[achiang]

I joined Google last year, hired directly as a manager. Germane to this thread, I'm in my early 40s.

At Google, the bar is that you are expected to be able to contribute as an equivalently senior IC, but will be expected to use those skills to inform how you do manager stuff.

So you will definitely get technical questions, the type of which will vary slightly depending on which level of management you're interviewing for. But they will be legit technical questions, like solving a graph theory problem or designing a distributed system.

In addition, you'll also get explicit sessions probing you on your leadership style and management fundamentals. Standard behavioral stuff.

Non CS background doesn't seem to matter as much as actual leadership experience afaict. Formal leadership roles seem to be weighted more strongly when considering your level, but you do seem to get some credit for informal roles too. I'm not super sure on this point.

I think it'd be hard to go directly as an external IC to a manager role. That's not a risk I'd personally want to take if I were the hiring manager in that situation.

If it helps you calibrate, I had about 6 years experience as a line manager at other companies, and I was considered for (and hired as) a line manager. I was never being considered as a 2nd level manager of managers.

hth.

[lordnacho]

Can you share a bit more about what management questions you were asked, and perhaps a hint as to how one prepares for them? There seems to be plenty about technical questions, but not so much about management and leadership.

Also is the technical bar lower? And do they care at all about having done business school?

[achiang]

They are truly standard behavioral questions that you can't really prepare for, other than thinking about what you did in various scenarios.

"Tell me about a time you had to resolve conflict between two engineers on your team."

And then a bunch of follow-up questions. "What went well/poorly about that", "what would you do differently next time", etc.

This is why I think it'd be hard to go directly from an IC role to a manager as an external hire.

FWIW, I think that hesitation would apply at any company, not just Google. In my last company, I myself was in charge of hiring other engineering managers, and I can tell you that I didn't even consider any resumes unless they called out some sort of lead role.

If they were an actual manager, i could skip directly to the behavioral questions. If they were a tech or project lead of some sort, I did a lot more probing on the exact scope on how much they dealt with people, what they were and were not responsible for, etc. before even getting into the behavioral stuff.

Managers are hugely influential in any org and hiring is an inherently risky activity. You want to minimize risk, not increase it by hiring someone who's never done the actual job before.

Back to Google, I'm not sure the technical bar is lower at all. I got literally the same questions that any senior IC would get, just fewer of them in order to have time for the manager sessions.

No idea whether recruiters care about business school. From my own personal observation, b-school can prepare you to do some analytical stuff, like cash flow analysis or broaden your knowledge base by reading M&A case studies, but nothing in there prepares you to be in charge of running a team with actual humans on it.