6 ms·

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

by philjr 10y ago

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 interview. Understanding context & navigating "real people", having soft skills etc. is meant to be part of the job description. Feels like this gentlemen couldn't turn the hardcore engineer off who's technically right about everything but yet never seems to get anyone to listen to him. Giving the hexadecimal representations of the 3-way handshake... really? You may have gotten a dumb recruiter and you may think you're smart, but from my perspective, you answered the questions in a pretty dumb way given the context of non-technical recruiter, very obviously reading answers from a sheet of paper. I've done two of these before and I've often said "Oh well, it might be down on your sheet at this thing" and the recruiter goes "Ah, yeh, that's it. Tick" and moved through 3-4 questions that in theory I might have gotten wrong. If you take the "be a dick" routine... Congrats. You won the moral war. Best of luck with your next job.

pgrote 10y ago
How were the answers stated to the recruiter being a dick? There was no room to a be a dick given the recruiter was looking for verbatim scripted answers.
edanm 10y ago
I more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.
- dkonofalski 10y ago
  Why is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.
  - philjr 10y ago
    I don't disagree, although I'm sceptical that's intentional on Google's part. I think if you applied some common sense to the situation and you were able to get off your moral high horse about what's correct vs answering the questions he needs you to answer to get to the actual proper interviews. Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved, I'm sure.
    - dkonofalski 10y ago
      What makes you skeptical, though? If anything, there are two things that make me almost certain of it: 1. The author of the post says that this was a phone call. That means that this, more than likely, is not a transcript of the call, but a paraphrase. The entire tone of the post lends itself to the author thinking that they're "correct" and that the interviewer was just a rude, monosyllabic simpleton. 2. The interview ended immediately after the author started to argue. Instead of trying to relate to the person and simplify their answers after the first few super-technical answers weren't accepted, they trudged on with the attitude of "this person has no idea what they're talking about and this is stupid" rather than "I'm clearly overshooting the mark here, maybe I should try and simplify the answers".
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills." I disagree. The Q&A process isn't indicative of almost any skills on the job except patients when your time is being wasted in a formal process. He'd have to have memorized every trivial, algorithmic fact plus their textbook (not real-world!) answers with no further knowledge or answers. Such a candidate is not valuable in any function in Google unless they're trying out for an IT version of Rainman. Not even for HR since they read a sheet instead of memorize it themselves. ;)
    - dkonofalski 10y ago
      You seem to have misunderstood. The "required skills" in question are communications skills, not technical skills. This wasn't a technical interview with an engineering team member as they seemed to think. This was a personality/psychological examination to make sure that their personality and communications skills match up with the culture and personality at Google. Directors typically don't do the low-level, high-skill technical work at companies like Google. They need to understand it, but, first and foremost, they need to be able to communicate with people of varying technical skill levels. This Q&A process, as you called it, is completely indicative of a person's communications skills.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
trevelyan 10y ago
Best of luck to Google, more like it.
scrollaway 10y ago
"Dumb recruiter"? What? Nobody's calling the recruiter dumb. Everybody is calling the process dumb. A process that puts somebody that cannot answer these questions, in charge of asking them and evaluating the answers. Having the candidate evaluate the competence of their recruiter is not part of the interview process. What the hell.
- harryf 10y ago
  I believe in the phone screen Google uses non-technical people to ask technical questions (as engineers are a scarce resource) so they're only able to handle "right or wrong" but you can probably work your way around that by being nice - this guy seemed to be being an ass...
  - Ph0X 10y ago
    I've had two phone screens with them and both times they were very technical people. Then again it was some time ago and with the bigger scale they may have changed it up. It is unfortunate, but as mentioned above, you need to just play the game until you get to the real part. It's like when I call customer support, I gotta play along with the non-technical people and get them to bump me up the chain to someone technical when I need advanced help. The unfortunate truth is that it's unreasonable to dedicate precious engineer time to screen millions and millions of people, they'd get no actual work done. So the first layers has to be like this. You just play along for the first step, and after that it'll get much much more interesting, trust me. This guy seemed like the kind of person who loves showing off his knowledge and having the last word on everything. Honestly this kind of people, as knowledgeable as they are, usually do poorly in a work environment.
    - dkonofalski 10y ago
      I'm glad that someone has some sense around here. I'm getting buried for saying the same thing. Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it. This was a culture interview, not a technical interview, and the fact that the author misinterpreted it only strengthens the interviewer's decision to not consider them further. They are very obviously not a good fit for a Director-level position at Google.
throw_away 10y ago
I don't understand why a non-technical recruiter would be asking technical questions of a technical candidate, especially to a high-level one. Maybe for college hires, where you need to weed out an overwhelming field of candidates. Maybe Google just gets that many more applicants but jeez, I feel a web form and a minimal machine learning classification could do a better screening job.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Maybe it's more of a case that a technical person was asking the questions but doesn't really care about justifying why they should hire an applicant if they don't say exactly what is written down
loeg 10y ago
The non-technical recruiter is asking technical questions with technical answers, but without the technical expertise to consider correct answers that are not literally the same words as the ones they have been given. That is not a good way to interview.
StreamBright 10y ago
The right answer? It is hard to believe that there is only one right answer to these questions. There are different level of answers to any given question. Think about how you might explain the second law of motion F = ma (scalar) vs F(vector) = ma(vector). Same thing applies here, three way handshake can be explained at many levels. Anyways, I understand that if you want to get hired you have to compromise, but I also understand this upsets many of us.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deadmik3 10y ago
I agree with you on this, the job description said it was just as much management as engineering. Management means being able to tolerate irritating situations without becoming an ass.
gxs 10y ago
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.
Ar-Curunir 10y ago
But most of these answers weren't even "technically right", or even dickish; they were pretty simple and straightforward answers. For instance, the recruiter asks what's the KILL signal, and then says the right answer is SIGTERM. If the answer itself is wrong, then what can you do? Not sure where you're getting this "be a dick" routine thing from, but when I read through the transcript, it was clear that the recruiter was looking for an excuse to reject the author, and nothing else.

by philjr 10y ago

pgrote 10y ago

How were the answers stated to the recruiter being a dick? There was no room to a be a dick given the recruiter was looking for verbatim scripted answers.

edanm 10y ago

I more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.

dkonofalski 10y ago
Why is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.
- philjr 10y ago
  I don't disagree, although I'm sceptical that's intentional on Google's part. I think if you applied some common sense to the situation and you were able to get off your moral high horse about what's correct vs answering the questions he needs you to answer to get to the actual proper interviews. Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved, I'm sure.
  - dkonofalski 10y ago
    What makes you skeptical, though? If anything, there are two things that make me almost certain of it: 1. The author of the post says that this was a phone call. That means that this, more than likely, is not a transcript of the call, but a paraphrase. The entire tone of the post lends itself to the author thinking that they're "correct" and that the interviewer was just a rude, monosyllabic simpleton. 2. The interview ended immediately after the author started to argue. Instead of trying to relate to the person and simplify their answers after the first few super-technical answers weren't accepted, they trudged on with the attitude of "this person has no idea what they're talking about and this is stupid" rather than "I'm clearly overshooting the mark here, maybe I should try and simplify the answers".
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills." I disagree. The Q&A process isn't indicative of almost any skills on the job except patients when your time is being wasted in a formal process. He'd have to have memorized every trivial, algorithmic fact plus their textbook (not real-world!) answers with no further knowledge or answers. Such a candidate is not valuable in any function in Google unless they're trying out for an IT version of Rainman. Not even for HR since they read a sheet instead of memorize it themselves. ;)
  - dkonofalski 10y ago
    You seem to have misunderstood. The "required skills" in question are communications skills, not technical skills. This wasn't a technical interview with an engineering team member as they seemed to think. This was a personality/psychological examination to make sure that their personality and communications skills match up with the culture and personality at Google. Directors typically don't do the low-level, high-skill technical work at companies like Google. They need to understand it, but, first and foremost, they need to be able to communicate with people of varying technical skill levels. This Q&A process, as you called it, is completely indicative of a person's communications skills.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

trevelyan 10y ago

Best of luck to Google, more like it.

scrollaway 10y ago

"Dumb recruiter"? What? Nobody's calling the recruiter dumb. Everybody is calling the process dumb. A process that puts somebody that cannot answer these questions, in charge of asking them and evaluating the answers. Having the candidate evaluate the competence of their recruiter is not part of the interview process. What the hell.

harryf 10y ago
I believe in the phone screen Google uses non-technical people to ask technical questions (as engineers are a scarce resource) so they're only able to handle "right or wrong" but you can probably work your way around that by being nice - this guy seemed to be being an ass...
- Ph0X 10y ago
  I've had two phone screens with them and both times they were very technical people. Then again it was some time ago and with the bigger scale they may have changed it up. It is unfortunate, but as mentioned above, you need to just play the game until you get to the real part. It's like when I call customer support, I gotta play along with the non-technical people and get them to bump me up the chain to someone technical when I need advanced help. The unfortunate truth is that it's unreasonable to dedicate precious engineer time to screen millions and millions of people, they'd get no actual work done. So the first layers has to be like this. You just play along for the first step, and after that it'll get much much more interesting, trust me. This guy seemed like the kind of person who loves showing off his knowledge and having the last word on everything. Honestly this kind of people, as knowledgeable as they are, usually do poorly in a work environment.
  - dkonofalski 10y ago
    I'm glad that someone has some sense around here. I'm getting buried for saying the same thing. Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it. This was a culture interview, not a technical interview, and the fact that the author misinterpreted it only strengthens the interviewer's decision to not consider them further. They are very obviously not a good fit for a Director-level position at Google.

throw_away 10y ago

I don't understand why a non-technical recruiter would be asking technical questions of a technical candidate, especially to a high-level one. Maybe for college hires, where you need to weed out an overwhelming field of candidates. Maybe Google just gets that many more applicants but jeez, I feel a web form and a minimal machine learning classification could do a better screening job.

intoverflow2 10y ago
Maybe it's more of a case that a technical person was asking the questions but doesn't really care about justifying why they should hire an applicant if they don't say exactly what is written down

loeg 10y ago

The non-technical recruiter is asking technical questions with technical answers, but without the technical expertise to consider correct answers that are not literally the same words as the ones they have been given. That is not a good way to interview.

StreamBright 10y ago

The right answer? It is hard to believe that there is only one right answer to these questions. There are different level of answers to any given question. Think about how you might explain the second law of motion F = ma (scalar) vs F(vector) = ma(vector). Same thing applies here, three way handshake can be explained at many levels. Anyways, I understand that if you want to get hired you have to compromise, but I also understand this upsets many of us.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deadmik3 10y ago

I agree with you on this, the job description said it was just as much management as engineering. Management means being able to tolerate irritating situations without becoming an ass.

gxs 10y ago

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.

Ar-Curunir 10y ago

But most of these answers weren't even "technically right", or even dickish; they were pretty simple and straightforward answers. For instance, the recruiter asks what's the KILL signal, and then says the right answer is SIGTERM. If the answer itself is wrong, then what can you do? Not sure where you're getting this "be a dick" routine thing from, but when I read through the transcript, it was clear that the recruiter was looking for an excuse to reject the author, and nothing else.