Google Systems Engineer interview questions

Got through the initial recruiter interview. They will ask you to rate yourself in different technical areas of expertise. Don't exaggerate! The recruiters are not technical, but they will close with asking you questions from a sheet they have based on your answers to the expertise question. The higher you rate yourself, the tougher the questions. Did that fine. Got to the first one-on-one technical interview, also over the phone. VERY technical, not much small talk. Questions were about explaining how traceroute work and displays timing numbers. Forgot the second one, but not too hard.

From very beginning process started out a bit messy as recruiters somehow switched my position to different one. In the end they managed to sort it out with my preparing for different position half of my "preparation time". Interview itself didn't last very long which I took as a bad sign. Interviewer was asking me questions based on what he saw on the resume, thus most of the questions were Linux and Networking. From how TCP/IP work, to what's a three way handsake to inodes and symbolic/hard links. However, as some interviews suggest interviewer didn't lead me to find an answer even when I didn't have one. Unfortunately for me whole process was based on whether you knew the question or not, with little or none involvement from the interviewer regarding my answers. Couple of days later I got an email that we won't be continuing the process.