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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#41

Post by vanusa »

sangnoir wrote: post #40
BoorishBears wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Either way, the point stands.

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

#42

Post by lokar »

vanusa wrote: post #36
lokar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 calculati…

The site has a detailed spec and test input/output, you can build and run the tests

The standard library is to sort, not take the median

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

#43

Post by ViViDboarder »

timzaman wrote: post #20

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.

Unlikely, unless the interviewer was just trolling them.

If it was just their attitude, they’d not tell them they were wrong when they weren’t and tell them to work on x y and z to be qualified in the future. They’d just complete or end the interview and say something like, “Great! You should hear back in x days” and then reject in their ATS.

If not, then the recruiter is an asshole and gaslighting the candidate.

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

#44

Post by specialist »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #15
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.

Heh.

I once helped author the hiring guidelines and questions used for recruiting and interviewing. After months of effort, the committee proudly, euphorically called the effort good.

I then asked the committee "Who here could pass the high bar we just set?"

Total buzz kill.

The upside was I was never asked to help again.

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

#45

Post by seanp2k2 »

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.

It’s great that they still don’t get how pointless it is to memorize things like protocol numbers for esoteric stuff that is trivial to google and find in a few seconds if the need should ever arise, which it rarely would. IIRC they asked me for the one for GRE.

I also had one (I forget the exact question) where my answer was technically correct but “wasn’t what [they] had”, and my explanation about why it was the same thing went way over the recruiter’s head.

Whoever thought this would be a fun little trivia game to have people play for their careers…yeah, no.

I still got through to the technical interviews wherein the first technical screener told me he doubts he’d be able to get his current position again now if he had to go through the interview for it, and he told me seriously not to feel bad if I don’t pass. I did pass that one.

Second technical screen was with a person with a thick accent and bad VoIP who was getting obviously frustrated due to both of us having to repeat stuff a lot.

This was all after a 6+ month dance of scheduling and waiting and hearing nothing from their recruiters. Got a rejection weeks later and never tried re-applying. They still reach out like every 6 months.

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

#46

Post by plasticchris »

specialist wrote: post #44
hiptobecubic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heh. I once helped author the hiring guidelines and questions used for recruiting and interviewing. After months of effort, the committee proudly, euphorically called the effort good. I then asked the committee "Who here could pass the high bar we just set?" Total buzz kill. The upside was I was never asked to help again.

There’s also the story of one hiring committee that was proud of its high bar. It got pranked by someone feeding them their own packets, which they denied. It was in a tech talk somewhere, don’t recall where.

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

#48

Post by vanusa »

lokar wrote: post #42
vanusa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 calculati…

The site has a detailed spec and test input/output, you can build and run the tests The standard library is to sort, not take the median

Well it does seem to be a cute filter for Python programming ability in that they definitely need to have taken a tour of the modern standard library to come up with

  min(x)
  max(x)
  statistics.mean(x)
  statistics.median(x)
But still - no 'for' loops? No if-then-else? You might be giving some of these candidates a pass.

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

#49

Post by desi_ninja »

fragmede wrote: post #6
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…

What is CLR in this context? Common Language Runtime (Microsoft's .NET VM) doesn't seem applicable.

CLRS - the intro to algorithms book

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

#50

Post by vanusa »

vanusa wrote: post #27
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…

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…

"No [one] is saying ..."
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