Google - UX Engineer - Phone Screen
Level: UX Engineer (different from pure UI/frontend - which is more engineering vs UX and prototyping)
Education: Masters
Years of Experience: ~8 at the time (10+ currently)
Questions Asked:
Had to make an algorithm that changed the color of every character in a string in a specific order based on an array. Question expanded to add this to the page with other designs/visual features that the manager came up with on the spot (New manager just promoted from IC running his own team and he wasn’t sure what he was looking for engineer wise)
Also asked some in depth questions regarding massive amounts of data on the page and how to increase efficiency.
Specifically ended on how I would handle a situation where there’s so much data that it freezes the page on load while calculating and attempting to create graphs, etc.
I did not know the answer he was looking for here, as that sounds like bad feature design if it freezes the page. I spoke of adding a loader with an async function to gather the data and handle the calculations after everything else. However, it turns out the answer he was looking for had to do with using web workers for a background thread, which I honestly still haven’t had to directly implement in my career.
I did not pass this interview and get an onsite. However, the recruiter immediately tried to set me up with another team, as they said I didn’t actually do bad, but the manager decided he wanted a different type of engineer. I did not bother continuing with any of the other teams after that.
Will note also that was the first time I’ve had an interviewer show complete disinterest in being there and not remotely talk even which asked questions. It was like he wanted me to flounder.