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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)

#301

Post by itronitron »

sowbug wrote: post #299
itronitron wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If I interviewed with a CEO or VP of Engineering, and that person asked me questions about my resume, I'd run away What else are they going to ask you about? If my resume highlights my notable accomplishments in XYZ and the VP of E asks me if I have any interest in doing XYZ then I am going to consider the VP of E to be a total idiot or incredibly distracted.

I don't care about XYZ. The company you came from already did that. The world doesn't need another XYZ. But we do care about XYZ', and we think someone with experience in X, Y, XY, YZ, XZ, XYZ, WXY, etc. will help us build the first XYZ' in the industry. That's why the screener picked your resume among the 500 we received. So I'll ask about XYZ', because that's what we're going to build. (We're actually building ZYX'…

good luck with that

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

#302

Post by scottydelta »

urda wrote: post #222

I'll repost this again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701858 This is a bullshit article, why did it frontpage again ?

it might be a bullshit article but the horrible experiences of so many people in this thread cannot be bullshit.

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

#303

Post by dgreensp »

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.

Yes, Google is missing out on some top-end candidates, who probably wouldn’t be happy there anyway. It’s not so simple as having a less annoying interview process and getting better engineers. The interview process is an extension of the corporate culture. It embodies certain attitudes and probably attracts certain personalities and repels others. Lots of people want to work at Google, and lots of people do, so only Google knows if something about the process is not working for them.

I’ve worked at Google, and engaged with Google recruiters over the years (who didn’t even know I was an ex-Googler). Talking to their recruiters does feel like talking to chatbots and can feel quite dehumanizing, in big and small ways. I’ve also worked at small start-ups that did world-class recruiting, or at least several classes better than Google — perhaps there are even higher classes, who knows. Both activities are called “recruiting” but they barely seem like the same thing.

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

#304

Post by icebraining »

dvt wrote: post #92
cm2187 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most resumes are full of lies anyway.

You really think the best way to start a new business relationship is with the assumption that the guy across the table is a lying scumbag?

You start by assuming they may be a lying scumbag. Hopefully by the time you make an offer, you're reasonably certain they aren't.

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

#305

Post by jacobush »

user5994461 wrote: post #218
mancerayder wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand this sentiment. To me, it feels like the Facebooks and Googles of the industry (by which I encompass other ad tech firms) are the 'banks' of 10 years ago. A few years ago, and I bet still today, there were/are a lot of new grads and experienced techies saying openly that they'd not want to work for a bank. Hopefully a similar spurning happens here.

Which is very ironic considering banks were the biggest tech employers at that time and some had pretty good money and working conditions as well.

How is that ironic...

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

#306

Post by s17n »

sjsjxhhc wrote: post #62
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?

If you’re one person out of many in the hiring process, and your role is to evaluate some specific skills, then yes, it may well be the case that knowing more about the candidate’s background will hurt more than it helps.

Exactly

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

#307

Post by sireat »

tzs wrote: post #57

> There's an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently? I would have said that I would multiply 10000 by 16. Oh well, no Google job for me I suppose.

Hilarious and technically correct!

As others have pointed out, this is just a filter for Google to see who wants the job the most and is willing to jump through the most hoops.

Google misses a lot of good candidates but the ones they get are good so they do not have to care about the broken process.

One could even say that this broken hiring process encourages the customer-averse CS automation nightmare at most Google products.

Hypothesis: Someone who experiences a hazing ritual to get a job at Google is less likely to worry about being nice to customers and will try to automate all customer facing interactions.

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

#308

Post by aje403 »

aje403 wrote: post #110
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…

Doesn’t sound like the interviewee has an inflated sense of worth from what’s written and it sounds like the interviewer cheated off someone to get his degree

What did I fart or something

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

#309

Post by crdoconnor »

geofft wrote: post #291
crdoconnor wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 appl…

I admit that this is certainly possible (Google recruiters wildly underleveling people, at least relative to their expectations if not their actual qualifications, and not clarifying this before passing the candidate onto other recruiters). If it's happening, it's a very different problem (no less real of a problem, though) and process fixes at this stage wouldn't help. Also, this interview performance should have be…

It's not only possible it's likely if they are setting general hiring quotas for their recruiters.

And, they almost certainly are setting quotas because they're currently being sued by one of their own recruiters over their quota policy.

>Also, this interview performance should have been enough to disqualify this candidate

They neither qualify him nor disqualify him. Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind.

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

#310

Post by sitkack »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #235
stephencanon wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. Except for all of the other big tech companies?

> Except for all of the other big tech companies? Many of which have the same type of interview processes? Hell, Facebook sometimes asks two coding questions per interview round, which is 45 minutes long as I recall. They seem to expect perfectly compiling code. If you're not doing coding competitions or practicing on Leetcode or other sites of its ilk, where you learn to regurgitate a Knapsack problem solution or Ru…

I do lots of interviews of smart, well spoken people who seem to be able to decompose problems, enumerate pros and cons of various solutions and then struggle with a filter and a reduction over the lines in a file.

These people are un-prepared for the interview, this question is easy and not insulting. Anyone doing tech interviews of any sort should be able to answer it, yet most don't.

I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1].

Being able to ace a top-k company interview is an ego boost that reduces stress levels day to day.

[0] http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/

[1] https://www.pramp.com/#/

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