Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gwan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 344 posts

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

#81

Post by organsnyder »

be_jenk wrote: post #59
ionforce wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Typically socially well-adjusted people can accept criticism on a project/product without taking it personally

Depends on the context and how it is delivered. If a job applicant started talking about my team's product "being pretty bad", that would be a red flag—I can only imagine what their code-review style would be like.

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

#83

Post by Bjartr »

onion2k wrote: post #47
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 million…

Google believes the opposite, that hiring the wrong person could cost that if they have a negative impact on the teams they work in so they prefer false negatives over false positives.

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

#84

Post by crdoconnor »

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 is the pre-screen, very likely conducted by a poorly-trained (or incompetent) recruiter.

Which is embarrassing. Their brand means that they can hire the best people. They have the money to hire the best people. There's literally nothing stopping them from hiring recruiters who have an ounce of competence except themselves.

It's not even like this can be blamed on the recruiter in question - they clearly have a systemic problem.

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

#85

Post by johannes1234321 »

mindfulplay wrote: post #35
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…

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

Well, maybe they also hire to own the app and the user base behind it or some technology in it.

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

#87

Post by waisbrot »

geofft wrote: post #43

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…

> He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts

OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview.

> exactly what this process is supposed to do

You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is.

> make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions

In your post you imagine slight differences that might make the questions more reasonable. I think the main problem here is the responses to the answers. For a non-engineer quizzing someone, the response to an answer should be "OK" and then you note down the answer and show your notes to an engineer at the end. This solves both the "that's not what's written on my sheet" problem and also allows the interviewee to form a more nuanced impression of your recruiting process.

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

#88

Post by pfarrell »

In my experience and from what I've gleaned from the outside, recruiting at Google consists of shoveling as many bodies into the pipeline every week to allow the top few to get picked for an onsite interview where it doesn't matter if they say no to everyone because there are always more applicants next week.

After getting through phone interviews and getting flown out to SF for an interview at youtube, I made the mistake of thinking I was like 95% of the way through the process. At google (and I suspect a few of the other megacorporations), getting to onsite interviews means you now in the lottery with similar chances.

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

#89

Post by reaperducer »

eitally wrote: post #8

> 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…

>the process gets abstracted into whatever Google thinks can be done algorithmically

Unfortunately, this is not unique to Google. Believing that all the world's problems and challenges can be solved by an algorithm is part of the culture. And it's what alienates SV from the rest of the world.

It's why Facebook doesn't understand that people want to see what they choose to follow on their newsfeed, and not what FB's latest algo thinks they want to see.

It's why Google thinks it's OK to collect every scrap of data it can about a person and try to follow them around. If a person did that, it would be called "stalking" and is a crime.

It's why Uber believes that it's OK to treat its passengers poorly and its drivers even worse - because they're all just values in a seemingly unlimited array that can just be popped off if they don't meet the metric.

It's why Amazon thinks it's OK to mix fake items in with real items when shipping purchases. Because data can always be trusted and 1 always equals 1.

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

#90

Post by dmoy »

madamelic wrote: post #46
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.

They mean false negative from a statistics point of view, which is what this literally is (if we take the author's assumption that they're qualified at face value). A false negative is an error in the process.
Post reply on HN