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

ive had 3 google interviews, one on-site, and I can say without a doubt that its not only demoralizing but a complete waste of time. Reading their own outline of the hiring process and watching the youtube video, I was instructed that "goofy" google questions weren't asked anymore. No less than 5 minutes in the meeting room and I was met with "how do you build a datacenter on the moon?" followed by "how many cans of beer can you fit in a school bus?"

My latest phone screen about a year ago started off with a technical recruiter handing off from Mountain View to a recruiter in San Diego, then passing me back to a technical screener in mountain view who couldnt remember his questions. The follow-up technical review came from Boulder Colorado and focused on C programming and Linux dynamic libraries for a SRE position.

All in all I hope they get their hiring process sorted out. The most disparaging and frustrating thing is hearing "just keep trying! everyone has to apply at least N times before they get hired." The fact that this sentiment exists at all speaks volumes to the management climate.

I'd love to hear thoughtful constructive criticism during an interview. But unsolicited negativity would be a bit of a flag.

That is true, but on the other hand, if the person reading the script stands on the wording of the question, as soon as they read the "correct" answer you've lost. There's now no recovering, because "obviously" now that you've heard the right answer you're just spinning to explain away your failure.

(As with others, I will stipulate that accuracy in this report may not be 100%, but I'm not necessarily willing to assign it 0% either, especially as I've encountered people like that myself.)

There are different clues in different contexts. The hardest is if there is a very technical definition that makes another answer more correct.

Maybe in a test of English:

"John has less _____ than Mary. So they decided to go to Mary's apartment for breakfast."

A. Bread

B. Window

C. Eggs

D. Times

"

This is an incredibly stupid question oh my God. What would I even pick.

All of the choices, and the whole question, is so stupid.

But anyway obviously they want you to pick "eggs" because you are supposed to know it is good for breakfast. You can tell how low the bar is by its inclusion of window, as though you might not know this simple word.

It is ungrammatical to say "less window than", "less times than" and "less eggs than" (you're supposed to say fewer eggs than.)

Only "bread" is grammatical in that sentence and it makes just as much sense as all the other stupid choices, but I would pick the ungrammatical choice C (it's a hard one though, the resulting sentence is stupid) versus the grammatically correct choice A.

This is just a technical distinction though.

So, as part of my job, I have been the hiring manager for directors for Google (3 in the past 6 months), and recruit quite a bit.

This was a simple phone screen, and it seems the recruiter was not given a good set of questions.

However, I actually doubt it was really a director of engineering screen, despite this person's experience level (maybe it should have been, but ...).

I say this because I know a lot of the leadership recruiters, (it's a separate thing from regular SWE/manager recruiting), and I know how the process works. They don't screen candidates this way normally precisely because it doesn't make sense. (Whatever you may think of Google's regular non-leadership recruiting :P)

Instead, they ask question directly relevant to what the hiring manager wants/needs (IE i give them the questions to use), and in most cases, do just enough to know whether it would be a waste of time for the hiring manager to talk to them. At which point, a hiring manager like me talks to the candidate and decides whether to bring them in for onsites.

This particular set of questions seems closer to standard non-leadership SRE questions.