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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#31

Post by ambrozk »

KerrAvon wrote: post #23
lokar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is your bar for “terrible”? Resumes are a demonstration of written communication skill — they should at least be competent at expressing certain basic things about the candidate. An underwhelming list of accomplishments or lack of significant prior experience need not be showstoppers, of course.

I frequently administer technical interviews. For candidates who have passed an initial recruiter screen, I have ascertained no correlation between resume quality and code production. Many, many candidates with extremely impressive resumes are unable to produce basic, working code.

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

#32

Post by ambrozk »

vanusa wrote: post #29
jll29 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

I think the point of GP comment to yours is that by reading resumes skillfully -- that is, between the lines -- and comparing with other factors (e.g. their portfolio) it's pretty easy to tell the "probably solid" from the keyword-stuffers and buzzword droppers. By "probably solid" I don't mean "immediate hire" but rather "It's a safe bet this person isn't utterly incompetent and I won't be wasting 10 minutes of my t…

I do not think it is possible to weed out all or even most of the completely incompetent programmers on the basis of resume screening. My reasoning is, I frequently conduct technical interviews, and a good percentage of those are with candidates lacking basic coding skills, and many of those candidates have impressively written resumes.

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

#33

Post by vanusa »

lokar wrote: post #28
vanusa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for this is that resume review is really ineffective as a screen. No is saying they should rely solely on resume review as a screen. What is under question here is the perceived wisdom (on Google's side) of screening for Director positions using badly programmed chatbots (or recruiters, whatever) instead of having them be asked the same questions by an actual human. IMO, a better approach now are basic on…

I've used (I think) hackerrank, and just done really basic stuff. Like freshman CS basics, starting with working code and extending it (eg a class that calculates the average of its contents, and you add min, max and median). Surprisingly it screens out about half.

Finding the median with or without sorting first?

If it's the latter (essentially a test of whether they've memorized quickselect) then that sounds like a horrible filter, actually. Unless it's for the position of "Senior Quicksort Engineer".

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

#34

Post by vanusa »

ambrozk wrote: post #32
vanusa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of GP comment to yours is that by reading resumes skillfully -- that is, between the lines -- and comparing with other factors (e.g. their portfolio) it's pretty easy to tell the "probably solid" from the keyword-stuffers and buzzword droppers. By "probably solid" I don't mean "immediate hire" but rather "It's a safe bet this person isn't utterly incompetent and I won't be wasting 10 minutes of my t…

I do not think it is possible to weed out all or even most of the completely incompetent programmers on the basis of resume screening. My reasoning is, I frequently conduct technical interviews, and a good percentage of those are with candidates lacking basic coding skills, and many of those candidates have impressively written resumes.

I would reckon (based on my own observation, combined with some research that has come out recently -- see below) that "a good percentage of this good percentage" probably failed due to nervousness, rather than than truly lacking basic coding skills.

If they failed your test -- you just know they failed your test. That doesn't mean you now that they're incompetent.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368089.3409712

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

#35

Post by lokar »

vanusa wrote: post #33
lokar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used (I think) hackerrank, and just done really basic stuff. Like freshman CS basics, starting with working code and extending it (eg a class that calculates the average of its contents, and you add min, max and median). Surprisingly it screens out about half.

Finding the median with or without sorting first? If it's the latter (essentially a test of whether they've memorized quickselect) then that sounds like a horrible filter, actually. Unless it's for the position of "Senior Quicksort Engineer".

They are free to use the standard library, and use whatever language they like (eg python). It's not about how to sort

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

#36

Post by vanusa »

lokar wrote: post #35
vanusa wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding the median with or without sorting first? If it's the latter (essentially a test of whether they've memorized quickselect) then that sounds like a horrible filter, actually. Unless it's for the position of "Senior Quicksort Engineer".

They are free to use the standard library, and use whatever language they like (eg python). It's not about how to sort

If some asks me to "calculate" something I assume they mean from scratch (without using a built-in). That's probably what a fair number of these people did.

Also, my sense is that Python is something of an outlier in having a mean and median functions in it standard library. I could be wrong, but AFAIK Go and JS do not, for example -- so people using those languages would surely bomb (at least on the median calculation part -- again, assuming they interpreted your question as "calculate from scratch").

I don't mean to be pedantic or split hairs. The point I'm trying to make is that even simple-seeming problems can have gotchas to them, depending on the context.

Interviewers could do better by either thinking just a bit more about the problems they select, or just communicating better. But many do not, unfortunately -- I have the sense they just pull problems out of the air, and see what sticks. Meanwhile counting the high number of fails as a success signal.

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

#37

Post by faangiq »

vanusa wrote: post #29
jll29 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

I think the point of GP comment to yours is that by reading resumes skillfully -- that is, between the lines -- and comparing with other factors (e.g. their portfolio) it's pretty easy to tell the "probably solid" from the keyword-stuffers and buzzword droppers. By "probably solid" I don't mean "immediate hire" but rather "It's a safe bet this person isn't utterly incompetent and I won't be wasting 10 minutes of my t…

Indeed, the point was that resume screening can have >50% accuracy when done right. Unfortunately I’ve seen 5% as the accepted norm in the industry.

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

#38

Post by otterley »

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…

As a former SRE with over 25 years experience at companies small and large, I’ve never understood why an SRE would need to implement quicksort, or how the skills needed by a competent SRE - specifically, to guide developers in making their applications adhere to well-known reliability and scalability tenets, and capture and evaluate the data to show where problems may lie — are evidenced by such rituals. And those rituals tell you nothing about your ability to influence developers through your social skills to adapt the business and its processes to have successful outcomes.

Obviously Google has had some success in this space as their opinions are highly influential, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if they were successful in spite of their interview practices—especially in the early days—because jobs at Google were much-coveted: talent from all over the world sought out a job there because the money and the prestige was just so damned good.

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

#39

Post by bsder »

yuliyp wrote: post #25
bsder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 candid…

I think the post you were replying to was using "pass" to mean "pass on the candidate" i.e. not move forward in the interview/hiring process. The point of such recruiter screens is to avoid an engineer seeing in a coding screen that the candidate has no chance in hell of success.

Hrm. Good point. I didn't catch that might have been the implication.

However, being professional is also important and I don't consider it a waste. I've experienced the reverse. It was clear after one interview that I was not a fit for the position.

I still ran the interview out even after pointing out that I really wasn't a fit because that's what professionals do. I later got a contract out of that company simply because I was professional about things and so many other people aren't.

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

#40

Post by sangnoir »

BoorishBears wrote: post #21
hiptobecubic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Don't do that. Don't conflate having to dumb yourself down for recruiters that reached out to you for a director of engineering role with communication skills. Yes sometimes you need to be able to simplify things for non-technical shareholders, but no that's not what this should be. In an engineering focused organization if recruiters are reaching out for a position this high up they should either be solely acting as…

> In an engineering focused organization if recruiters are reaching out for a position this high up...

How high up is this? What's a director in FANG-land? In some places, a manager of managers is a director - which isn't very high, and can be closer to the ICs than to the CEO on the org chart.

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