Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

I interviewed at Google a million years ago and got the same sort of "trivia list", which was surprising to me. I passed most of them and everyone seemed excited about me while I was there, but then I started criticizing the interview process and (more importantly) Google Finance as being pretty bad, and this really upset everyone.

I could tell they weren't used to ever being criticized, pointing out how the interview process had effectively zero behavioral aspects or problem solving questions, as well as all the gaps between one of their products and the competition, and they did not give me an offer.

The funny part is they incorporated much of my feedback into Google Finance years later. It's still a mess, but hey at least they made some progress.

I have no idea at all why people want to work for these kind of companies if that is the entrance criteria; especially with that kind of seniority and being abused like that. Was Norvig doing these tests I wonder? I do think people overestimate the importance in their life of working for a company like that.

Reminds me of the time a TSA person at the airport asked a programmer at the port of entry to answer some canned CS questions from wikipedia and expected the exact answers...

> Me: on which kind of CPU? Why not let me compare my code to yours in a benchmark?

While I agree that this is the right answer, questions regarding "Big-O" are trying to find out whether or not you can evaluate the complexity of an algorithm. If you can, you have some hope of writing different useful benchmarks that could be compared, where sometimes you can see orders of magnitude of improvement. If you can't, you might be just blindly tweaking the code to get 1-5% improvement from compiler flags, assembly optimizations, etc.

In practice this recruiter might be bad at their job by binding themselves so rigidly to the script.

I would have hung up about halfway in when the recruiter said there was a best sorting algorithm. That is patently false, and the best algorithm depends heavily on your needs at the time which is where engineering comes in. Whoever wrote that test didn't seem to understand what engineers do, but what makes a competent engineering organization.