[litewulf]

When I interviewed at Google 5 years ago they weren't using those brainteasers.

There are many posts online about the actual, CS-y questions that you can expect in a Google interview, I had just assumed that the mentions of brainteasers were merely urban legend.

[inopinatus]

I've interviewed at Google. Years, years ago. I didn't get the job. Similarly, no brainteasers, but something worse: they made me write syntactically correct code on a whiteboard. I have never written code without using a keyboard; turns out, I just didn't have the neural pathways for anything else. My brain kinda seized up. I specifically recall failing to recognise the fibonacci sequence (especially horrifying given that I read mathematics at Edinburgh). Things went downhill from there.

Ever since, whenever I've interviewed someone, I ask them to demonstrate their strengths to me first.

[objclxt]

> Similarly, no brainteasers, but something worse: they made me write syntactically correct code on a whiteboard

Interestingly, I believe Google are slowly moving over all their coding interviews from whiteboards to Chromebooks - this is what I was told by my Google recruiter when I last interviewed with them, anyway.

The whiteboard can be a bit polarising...I love whiteboarding code, but I suspect many people detest it with a passion (I used to teach CS, so it's something I picked up on the job). I do think it is rather unfair to have candidates whiteboard and demand syntactically correct code, especially when under pressure. There's room for flexibility.

[mturmon]

"I ask them to demonstrate their strengths to me first"

Nice. That agrees with some of the other comments here. For example, about asking about past work or projects that they are proud of or that demonstrate their skills.

Another hard issue is what to do, as an interviewer, if things start to go downhill to the point where the candidate becomes flustered and you can tell they're not at their best.

[eternauta3k]

What do you mean by "read mathematics at Edinburgh"?

[objclxt]

From what I hear, the brainteasers were retired quite a while ago for engineering and technology roles, but persisted in other fields (like account management, sales, etc) for some time longer.