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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 en

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 engineering, but they decided to interview him for a different level/job instead. But it's super-strange even then (i've literally reviewed thousands of hiring packets, phone screens, etc, and this is ... out there. I'm not as familiar with SRE hiring practices, admittedly, though i've reviewed enough SRE candidates to know what kind of questions they ask). As for the answers themselves, i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt, as there are always two sides to every story. 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".

mkagenius 10y ago
Ha!
anuj_nm 10y ago
I was asked pretty much the same questions for an SRE position at Google. Note that I only found the recruiter phone screen to be this kind of 'pop quiz'. The engineering interviews were more detailed discussions with engineers.
- redog 10y ago
  About 8 years ago I had the same questions.
  - anuj_nm 10y ago
    Mine was 2 months ago. I'm surprised how stale these questions are.
jnbiche 10y ago
On one hand you say that these are "bog-standard" SRE questions, and on the other you say it's "super strange". What exactly is super strange? That a non-technical recruiter asked the questions? If that's not the strange part, then surely it's believable that the recruiter would not recognize some of the subtleties involved? That said, if this guy is the creator of GWAN, then it's entirely possible that his personality rubbed someone the wrong way and he was nixed for "personality reasons" in the only way they could.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  the questions asked don't strike me as strange, but the corrected answers/explanations by the recruiter are very strange indeed.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- burkaman 10y ago
  It's super strange that the recruiter would have no understanding that alternate answers are possible, and would end the call abruptly claiming the candidate didn't know their fundamentals. I've done this kind of phone screen for an entry level position at Google, and while the recruiter wasn't an engineer, they did have some basic knowledge of the concepts involved, and were able to prompt me with follow-up questions if I missed something or got a question half right. The questions themselves are not strange, it's the alleged attitude of the recruiter.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "What exactly is super strange? " Sure. For starters: 1. This guy apparently did not know he was interviewing for an SRE position. 2. The recruiter was looking for very very specific answers and immediately rejected any others. 3. There was no other discussion of anything, at all.
  - dkonofalski 10y ago
    This is exactly why I think that transcript is a bogus, one-sided take from someone who's dejected and hurt by the fact that they weren't chosen. It reeks of the smell of someone that thinks they were smarter than the interviewer.
joesmo 10y ago
Yup, those are SRE questions, but the fact that Google didn't interview him for the position he applied for makes them out to be even bigger idiots than I had them pegged at for using SRE questions on a director role. Regardless, just having such a stupid process exposed reflects badly on Google. In my own experience, Google isn't even able to call at the scheduled time so, while not the worst interviewers ever, they're pretty close and very far down the ladder. Put it another way, I doubt they could convince many to even interview without their extremely hefty compensation packages.
- sfrailsdev 10y ago
  From what I've heard, google intentionally screws with timing, who you will be speaking to, and other factors in order to try to understand how you deal with changes in circumstances.
  - joesmo 10y ago
    Yeah, I've heard this too. If it's true, it just shows what assholes they are when it comes to respecting people's time. Which I think is the original point of the article which comes in loud and clear: Google will waste your time; don't interview there.
    - sfrailsdev 10y ago
      When I was starting out, Doing well in the Google interview process was a nice confidence booster.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      Unfortunately they will just ignore the complaints and move on to the next resume in the pile.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    If that's true (and I would love to know if it is), then Google should know that is a big no-no in a lot of cultures, and there are much better ways to test for it. Some still hold the broken word to be an indication of people you don't want to deal with, ever.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Your comment combined with this one... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701650 ...creates an alternative interpretation in my mind that's not as bad. That is that the questions were a filter attempt done wrong in that it didn't account for stronger candidates giving better answers with a way for interviewer to confirm them. On top of that, a simple, data, entry error by HR person or whoever forwarded his name to them might have put him in wrong interview category. That's two, small problems vs a huge one implied here. Although the damage appears huge if they're filtering out candidates with his track record with the pre-screens.
- Fortinbras 10y ago
  Reminds me of a question I was asked when I interviewed at a blue bird company. "How would you make a directory if the parents were not present" Me: mkdir -p "Ah, yes. Suppose there was no -p option?" Recursive function.... "Ah, yes -- didn't expect recursion. Can you write that a s a loop?"
vmasto 10y ago
I would 100% back you up in my mind had it not been for the "Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?" question. I hope you'll agree that there is no way a correct answer would ever validate this question.
- dlubarov 10y ago
  I'm another Google employee. I really don't think that's an accurate transcription. There's a standard SRE question which is related, but different. I won't give the exact question, but you could try searching Glassdoor. If "Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?" really was the question, then the recruiter must have asked it from memory and misconstrued it. It's certainly not a standard Google SRE interview question.
dordoka 10y ago
I was interviewed by Google for an SRE management position and I got asked 6 of the OP's questions.
ozgung 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- raverbashing 10y ago
  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.
  - kyrra 10y ago
    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/ https://cloud.google.com/support/ [1] https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/ https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      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
potatolicious 10y ago
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 such that I actively warn friends applying/being referred to temper their expectations of a repeatable/reliable process. Most colleagues I've spoken to about this, including myself, have strong doubts we would have made the cut if we interviewed again - even though all are strong engineers with great perf records. At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously? We don't have to accept every detail of the reporting as gospel, but there's clearly something here.
- odbol_ 10y ago
  The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory, but not one test on knowledge of languages, architecture, design, or actual real-world problem solving. I walked into an interview with one guy and he literally did not even say hello: he just jumped straight into some problem I had to solve on the whiteboard. The problem with that approach is you end up with a very homogenous team of really smart, logical people, but without the balance of more creative, empathic types. Ideally, a well-functioning team will have both, and will have people from many different backgrounds and educations, because that's when you get true collaboration and innovation: by mixing unrelated disciplines.
  - natmaster 10y ago
    This explains why Google is incapable of attacking any product that requires an understanding of humanity to be successful rather than just raw data. (e.g., google+, youtube comments, etc)
    - meshko 10y ago
      these are just lack of good product management, nothing to do with engineers. I do suspect Google's PM culture is... lacking.
ajmarsh 10y ago
This was very similar to my first experience interviewing for an SRE role at Google. After about 20 minutes I got tired of arguing with a clearly non-technical recruiter and politely excused myself. My second interview well, that was a whole different bucket of problems.
- __jal 10y ago
  Yeah. I'll never interview with Google again. I've got friends who work in (mostly nontechnical) roles there who had very different experiences, but my interview was such a hot mess of disorganization, cluelessness and arrogance that I ended it early and told them I had no interest in the role or the company. Two years on, I think I made the right call.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    Yeah I had a somewhat similar experience. My first technical interviewer was 15 minutes late (so it was now a 30 minute interview). Then, after being asked the typical slew of questions (what is a hash table, etc) I was asked to implement a basic data structure (Set). Which was easy enough but my interviewer wouldn't let me finish writing up my implementation and, instead, insisted I focused on optimization of a particular, custom method he asked me to implement. I protested (premature optimization, etc) but ultimately went along with it. I finished optimizing but didn't get a chance to finish my Set by the time the interview was over. I got an email a week later saying thanks but no thanks with zero explanation. I had gotten everything right, what went wrong? So I had some of my Google friends track down the interviewer and ask. Apparently I didn't continue forward because I didn't finish my Set implementation... I've had Google contact me on occasion since then. I have not re-applied / re-interviewed with them. Their interview process is already bad enough.
powera 10y ago
This is the SRE prescreen. At least it's the one I was asked in 2007, almost verbatim. Possibly too verbatim.
- powera 10y ago
  Also, his answer on #9 is wrong, or at least <EDIT> his explanation of the conversation is terribly confusing </edit> With 10000 numbers, it's only efficient to create a lookup table with 8-bit integers, not with 16-bit integers. Based on his LinkedIn profile, I don't think anyone at Google would have thought of him as a "director of engineering". Being an "R&D director" at some unknown company at 24 is entirely un-comparable to a director at Google, and since then he's worked at his own very small company. He was probably a candidate for Senior SRE.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    Do you recall the question? Site's down. I recall thinking the right answer was to use POPCNT but maybe I'm misremembering the question.
    - baby 10y ago
      just prepend "cache://" to the url
      - tgokh 10y ago
        Woah, I've never seen this before -- thanks for sharing!
    - powera 10y ago
      The question was "how do you do bit-counting of a bunch of numbers". The two canonical answers are "lookup table" and "using bit shifts and multiplying by magic numbers". The fact that there's a machine instruction for it does makes it a bad question.
      - 10y ago
mirekrusin 10y ago
It's an interesting recruitment setup where overqualified candidates are rejected.
- zerkten 10y ago
  You can have situations where you are prepared to recruit someone with potential versus being the final article. In those situations the overqualified candidates may not compare well with what you consider the potential of the slightly under-qualified candidate, and may not have some of their other attributes. It's obviously a risk, but it happens more than people think.
  - mirekrusin 10y ago
    Still, overqualified candidate supersets qualified/unqualified. He/she should pass the test. Failure of recognising overqualified candidate from under qualified is a failure on the recruiter side, not the candidate side. Recruiter is of course allowed to say "I'm sorry, but you are well overqualified for this position". In this case he was falsely recognised as somebody under qualified.
rifung 10y ago
I realize this is a long shot, but seeing as you're actually in a pretty high position, could you try having the recruiter screen changed to be multiple choice? It's simpler when having a non technical person asking the questions and I imagine it would lower false negatives. Frankly I don't care personally but it seems like most people would like this better.
zobzu 10y ago
I had similar questions for a SRE position at google a few years back in fact, so I found it interesting and does not surprise me. I eventually refused the position without going on-site just because of how ridiculous the questions/replies were (and frankly, because I had another good offer elsewhere, but it did contribute greatly). While my experience wasn't as bad by a long stretch, I can see how this is plausible. In particular I immediately figured out that the recruiter wasn't very technically inclined, had a "heres a list of correct responses" spreadsheet to help him, and had very little time to waste. Due to taking that into account - I was always accommodating instead of confrontational (which got me more interviews, which were better/with real engineers, yay - though not great either). Had I been confrontational, pointing out mistakes and misunderstandings, I'm sure it'd have gone pretty bad.
ransom1538 10y ago
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 the 2 candidates to the company. Former H1B employees love this option. A team has a 'friend' in mind. I honestly think, this isn't a question of a dumb recruiter, more like a way to just push something through. The recruiter was probably taken to lunch with a high five. This is very normal. I wouldn't freakout that they have a 'dumb process' you need to read between the lines here. The saddest part, this pawn gets a "PASSED" on his record at Google -- but it was just internal politics.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > 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?
kabdib 10y ago
Wow. If this is actually what happens, even a little bit, then Google has a huge, huge fucking problem, and it needs to be fixed. I've never bothered to apply to Google. But if this happened to me, I'd just walk away. You don't know me, but you don't want that :-)
- hasch 10y ago
  I think in this case, it's more like there are "independent" recruiters with their fixed Q&A sheets sitting around, somewhere, and fishing around for possible candidates to make it to a second level.
hasch 10y ago
Just FWIW, about 5 years ago someone also contacted me for a google interview. The questions were very similar, so I'm not surprised. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but after a few mins I didn't took the call serious any more and in the end after 30 min it felt more like a way too long prank call.
falsedan 10y ago
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.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I'd hope it's not too typical, since four out of the ten official answers are wrong, and even one of the questions manages to be wrong. (Specifically, the "why is quicksort the best?" is just completely ridiculous.) It's one thing to blindly apply a simple questionnaire without thinking about the answers that come back, and yet another thing to do it with a questionnaire that's doesn't even get stuff right.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if the recruiter just googled to find a list of questions and answers. This candidate probably isn't even on any official radar. The recruiter probably just uses this as a means to evaluate candidates before they officially call dibs on them. Google could very well be different since they do many things differently but recruiting has always been a sales position with everything it comes with, namely leads, quotas, conversions, etc.
caleblloyd 10y ago
I can confirm that a recruiter contacted me and asked pretty much these exact same questions when trying to recruit me for an SRE job. My recruiter was reading these questions off of a sheet of paper, but when we had discrepancies in our answers and she would say something like "It says here an inode holds metadata", and I would respond with something like "oh, metadata and attributes are the same thing", she would say "oh, well you are correct then!" I made it to the first phone interview but that's where the path ended. I was bummed for a little but then remembered I prefer small business anyways :)
microtherion 10y ago
Having only seen the candidate's paraphrase of that conversation (and never having worked for or interviewed with Google), I would STILL be inclined to give that candidate a thumbs down. To solve difficult technical discussions, it's important to be able to restate the other side's arguments in the light most favorable to THEM, while the candidate was entirely focused on paraphrasing the interviewer's argument in the least sympathetic way. Would you want to work with a person like that?
- dilemma 10y ago
  So what you want to see from the author is a Mao-era self-criticism stating why Google were 100% right in rejecting him.
  - thwd 10y ago
    I think they mean that if you realize you're talking to a non-techie then you should make an effort to use simple words. Your TCP hex opcode knowledge does not impress someone who doesn't know what hex or TCP is. Figuring that they must be looking for an answer along the lines of "SYN/ACK" is a skill as well. A people skill.
kafkaesq 10y ago
IE maybe he applied to a position labeled director of engineering, but they decided to interview him for a different level/job instead. A "different" job, several grades lower in responsibility (and pay). Without in any way prefacing him, beforehand. Is that the way things usually work in the Google hiring process?
kev009 10y ago
This blog is exactly what an SRE interview is like. I breezed through these kinds of questions with the recruiter since I'm younger have a fairly fresh CS background. Then, my first SRE staff interviewer primarily asked how I would build a data center on the moon. I work on the FreeBSD kernel and TCP full time. I know what BDP, window sizing, head of line blocking, etc are way beyond what a typical SRE would and how communication latency would cause major issues. That confused the questioner. I can't think of anything else I'd have said wrong, my background is systems engineering and I know more about power distribution, HVAC, and data center design than I care to. The lady was skeptical of my answers and it felt really humiliating even though I would rate myself more knowledgeable than my questioner, because of the candidate/interviewer positioning and failure. The next man, on another day, asked me a bunch of math trivia like estimating the angles on the hands of a clock and orders of magnitude guesses of a small item like a marble to fill a room. I told him I was no longer interested in working for Google and he was really startled because "he didn't get to ask me systems questions yet".. well, good luck with that. Everyone was really sad at that point, including the recruiter. Nobody from Google has contacted me again, which is a relief. I found the entire process gross.
- _wmd 10y ago
  > even though I would rate myself more knowledgeable than my questioner Don't get me wrong, I'm guessing you know your stuff, but you also strike me as someone who may likely have failed on culture fit down the line. Interviewers are often more sensitive to attitude than they ever are to aptitude, and for good reason, your HVAC knowledge may be irrelevant once you discover the custom designs in use behind closed doors, and a bad attitude toward learning where you're weak can be a much more fatal problem for a new hire.
  - kev009 10y ago
    That may well be the case. The reason I quit the interview is because I evaluate a potential employer while they are evaluating me.. I really love when someone asks "do you have any questions for me?" and take full advantage to try and get candid knowledge of a team and more importantly leadership. I determined Google would not be a good fit for me.
wpietri 10y ago
I gather you didn't run this by your PR folks: > 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". I get that you are happy at Google, that you want to defend your employer. But implying the guy's a liar or a fool does not help. If anything, it makes me more likely to believe that Google has something to be touchy about here.
- kentonv 10y ago
  Well, I mean, he's right: any time a story seems outrageous and unbelievable, it's often because it has been embellished at least somewhat. That doesn't mean it's completely false either, though.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    "Often"? Would you be so kind as to show me your data on that? Maybe it's just this election season, but I seem to be hearing about quite a lot of outrageous things that are perfectly true. Even if you're correct and he's merely saying something generically true about almost any concerning story, him saying it in the context of the post reads to me as a veiled accusation. For example, suppose you posted an open-source project of yours here. If I were to comment, "Open-source projects are often half-finished, buggy messes," how would that seem? It is factually true; randomly looking at GitHub projects is enough to show that. But in context, it's an unkind thing to say because encourages people to look at your project as one of them.
tmptmp 10y ago
This reminds me the story of one of the WhatsApp founders getting rejected by FaceBook. [1] Hope this doesn't turn out that costly for Google. But I'd be happy if it does, if it is the way the interview was really conducted. [1] https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383 https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383
hclivess 10y ago
no, there are not. go marry microsoft, stupid
gbil 10y ago
5 years ago after applying for a unix systems engineer position at google, I had a phone interview with more or less the same questions - more probably as this interview was interrupted, so for sure these are questions asked from google recruiters but for sure I would also be surprised if such interviews take place for such high profile position. I would assume things are done differently in such cases and not via the "usual" way.
mliker 10y ago
I agree with DannyBee. The author of this post seems to suffer from a bit of arrogance and inflated sense of his own abilities. It's likely he tweaked the story a bit to make himself feel better. I've seen many high level directors do this since at that stage in their careers, they can't possibly imagine themselves to not get an offer from a company.
johnnyfaehell 10y ago
> 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. This makes the most sense to me, why would a director of engineering be responsible for getting Google back online if it went down when there are SREs.

mkagenius 10y ago

Ha!

anuj_nm 10y ago

I was asked pretty much the same questions for an SRE position at Google. Note that I only found the recruiter phone screen to be this kind of 'pop quiz'. The engineering interviews were more detailed discussions with engineers.

redog 10y ago
About 8 years ago I had the same questions.
- anuj_nm 10y ago
  Mine was 2 months ago. I'm surprised how stale these questions are.

jnbiche 10y ago

On one hand you say that these are "bog-standard" SRE questions, and on the other you say it's "super strange". What exactly is super strange? That a non-technical recruiter asked the questions? If that's not the strange part, then surely it's believable that the recruiter would not recognize some of the subtleties involved? That said, if this guy is the creator of GWAN, then it's entirely possible that his personality rubbed someone the wrong way and he was nixed for "personality reasons" in the only way they could.

novaleaf 10y ago
the questions asked don't strike me as strange, but the corrected answers/explanations by the recruiter are very strange indeed.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
burkaman 10y ago
It's super strange that the recruiter would have no understanding that alternate answers are possible, and would end the call abruptly claiming the candidate didn't know their fundamentals. I've done this kind of phone screen for an entry level position at Google, and while the recruiter wasn't an engineer, they did have some basic knowledge of the concepts involved, and were able to prompt me with follow-up questions if I missed something or got a question half right. The questions themselves are not strange, it's the alleged attitude of the recruiter.
DannyBee 10y ago
"What exactly is super strange? " Sure. For starters: 1. This guy apparently did not know he was interviewing for an SRE position. 2. The recruiter was looking for very very specific answers and immediately rejected any others. 3. There was no other discussion of anything, at all.
- dkonofalski 10y ago
  This is exactly why I think that transcript is a bogus, one-sided take from someone who's dejected and hurt by the fact that they weren't chosen. It reeks of the smell of someone that thinks they were smarter than the interviewer.

joesmo 10y ago

Yup, those are SRE questions, but the fact that Google didn't interview him for the position he applied for makes them out to be even bigger idiots than I had them pegged at for using SRE questions on a director role. Regardless, just having such a stupid process exposed reflects badly on Google. In my own experience, Google isn't even able to call at the scheduled time so, while not the worst interviewers ever, they're pretty close and very far down the ladder. Put it another way, I doubt they could convince many to even interview without their extremely hefty compensation packages.

sfrailsdev 10y ago
From what I've heard, google intentionally screws with timing, who you will be speaking to, and other factors in order to try to understand how you deal with changes in circumstances.
- joesmo 10y ago
  Yeah, I've heard this too. If it's true, it just shows what assholes they are when it comes to respecting people's time. Which I think is the original point of the article which comes in loud and clear: Google will waste your time; don't interview there.
  - sfrailsdev 10y ago
    When I was starting out, Doing well in the Google interview process was a nice confidence booster.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    Unfortunately they will just ignore the complaints and move on to the next resume in the pile.
- protomyth 10y ago
  If that's true (and I would love to know if it is), then Google should know that is a big no-no in a lot of cultures, and there are much better ways to test for it. Some still hold the broken word to be an indication of people you don't want to deal with, ever.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Your comment combined with this one... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701650 ...creates an alternative interpretation in my mind that's not as bad. That is that the questions were a filter attempt done wrong in that it didn't account for stronger candidates giving better answers with a way for interviewer to confirm them. On top of that, a simple, data, entry error by HR person or whoever forwarded his name to them might have put him in wrong interview category. That's two, small problems vs a huge one implied here. Although the damage appears huge if they're filtering out candidates with his track record with the pre-screens.

Fortinbras 10y ago
Reminds me of a question I was asked when I interviewed at a blue bird company. "How would you make a directory if the parents were not present" Me: mkdir -p "Ah, yes. Suppose there was no -p option?" Recursive function.... "Ah, yes -- didn't expect recursion. Can you write that a s a loop?"

vmasto 10y ago

I would 100% back you up in my mind had it not been for the "Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?" question. I hope you'll agree that there is no way a correct answer would ever validate this question.

dlubarov 10y ago
I'm another Google employee. I really don't think that's an accurate transcription. There's a standard SRE question which is related, but different. I won't give the exact question, but you could try searching Glassdoor. If "Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?" really was the question, then the recruiter must have asked it from memory and misconstrued it. It's certainly not a standard Google SRE interview question.

dordoka 10y ago

I was interviewed by Google for an SRE management position and I got asked 6 of the OP's questions.

ozgung 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
raverbashing 10y ago
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.
- kyrra 10y ago
  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/ https://cloud.google.com/support/ [1] https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/ https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    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

potatolicious 10y ago

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 such that I actively warn friends applying/being referred to temper their expectations of a repeatable/reliable process. Most colleagues I've spoken to about this, including myself, have strong doubts we would have made the cut if we interviewed again - even though all are strong engineers with great perf records. At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously? We don't have to accept every detail of the reporting as gospel, but there's clearly something here.

odbol_ 10y ago
The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory, but not one test on knowledge of languages, architecture, design, or actual real-world problem solving. I walked into an interview with one guy and he literally did not even say hello: he just jumped straight into some problem I had to solve on the whiteboard. The problem with that approach is you end up with a very homogenous team of really smart, logical people, but without the balance of more creative, empathic types. Ideally, a well-functioning team will have both, and will have people from many different backgrounds and educations, because that's when you get true collaboration and innovation: by mixing unrelated disciplines.
- natmaster 10y ago
  This explains why Google is incapable of attacking any product that requires an understanding of humanity to be successful rather than just raw data. (e.g., google+, youtube comments, etc)
  - meshko 10y ago
    these are just lack of good product management, nothing to do with engineers. I do suspect Google's PM culture is... lacking.

ajmarsh 10y ago

This was very similar to my first experience interviewing for an SRE role at Google. After about 20 minutes I got tired of arguing with a clearly non-technical recruiter and politely excused myself. My second interview well, that was a whole different bucket of problems.

__jal 10y ago
Yeah. I'll never interview with Google again. I've got friends who work in (mostly nontechnical) roles there who had very different experiences, but my interview was such a hot mess of disorganization, cluelessness and arrogance that I ended it early and told them I had no interest in the role or the company. Two years on, I think I made the right call.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Yeah I had a somewhat similar experience. My first technical interviewer was 15 minutes late (so it was now a 30 minute interview). Then, after being asked the typical slew of questions (what is a hash table, etc) I was asked to implement a basic data structure (Set). Which was easy enough but my interviewer wouldn't let me finish writing up my implementation and, instead, insisted I focused on optimization of a particular, custom method he asked me to implement. I protested (premature optimization, etc) but ultimately went along with it. I finished optimizing but didn't get a chance to finish my Set by the time the interview was over. I got an email a week later saying thanks but no thanks with zero explanation. I had gotten everything right, what went wrong? So I had some of my Google friends track down the interviewer and ask. Apparently I didn't continue forward because I didn't finish my Set implementation... I've had Google contact me on occasion since then. I have not re-applied / re-interviewed with them. Their interview process is already bad enough.

powera 10y ago

This is the SRE prescreen. At least it's the one I was asked in 2007, almost verbatim. Possibly too verbatim.

powera 10y ago
Also, his answer on #9 is wrong, or at least <EDIT> his explanation of the conversation is terribly confusing </edit> With 10000 numbers, it's only efficient to create a lookup table with 8-bit integers, not with 16-bit integers. Based on his LinkedIn profile, I don't think anyone at Google would have thought of him as a "director of engineering". Being an "R&D director" at some unknown company at 24 is entirely un-comparable to a director at Google, and since then he's worked at his own very small company. He was probably a candidate for Senior SRE.
- rayiner 10y ago
  Do you recall the question? Site's down. I recall thinking the right answer was to use POPCNT but maybe I'm misremembering the question.
  - baby 10y ago
    just prepend "cache://" to the url
    - tgokh 10y ago
      Woah, I've never seen this before -- thanks for sharing!
  - powera 10y ago
    The question was "how do you do bit-counting of a bunch of numbers". The two canonical answers are "lookup table" and "using bit shifts and multiplying by magic numbers". The fact that there's a machine instruction for it does makes it a bad question.
    - 10y ago

mirekrusin 10y ago

It's an interesting recruitment setup where overqualified candidates are rejected.

zerkten 10y ago
You can have situations where you are prepared to recruit someone with potential versus being the final article. In those situations the overqualified candidates may not compare well with what you consider the potential of the slightly under-qualified candidate, and may not have some of their other attributes. It's obviously a risk, but it happens more than people think.
- mirekrusin 10y ago
  Still, overqualified candidate supersets qualified/unqualified. He/she should pass the test. Failure of recognising overqualified candidate from under qualified is a failure on the recruiter side, not the candidate side. Recruiter is of course allowed to say "I'm sorry, but you are well overqualified for this position". In this case he was falsely recognised as somebody under qualified.

rifung 10y ago

I realize this is a long shot, but seeing as you're actually in a pretty high position, could you try having the recruiter screen changed to be multiple choice? It's simpler when having a non technical person asking the questions and I imagine it would lower false negatives. Frankly I don't care personally but it seems like most people would like this better.

zobzu 10y ago

I had similar questions for a SRE position at google a few years back in fact, so I found it interesting and does not surprise me. I eventually refused the position without going on-site just because of how ridiculous the questions/replies were (and frankly, because I had another good offer elsewhere, but it did contribute greatly). While my experience wasn't as bad by a long stretch, I can see how this is plausible. In particular I immediately figured out that the recruiter wasn't very technically inclined, had a "heres a list of correct responses" spreadsheet to help him, and had very little time to waste. Due to taking that into account - I was always accommodating instead of confrontational (which got me more interviews, which were better/with real engineers, yay - though not great either). Had I been confrontational, pointing out mistakes and misunderstandings, I'm sure it'd have gone pretty bad.

ransom1538 10y ago

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 the 2 candidates to the company. Former H1B employees love this option. A team has a 'friend' in mind. I honestly think, this isn't a question of a dumb recruiter, more like a way to just push something through. The recruiter was probably taken to lunch with a high five. This is very normal. I wouldn't freakout that they have a 'dumb process' you need to read between the lines here. The saddest part, this pawn gets a "PASSED" on his record at Google -- but it was just internal politics.

serge2k 10y ago
> 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?

kabdib 10y ago

Wow. If this is actually what happens, even a little bit, then Google has a huge, huge fucking problem, and it needs to be fixed. I've never bothered to apply to Google. But if this happened to me, I'd just walk away. You don't know me, but you don't want that :-)

hasch 10y ago
I think in this case, it's more like there are "independent" recruiters with their fixed Q&A sheets sitting around, somewhere, and fishing around for possible candidates to make it to a second level.

hasch 10y ago

Just FWIW, about 5 years ago someone also contacted me for a google interview. The questions were very similar, so I'm not surprised. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but after a few mins I didn't took the call serious any more and in the end after 30 min it felt more like a way too long prank call.

falsedan 10y ago

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.

mikeash 10y ago
I'd hope it's not too typical, since four out of the ten official answers are wrong, and even one of the questions manages to be wrong. (Specifically, the "why is quicksort the best?" is just completely ridiculous.) It's one thing to blindly apply a simple questionnaire without thinking about the answers that come back, and yet another thing to do it with a questionnaire that's doesn't even get stuff right.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the recruiter just googled to find a list of questions and answers. This candidate probably isn't even on any official radar. The recruiter probably just uses this as a means to evaluate candidates before they officially call dibs on them. Google could very well be different since they do many things differently but recruiting has always been a sales position with everything it comes with, namely leads, quotas, conversions, etc.

caleblloyd 10y ago

I can confirm that a recruiter contacted me and asked pretty much these exact same questions when trying to recruit me for an SRE job. My recruiter was reading these questions off of a sheet of paper, but when we had discrepancies in our answers and she would say something like "It says here an inode holds metadata", and I would respond with something like "oh, metadata and attributes are the same thing", she would say "oh, well you are correct then!" I made it to the first phone interview but that's where the path ended. I was bummed for a little but then remembered I prefer small business anyways :)

microtherion 10y ago

Having only seen the candidate's paraphrase of that conversation (and never having worked for or interviewed with Google), I would STILL be inclined to give that candidate a thumbs down. To solve difficult technical discussions, it's important to be able to restate the other side's arguments in the light most favorable to THEM, while the candidate was entirely focused on paraphrasing the interviewer's argument in the least sympathetic way. Would you want to work with a person like that?

dilemma 10y ago
So what you want to see from the author is a Mao-era self-criticism stating why Google were 100% right in rejecting him.
- thwd 10y ago
  I think they mean that if you realize you're talking to a non-techie then you should make an effort to use simple words. Your TCP hex opcode knowledge does not impress someone who doesn't know what hex or TCP is. Figuring that they must be looking for an answer along the lines of "SYN/ACK" is a skill as well. A people skill.

kafkaesq 10y ago

IE maybe he applied to a position labeled director of engineering, but they decided to interview him for a different level/job instead. A "different" job, several grades lower in responsibility (and pay). Without in any way prefacing him, beforehand. Is that the way things usually work in the Google hiring process?

kev009 10y ago

This blog is exactly what an SRE interview is like. I breezed through these kinds of questions with the recruiter since I'm younger have a fairly fresh CS background. Then, my first SRE staff interviewer primarily asked how I would build a data center on the moon. I work on the FreeBSD kernel and TCP full time. I know what BDP, window sizing, head of line blocking, etc are way beyond what a typical SRE would and how communication latency would cause major issues. That confused the questioner. I can't think of anything else I'd have said wrong, my background is systems engineering and I know more about power distribution, HVAC, and data center design than I care to. The lady was skeptical of my answers and it felt really humiliating even though I would rate myself more knowledgeable than my questioner, because of the candidate/interviewer positioning and failure. The next man, on another day, asked me a bunch of math trivia like estimating the angles on the hands of a clock and orders of magnitude guesses of a small item like a marble to fill a room. I told him I was no longer interested in working for Google and he was really startled because "he didn't get to ask me systems questions yet".. well, good luck with that. Everyone was really sad at that point, including the recruiter. Nobody from Google has contacted me again, which is a relief. I found the entire process gross.

_wmd 10y ago
> even though I would rate myself more knowledgeable than my questioner Don't get me wrong, I'm guessing you know your stuff, but you also strike me as someone who may likely have failed on culture fit down the line. Interviewers are often more sensitive to attitude than they ever are to aptitude, and for good reason, your HVAC knowledge may be irrelevant once you discover the custom designs in use behind closed doors, and a bad attitude toward learning where you're weak can be a much more fatal problem for a new hire.
- kev009 10y ago
  That may well be the case. The reason I quit the interview is because I evaluate a potential employer while they are evaluating me.. I really love when someone asks "do you have any questions for me?" and take full advantage to try and get candid knowledge of a team and more importantly leadership. I determined Google would not be a good fit for me.

wpietri 10y ago

I gather you didn't run this by your PR folks: > 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". I get that you are happy at Google, that you want to defend your employer. But implying the guy's a liar or a fool does not help. If anything, it makes me more likely to believe that Google has something to be touchy about here.

kentonv 10y ago
Well, I mean, he's right: any time a story seems outrageous and unbelievable, it's often because it has been embellished at least somewhat. That doesn't mean it's completely false either, though.
- wpietri 10y ago
  "Often"? Would you be so kind as to show me your data on that? Maybe it's just this election season, but I seem to be hearing about quite a lot of outrageous things that are perfectly true. Even if you're correct and he's merely saying something generically true about almost any concerning story, him saying it in the context of the post reads to me as a veiled accusation. For example, suppose you posted an open-source project of yours here. If I were to comment, "Open-source projects are often half-finished, buggy messes," how would that seem? It is factually true; randomly looking at GitHub projects is enough to show that. But in context, it's an unkind thing to say because encourages people to look at your project as one of them.

tmptmp 10y ago

This reminds me the story of one of the WhatsApp founders getting rejected by FaceBook. [1] Hope this doesn't turn out that costly for Google. But I'd be happy if it does, if it is the way the interview was really conducted. [1] https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383 https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383

hclivess 10y ago

no, there are not. go marry microsoft, stupid

gbil 10y ago

5 years ago after applying for a unix systems engineer position at google, I had a phone interview with more or less the same questions - more probably as this interview was interrupted, so for sure these are questions asked from google recruiters but for sure I would also be surprised if such interviews take place for such high profile position. I would assume things are done differently in such cases and not via the "usual" way.

mliker 10y ago

I agree with DannyBee. The author of this post seems to suffer from a bit of arrogance and inflated sense of his own abilities. It's likely he tweaked the story a bit to make himself feel better. I've seen many high level directors do this since at that stage in their careers, they can't possibly imagine themselves to not get an offer from a company.

johnnyfaehell 10y ago

> 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. This makes the most sense to me, why would a director of engineering be responsible for getting Google back online if it went down when there are SREs.