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

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

#41

Post by s17n »

_Marak_ wrote: post #33

Google 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…

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

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

#42

Post by lxhrstn »

cordite wrote: post #39
itissid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://twitter.com/cyberomin/status/835888786462625792

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

#43

Post by geofft »

This was posted previously, in October 2016:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272

An actual Google director of engineering pointed out that these are individual-contributor SWE/SRE questions (and I can attest I got very similar questions as a new college grad).

As I commented previously: "Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds like he thinks his current role, CEO-who-writes-code of a very small software company (http://www.gwan.com/about), qualifies him for a director-of-engineering-level position. He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts."

Also, a ton of this conversation makes a lot more sense if you make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702726 (Which is a very gentle assumption, if the interviewee also mistakenly thought they were being interviewed to be a director of engineering.)

In which case, screening out someone with an inflated sense of their own experience and overconfidence that the stupid person on the other end of the phone is stupid is exactly what this process is supposed to do.

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

#44

Post by rorykoehler »

w8rbt wrote: post #34

Same 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 absolu…

Surely the correct answer is you Google how to do it!?

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

#45

Post by paulcole »

4684499 wrote: post #24

Silly question maybe, is there any chance they do this on purpose?

Zappos has high-level candidates be interviewed by lower-level employees. This is a test to see how they interact with and treat another person who's not on their "level."

Wouldn't be surprised if this is something similar. Acting like the smartest and most important person in the room is rarely a good look, even if you are.

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

#46

Post by madamelic »

zeroxfe wrote: post #13

This is the pre-screen, very likely conducted by a poorly-trained (or incompetent) recruiter. IIRC, there is a ton of room for response variety in the answers, and the screeners are trained to handle them (obv. very difficult to do well.) The pre-screens are act as first-pass filters before the actual interviews (conducted by engineers.) Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-neg…

>this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process

I wouldn't call it a "false negative" if your recruiters are completely incapable of filtering correctly.

It's a false negative if someone has an off day. It is an error in your hiring process if it purposefully filters out people who get their hands dirty and can talk nuance.

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

#47

Post by onion2k »

zeroxfe wrote: post #13

This is the pre-screen, very likely conducted by a poorly-trained (or incompetent) recruiter. IIRC, there is a ton of room for response variety in the answers, and the screeners are trained to handle them (obv. very difficult to do well.) The pre-screens are act as first-pass filters before the actual interviews (conducted by engineers.) Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-neg…

Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process.

Yes, and it's worth remembering that Google are the unfortunate casualty here. Being rejected as a false negative sucks as a candidate, but ultimately there are plenty more developer jobs around if you're actually good. As a business rejecting the right person could cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, mistakes, and bad PR.

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

#48

Post by geofft »

wyldfire wrote: post #22

> Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper. When I got a similar screening from GOOG, the recruiter confessed upfront to having these technical questions scripted and seemed much more flexible than this particular one. > 7. what is the name of the KILL signal? The question might have been "what is the default signal sent by 'kill'?" The answer to that question is SIGTERM and not SIGKILL. The recru…

Also, if you can't have enough of a conversation with someone who's unfamiliar with the "kill" command to figure out exactly what signal they have in mind even when they're using the wrong words, and without getting upset at them or deciding that they're beneath you, you're not qualified to be a director of engineering.

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

#49

Post by bartread »

andrew_ wrote: post #10

Tossing 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…

My take on Google's hiring process, having observed a few people going through it, is that it's a complete nightmare. Unfortunately I don't think there's any incentive for them to change because so many people are willing to go through that nightmare in order to work there.

My whole approach to recruitment is to strip the process down as much as possible to make it as easy and appealing as possible for people to apply, but that's because I have to: I work for a company nobody's heard of, and which doesn't have engineers queuing up to work for them.

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

#50

Post by KboPAacDA3 »

cordite wrote: post #39
itissid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/immigrant-says-customs-quizzed...
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