Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by shubb » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:00 PM UTC

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.

It's hard to square that with the whole 10x engineer thing.

It is true that hiring a security risk could be more damaging than rejecting a super talent, but all companies have systems in place that should reduce impact of incompetence and manage out inadevertantly hired incompetent people, because no hiring proccess is perfect.

So about rejecting a super talent to avoid hiring an incompetent person. It seems that statistically, a minority of people produce a majority of the value. Google hires in bulk, and I doubt their Cal Tech manufactured Mc Engineers are all elite people, so I'd guess they have the same problem as anyone else.

That problem is hunting for these people who will drive your buisness forward. Like YC and startups, you need to hire a bunch of bad bets for the big payoff.

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

#132

Post by dvt » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:00 PM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #123

dvt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He was in fintech IIRC, I just remember he had a math PhD because I explored his blog a bit.

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

#133

Post by fjsolwmv » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:01 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #103

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.

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 ca…

It's biased toward people who have taken a few weeks to prep on the standard Google interview curriculum that has been widely advertised for a decade.

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

#134

Post by RightMillennial » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:01 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #119

RightMillennial wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To avoid bias? As in to be completely unprepared? Wouldn't reading the résumé give you a better idea of the interviewee's background, and allow you to better assess him?

At Google there are two layers of the hiring process. Interviewers provide information for the hiring committee. The hiring committee has the resume. They don't need people to read it to them.

> They don't need people to read it to them.

I'm not following. Why would someone read the resume to someone else?

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

#135

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:01 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #118

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…

> incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway thro…

The OP is misremembering (slightly) some questions.

Also, this quiz is given by non-technical recruiters just to get a guage on how tech-savvy the candidate is. If I remember correctly, the passmark is 6/10.

The questions (when not misremembered) are very precise in their wording, and recruiters are given a pretty comprehensive list of correct answers.

I'm sure a few great candidates fail this stage, but that's the nature of hiring. Google gets a lot of job applications per day, and a first stage screening like this needs to be able to be executed by non-technical staff in a few minutes. Other companies use online tests, which tend to take the candidate more time and are easier to cheat at.

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

#136

Post by fjsolwmv » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #69

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 le…

I thought Google hires into a general pool, and hiring managers don't "own" candidates like Amazon HMs do.

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

#137

Post by sailingparrot » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #121

sailingparrot wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To be fair we are talking about Google, not the local shop at the corner of the streets. Each recruiter must do tens of screening a day, and they have tens of recruiters assigned to each department, we are not talking about reviewing 2 applications a day during coffee break.

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

#138

Post by Gargoyle » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

sdhgaiojfsa wrote: post #125

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…

> 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 que…

"Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent."

Is this really true, though? Are they losing out on more top end candidates?

There are other places with interesting work and big paychecks. Some of them aren't building reputations for annoying interview processes.

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

#139

Post by dvt » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #120

dvt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not what was said. At all. To be perfectly honest, I doubt there are dozens of director-level interview samples because there aren't tons of engineering directors, further "director of engineering" is a management, not technical role, so wouldn't be given questions like this, at all, and of the remainder, most of them were promoted from within google, not hired from outside it. Most new hires get screened in s…

> What these questions are are the standard set of pre-screening questions asked of a potential SRE IC or maybe TLM candidate. A SWE wouldn't be asked these questions, because they aren't related to the role. A SWE candidate still might get screened, but not with these questions.

A question on Glassdoor (for a Director position) is in the same vein: "How do you tell if a calculator is 8 bit or 16 bit."[1]

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Director-Intervie...

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

#140

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

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…

>This makes almost no sense for most roles, including any type of specialist as well as middle/senior management, and you end up with situations like you faced.

Worth noting that for specialist roles and middle/senior management, there are special pipelines. The problems seems to be a mismatch in what the average person thinks is "specialist" and what Google thinks is specialist. Lots of people think they're specialists, maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but more often than not it doesn't matter anyway. "I built an app" or "I built a tool used by many of your engineers" or whatever doesn't make you a specialist. It might be a reason to stick you into the generalist SWE pipeline, and it might be a 20% project for you

There's a surprisingly high hit rate for "checking random notable person in the OSS community in the company directory". They almost never work on things related to their public notoriety.

The one exception to this is research staff. Someone notable for their research is probably hired for their research. But this doesn't mean that any PhD will be hired for their research, much as you won't be extending your thesis if you get hired by a quant trading firm.

>If it makes you feel better, it's equally frustrating for hiring managers, who just get input from recruiters that so-and-so failed the phone screen.

This is perhaps the single most important aspect of the hiring process at the bigCos. The hiring process is built from the ground up to prevent you from doing this. The companies have a level of technical competency they expect from employees. Your first priority as a manager isn't to maintain that level of technical competency, its to have someone fill your headcount.

If they let you screen people, then either they let you waste other people's time on candidates who should have been screened out, or they let you make the final hiring decision, and you potentially hire someone who doesn't meet the global competency level. This ends up getting silos and requiring interviews to switch teams and having "weak" and "strong" teams and such, which is still sometimes a problem at Google, and Amazon, but no where near like it was apparently an issue in the Microsoft of old.