My impression is that Google standardizes interviews with a sort of grading rubric.

Similar to standardized testing in education, this method of evaluation is biased towards a specific type of personality/skill set.

I went through a phone interview with someone on the Software Test Engineering team, set up by a recruiter. Right off the bat, I felt this person was not enthusiastic about the interview. I'm sure due to the sheer number of applicants interviewed at Google, it gets mundane to have to conduct so many.

At the start of the interview, there wasn't really much of an introduction; it was as if he had a list of questions prepared to ask and got started right away. I didn't feel like there was any organic conversation that allowed the opportunity to communicate any of my experience or skill set.

The first question was simple but not well-defined: "For the mathematical equation for search bar (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), how would a test plan be organized and implemented?"

I asked a couple of questions for clarification and apparently took too long to formulate my answer, because his reply was, "Okay, well, that took a while."

I correctly answered the brain teaser coding question, but I'm pretty sure I had already failed the "answer a vague question with not enough information to allow a detailed response" portion of the rubric.

At the end of the interview, the interviewer thoroughly answered all of my questions about the team and the position, which was nice. But overall, throughout the interview, I felt that with any questions I asked, the purpose of the reply was more to keep things moving rather than to add clarification. This was unnecessary considering we finished five minutes early.

1. For the mathematical equation for a search bar (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), how would a test plan be organized and implemented?

2. Write a function to locate the first character in a given string which is out of alphabetical order and return the index to that character. (e.g. "dfhka" -> 4) "aBcDea" -> 5