Plenty of discussion on the first time this was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272
That was posted in 2016, so this submission qualifies as new content. (it doesn't feel like over a year though!)
Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
31–40 of 344 posts
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#32Another data point - I had a very similar Google recruiter "test", being disdainfully dismissed because I couldn't/wouldn't regurgitate the same incorrect template answers they had. I've since terminated any approaches by Google recruiters as being a waste of my time and emotional energy.
This is similar to taking standardized tests where you are smarter than the question-writer. What would you select as the answer to the following question: " x is an integer. If x² = 16, then x =? A. 1. B. 2. C. 4. D. 16. E. Not enough information. " Think hard and tell me what you would select. For me it is VERY clear that I have to select C, 4. It is just as clear that it is the wrong answer, and the correct answer…
IRL the misinformed question author wouldn't include an "E" as a possible answer and that's your cue to select C.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#33Google hiring has been fubar for years now.
I think many of us here have been contacted ( unsolicited ) by Google for job interviews in the past.
My Google interview story ends with me stopping the 8th interview ( 4th technical interview ) half-way in due to the frustration of listening to my interviewer loudly reply to text messages on his phone while I'm trying to write very complex source code into a shared Google Text Document using no other development tools.
At one point the 8th interviewer asked me if I had ever used Github before. Considering Google cold-contacted me on my public Github email address and half my resume was Github projects it was obvious this guy didn't even look at my resume...
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#34Same experience here with the trivia questions. They called me out of the blue about 10 years ago and said they wanted to interview me. So I said OK. Later, during the interview, the questions were largely trivia. How do you remove a file using the rm command when the file is named -f?
I was like, what sane person would name a file -f? Anyway, after I got over the shock of the question... you can ./-f, use the absolute /path/to/-f or -- -f and maybe other ways too.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#35Tossing my hat in the ring with a similar experience. Was approached in 2003 because of an app I had written that got attention, and was told that Googlers wanted to speak with me about the app. What followed was three calls with gate-keepers of sorts, between which there was zero knowledge transfer from call to call. None of them inquired about the app and all of them asked questions so unrelated to the app that the…
To be fair, if any company hired you based just on your app, it would be unfair to you and the company. Most software companies thrive because of generalist SWEs who need to demonstrate consistent performance.
It might be that the app was a foot in the door but might not be applicable past that initial point
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#36Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#37I had a similar experience in 2013, which while I passed the screen it only ended up matching me to SRE roles. I have PhD in CompSci so that was pretty disappointing so I did not bother scheduling an onsite.
My more recent experience was a lot more positive, the screen is much more conversational and coding-based and not a test of wrote memorization of CS trivia.
I don't know if this is due to changes in the past 5 years or the recruiters being from different teams.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#38This sounds like an old post. Google recruiting was really terrible 10 years ago but these days it’s just bad or okay sometimes. I would be shocked if they asked potential directors of engineering these questions today.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#39> Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper. This is the problem. Google hires as such ridiculous volume (onboarding >5000 people last quarter, and on average growing at ~10000 employees (FTEs) per year) that the process gets abstracted into whatever Google thinks can be done algorithmically. This makes almost no sense for most roles, including any type of specialist as well as middle/senior manage…
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...
Could you find the source for this?
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#40I 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 intervie…
> then I started criticizing the interview process and (more importantly) Google Finance as being pretty bad, and this really upset everyone. Not rocket science, everybody. Who knew that people don't respond well to being criticized by strangers! Nobel Prize.
Guess we found the Google Finance developer on HN