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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#11

Post by faangiq »

lokar wrote: post #8

The reason for this is that resume review is really ineffective as a screen. You end up having engineers wasting time on technical interviews that are clearly a pass in the first 10m (but you keep going for 45 to stay professional) IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate. The goal of which is to show you are serious about the tech stuff and give people…

Resume screening is very effective when done by someone who is intelligent. The tech industry refuses to take hiring seriously and apply such people to the problem.

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

#12

Post by lokar »

faangiq wrote: post #11
lokar wrote: post #8

The reason for this is that resume review is really ineffective as a screen. You end up having engineers wasting time on technical interviews that are clearly a pass in the first 10m (but you keep going for 45 to stay professional) IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate. The goal of which is to show you are serious about the tech stuff and give people…

Resume screening is very effective when done by someone who is intelligent. The tech industry refuses to take hiring seriously and apply such people to the problem.

I've read many resumes that seem solid. Then the candidate knows almost nothing. They just lie on the resumes.

I've also talked to people with terrible resumes who turn out to be great. They are just bad at resumes.

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

#13

Post by sebastien_b »

rurban wrote: post #3

This exchange happened around 2016 or so, if I remember correctly. Already posted here a couple of times. And it happened to me also. Those recruiters were hilarious, you cannot make that up. I got 8 of 10 by luck, but refused a 2nd exchange with those bots.

Thanks for this - now I know what link to reply with for recruiters that keep spamming me as if I’d be interested in working at whatever company they’re spamming me for.

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

#14

Post by BoorishBears »

mmacvicarprett wrote: post #10

Not surprising, the candidate did fail at acknowledge who the interviewer was to adapt their answers. It was a recruiter reading answers from a sheet, the simpler you keep it the highest the chance of passing the stupid test.

Not everyone wants to work at a place that needs you to dumb things down just to get your foot in the door as a Director of Engineering

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

#15

Post by hiptobecubic »

dekhn wrote: post #2

These are the prescreen questions that were used for senior SRE. It's not a hiring test- this person didn't even get to the actual hiring interviews (which would have asked you, for example, to implement quicksort in code on a whiteboard). The recruiter-screeners in this case don't know anything, they're just looking for you to answer some questions against a table of "right answers", and they wouldn't know it if you…

This is also what I tell people, including students, unfortunately. Interviewing at Google seems to do a reasonable job of preventing them from hiring anyone hopeless, but not a good job hiring people who aren't hopeless.

Most Googlers I know are not at all confident that they would get their job back if they had to reinterview for it, including those with top performance review ratings.

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

#16

Post by jll29 »

lokar wrote: post #12
faangiq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resume screening is very effective when done by someone who is intelligent. The tech industry refuses to take hiring seriously and apply such people to the problem.

I've read many resumes that seem solid. Then the candidate knows almost nothing. They just lie on the resumes. I've also talked to people with terrible resumes who turn out to be great. They are just bad at resumes.

I second that. It's not necessary about "lying", many candidates may drop a keyword as something they know, when really they have only heard about it instead of mastering it.

Some people also under-rate their skills, because they are very demanding to themselves (the bad ones don't know "sort" and want to re-implement their own sorting method in Python).

I pre-screen using practical problems that I have to solve every day, and when candidates know their UNIX shell commands that's usually a really good sign.

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

#17

Post by bsder »

lokar wrote: post #8

The reason for this is that resume review is really ineffective as a screen. You end up having engineers wasting time on technical interviews that are clearly a pass in the first 10m (but you keep going for 45 to stay professional) IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate. The goal of which is to show you are serious about the tech stuff and give people…

> You end up having engineers wasting time on technical interviews that are clearly a pass in the first 10m (but you keep going for 45 to stay professional)

If someone is a pass in the first 10 minutes, the next 35 minutes are me trying to sell the company to the candidate. This is not, even slightly, a waste of time.

I have Allied Mastercomputer levels of HATE for whichever HR drone decided that "interviewing candidates" needed to be a bullet point in the "corporate evaluation process" and thus made the interviewing process even shittier than it needed to be.

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

#18

Post by hiptobecubic »

rurban wrote: post #3

This exchange happened around 2016 or so, if I remember correctly. Already posted here a couple of times. And it happened to me also. Those recruiters were hilarious, you cannot make that up. I got 8 of 10 by luck, but refused a 2nd exchange with those bots.

I had similar questions on 2016, although not quite as wrong/bad as presented here. E.g. "why is quicksort the best" wasn't asked. Instead, something more like "What is the average case time complexity of quicksort?"

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

#19

Post by hiptobecubic »

BoorishBears wrote: post #14
mmacvicarprett wrote: post #10

Not surprising, the candidate did fail at acknowledge who the interviewer was to adapt their answers. It was a recruiter reading answers from a sheet, the simpler you keep it the highest the chance of passing the stupid test.

Not everyone wants to work at a place that needs you to dumb things down just to get your foot in the door as a Director of Engineering

Not everyone wants a director of engineering that can't communicate with the rest of the company.

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

#20

Post by timzaman »

It is so typical to interview very senior people who get really arrogant about their skills, but when it comes down to it, they fail at this rapidfire, and in a very non graceful way. This rapidfire is very coarse and weeds out most incompetent people. It's likely not your answers, but your attitude that failed you.
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