I was at Google from Nov. 2005 to July 2017, and part of everyone’s job was to interview potential employees. I hated it, at first.
Interviewing Engineers
My first two years, I interviewed engineer candidates (being an engineer myself). There was a dreary routine to it after a while: desperately eager CS graduates, who all seemed the same.
This might have been an early warning, had I chosen to heed it, that I was sick of programming as a career. If I’d still been really into it, I’d have relished the challenge of interviewing engineers.
Google is famous for asking interviewees to solve a problem, either an algorithm or an actual coding question. The idea was that anyone can fake being able to code and talk a good game of it, but having them do it on the spot was a way to cut through that.
Google isn’t the first company to do this, of course. How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle -- How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers is an early book on Microsoft’s interviewing techniques.
As I said, I grew to hate doing this, but it did give me a good party trick: I’d ask people to solve the following problem:
You have eight billiard balls, all identical except that one is heavier. All you have available to you is a balance scale, where you can tell which side is heavier, but that’s all, like this:
.Of course anyone can find the heavier ball in three trials (4 against 4, then 2 against 2, then 1 against 1), but can you find it in two?
(Answer at the end. This actually wasn’t a Google question, because it’s in that Microsoft book.)
In case you’re feeling bad about being stumped, this should heighten your distress: most people I’ve given this to can solve it.
Is this method fair? Well, it’s what Google did, and we generally weren’t free to just ignore that. We even had constantly-growing lists of “prohibited questions,” i.e. questions whose answers had already been posted online, so interviewees might know them.
We also would help the candidate with hints if necessary, and in fact, talking out loud about your thought process and asking for help when you needed it was a plus, not a minus. It’s your ability to think on your feet that was being tested, not “did they know the answer?” In any case, that was what Google did, so I did it.
By the way, there are websites with all known Google interview questions, so that you can cheat and solve them without having to think on your feet. There are also websites, like leetcode, with many, many interview questions, so the utility of this method of interviewing has diminished. There are even websites where you can do a practice interview, and get feedback on how well you did. None of this was present when I was interviewing.
After an Engineer Interview
After you interview an engineer, you fill out a questionnaire, and you get to see what all the other interviewers thought. Still later, there might be a Hiring Committee meeting to decide on their fate (I never served on one of those, since I thought it would be depressing). You’d always find out what happened with the candidate.
Patents
I also had an interest in patent law, which I’d acquired at my previous job (Packeteer). I took a year off of work after that job, during which I studied and passed the Patent Bar exam and became a Patent Agent. This is not the same as being a patent lawyer, since I can’t appear in court or give legal advice, but I can represent you before the Patent Office (I won’t though, not having malpractice insurance).
When I was in college I actually considered, for a long time, being a lawyer. I think I could have been reasonably good at it, but on the whole I made the right choice in becoming an engineer. Still, I don’t have the reflexive hatred of lawyers that a lot of people have; I kinda like them (difficult as that might be to believe)!
At Google I made some contacts with the patent lawyers, and by and by I got asked if I would interview candidates for that job. They liked to have an engineer as one of the interviewers. Why?
Part of what a patent lawyer does is talking to engineers, at least the lawyers who did prosecution, or the acquisition of new patents (litigation or licensing doesn’t involve quite as much of that and I didn’t interview those candidates). So judging the candidate strictly from that angle is valuable.
A lawyer evaluating ideas for patents or actually writing one (or talking to an outside law firm that does it) has to come up to speed on unfamiliar technology very quickly. Most engineers don’t know that and wouldn’t believe it if you told them. But then, inability to imagine how anyone else thinks is one of the defining characteristics of Asperger’s, and as Temple Grandin said here
engineers do tend to suffer from that. They think lawyers are stupid. They’re wrong.
Interview Question for a Prosecution Lawyer
At any rate, when I wondered what would be a Googley interview question for patent lawyers, I came up with this:
Let’s pretend I’m an engineer who’s coming to you with an idea for a patent, and I’m describing it to you. After we’re done, you’re going to write the first claim for it.
I used a patent from a previous job, not a Google patent, so there was almost zero chance they’d be familiar with it.
No candidate ever said, “No, I’m not doing that.” After all, this is like what they’d be doing in their job, and anyway, the other interviewers will ask them the more lawyerly questions. They can ask me whatever questions they want about the invention; I’m not expecting them to know the topic.
I actually thought this was fun. I think they enjoyed it, too, but then they probably wouldn’t show it if not. I’d grade them on how agile their mind was, whether they asked questions when they didn’t know, and (as the lawyers wanted me to do, being the engineer interviewer) whether this person could get along with engineers.
The Results
This question proved to be a hit. Giving the same question over and over really drove home the differences between candidates. The problem, if it’s indeed a problem, was that I got too good at explaining the invention! Everyone was acing it. I think I did this about 40 times.
I mentioned earlier that when you did an engineer interview, you’d get to see what the other interviewers said about the candidate, and you’d be notified of the results of the hiring process. Not for these interviews! I never heard a single word back. I’m sure Legal had a meeting about each candidate, but I was never invited.
Sometimes a few months later I’d look and see if they’d become employees or not. But I later found out the Legal folks were paying attention! See below.
My title (“Who Wouldn’t Enjoy Torturing Lawyers?”) was my usual quip when people asked me why I was interviewing lawyers and not engineers.
My Interview Question for Patent Acquisition Specialists
There was a brief period in 2011 when Google had bought into the myth that a big company needs a lot of patents, for counter-suits, cross-licensing, etc. They lost a big auction for a group of Nortel patents:
Nortel has announced this evening that a consortium has won the bidding at a cash price of $4.5 billion. So who is in this consortium? Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, and others — essentially, it’s everyone but Google, it seems.
Ouch.
This means that over 6,000 patents will now be in the hands of these winners. And that sort of sucks for Google because losing the bidding means that they still control less than 1,000 patents. And that in turn means lawsuits. As in, Google is going to keep getting sued because they are vulnerable. That not good news for Google, but it’s the way it’s going to be. Well, provided the courts approve the bidding results.
Having a lot of patents does not “protect” you in any way, shape, or form from patent trolls, but that’s another, longer discussion. Google finally bought Motorola, mainly for its patents (which were mostly worthless, IMHO).
Anyhow, Google was interviewing people whose job it would be to acquire patents. My question “pretend I’m the inventor and I’m describing my invention to you” wasn’t appropriate, so I needed a new one. This is what I came up with:
Google has the chance to bid on a portfolio of 1,000 patents in the wireless space. You have 24 hours to decide whether to bid, and how much. You can use any Google resources you want to help you. How do you do it?
This situation is definitely unrealistic. In reality you have weeks, or even months, to formulate your bid in an auction like this. Still, it tests creative thinking, so I’ll defend the question. There’s no right answer, and in fact, I asked it 13 times and got 13 different answers!
Analysis
Digression: I used to say that, in Engineering they’d give you a task and ask “Can you have this by tomorrow?” In Legal, they’d give you a task and say “We’re having a meeting with outside counsel on this next Tuesday.” So in reality, if you only have 24 hours to do something, it’s usually because you procrastinated until the deadline.
There are automated methods of valuing patents (see here and here) and I would expect that any candidate would at least be familiar with them and their limitations. I kinda hoped someone would say, “I’d get all the best analytical minds in Google and give them 24 hours to come up with something!” That would have definitely won the prize. Many aspects of a patent are susceptible to automated analysis, as one of those references shows (these are all explained there), and none of them are really very good:
Backward Citations: how many other patents it cites
Citations to non-patent literature: how many non-patent sources it cites
Claims: the number of claims, or the number of words in the claims may be relevant to their strength (there is doubt about this)
Forward Citations: how many other patents cite IT (utility of this only works if it’s an old patent)
Essentiality: is the patent essential to a standard
Grant lag: how long the PTO took before granting the patent
Legal status : is the patent currently abandoned, pending, or granted? Have its maintenance fees been paid?
Licensing : has the patent been licensed out (difficult to determine)?
Opposition or Litigation : has the patent been litigated or challenged
Ownership : who owns it
Term : how long does it have to run
Technological scope: the Patent Office assigns codes to each patent corresponding to its technological area. Arguably, a patent with more codes assigned may be more valuable. Or not.
To be honest, of the answers from the 13 candidates I gave this to, I can’t remember 11 of them, but they were all over the map! I also don’t remember who was hired or not hired.
The two answers I do recall are:
I’d just bid $350,000 each.
I’d get a lot of people to read them all (this is allowed: I said you could use any Google resources you liked).
Bidding on an auction is mostly a seat-of-the-patents management decision and it depends on knowing who the other bidders are. In any case, the period of hiring people purely to acquire patents was brief.
Actually Being in Legal
By and by, I did transfer to Legal, as a Technical Advisor in Patent Litigation. I had many adventures there, some of which will have to remain confidential. The other ones, I’ll write about in a separate post.
The one that’s relevant to this is: I found out that they actually were paying attention to my reports on the candidates! In fact, I was famous in Legal. I felt like Rodriguez in the movie Searching for Sugar Man, who gets tracked down in Detroit by his fans in South Africa, where he was famous, and brought down there for concerts. He didn’t even know he had fans. There were people waiting for him at the airport, and he said, “Who are all these people here for?”
Appendix: That 8 ball problem
Take any six balls and weigh three against three. Call those groups A and B.
If A and B are the same, then it’s one of the remaining two balls. Weigh those.
If A and B are different, then the heavy ball is in one of those groups. Let’s say it’s the A group.
Pick any two balls from A and weigh them. If one is heavier, that’s it. If they’re the same, the remaining ball is heavier.