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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#561

Post by mikeash »

probinso wrote: post #525

The problem is Google doesn't need you. Google gets onefinity applications per day. If they shave %90 percent of cold applicants this way then they will not hurt for more applicants. A company that large will gain it's best participants by reference. ----------------------------------------- my interview with google was very short. them: what is 2 ^ 37? me: can I use a calculator? them: no me: then we are done here.

Did they want an exact answer? Getting closeish without a calculator is not too hard: 2^30 is about a billion, so 2^37 is about 128 billion.

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

#562

Post by ctdonath »

zeppelin101 wrote: post #533
_t0du wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, general interviewing (unrelated to tech) contains various amounts of "are you lying on your resume" type questions. If someone walks in with a breakdown of 10 years dev, 5 years management, they should be able to at least comfortably answer system/coding type questions. As in, if you do something every day for 10 years, you don't forget all of it in 5. I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing…

How can you not know what MVC stands for? It's pretty much a buzzword!

Not all programming/engineering circles use the same buzzwords. For five years my mobile development groups used the concept without the acronym.

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

#563

Post by ubernostrum »

rayiner wrote: post #341
tptacek wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The length of an ethernet address is a trivia question. It's a good way to score a board game. Filtering out candidates based on it is lunacy.

I agree with the first and second sentence. As to the third: what would be your thought process as to someone who claimed to be a network programmer on the phone but couldn't answer most of those questions?

And here it is.

I do plenty of interviews, and so I do have some sympathy for the idea that some overwhelming majority of applicants simply cannot perform even the most basic coding tasks but are somehow trying to sneak in anyway, but at the same time I can't escape the suspicion that a lot of the stories are actually from badly-designed or badly-calibrated interviews gone off the rails.

I absolutely believe that the article we're discussing here gives a fair view of a Google phone screen, since I've been through it too and even got asked some of the same questions. The only reason I "passed" was that I recalibrated way, way down to meet the expectations and the technical understanding of the recruiter I was talking to (who did very clearly seem to be reading off a prepared script). This was surprising since Google had reached out to me to ask me to apply, which one would think indicates a confidence in basic technical skills, but if I hadn't caught that and adjusted how I was interpreting and answering the random trivia they threw at me, I likely wouldn't have passed the screen and would have been labeled just another impostor trying to sneak into a job I'm unqualified for.

So when I hear someone else talking about all the "unqualified" applicants they get, I can't help wondering how many really were qualified applicant talking to unqualified interviewer using unqualified interview process.

(disclosure: I don't work for Google, don't ever intend to work for Google, and in fact hung up on a later screening call out of frustration with the way they ran their process, which at least finally got their recruiters to stop spamming me)

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

#564

Post by erpellan »

potatolicious wrote: post #375
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…

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…

I got pinged by Google about a year ago (after being narrowly rejected 9 years ago) asking if I'd be interested in re-applying. I said, "Sure, why not?".

I was immediately asked which department I wanted to join and why. I said, "Err, not sure, how about SRE?". To be told, "Oh, well that's not my area, let me ask them."

Shortly after that I got a curt message saying "Thank you for applying to Google. We have no vacancies that would suit you right now, thanks for applying, goodbye."

Somewhat bemused by the whole process (you contacted me, dude!), I went about my day.

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

#565

Post by raverbashing »

kyrra wrote: post #546
raverbashing wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supp…

I am aware of these support channels, but there are a lot of stories of paying customers getting stonewalled. Not to mention cases where non-paying customers or content producers get simply kicked out without recourse - though sometimes Google (and others) are right to act in a certain way

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

#566

Post by sreque »

bostik wrote: post #502
_ivvf wrote: post #443

I think the candidate made a simple mistake: the interviewer is always right. Your job in an interview isn't to be right or to teach the interviewer. Your job is to make the interviewer like you foremost, and second make the interview think that you're qualified. And of course no one likes being corrected or told they are wrong. In my opinion, it is better to do well on an interview and decide after the fact that you…

> the interviewer is always right That is an awful sentiment, and I find myself in violent disagreement with you. A good number of my enjoyable interviews have been with candidates who clearly knew more than I did, and could expand from an interesting detail to a short ex-tempore lecture on the topic. I cherish each of those. An interview where I, as an interviewer, learn something is a fine thing indeed.

If the interviewer is in a position where he/she seems willing to listen and learn, then by all means impress. However, correcting an interviewer is always a dangerous gamble, and it is downright foolish to keep arguing with him or her when he/she doesn't agree with you.

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

#567

Post by crdoconnor »

serge2k wrote: post #537
crdoconnor wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, It's not just this guy. There have been others: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years. I've also heard a few…

> There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years. That's a poor metric to evaluate the rampant complaints about a high false negative rate. I don't think that many people are disputing that the people who do get hired are qualified most of the time.

When the in house engineers come out with products like Wave and Glass while things like Maps and Android are purchased you have to wonder.

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

#569

Post by falsedan »

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…

This looks like a typical pre-interview recruiter phone screen… they're looking for shibboleths that identify the candidate as a genuine computer person who took CS 101, and exclude candidates who spam every job with bogus CVs. I'd start every candidate with this screen, unless I personally knew them & was familiar with their technical ability.

  > none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets
They'd be internal to recruiting, so you wouldn't see them unless you were heavily involved (doing interviews and recruiting trips isn't being heavily involved). They're for any recruiter to use to quickly eliminate bogus applicants.

  > Particularly, when one side presents something that makes the other side look like a blithering idiot, the
  > likelihood it's 100% accurate is, historically, "not great".
You can just outright call him a liar… I'd expect this to be a fairly accurate report. It looks like the recruiter misused the screen; instead of eliminating obviously bogus candidates, they used it to eliminate a candidate who may or may not get an offer (and thus a commission). They should have proceeded to the technical phone screen stage. If the guideline on the recruiter screening is: drop anyone with <100% correct, then I think that's silly.
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