6 ms·

> He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If

> He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview. > exactly what this process is supposed to do You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is. > make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions In your post you imagine slight differences that might make the questions more reasonable. I think the main problem here is the responses to the answers. For a non-engineer quizzing someone, the response to an answer should be "OK" and then you note down the answer and show your notes to an engineer at the end. This solves both the "that's not what's written on my sheet" problem and also allows the interviewee to form a more nuanced impression of your recruiting process.

Voloskaya 8y ago
> The response to an answer should be "OK" and then you note down the answer and show your notes to an engineer at the end. This kinds of defeat the purpose of the screening interview though doesn't it? The point is to not disturb an engineer when 99% of the people that are being screened are unqualified.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  If your engineering managers can't be disturbed than maybe you don't have time to hire.
  - Voloskaya 8y ago
    To be fair we are talking about Google, not the local shop at the corner of the streets. Each recruiter must do tens of screening a day, and they have tens of recruiters assigned to each department, we are not talking about reviewing 2 applications a day during coffee break.
- tomhallett 8y ago
  Not entirely: the answers written down by the recuiters can be reviewed in batch, while the phone screen has a lot more overhead.
geofft 8y ago
> incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway through this screen was because of combativeness / personality, not phone screen performance per se. > You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is. I think I disagree with this though - there are certain people who are going to be predisposed to complaining about things that don't go their way, and you want to make sure you fail them as early as possible. At a company small enough that its strength is the CEO's coding abilities, a curmudgeon with significant raw technical talent can do very well. At a Google-sized company they just can't.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  The OP is misremembering (slightly) some questions. Also, this quiz is given by non-technical recruiters just to get a guage on how tech-savvy the candidate is. If I remember correctly, the passmark is 6/10. The questions (when not misremembered) are very precise in their wording, and recruiters are given a pretty comprehensive list of correct answers. I'm sure a few great candidates fail this stage, but that's the nature of hiring. Google gets a lot of job applications per day, and a first stage screening like this needs to be able to be executed by non-technical staff in a few minutes. Other companies use online tests, which tend to take the candidate more time and are easier to cheat at.
- socrates666 8y ago
  They can, actually...the culture needs to learn to adopt them is all. Having real talent and having to basically navigate terrain of those with less skill than you and yet, oddly enough, more power, is very frustrating. These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future. If anyone feels even remotely insecure because of your prowess you are shot down. I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me. You might say I'm the problem...I point to the stack of clowns that said it couldn't be done and go...yeah sure.
sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
> OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview. I would not ask the questions listed in this interview. But, I'm not a recruiter. I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am. Those questions may not be optimize for the same thing any given candidate is optimizing for. > You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is. People in the original thread in 2016 said much the same, arguing that people would no longer want to work for Google. It's 2018 and Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent. Seems like offering high salaries and interesting work matters a lot more to the average candidate than whether the prescreen has a view suboptimal questions.
- thereare5lights 8y ago
  > I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am. That's an odd assumption to make, that the average recruiter is competent, for a community that assumes the vast majority of their fellow engineers can't code.
  - geofft 8y ago
    > a community that assumes the vast majority of their fellow engineers can't code. If you're talking about FizzBuzz, that's about candidates, not stably employed folks. Candidates are by definition a pool that favors people that haven't been hired already, except for people new to the industry. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ (Also, there's no rigorous evidence supporting the hypothesis that most people in the industry or even most applicants can't write FizzBuzz, as far as I know. But that's not quite relevant to your question about perception; I do admit there is a perception that the hypothesis is true.)

Voloskaya 8y ago

> The response to an answer should be "OK" and then you note down the answer and show your notes to an engineer at the end. This kinds of defeat the purpose of the screening interview though doesn't it? The point is to not disturb an engineer when 99% of the people that are being screened are unqualified.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
If your engineering managers can't be disturbed than maybe you don't have time to hire.
- Voloskaya 8y ago
  To be fair we are talking about Google, not the local shop at the corner of the streets. Each recruiter must do tens of screening a day, and they have tens of recruiters assigned to each department, we are not talking about reviewing 2 applications a day during coffee break.
tomhallett 8y ago
Not entirely: the answers written down by the recuiters can be reviewed in batch, while the phone screen has a lot more overhead.

geofft 8y ago

> incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway through this screen was because of combativeness / personality, not phone screen performance per se. > You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is. I think I disagree with this though - there are certain people who are going to be predisposed to complaining about things that don't go their way, and you want to make sure you fail them as early as possible. At a company small enough that its strength is the CEO's coding abilities, a curmudgeon with significant raw technical talent can do very well. At a Google-sized company they just can't.

londons_explore 8y ago
The OP is misremembering (slightly) some questions. Also, this quiz is given by non-technical recruiters just to get a guage on how tech-savvy the candidate is. If I remember correctly, the passmark is 6/10. The questions (when not misremembered) are very precise in their wording, and recruiters are given a pretty comprehensive list of correct answers. I'm sure a few great candidates fail this stage, but that's the nature of hiring. Google gets a lot of job applications per day, and a first stage screening like this needs to be able to be executed by non-technical staff in a few minutes. Other companies use online tests, which tend to take the candidate more time and are easier to cheat at.
socrates666 8y ago
They can, actually...the culture needs to learn to adopt them is all. Having real talent and having to basically navigate terrain of those with less skill than you and yet, oddly enough, more power, is very frustrating. These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future. If anyone feels even remotely insecure because of your prowess you are shot down. I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me. You might say I'm the problem...I point to the stack of clowns that said it couldn't be done and go...yeah sure.

sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago

> OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview. I would not ask the questions listed in this interview. But, I'm not a recruiter. I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am. Those questions may not be optimize for the same thing any given candidate is optimizing for. > You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is. People in the original thread in 2016 said much the same, arguing that people would no longer want to work for Google. It's 2018 and Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent. Seems like offering high salaries and interesting work matters a lot more to the average candidate than whether the prescreen has a view suboptimal questions.

thereare5lights 8y ago
> I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am. That's an odd assumption to make, that the average recruiter is competent, for a community that assumes the vast majority of their fellow engineers can't code.
- geofft 8y ago
  > a community that assumes the vast majority of their fellow engineers can't code. If you're talking about FizzBuzz, that's about candidates, not stably employed folks. Candidates are by definition a pool that favors people that haven't been hired already, except for people new to the industry. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ (Also, there's no rigorous evidence supporting the hypothesis that most people in the industry or even most applicants can't write FizzBuzz, as far as I know. But that's not quite relevant to your question about perception; I do admit there is a perception that the hypothesis is true.)