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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)

#151

Post by geofft »

dvt wrote: post #139
joshuamorton wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

a) 2013, when they still asked brainteasers

b) That's a different question from this set about UNIX arcana, so it's not the same set

c) All of the other questions on that page are non-technical, so this isn't a question from a standard director set either. (It may be what 'DannyBee said, that people assumed they were being screened for a much higher position than they were actually being screened for.)

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

#152

Post by golergka »

psyc wrote: post #74
crispyporkbites wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm? You just make your entire hiring call on talking to the person without looking at their career, academics and skills?

I doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my…

> I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt.

I have had a pleasure of interviewing a 'veteran' who listed both Emacs and vim on his resume, among dozens of other keywords and many, many years of professional experience. I asked him, how do you exit these text editors? "As any other program", he answered, perplexed - "you click on the cross in the upper-right corner".

This was not an unique and ever especially outstanding event in my interviewing experience.

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

#153

Post by trevor-e »

Unrelated to the main point of the article, but I really hate when people point out "been programming for XX years, since I was 6 years old!!" Years of experience does not equate to being a skilled programmer. I could play basketball for 40 years and be way worse than Lebron James was in middle school. Experience is important for other reasons.

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

#154

Post by sowbug »

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.

You seem to be getting beaten up over this point, so I'd like to un-lurk and support it.

A screener's job is to read the resume and match static facts to company needs. A recruiter's job is to gauge subjective fit and mutual interest.

An interviewer's job is to assess analytical ability, communication skills, personality, and culture fit, as well as to be an advertisement for the company/team/project/position if both sides want to close the deal. None of that depends on a re-evaluation of the static facts on the resume.

If I interviewed with a CEO or VP of Engineering, and that person asked me questions about my resume, I'd run away as quickly as possible from that company. I'd do the same depending on the circumstances if an engineer referenced my resume during an interview.

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

#155

Post by joshuamorton »

shubb wrote: post #131
Bjartr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

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

That's because Google doesn't particularly ascribe to this idea. With good infra, tooling, and environment (management, mentorship, etc.) anyone can be "10X".

>manage out inadevertantly hired incompetent people, because no hiring proccess is perfect.

I'm not sure I've ever met an engineer at Google who I would call incompetent. Certainly some who are less competent than me, certainly some who are more. Certainly some who have made singular technical decisions are think are wrong or bad, but none who are incompetent. The hiring process is the system you describe.

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

#156

Post by guilt »

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…

Yeah, try discrediting the article than fix your mistakes.

Real mature, Google.

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

#157

Post by geofft »

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 annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated, but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it against the company, but I didn't.)

If Google is losing out on good candidates, it's going to be either because of false negatives in the interview process, or ongoing engineering culture concerns (which is roughly why I declined the Google offer I got last year), not because of people self-selecting against annoying interviewing processes. Even this blog post itself is written in the form of "Here's what you need to know to get past the process" - i.e., even this guy assumes people still want to work at Google and work around their process.

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

#158

Post by ksk »

I sense a little bit of CS ego in the interview. "Let me show you how you're not even qualified to take this interview" is never a winning strategy in any business scenario. Being able to read a person, and giving them an appropriate response is an important skill. After the first couple of responses it was pretty clear that the recruiter was only interested in cookie cutter answers. If you don't want to work at Google why even take the interview? And if you do, why would you care if a recruiting agency paper pusher asked you some dumb questions?

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

#159

Post by geofft »

guilt wrote: post #156
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…

Yeah, try discrediting the article than fix your mistakes. Real mature, Google.

... Sorry, are you accusing me of working for Google? My identity is very public, I don't.

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

#160

Post by trisimix »

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…

Assuming he didnt lie about the exchange of words, this guy could be a homeless person make believing hes getting hired as ceo of google and this interview would still be an affront to proper advancement. You cannot possibly justify making a quiz that asks about kill in unix and doesnt accept SIGKILL ~literally kill with SIGTERM the default. If you are looking for the default level (15) you should specify. If this interview actually happened the way this guy says it did, Google is making terrible mistakes. I know first semester 2 year networking degree students that would have scored higher than this guy. Seriously people should be appalled at the inadequacy of that interview. Respect lost.
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