking. Im pretty big on networking. I like to share experiences and learn from others. I still keep in touch with a lot of people I used to work with, my peers, sponsors, mentors, engineers I worked with and managers I had. I share my experience and learn from theirs. I think those conversations provide an environment of being able to get a different perspective on situations from people you are not directly working with. I find it very valuable.
Early morning running. It is important to have personal time in our busy lives so that you have a chance to reset or figure out what to focus on. I usually work out or run early in the mornings and prepare myself for my day and it gives me a good way to clear my head and start the day strong.
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How Would You Approach Coaching
That depends on the engineering team and each engineer. Some teams may be comfortable with evaluations strong on feedback and monthly meetings. Others may prefer workshops where theyre actively solving problems. In any case, I would determine the team’s main strengths and weaknesses and help them improve accordingly. I would hold one-on-one coaching sessions with the engineering team’s individual members. To learn more about their goals and where they see their careers going.
Ux Engineer Interview Questions
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What Do You Believe Youll Achieve As An Engineering Manager That You Couldnt Achieve As An Engineer
I believe my role as an engineering manager will make communication between clients and engineering teams easier for our company. In this position, Ill help the clients understand the process and help the engineers understand the clients expectations. This will make it much easier to set the right budgets and expectations, so everyones satisfied with the outcome. I also look forward to offering my insight into the engineering talent at our company.
Whats A Google Engineering Manager Interview Process Like
A Google engineering manager interview typically consists of 2 to 3 rounds. At Google, the team-matching process takes place right after the interviews. As a result, this loop can go on for weeks and sometimes even months. The interview process kicks off with a telephonic round with the recruiter and is followed by a technical phone screen. After you pass this round, you will sit for 4-5 on-site interviews.
Hereâs what you can expect during each round of the interview process.
Recruiter Phone Screen
The recruiter will call you and ensure your identity and if you are a mutual fit. They will assess this by asking few basic behavioral questions. The questions will cover the fundamentals of the role and will also shed light on the upcoming technical round.
Technical Phone Screen
This round covers data structures and algorithms. The questions are usually open-ended to test your eye for details. You will need to define the problem state and identify the requirements.
Remember to walk through the process and explain it algorithmically.
Google interviewers expect mistakes. Thus, you can optimize and test your code later. Jot down the corner and edge cases and brace for testing. Then, proceed to refine your code. Identify the bugs following the test cases and clean your code accordingly.
On-site
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What Is Your Approach To Hiring
In terms of hiring, there are few important things. I believe technical foundation is important for hiring engineers but this is not the only criteria. What I like to focus on is to build a diverse, engaged, and effective team. I pay a lot of attention to the culture and also peoples passion and drive.
I really believe that engineers excel if theyre passionate about what theyre working on and they feel supported and challenged. But also every person is different, so its interesting to look into what drives them. That is a question I frequently ask candidates, what are they passionate about and what do they really want to work on. I look into how to align their passion and their drive with what were working on.
In terms of cultural fit, I strongly believe that one person can change the whole team, so I evaluate how people collaborate with others, how they work within the team, and how they can handle different technical opinions. It is common to have technical design discussions with multiple approaches and not a clear right solution. Being able to work with a team to hash out different designs and proposing something that works for everyone is an essential skill, especially for more senior engineers.
Thats three things I focus on: the technical foundation, passion and drive, and the cultural fit.
Tips To Amp Up Your Google Engineering Manager Interview Prep
Just knowing what to prepare is not enough. When preparing for tough tech interviews at a company like Google, your prep should be planned, and you must adopt a strategy that ensures youâll be ready and comfortable during the interview. You should also be ready to adapt during the interview, so you can solve any problem that comes your way. Here are some tips to help you:
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The Google Onsite Interview
The Google onsite round involves speaking to a number of Googlers. Usually this will include four to six separate interviews, including one lunch interview.
Generally, you will be asked primarily coding interview questions and potentially one or two system design questions as well.
The more experience you have, the higher proportion of system design and topic-specific questions you can expect to be asked. Google rarely asks any system design questions to engineers with less than 5 years of experience.
Each interviewer collects feedback on how well you performed during the one-on-one interview with you. This feedback is collected by each interviewer independently as to eliminate cross-chatter and biases between your interviewers. If you felt as if you performed subpar in one of the interviews, that baggage stays there and does not follow you into the next interview.
Develop Questions For Each Topic
Next, we came up with questions designed to help us assess the candidates in each area.
Coming up with good questions for each area was surprisingly complicated. It was relatively easy to frame questions for the Respect category, for example, but harder to get at the Innovation issue. To make things come out even, we moved some questions around and slightly reworded them until we had at least three questions in each category.
We decided not to be shy and to go ahead and ask some weird and/or challenging questions. We recalled tough situations that had occurred on our team within the past few months . Then we transformed those experiences into questions we hoped would prime the candidates to describe how they would respond in similar situations. The questions included:
- How do you define the role of a manager on an engineering team?
- Describe a time when you were surprised by the work one of your reports did and how they spent their time. How did you respond?
- When a problem arises on the team, how do you decide at what point to step in and address it?
- Describe a time when you and one of your reports disagreed on priorities. How did you handle the situation?
- Tell us about a time when you put a great deal of trust in your team.
- What made you interested in moving into management?
- When you join a new team, how do you like to learn the product?
Finally, in preparation for the interviews, Allan and I divided the categories between the two of us. We each took separate notes.
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