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

141–150 of 344 posts

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

#141

Post by crdoconnor »

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…

>Also, a ton of this conversation makes a lot more sense if you make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions. Which is a very gentle assumption.

No, that's a pretty insulting and disturbingly koolaid flavored presumption.

This conversation makes sense to me because of the number of people who have commented that they ended up being unwittingly considered for position that they did not apply for and did not actually even necessarily want. There's at least two in the comments section here and I know two more personally (one of whom is a very talented director of HR, ironically enough).

I actually even said this to that director of engineering's comment you mentioned two years ago.

He neglected to respond.

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

#142

Post by tomhallett »

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.

Not entirely: the answers written down by the recuiters can be reviewed in batch, while the phone screen has a lot more overhead.

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

#143

Post by kamaal »

noarchy wrote: post #98
_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…

So who at Google is using Google Docs to write their code, day-to-day? No one, right? And 8 interviews? Was it even the last potential interview? That is indeed fubar. They do this because they can. Hiring is an expensive process, and not everyone can afford to dump this much effort into a single hire.

>>And 8 interviews?

Pretty standard across these AmaGoogFaceSoft like companies. They basically have too much money and time to spend on these things, and they inevitable hire people like them who have lot of free time on their hands to prepare for their textbook puzzle questions.

In other words they wish to hire candidates who do bare minimum work but spend hours preparing for interviews to move to next jobs.

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

#144

Post by jroseattle »

We experienced the same type of issue with my company, and decided to try to address it.

First, our problem statement: filtering phone-screens by recruiters is resulting in poor experience, false positives, etc.

We thought about potential causes, but instead opted to look at the logistics of the call: recruiter runs process, gets responses, and then returns to engineering with feedback.

It was a vacuum filled with innuendo, unspoken assumptions, you name it. Collectively, our recruiting operation was an echo chamber.

So we asked if we could have recruiting calls recorded and/or transcribed. Candidates had no problem agreeing to it -- the recruiters were reluctant at first. (You can probably guess where this going...)

We recorded/transcribed maybe five calls, and that's all that was necessary. We saw dramatic improvement, and we owe most of that to the Observer Effect. We maintained the same throughput of candidates, but we saw more ideally-suited candidates pass through as well as heard better experiences from candidates.

I'd suggest most any operation try this.

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

#145

Post by Eridrus »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #136
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.

It's probably different for leadership candidates simply because there are far fewer available roles.

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

#146

Post by gbacon »

huhwhaa23 wrote: post #7
logicallee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to taking standardized tests where you are smarter than the question-writer. What would you select as the answer to the following question: " x is an integer. If x² = 16, then x =? A. 1. B. 2. C. 4. D. 16. E. Not enough information. " Think hard and tell me what you would select. For me it is VERY clear that I have to select C, 4. It is just as clear that it is the wrong answer, and the correct answer…

I don't get it. Integers include negative numbers, so -4 and 4 are both integers. Why would you select C? Because you're assuming the recruiter doesn't know what an integer is, based on the fact that all the answer choices are positive integers?

Having tutored my 13-year-old daughter through algebra this school year, a common mistake is flipping this into a square-root problem.

As asked, the question is about mappings ℝ+ → ℝ ⨯ ℝ ∪ {0}. Square root is different, mapping ℝ+ → ℝ+ ∪ {0}. The question could have been sloppily worded or someone trying to make it look more “mathy.”

When I tell my daughter that negative numbers have square roots too and are imaginary, she rolls her eyes and sighs.

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

#147

Post by product50 »

Gargoyle wrote: post #138
sdhgaiojfsa wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.

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

#148

Post by joeldg »

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…

long long ago, probably 2005, they called me up and said they were going to interview me for a different position than what I had applied for...

I had applied for a developer position and they wanted to interview me for a systems engineering position.

I said "I didn't apply for that position as I don't think I qualify for it" They said "Just go with it".

Predictably, I bombed it, one question I remember is what is the name of process id #1 in linux.

Never applied at Google again.

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

#149

Post by philwelch »

dvt wrote: post #54
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.

Uh, what? Every time I've done an interview, the first thing I looked at was the candidate's resume. Even ignoring the fact that everyone is different, has different experiences, and is strong/weak in different areas (which is very important to know as an interviewer), I'm not sure what kind of bias you're trying to avoid.

FWIW, I’ve seen the same practice advised in “unconscious bias training”. The idea being that if you notice that someone went to the same university you did, or a prestigious university, or worked for a prestigious company or a company you worked for, you’ll be unconsciously biased in their favor. The antidote to unconscious bias is to have a standardized interview and a standardized rubric for evaluating the candidate’s answers and to disregard any other information.

I’m very deliberately not sharing my personal opinions on this.

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

#150

Post by joshuamorton »

RightMillennial wrote: post #134
UncleMeat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So, when I interview someone, I ask them some technical questions and maybe some questions about their work, and provide structured feedback to a seperate group of people who make final hiring decisions.

There's actually not a whole lot of reason for me to look at their resume. The group who makes hiring decisions has it, so my interpretation of it won't be that valuable. Potentially I could ask them to elaborate on some of their prior work or projects, but that's usually less meaningful than just asking technical questions.

Post reply on HN