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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#541

Post by pjmlp »

serge2k wrote: post #421
potatolicious wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I also work for Google, opinions are my own, etc etc. > "i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt" I mean sure, a single instance of this might be overblown, exaggerated, or false in some way. But there is an avalanche of reports like this, to the point where it's become widespread industry insider knowledge. I enjoy working here, but the interviewing practices are…

> At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously My guess is when the number of applications per position actually drops far enough that the false negative rate starts to hurt. Until then, an interview processed optimized for avoiding false positives at all costs will persist. Totally makes sense for a company worth hundreds of billions though, can you imagine if they had a few more bad hires sneak in?…

It happens all the time Google acquires a new company, those employees aren't going through these crazy interview processes.

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

#542

Post by serge2k »

ransom1538 wrote: post #474
DannyBee wrote: post #152

FWIW: As a director of engineering for Google, who interviews other directors of engineering for Google, none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets. These are bog standard SWE-SRE questions (particularly, SRE) at some companies, so my guess is he was really being evaluated for a normal SWE-SRE position. IE maybe he applied to a position labeled director of engineer…

These are not director questions. I wonder if this is a case where a team didn't want to hire: A team gets pressure to hire, but they don't want to. A team has a great internal candidate but can't push it through without going through external candidates. (Expecting any director couldn't answer these -- which they shouldn't). A team can get 2 for 1. Usually an H1B situation, which has the extra benefit of chaining th…

> team can get 2 for 1. Usually an H1B situation, which has the extra benefit of chaining the 2 candidates to the company. Former H1B employees love this option.

Are you saying google pays their H1B employees half of what they do others?

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

#543

Post by JimboOmega »

DannyBee wrote: post #532
JimboOmega wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has never made it that clear what position I was interviewing for (and definitely not what team/role) when I interviewed with them. This was sort of pitched as a selling point, since after being hired you'd float around and find the niche eventually?

When was this? This was the case when i started (~2006), but it definitely changed and is not the case anymore.

Probably late 2000s when I was last on site. Google bugs me every year (most recently a week or two ago), but I don't usually push on the process.

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

#544

Post by sziwan »

optimuspaul wrote: post #510
johndubchak wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that suggests you're giving them the wrong interview.

I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about…

> Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz?

Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.

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

#545

Post by frankc »

kkapelon wrote: post #12

They asked me the same questions back in 2012. I was applying for a Java developer position. The person asking the questions said right from the start that he is not technical (he was a psychologist) and that he had a cheatsheet in front of him. I passed that telephone call and failed the process later on another call (on the lightbulbs and the 100 floor building) Really surprised to see that 4 years later they still…

That's really interesting that he said he was a psychologist. I am probably giving them too much credit, but maybe they rare screening for personality with this test and not for technical knowledge. If you handle a frustrating and difficult situation gracefully, perhaps how many answers you got "correct" is irrelevant?

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

#546

Post by kyrra »

raverbashing wrote: post #407
ozgung wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying Google's recruiters don't tell what position they are interviewing for and that they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process.

It seems to me parent's answer only reflects the general attitude at Google: they don't question anything they do, they don't do "customer support" and they don't display humility Yes, I'm not expecting the conversation to have been exactly that, but it shows problems regardless.

Google questions a lot of what it does. It's made up of lots of engineers and other that are on this site and care deeply about the fields we are in. We are always questioning decisions made and try to use data as best as we can to back up those decision.

As for customer support, it depends on the product you are talking about. Your free gmail account or $5 purchases through the play store: don't expect a lot of support here (but there is some). If you are using Google Cloud, Apps, AdWords, or other products where you pay, you can expected to get amazing support (this will change with your spend level). For example: on the cloud side, you can pay for support contracts that gets you lots of 1-on-1 time with Google support staff to help you use the services[0]. Or with the new Pixel, there is on-phone support[1].

[0] https://cloud.google.com/support/

[1] https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/

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

#547

Post by DannyBee »

falcolas wrote: post #527
DannyBee wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it is definitely standard process to tell him (if they didn't, that's a definite failure). Again, remember you only have one side of the story here. I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim. Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it) Second i'm going to point out a few things: Experience may translate into wisdom, it may…

> SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory. > Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and 3 sen…

"Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory. "

This is one reason why i find it super-strange. It's not a set of "high level employee" questions. It's a standard SRE pre-screening.

"How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?"

My view of unreasonable is not about whether there is a problem or not. It's not about the consensus. I don't actually have an opinion myself on the hiring process. If people i work on recruiting raise problems, i try to solve them. I have not had trouble trying to recruit in general. So i haven't formed a strong opinion, even after 11 years. If folks want to decide the process is horrible, okay. If folks want to decide it's great, that's also okay.

But it's unreasonable because it's both super-quick reaction without time to settle and think, and not aimed at anything other than trying to reinforce one view or the other.

Nobody is actually listening to each other, they are just trying to force whatever their view is, good or bad, on others.

So to answer you directly, i don't think pointing out a problem is unreasonable, but that's not my complaint. My complaint is that the actual discussion is not a discussion, but mostly people just arguing on the internet. IE You shouldn't take me saying "unreasonable" as a proxy for "me saying i think their viewpoint is wrong". I just think the mechanism of discussion here is unlikely to yield fruitful results.

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

#548

Post by gmarx »

biocomputation wrote: post #256
gmarx wrote: post #142

"There's an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently?" multiply 10,000 by 16. There are 160,000 bits

My sarcastic reply is to your very reasonable answer is: On the x86 architecture, integer multiplies take more cycles than a comparable solution that uses bit twiddling so you're just WRONG! You are the weakest link, GOODBYE!

I get that but I am proposing to hard code the answer since I already know it

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

#549

Post by DannyBee »

serge2k wrote: post #534
DannyBee wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it is definitely standard process to tell him (if they didn't, that's a definite failure). Again, remember you only have one side of the story here. I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim. Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it) Second i'm going to point out a few things: Experience may translate into wisdom, it may…

> Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly. How about the dozens of other seemingly qualified people who have complained about the google process?

"How about the dozens of other seemingly qualified people who have complained about the google process?"

And what's the other side of that? IE the literally tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands who haven't?

Again, i'm not saying there is no problem, i'm just saying this is probably not a great mechanism to evaluate whether there is a problem or not.

If you want actual usable data, this wouldn't be the way to get it, good or bad.

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

#550

Post by gxs »

philjr wrote: post #78

Without actually hearing the transcript verbatim, it's hard to give much enlightened perspective here, but there's a lot of "hur hur, dumb recruiter" responses here. What I will say, in general, is that figuring out what the "right" answers are here for what is obviously a technical phone screen by a non-technical person with answers on a piece of paper is also part of the challenge. This is a Director of Engineering…

I'd be willing to bet that you were an engineer that eventually moved into management.

Most technical people, surprisingly, don't have the tact to discern these two scenarios.

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