Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

Ha ha re:

> 10. what is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection?

> Me: in hexadecimal: 0x02, 0x12, 0x10 – literally "synchronize" and "acknowledge".

> Recruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. You should learn the Linux function calls, how the TCP/IP stack works, and what big-O means to eventually qualify if you are interviewed at a later time. Good luck, bye.

That's embarrassing.

Are you surprised though? If a person who does not have the merit to judge the answers very well this is what happens.

Surprising they wouldn't have given the recruiter a list of alternate acceptable answers.

Almost feels like the recruiter was conspiring against you, but why?

Why the hell is a non-technical recruiter giving these tests? Google engineers or managers should be administering it, not the high school dropouts who make up the recruiting industry. There's so much wiggle room here that have a rote-memorization style test for engineering is completely crazy. I've never had a technical test given to me by a recruiting firm. Its always a call with someone from the company, if not the hiring manager.

Perhaps this is what they give to 'second string' applications to make HR happy while the guys who actually get the jobs are friends of the hiring manager or team leads. Or its a H1B ploy to say, "See Obama, we need tech talent. Look how terrible our domestic talent is. They score 40% on our tests!" Meanwhile Bombay Upstairs University has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge deal with Google hiring managers who accidentally leak the test on a 'forgotten' ftp site.

Everything about this is fishy. I think there's fraud here, not just incompetence. I've been the hiring stooge for shops who have already made their decisions before and its always terrible and, frankly, hurtful. These are the signs of a non-serious 'stooge' interview.

This is actually a real danger in hiring: personal bias.

I feel like someone that's not unusually unintelligent should have been able to make the connections between SYN and synchronize or ACK and acknowledge. I don't know why people are defending the recruiter. The process is dumb, but so is an interviewer that asserts himself as an authority when he has to read from a sheet of paper. I don't expect him to be a technical expert, but I do expect him to know when he needs to consult a technical expert about a particular candidate's answers. If this is an accurate representation of his interviewing skills, he needs a new job.

In my experience Google recruiters do have a sheet with alternate answers, but those can't cover everything.