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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

144 points by iamthemalto 5y ago

dekhn 5y ago
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.
- fragmede 5y ago
  What is CLR in this context? Common Language Runtime (Microsoft's .NET VM) doesn't seem applicable.
  - sushid 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms
  - desi_ninja 5y ago
    CLRS - the intro to algorithms book
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  This is also what I tell people, including students, unfortunately. Interviewing at Google seems to do a reasonable job of preventing them from hiring anyone hopeless, but not a good job hiring people who aren't hopeless. Most Googlers I know are not at all confident that they would get their job back if they had to reinterview for it, including those with top performance review ratings.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Heh. I once helped author the hiring guidelines and questions used for recruiting and interviewing. After months of effort, the committee proudly, euphorically called the effort good. I then asked the committee "Who here could pass the high bar we just set?" Total buzz kill. The upside was I was never asked to help again.
    - plasticchris 5y ago
      There’s also the story of one hiring committee that was proud of its high bar. It got pranked by someone feeding them their own packets, which they denied. It was in a tech talk somewhere, don’t recall where.
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        This is a valuable experiment to run for any hiring process. Generally, you want to select for successful employees in your company, which hirers normally are. If they can't get selected, something is very very wrong with your process.
- otterley 5y ago
  As a former SRE with over 25 years experience at companies small and large, I’ve never understood why an SRE would need to implement quicksort, or how the skills needed by a competent SRE - specifically, to guide developers in making their applications adhere to well-known reliability and scalability tenets, and capture and evaluate the data to show where problems may lie — are evidenced by such rituals. And those rituals tell you nothing about your ability to influence developers through your social skills to adapt the business and its processes to have successful outcomes. Obviously Google has had some success in this space as their opinions are highly influential, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if they were successful in spite of their interview practices—especially in the early days—because jobs at Google were much-coveted: talent from all over the world sought out a job there because the money and the prestige was just so damned good.
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    Google has two kinds of sres - the one you describe and just swes that are assigned to sre department that mainly write code.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  Afaik this prescreen questionnaire is there bc it was statistically determined it fairs better than a resume screen at selecting candidates that would pass subsequent interviews
rurban 5y ago
This exchange happened around 2016 or so, if I remember correctly. Already posted here a couple of times. And it happened to me also. Those recruiters were hilarious, you cannot make that up. I got 8 of 10 by luck, but refused a 2nd exchange with those bots.
- sebastien_b 5y ago
  Thanks for this - now I know what link to reply with for recruiters that keep spamming me as if I’d be interested in working at whatever company they’re spamming me for.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I had similar questions on 2016, although not quite as wrong/bad as presented here. E.g. "why is quicksort the best" wasn't asked. Instead, something more like "What is the average case time complexity of quicksort?"
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  It’s great that they still don’t get how pointless it is to memorize things like protocol numbers for esoteric stuff that is trivial to google and find in a few seconds if the need should ever arise, which it rarely would. IIRC they asked me for the one for GRE. I also had one (I forget the exact question) where my answer was technically correct but “wasn’t what [they] had”, and my explanation about why it was the same thing went way over the recruiter’s head. Whoever thought this would be a fun little trivia game to have people play for their careers…yeah, no. I still got through to the technical interviews wherein the first technical screener told me he doubts he’d be able to get his current position again now if he had to go through the interview for it, and he told me seriously not to feel bad if I don’t pass. I did pass that one. Second technical screen was with a person with a thick accent and bad VoIP who was getting obviously frustrated due to both of us having to repeat stuff a lot. This was all after a 6+ month dance of scheduling and waiting and hearing nothing from their recruiters. Got a rejection weeks later and never tried re-applying. They still reach out like every 6 months.
mbroncano 5y ago
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.
lucasyvas 5y ago
Send them an invoice for your wasted time.
lokar 5y ago
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.
- faangiq 5y ago
  Resume screening is very effective when done by someone who is intelligent. The tech industry refuses to take hiring seriously and apply such people to the problem.
  - lokar 5y ago
    I've read many resumes that seem solid. Then the candidate knows almost nothing. They just lie on the resumes. I've also talked to people with terrible resumes who turn out to be great. They are just bad at resumes.
    - jll29 5y ago
      I second that. It's not necessary about "lying", many candidates may drop a keyword as something they know, when really they have only heard about it instead of mastering it. Some people also under-rate their skills, because they are very demanding to themselves (the bad ones don't know "sort" and want to re-implement their own sorting method in Python). I pre-screen using practical problems that I have to solve every day, and when candidates know their UNIX shell commands that's usually a really good sign.
      - vanusa 5y ago
        I think the point of GP comment to yours is that by reading resumes skillfully -- that is, between the lines -- and comparing with other factors (e.g. their portfolio) it's pretty easy to tell the "probably solid" from the keyword-stuffers and buzzword droppers. By "probably solid" I don't mean "immediate hire" but rather "It's a safe bet this person isn't utterly incompetent and I won't be wasting 10 minutes of my time talking to them."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mmacvicarprett 5y ago
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.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Not everyone wants to work at a place that needs you to dumb things down just to get your foot in the door as a Director of Engineering
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    Not everyone wants a director of engineering that can't communicate with the rest of the company.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      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 a data gatherer while a highly technical person reviews, or they should be technical enough themselves. We're not talking about screening internships here, the person in the article didn't ask Google for an interview, it was on Google to provide competent points of contact. That doesn't necessarily scale if we're talking about applications they receive, but that's why the article states almost immediately it was an unsolicited interview.
      - ricardobeat 5y ago
        > for a position this high up There are probably thousands of 'director of engineering' or similar roles at Google. If it's anything like other companies, they will be managing something like ~50 people. It's a middle management role, not that high up - except in compensation relative to the median...
timzaman 5y ago
It is so typical to interview very senior people who get really arrogant about their skills, but when it comes down to it, they fail at this rapidfire, and in a very non graceful way. This rapidfire is very coarse and weeds out most incompetent people. It's likely not your answers, but your attitude that failed you.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  Unlikely, unless the interviewer was just trolling them. If it was just their attitude, they’d not tell them they were wrong when they weren’t and tell them to work on x y and z to be qualified in the future. They’d just complete or end the interview and say something like, “Great! You should hear back in x days” and then reject in their ATS. If not, then the recruiter is an asshole and gaslighting the candidate.
emptybottle 5y ago
These questions would make for a fun tech pub trivia night. I wonder how many teams of working engineers would get them right without cramming?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
FranksTV 5y ago
This reads like it was written by Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge"

144 points by iamthemalto 5y ago

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.

fragmede 5y ago
What is CLR in this context? Common Language Runtime (Microsoft's .NET VM) doesn't seem applicable.
- sushid 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms
- desi_ninja 5y ago
  CLRS - the intro to algorithms book
hiptobecubic 5y ago
This is also what I tell people, including students, unfortunately. Interviewing at Google seems to do a reasonable job of preventing them from hiring anyone hopeless, but not a good job hiring people who aren't hopeless. Most Googlers I know are not at all confident that they would get their job back if they had to reinterview for it, including those with top performance review ratings.
- specialist 5y ago
  Heh. I once helped author the hiring guidelines and questions used for recruiting and interviewing. After months of effort, the committee proudly, euphorically called the effort good. I then asked the committee "Who here could pass the high bar we just set?" Total buzz kill. The upside was I was never asked to help again.
  - plasticchris 5y ago
    There’s also the story of one hiring committee that was proud of its high bar. It got pranked by someone feeding them their own packets, which they denied. It was in a tech talk somewhere, don’t recall where.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      This is a valuable experiment to run for any hiring process. Generally, you want to select for successful employees in your company, which hirers normally are. If they can't get selected, something is very very wrong with your process.
otterley 5y ago
As a former SRE with over 25 years experience at companies small and large, I’ve never understood why an SRE would need to implement quicksort, or how the skills needed by a competent SRE - specifically, to guide developers in making their applications adhere to well-known reliability and scalability tenets, and capture and evaluate the data to show where problems may lie — are evidenced by such rituals. And those rituals tell you nothing about your ability to influence developers through your social skills to adapt the business and its processes to have successful outcomes. Obviously Google has had some success in this space as their opinions are highly influential, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if they were successful in spite of their interview practices—especially in the early days—because jobs at Google were much-coveted: talent from all over the world sought out a job there because the money and the prestige was just so damned good.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  Google has two kinds of sres - the one you describe and just swes that are assigned to sre department that mainly write code.
dilyevsky 5y ago
Afaik this prescreen questionnaire is there bc it was statistically determined it fairs better than a resume screen at selecting candidates that would pass subsequent interviews

rurban 5y ago

This exchange happened around 2016 or so, if I remember correctly. Already posted here a couple of times. And it happened to me also. Those recruiters were hilarious, you cannot make that up. I got 8 of 10 by luck, but refused a 2nd exchange with those bots.

sebastien_b 5y ago
Thanks for this - now I know what link to reply with for recruiters that keep spamming me as if I’d be interested in working at whatever company they’re spamming me for.
hiptobecubic 5y ago
I had similar questions on 2016, although not quite as wrong/bad as presented here. E.g. "why is quicksort the best" wasn't asked. Instead, something more like "What is the average case time complexity of quicksort?"
seanp2k2 5y ago
It’s great that they still don’t get how pointless it is to memorize things like protocol numbers for esoteric stuff that is trivial to google and find in a few seconds if the need should ever arise, which it rarely would. IIRC they asked me for the one for GRE. I also had one (I forget the exact question) where my answer was technically correct but “wasn’t what [they] had”, and my explanation about why it was the same thing went way over the recruiter’s head. Whoever thought this would be a fun little trivia game to have people play for their careers…yeah, no. I still got through to the technical interviews wherein the first technical screener told me he doubts he’d be able to get his current position again now if he had to go through the interview for it, and he told me seriously not to feel bad if I don’t pass. I did pass that one. Second technical screen was with a person with a thick accent and bad VoIP who was getting obviously frustrated due to both of us having to repeat stuff a lot. This was all after a 6+ month dance of scheduling and waiting and hearing nothing from their recruiters. Got a rejection weeks later and never tried re-applying. They still reach out like every 6 months.

mbroncano 5y ago

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.

lucasyvas 5y ago

Send them an invoice for your wasted time.

lokar 5y ago

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.

faangiq 5y ago
Resume screening is very effective when done by someone who is intelligent. The tech industry refuses to take hiring seriously and apply such people to the problem.
- lokar 5y ago
  I've read many resumes that seem solid. Then the candidate knows almost nothing. They just lie on the resumes. I've also talked to people with terrible resumes who turn out to be great. They are just bad at resumes.
  - jll29 5y ago
    I second that. It's not necessary about "lying", many candidates may drop a keyword as something they know, when really they have only heard about it instead of mastering it. Some people also under-rate their skills, because they are very demanding to themselves (the bad ones don't know "sort" and want to re-implement their own sorting method in Python). I pre-screen using practical problems that I have to solve every day, and when candidates know their UNIX shell commands that's usually a really good sign.
    - vanusa 5y ago
      I think the point of GP comment to yours is that by reading resumes skillfully -- that is, between the lines -- and comparing with other factors (e.g. their portfolio) it's pretty easy to tell the "probably solid" from the keyword-stuffers and buzzword droppers. By "probably solid" I don't mean "immediate hire" but rather "It's a safe bet this person isn't utterly incompetent and I won't be wasting 10 minutes of my time talking to them."

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mmacvicarprett 5y ago

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.

BoorishBears 5y ago
Not everyone wants to work at a place that needs you to dumb things down just to get your foot in the door as a Director of Engineering
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Not everyone wants a director of engineering that can't communicate with the rest of the company.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    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 a data gatherer while a highly technical person reviews, or they should be technical enough themselves. We're not talking about screening internships here, the person in the article didn't ask Google for an interview, it was on Google to provide competent points of contact. That doesn't necessarily scale if we're talking about applications they receive, but that's why the article states almost immediately it was an unsolicited interview.
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      > for a position this high up There are probably thousands of 'director of engineering' or similar roles at Google. If it's anything like other companies, they will be managing something like ~50 people. It's a middle management role, not that high up - except in compensation relative to the median...

timzaman 5y ago

It is so typical to interview very senior people who get really arrogant about their skills, but when it comes down to it, they fail at this rapidfire, and in a very non graceful way. This rapidfire is very coarse and weeds out most incompetent people. It's likely not your answers, but your attitude that failed you.

ViViDboarder 5y ago
Unlikely, unless the interviewer was just trolling them. If it was just their attitude, they’d not tell them they were wrong when they weren’t and tell them to work on x y and z to be qualified in the future. They’d just complete or end the interview and say something like, “Great! You should hear back in x days” and then reject in their ATS. If not, then the recruiter is an asshole and gaslighting the candidate.

emptybottle 5y ago

These questions would make for a fun tech pub trivia night. I wonder how many teams of working engineers would get them right without cramming?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

FranksTV 5y ago

This reads like it was written by Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge"