My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances.

My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again.

I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm not because I don't have the patience for their interview questions.

To be clear, the entire question was: What's not in a Linux inode?

My answer was: Lots of things...dinosaurs, the moon...

The interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename.

I honestly lost all respect for the process, sorry Googlers.

I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here:

I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone.

However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remember the exact algorithm so I basically had to re-figure it out on the fly, which took most of the interview (I even similarly mention "in any real situation I would just look this up", but that didn't help). At the end, I had a bunch of pseudo-C++-code that should do it correctly.

I thought I was done, then the interviewer said she would go go copy my code and compile it after the interview to see if I was right, which blew my mind. It was never mentioned previously that the code would actually be compiled and run, and with no syntax highlighting or ability to compile and test the code myself there is zero chance it was ever going to work.

I never heard back, so I'm assuming my code failed and they left it at that. Anyway, I'm much happier now that I think I would have been at Google.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848556

I once had an in-person interview where they gave me a sheet of printed code and asked me to point out the syntax errors. Some interviewers are absolutely insane.

Github PRs also lack syntax checking etc - so it isn't something you'll never see at work right?

(Admittedly if the PR doesn't build why are you reviewing it but whatever)

This is incorrect. You can run tests on PRs and disallow merging until it passes all the checks

https://github.com/features/actions