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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#51

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

Afaik this prescreen questionnaire is there bc it was statistically determined it fairs better than a resume screen at selecting candidates that would pass subsequent interviews

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

#52

Post by BoorishBears »

ricardobeat wrote: post #22
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…

> for a position this high up There are probably thousands of 'director of engineering' or similar roles at Google. If it's anything like other companies, they will be managing something like ~50 people. It's a middle management role, not that high up - except in compensation relative to the median...

Are we really downplaying being an L8 at Google now?

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

#53

Post by BoorishBears »

emptybottle wrote: post #24
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…

At the same time, don’t conflate engineering skill with director level management skill, they are two vastly different things.

I don't see how this follows what I said in the slightest...

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

#54

Post by dilyevsky »

otterley wrote: post #38
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 ri…

Google has two kinds of sres - the one you describe and just swes that are assigned to sre department that mainly write code.

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

#55

Post by BoorishBears »

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.

This isn't about saying a director is a 1 of 1 position, it's not.

But there are orders of magnitude fewer people are hired yearly into director positions than something like an L5.

So the expectation is past a point you're not going to reach out to someone and waste their time like this.

-

Also a manager of managers is plenty high, some places are just so bloated it doesn't seem that way.

You'd think someone you're trusting to have that level of influence is worth the extra effort

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

#56

Post by sangnoir »

BoorishBears wrote: post #55
sangnoir wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This isn't about saying a director is a 1 of 1 position, it's not. But there are orders of magnitude fewer people are hired yearly into director positions than something like an L5. So the expectation is past a point you're not going to reach out to someone and waste their time like this. - Also a manager of managers is plenty high, some places are just so bloated it doesn't seem that way. You'd think someone you're…

> But there are orders of magnitude fewer people are hired yearly into director positions than something like an L5.

That is true, but gives no indication of how many Director candidates they have to go through as Google has "a lot* of L5s. I would expect the C-Suite to get the high-touch approach, as they probably screen less than a dozen interviewees for CxO.

Let's ballpark this (simplified). Say there's a 1:3 manager to L5 ratio, and 1:5 director to manager ratio. We'd roughly expect 1 director to be hired for every 15 L5s. If Google hires 1500 L5s a year, then it would hire 100 corresponding directors. If it averages 20 applicants per post, that's about 2000 screens per year. Would that justify getting specialized recruiters? I don't know

Aside: this used to be the kind of "estimate/puzzle" question Google used to ask it's interviews, allegedly

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

#57

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

plasticchris wrote: post #46
specialist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a valuable experiment to run for any hiring process.

Generally, you want to select for successful employees in your company, which hirers normally are. If they can't get selected, something is very very wrong with your process.

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

#58

Post by ricardobeat »

BoorishBears wrote: post #52
ricardobeat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for a position this high up There are probably thousands of 'director of engineering' or similar roles at Google. If it's anything like other companies, they will be managing something like ~50 people. It's a middle management role, not that high up - except in compensation relative to the median...

Are we really downplaying being an L8 at Google now?

The point is that for a role with 1000 seats, at a turnover of 10% and the usual acceptance rate of 0.1-1%, they will be interviewing thousands of people for this role every year. It's not gonna be a white-gloves process like hiring a C-level.

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

#59

Post by aiisjustanif »

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.

L8, above senior managers that are L7.

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

#60

Post by aiisjustanif »

ricardobeat wrote: post #58
BoorishBears wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we really downplaying being an L8 at Google now?

The point is that for a role with 1000 seats, at a turnover of 10% and the usual acceptance rate of 0.1-1%, they will be interviewing thousands of people for this role every year. It's not gonna be a white-gloves process like hiring a C-level.

L7 is < 3% and L8 is < 1% about of all of the employees specifically in the engineering department. Should be much less than 1000.
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