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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)

#121

Post by fjsolwmv »

sailingparrot wrote: post #112
waisbrot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 kinds of defeat the purpose of the screening interview though doesn't it? The point is to not disturb an engineer when 99% of the people that are being screened are unqualified.

If your engineering managers can't be disturbed than maybe you don't have time to hire.

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

#123

Post by fjsolwmv »

dvt wrote: post #117
geofft wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you post a link to one of these? The first Quora answer I find says, "First interview was on the phone with a recruiter. The questions were typical recruiter screening. Nothing hard or detailed. Questions about background and feeling out my interest." I definitely believe there's a recruiter screening process - I would just be surprised if it's the same screening process they give to new college grads, with the s…

I read a similar screen a few years ago (some guy with a math PhD, also applying for a director position at GOOG). I'll try to find the blog post. Even if the screens are different, I'm not sure they're that different.

"math PhD" as highest credential or achievement is plain or senior engineer, nowhere near director.

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

#124

Post by markbnj »

geofft wrote: post #48
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.

It's possible that the process didn't permit much back and forth clarifying of concepts or questions. It does seem that way reading between the lines. I've had some similar experiences over the years (not with Google) so it seems at least plausible to me. It's also possible, if not likely, that the author of the OP was upset, felt slighted, and is not remembering things as clearly as he or she thinks.

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

#125

Post by sdhgaiojfsa »

waisbrot wrote: post #87
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…

> 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.

I would not ask the questions listed in this interview. But, I'm not a recruiter. I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am. Those questions may not be optimize for the same thing any given candidate is optimizing for.

> 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.

People in the original thread in 2016 said much the same, arguing that people would no longer want to work for Google. It's 2018 and Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent. Seems like offering high salaries and interesting work matters a lot more to the average candidate than whether the prescreen has a view suboptimal questions.

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

#126

Post by stevep98 »

itissid wrote: post #25
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…

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...

A friend of mine got into a little confusion at immigration when asked his profession to which he replied “programmer”, which was seen as lesser category of job than his visa was issued for, which was “software engineer”

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

#127

Post by DannyBee »

dvt wrote: post #100
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…

Not sure why this is so highly rated when it's so blatantly wrong. There are literally dozens of director-level interview samples online (as well as people discussing these on Quora and other platforms) and they all start with the recruiter screening process. To say that only SREs get screened is incredibly misleading.

Can you link me some?

I suspect, again, it's more people thinking they are being interviewed for director, when they aren't (or it was long enough ago that it was before leadership recruiting existed)

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

#128

Post by fjsolwmv »

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…

Sounds like you ate the recruiter linkedin spam bait, or whatever the thing was then. "We are very impressed with your $EXPERIENCE and our engineers would like to talk to you."

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

#129

Post by geofft »

jerf wrote: post #65
geofft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 assi…

So the trick is to not answer the question immediately if you're unsure, but ask to clarify. Which, again, is a good skill in life (as an IC, and certainly as a director of engineering). If you're reviewing your coworker's code and they got something wrong, asking "Can you clarify what you meant here" will go over ten times better than "You're wrong" (and a hundred times better if they're not in fact wrong). Maybe this is a bug in human cognition, sure, but at a Google-sized company you can't get anything technical done without interfacing with buggy humans on a regular basis.

"The KILL signal? So you're calling the kill function with KILL as an argument, or typing kill dash KILL, or...?" would have cleared up the confusion immediately, because even a screener unfamiliar with the material would have said "Oh, that's not what I'm asking."

I do strongly believe that the questions as written down are not as reported in this blog post, because there are tons of other sources who have written about being asked this question in an initial screen, and they all phrase it as "What is the signal that the kill command sends."

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

#130

Post by mieseratte »

bartread wrote: post #49
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 appl…

In my experience, the recruiters are some of the best, nicest folks I've had the pleasure of dealing with. I know that's a low bar to crawl over in the world of copy-paste recruiters, but they were good folks who made sure things worked, and when my interviewer failed to call, made sure to prod his ass.

Now, I didn't get past the phone screen but the experience actually interviewing was so piss-poor I doubt I'd have pressed on had I passed. The interviewer managed to call nearly 30 minutes late, spent about as much time talking about himself as he did asking me questions, and when he actually asked questions he would proceed to repeat what I had said as if I hadn't even said anything.

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