Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

I've been at Google for five years as a SWE and I've been interviewing for 3 of those. I'd fail this pop quiz.

This strikes me as bizarre and inconsistent with all the practices I'm aware of. The idea that we'd ask anyone this stuff, let alone director candidates, strains belief.

This seems like a pre-screen where the recruiter is trying to assess the viability of a candidate themselves. But I would assume that based on experience with recruiters elsewhere, no idea if Google has a higher bar for their recruiters.

I only have a sample size of one, but I blew threw a phone interview with Google about a year ago -- and the guy giving it was very technically skilled. We talked about the subtler aspects of the questions as we went.

They offered an in-person interview, of course, but I declined when I found out that they were only hiring for Google Payments in Boulder. I'm sure the job has interesting aspects, and maybe my imagination just isn't up to the task, but I have a hard time figuring out how I wouldn't go insane with boredom working on a system that just moves money around, not to mention frustration from working with the extra regulatory/process restrictions that must be in place to keep compliance up...

Likewise, identical situation, identical thoughts/response.

I want to follow up on this and see what the deal is. It just strikes me as fundamentally wrong.

I'm honestly hoping this is not actually a Google recruiter doing this; if it is, that's just broken.

I know someone working in that area--apparently lots of string parsing. It's vitally important (moving money usually is) but not very exciting/cutting edge (moving money usually isn't--after all, it's an old technology).

This strikes me as an interview with a recruiter. This is almost definitely not a legitimate Google interview.

Maybe it was for a vendor/contractor position.

I had exactly the same kind of quiz at the beginning of the year on a Google phone screen interview. Some questions were exactly the same. I passed apparently but declined the in person interview. The recruiter over the phone was way more technical though and accepted answers not strictly matching his response sheet (and was able to discuss the technical whereabouts)

Wait. You didn't know what position and location you were being interviewed for? That kind of arrogance from a company can only exist if the job seekers are desperate or perceive any job at Google as nirvana.

I've had similar phone screens previously both at Google and Facebook. The depth/specifics of some of the questions seems maybe a little deeper but it's not too far off what I remember from my screens to be honest.

To add to the chorus: I had an extremely similar interview (including a few verbatim questions) during my phone screen for an SRE role at Google five years ago.

These are pretty much SWE/SRE questions, not director questions.

I think you're misunderstanding how the process works. It's not like they wait until they're ready to hire you and then tell you where you're going to work -- they ask you where you want to work. After I had passed all of the interviews, they gave time to consider the different locations and pick which one I wanted to work at (I could only pick a location that had available positions, of course). After I had accepted the job offer, about a month before I started, they contacted me again with a survey that asked me about my interests and skills, which helped them place me on a team. Since I'm working at a smaller office, there were only two team choices, but the larger offices (ie. Mountain View and Seattle) will give you several choices. On top of that, you're free to change teams after as little as a year. So I would hardly call any of that 'arrogance'.

The only way this makes "sense" is if you already have the candidate (or pool of H1-B candidates) you want in mind, but have to prove you opened up the position to the general public first.

My company posts positions available in a common area as part of an H1B related initiative in order to verify that no US techie wants the job before they go looking for the candidate. They were offering around .6 of typical salary given position and location. Shameful what is happening in tech right now, absolutely shameful.

I know some companies do this, but this is Google. There's no incentive for them to hire H1-B's if a equally qualified American citizen is available, since they are going to pay equal salary.

As another data point, when I interviewed at Google a few years ago I had a phone interview with some of these exact questions.

Also, judging by the smugness of the people I interviewed, the "We'll stop here because it's obvious you don't have the skills..." part doesn't surprise me either.

They don't have to offer the same salary, just salary in the same range. That range can be pretty wide ($20k+)

Employees on an H1-B visa have drastically less job mobility than US Citizens. This creates a power advantage for the employer.

>but this is Google

Google has, in the past, illegally conspired to prevent other companies from recruiting their employees. This lowers wages and reduces employee mobility. Clearly there's incentive because they have literally broken the law in the past to achieve these results.

I interned at a large company that stapled stacks of job descriptions labeled "H1-B OPPORTUNITY" on bulletin boards outside the elevators. They listed salaries that were super underpaid, and everyone I worked with was clearly an H1-B employee. It's disgusting how shameless some of these companies are.

> Employees on an H1-B visa have drastically less job mobility than US Citizens. This creates a power advantage for the employer.

Yet Google pays the lawyers needed to get you a Green Card as fast as possible.

I was asked similar questions when I was hired as an SRE nine years ago. The recruiter stopped after a few correct answers, iirc. There was probably at least one I didn't know / guessed wrong on, but I don't remember. They also asked me to rank my knowledge in several areas on a scale of 1-10, and I think the questions focused on areas in which I'd chosen higher grades. Following conversations with engineers also focused on those areas.

As I understand it, this is meant to be a shibboleth a non-technical recruiter can use to spot an experienced software engineer / sysadmin in a quick conversation ("pre-screen"). That's a hard thing to pull off. They can't ask someone to design a system, diagnose a problem, or write code because they're unqualified to grade the answer. Instead, they ask some simple canned questions. The questions may not test essential, first principles sorts of knowledge, but if someone can't answer any of them it's a bad sign. The questions should have a small family of correct answers that recruiters can recognize, and the recruiter should just see that a candidate can get some of them right before scheduling a phone screen with a Google engineer. If the transcript is accurate, this process failed.

Google recruiters ask these exact questions in phone screens.

Its not that simple. There are quotas by country. For someone with a let's say Bachelors or even Masters degree from certain countries, just money wont get them GC soon. The wait time is several years AFAIK.

Yet a Green Card does not give an employee anywhere near the same level of job mobility as a US Citizen.

I have some friends on H1B who work there and also other top tech companies, trust me there's no discrimination in salary. With the extra legal fee, i think it's a burden for them to have people on temp visas.

A green card allows you to live and work in the US without employer sponsorship. There is complete mobility, on par with a US citizen.

Important? Absolutely.

But I do games, apps, machine learning, IoT, hardware drivers, and deep dives into broken code that no one knows how to fix. Fancy accounting software didn't doesn't strike me as interesting. Even if it involves string parsing. :)

Google typically recruits people from Europe in European offices, and the same goes for offices in Asia, etc. The H-1B process is so painful that they do everything to avoid it, and only resort to it if they cannot find the candidates they are looking for in the US (which happens often on the scale of a company as big as Google).

Some people responded saying that they might still do this to get underpaid employees from abroad... which is just silly. The salaries are exactly the same whatever your country of origin, and companies like Google are not the ones you should attack if you want to make a point about H-1B abuse.

It's not as bad as previous poster states, but it's not quite as simple as you make it seem either. A green card holder forfeits their residency if they leave the US for "more than 6 months", or if border patrol people feel like they've abandoned their residency for any reason. This doesn't affect most employees, but if you're a consultant working on-site in another country for extended periods, or simply travel often, you have to do way more work to get everything cleared. And even then, there's no guarantee you won't run into problems.