Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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 answered in a way that was technically correct, but not in the answer key.

The reasoning behind this, sadly, is that Google thinks it tuned its hiring questions to reduce the rate of false positives- hiring an unqualified person into a role- at the expense of false negatives (not hiring a qualified person). Eventually, I stopped referring people to Google as the process was quite capricious. I told anybody who wanted to apply to read everything online about the process, memorize CLR and leetcode, and then tell the interviewers what they wanted to hear.

I had a similar experience a few years ago. Although I soon realized what the deal was, and what the expectations of the screener were (so I could adjust and ‘pass’), it discouraged me from moving forward.

It seems nowadays the process is much more reasonable, but Google is still far behind other FAANG companies in regard to their interviewing process, in my opinion.

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

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 a way to bow out gracefully.

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.