Your advice may be good in general, but I suspect that trying to find 'the button' on most of the Google interviewers I know would quickly turn into interview suicide.

Every one of us tries to leave a few minutes at the end for questions and interaction, but for us, the meat of the interview is when you let us see how you think.

I usually ask a question about something on your resume. You damn well better be able to talk about it like, well, someone smart that worked with that technology or platform for the period you claim. I don't care whether GWT, Java, or left handed smokeshifters are on your resume, but if you put one of them there, I expect you to be at least reasonable competent and able to discuss it. Perhaps for an entire hour.

If you do not understand something, take it off the resume. Or put some weasel words or a date that might let the interviewer know that your FORTRAN is, perhaps, a wee bit dated. (Laugh not - a very dear friend has been using FORTRAN in the finance world for almost twenty years.)

I always ask you to write some code.

This does not mean 'write some pseudocode that cannot work', it means pick up the marker, and write something pretty close to syntatactically and semantically correct. I do not care if you drop a semicolon or name a variable poorly. I care very much if you cannot write a method signature even close to correct, when you claim a decade of Java.

If you do not know Java, use something you do. I will transcribe it, and chat about it with a C++ or Python or C# guy afterwards.

I expect the solution to be reasonably good. I have screened over 50 people thus far this year. Most were ok, some were great, and some did not do well. The ones that made it were the ones that answered the questions well. The ones that showed at least one sign of clear skill, and that did not make me regret spending time with them.

I had a recent screen where a candidate did not know an important detail of how interfaces interact in Java, and how you would write one that did not have . I was not hunting trivia, nor was I hoping for the candidate to perish. I expected, though, that a candidate rating himself a 9 out of 10 in Java and listing more than 7 years of experience would have pretty much completely mastered this fundamental tool of the language. I would not expect that from a new grad, or someone not terribly familiar with the language.

At the end of the day, every single person I screen might be writing a system I depend on within a year. I want at least one good reason to think that said system will work.

Scott