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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#61

Post by lokar »

vanusa wrote: post #48
lokar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's really just to make the point that you will need to write real code and answer technical questions in this process. And it provides an easy way to for them to drop out if they decide they don't want to do that.

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

#62

Post by BoorishBears »

sangnoir wrote: post #56
BoorishBears wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mana…

> I don't know

Allow me to inform you it is. Your ratios are unrealistic even for estimating unless you really think there's 1 L6 for every 3 L5s at Google. Also we're talking about around an L8 for director:

Yet it still holds for those numbers that yes, if you can afford to reach out to them, you can afford technical staff to be in the loop. Because it's not just about the company, it's about respecting the engineer's time. Not that many people are qualified enough to be getting calls to be hired in as directors, it's not a small feat even if it's 100 hires a year. You don't want them having experiences like this if only for the image it gives off to other potential hires..

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

Used to use about a decade ago? And I believe the moment you said "1:3 manager to L5 ratio" your interviewer would give you a subtle but questioning look and expect you to revise that.

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

#63

Post by BoorishBears »

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.

See sibling comment, and also there is a gulf between C-level hiring loop and throwing clearly non-technical recruiters at L8s.

They didn't even need a technical recruiter, having the recruiter do their thing when it comes to soft aspects, like lightly checking dates, seeing if the person seems interested, etc. Then bringing in someone technical to review the technical stuff... it's really not asking that much.

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

#64

Post by vanusa »

lokar wrote: post #61
vanusa wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's really just to make the point that you will need to write real code and answer technical questions in this process. And it provides an easy way to for them to drop out if they decide they don't want to do that.

Well put. I appreciate your clarifications.

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

#65

Post by ricardobeat »

aiisjustanif wrote: post #60
ricardobeat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm going by headcount numbers found online. 4% of 27000 is >1000. And HR is probably dealing with hiring for director roles among the other 100k non-engineering employees as well.

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

#66

Post by jtsiskin »

mmacvicarprett wrote: post #10

Not surprising, the candidate did fail at acknowledge who the interviewer was to adapt their answers. It was a recruiter reading answers from a sheet, the simpler you keep it the highest the chance of passing the stupid test.

Yes - after “Recruiter: wrong, not "attributes", it's "metadata".” - it’s clear enough what’s happening. “stat() return an error code, not an inode” - I know this isn’t what’s on the paper, and the author should have also. “stat() let you get the inode number” would have let you stay pedantically correct yet still satisfy the recruiter.

“What is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection?” - as soon as I read the question, I knew right away the author would give the exact hex, and the recruiter would want the three letter acronyms.

Perhaps this was a brilliant engineer disguising a personality interview as a technical one. Personally I would want my coworker or boss to be someone with enough awareness to have passed this interview. Compassion, empathy, social awareness, understanding someone else’s role and perspective, setting aside your ego to help a conversation go smoothly - important for a director to have.

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

#68

Post by hiptobecubic »

BoorishBears wrote: post #21
hiptobecubic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants a director of engineering that can't communicate with the rest of the company.

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…

If the person can't tell the difference between "dumbing down" and communicating appropriately for the audience in order to get their message across then I think the process ending in "no hire" is working fine.

There's no level above which this stops being important. If anything, it only increases as you go up.

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

#69

Post by sangnoir »

BoorishBears wrote: post #62
sangnoir wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mana…

> I don't know Allow me to inform you it is. Your ratios are unrealistic even for estimating unless you really think there's 1 L6 for every 3 L5s at Google. Also we're talking about around an L8 for director: Yet it still holds for those numbers that yes, if you can afford to reach out to them, you can afford technical staff to be in the loop. Because it's not just about the company, it's about respecting the enginee…

You may have misread my comment - I said 1 director[1] to every 15 L5s.

> And I believe the moment you said "1:3 manager to L5 ratio" your interviewer would give you a subtle but questioning look and expect you to revise that.

I deliberately chose a high number to show that the number of Director interviews is still large after steelmanning your PoV (at the lower boundary of director-to-L5 ratio): I don't imagine many teams have 3+ L5s on them.

Also, in the spirit of learning, could you perhaps plugin numbers that you think are more reasonable (L5 per team, and number of teams a director is responsible for)?

1. I'm calling the L5's skip-level manager a Director - I'm assuming that's what they are called at Google, but I could be wrong. That's the ratio I'm calculating

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

#70

Post by BoorishBears »

sangnoir wrote: post #69
BoorishBears wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know Allow me to inform you it is. Your ratios are unrealistic even for estimating unless you really think there's 1 L6 for every 3 L5s at Google. Also we're talking about around an L8 for director: Yet it still holds for those numbers that yes, if you can afford to reach out to them, you can afford technical staff to be in the loop. Because it's not just about the company, it's about respecting the enginee…

You may have misread my comment - I said 1 director[1] to every 15 L5s. > And I believe the moment you said "1:3 manager to L5 ratio" your interviewer would give you a subtle but questioning look and expect you to revise that. I deliberately chose a high number to show that the number of Director interviews is still large after steelmanning your PoV (at the lower boundary of director-to-L5 ratio): I don't imagine man…

You didn't misread it, I said 1 manager (L6)to 3 L5s.

L6 is Engineering Manager 1. That's how far up an L8 is.

And L6s are usually estimated to be 10% of Google. You can assume that there are order of magnitudes fewer devs each time you go up from there.

Also to be clear, it's extremely to be hired into Google higher than an L6. Even getting hired in as an L6 takes more experience than it does to join as an L5 and become an L6.

Most L6s at other FAANG companies would be downleveled without a very very strong performance, so getting reached out to as an L8 is not a small deal...

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