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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)

#101

Post by mirth23 »

organicmultiloc wrote: post #21

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 intervie…

That's familiar. Towards the end of my Google interview 10+ years ago I was asked "What do you think Google could do better?" and my answer, which was constructively framed in terms of my wanting to help fix it, led to the technical interviewer saying "Well I won't waste any more of your time."

Like OP, I was told that I was interviewing for a managerial position (in my case, a PM in SRE) but was given a technical interview that seemed designed for recent grads (I had about 10 years of experience at that point). My interviewer was My sense was that they were looking for extremely pedantic and detail-oriented programmers and nothing that I was being asked had to do with real problem solving, design, abstract thinking, or interpersonal skills.

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

#102

Post by nfRfqX5n »

my interview process spanned 5 months between all of them. really wasn't fun trying to have a convo and answer questions while the interviewer types down every word you say. seemed very robotic.

you get almost no feedback for spending all of that time, so you don't really know where you went wrong or how to improve. i understand they can't say anything due to the possibility of a lawsuit, but they should be able to figure something out with that

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

#103

Post by dasil003 »

s17n wrote: post #41
_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.

So in the realm of infinite knowledge and experience candidates may have, the signal you want is based purely on the specific contrived questions of your choice.

You should be aware this is not unbiased, it's just biased towards those who happen to have worked on similar problems to what you think is important.

Google can probably get away with this due to the size of applicant pool, but when I see other companies cargo-culting this approach I can't help but see a huge talent arbitrage opportunity.

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

#104

Post by waisbrot »

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

I mean, you maybe wouldn't just send an offer letter to someone who wrote an app, sure. (But depending on what they wrote, maybe you would. Something reasonably large and open-source, where they ended up incorporating a substantial amount of code from other contributors?)

But if someone's got 30kloc sitting there, why wouldn't you look at that body of work instead of starting from scratch with "please write FizzBuzz on this whiteboard"?

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

#105

Post by psyc »

geofft wrote: post #58
koolba wrote: post #5

This is so good I can’t tell if it’s literal or a parody. The part about inodes in particular.

The interviewee's answer to the inode thing is simply wrong. An inode is metadata (or "attributes", sure): it's not an index or an identifier. I think the interviewee is thinking of the inode number , which is a related but different thing. The interviewer was right.

http://www.linfo.org/inode.html

I swear this is about the 20th time in a week I've seen a good comment (the parent) in the gray. Unless I'm imagining things, this has been happening with extremely noticeable increasing frequency. I've held off saying anything about it for days while it keeps happening more and more.

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

#106

Post by hennsen »

cm2187 wrote: post #55
s17n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And most resumes are full of lies anyway.

And somebody putting only lies in a resume will turn super honest on the phone?

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

#108

Post by CodeSheikh »

Yes this guy might have an inflated complexion of a self-claimed all-star but to be honest Google and all big tech companies have really frustrating recruiting process and most of the time interviewee's frustrations go unheard. So this guy took the only approach that he could think off, is to take his plea to the internet.

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

#109

Post by jhall1468 »

Bjartr wrote: post #83
onion2k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's totally fine. The problem is this way is a dumb way of doing it. Send out screener coding questions and have an engineer quickly review the responses rather than someone with a business degree that has no idea how to speak the same language an engineer would.

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

#110

Post by aje403 »

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…

Doesn’t sound like the interviewee has an inflated sense of worth from what’s written and it sounds like the interviewer cheated off someone to get his degree
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