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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#201

Post by wingless »

67726e wrote: post #120
jackweirdy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical Recruiter: "What are mitochondria?" Applicant Doctor: "They're double membrane-bound organelles found in all eukaryotic organisms, commonly between 0.75 and 3μm in diameter, that generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate" Recruiter: "No. They are the powerhouse of the cell".

To be entirely objective, I have run into recruiters of that variety in my career. However I've also had plenty of recruiters that were able to pick up on one's deeper knowledge of a given concept and accept that as correct, even if it wasn't the "textbook answer" they were looking for.

You don't even have to give feedback in an interview. Just let them answer your question and if it's too detailed, write it down and look it up later. In fact, Google usually doesn't give back any feedback during or after their onsite interviews.

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

#202

Post by sllabres »

dkonofalski wrote: post #129
lordnacho wrote: post #13

I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing. It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie…

I'm just reaching here, but is there a chance at all that the test wasn't really about whether or not he knew the correct answers but more that he knew the correct answers and was able to simplify them to the extent that a non-technical user could understand and compare them? I have a feeling that Google is far more interested in someone being able to get their point across than someone that just wants to sit there a…

Don't think so, or would you consider the O(n) notation something a non technical user would want to follow?

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

#203

Post by philjr »

dkonofalski wrote: post #179
edanm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.

Why is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.

I don't disagree, although I'm sceptical that's intentional on Google's part. I think if you applied some common sense to the situation and you were able to get off your moral high horse about what's correct vs answering the questions he needs you to answer to get to the actual proper interviews.

Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved, I'm sure.

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

#204

Post by phaus »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #93
mherdeg wrote: post #17

Ha ha re: > 10. what is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection? > Me: in hexadecimal: 0x02, 0x12, 0x10 – literally "synchronize" and "acknowledge". > Recruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. Y…

Surprising they wouldn't have given the recruiter a list of alternate acceptable answers. Almost feels like the recruiter was conspiring against you, but why?

I feel like someone that's not unusually unintelligent should have been able to make the connections between SYN and synchronize or ACK and acknowledge. I don't know why people are defending the recruiter. The process is dumb, but so is an interviewer that asserts himself as an authority when he has to read from a sheet of paper. I don't expect him to be a technical expert, but I do expect him to know when he needs to consult a technical expert about a particular candidate's answers. If this is an accurate representation of his interviewing skills, he needs a new job.

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

#206

Post by dkonofalski »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #166

Isn't a Director of Engineering meant to be an interface between engineers and the rest of the organization? Perhaps this was more like a smoke test for the political insight such a role calls for, not the ostensible test of technical skill it was presented as. After the first couple of wrong answers, people with the right social skills to manage others and represent their interests to the broader organization would…

I think this is exactly what they're looking for and what half of the people in this thread are missing. Someone else mentioned that they also had this interview and remembered these questions and that the person doing the interview told them he was a psychologist. Why would they be doing a technical interview with a psychologist? This was a skills interview for sure but it wasn't the skills that most of these people are assuming.

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

#207

Post by sidazad »

dkonofalski wrote: post #129
lordnacho wrote: post #13

I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing. It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie…

I'm just reaching here, but is there a chance at all that the test wasn't really about whether or not he knew the correct answers but more that he knew the correct answers and was able to simplify them to the extent that a non-technical user could understand and compare them? I have a feeling that Google is far more interested in someone being able to get their point across than someone that just wants to sit there a…

I can't fathom a scenario where a tech person would need to dump down something like SYN-ACKs and iNodes for a non-technical person. It's one thing if you are trying to explain performance trade-offs to non-technical users or colleagues. But not lower level protocol details.

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

#208

Post by Ph0X »

harryf wrote: post #196
scrollaway wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dumb recruiter"? What? Nobody's calling the recruiter dumb. Everybody is calling the process dumb. A process that puts somebody that cannot answer these questions, in charge of asking them and evaluating the answers. Having the candidate evaluate the competence of their recruiter is not part of the interview process. What the hell.

I believe in the phone screen Google uses non-technical people to ask technical questions (as engineers are a scarce resource) so they're only able to handle "right or wrong" but you can probably work your way around that by being nice - this guy seemed to be being an ass...

I've had two phone screens with them and both times they were very technical people. Then again it was some time ago and with the bigger scale they may have changed it up.

It is unfortunate, but as mentioned above, you need to just play the game until you get to the real part. It's like when I call customer support, I gotta play along with the non-technical people and get them to bump me up the chain to someone technical when I need advanced help.

The unfortunate truth is that it's unreasonable to dedicate precious engineer time to screen millions and millions of people, they'd get no actual work done. So the first layers has to be like this. You just play along for the first step, and after that it'll get much much more interesting, trust me.

This guy seemed like the kind of person who loves showing off his knowledge and having the last word on everything. Honestly this kind of people, as knowledgeable as they are, usually do poorly in a work environment.

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

#209

Post by mooreds »

mankash666 wrote: post #74

"Recruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. " Because when Google is down, it's typically upper management that fixes network issues. CEO level to directors of engineering are on pager duty most nights there.

May I assume this is tongue in cheek?

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

#210

Post by teraflop »

gberger wrote: post #85
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew all these answers too, because I was a developer in the 1990s. There is absolutely no purpose to knowing off the top of your head how long an ethernet address is, or even what system call will retrieve an inode (his bickering over stat() "filling in" rather than "returning" was bogus, for what it's worth). The top Google search result for each of these questions has the answer. Knowing these things isn't part…

But what if Google is down and you are tasked with diagnosing it?

I bet Google has their own internal "backup Google", for just such an occasion.
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