Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

I'm just reaching here, but is there a chance at all that the test wasn't really about whether or not he knew the correct answers but more that he knew the correct answers and was able to simplify them to the extent that a non-technical user could understand and compare them? I have a feeling that Google is far more interested in someone being able to get their point across than someone that just wants to sit there and argue about whether or not an answer is right. Just based on reading his responses, I got a condescending vibe and a vibe that this guy always has to be right and would work terribly with people of different levels of skills. At a Director-level position, that kind of skill is the most basic skill you need to have.

That's not the problem, a non-tech recruiter cannot assess the correctness. Even the simplification can be done, which I disagree, the answer will be rejected because it's not a literal match. That, is the problem.

> this guy always has to be right and would work terribly with people of different levels of skills

Are you talking about the recruiter?

Yeah I agree. I think one issue is also the test. For a lot of these things, as with most things, there is a short answer and a long answer. I think by the second or third question I would have picked up on the fact that the recruiter didn't really know what he was talking about and was looking for the short textbook answer. Seems like the author refused to or couldn't do that.

Don't think so, or would you consider the O(n) notation something a non technical user would want to follow?

I can't fathom a scenario where a tech person would need to dump down something like SYN-ACKs and iNodes for a non-technical person. It's one thing if you are trying to explain performance trade-offs to non-technical users or colleagues. But not lower level protocol details.

No, I'm talking about the person that wrote the post. Since this was a phone interview, this is a paraphrase of what happened, written by the post author. The whole thing smacks of "I knew way more than that person, they were clearly an idiot".

That's not the point of the test. The point of the test is to see whether or not the person attempted to get on the level of the person they were talking to. I have a feeling that the interview would have kept going had the author not started to argue. They're looking for someone that can translate, not someone that will talk down and argue just so that they can be "right".

I don't think that's the point, though. The answers and questions are meaningless to the test. It's how the person addresses the questions and answers that matters in the test. Someone else posted that the person interviewing the author is typically a psychologist in this test. That, to me, means that the technical correctness of the answers is not relevant and that an actual technical engineering screening comes after it's determined that the person is a culture/personality match.

I am a bit confused.

I did not see any argument here from the statement in the article. The recruiter clearly had little clue about what is right and wrong. And the way the recruiter assess the answer by throwing right/wrong seems more rude to me compared to the author "wanting to be right".

Please do not speculating based on something that is not present in the article.

I had done similar interviews before, the recruiters I worked with did not show the same level incompetence as this one. When I want to be more specific on details, they would suggest that they think it's enough and move on. Not like this recruiter who just throw a 'wrong'.

If this was the point of the test he should have been told this was the point of the test. Gotcha's make poor interview questions.

It strikes me as more along the lines of "I knew way more than that person, and they were completely oblivious to the fact that they didn't know this stuff, AND they were in a position that required them to know stuff."

I'm fine working with non-technical people (or who don't know any given field), but I wouldn't be fine working with those people if they were insistent that they did know about these things about which they actually had no clue, or if they were in a position where they really need to know this stuff.

I have coworkers who don't know how to use the command line, but they aren't engineers and they don't try to tell me what commands to run when I pull up a console, so it's fine. If they keep insisting that I should use "dir" and that "ls" is wrong, that would be a problem. If they were the CTO, that would be a problem.

When we hire engineers for customer support, the non-technical operations guy interviews them, but he always has at least one engineer do a portion of the interview because he knows he's not fully qualified to judge someone's technical chops.

The OP isn't being condescending just because someone didn't know stuff. It's because someone didn't know stuff, but because they acted like they did. You want to be insufferable, insist you know better than the experts in a given field.

Then the final reply to "learn about ..." would be a bald lie.

I'm not speculating. This all took place during a phone call so the post is completely the interpretation of the author with regard to how the recruiter answered the questions. For all we know, the author just paraphrased everything as "That's wrong" to make the recruiter look like a simpleton so that they themselves wouldn't look silly for not passing. We have no other information except for 1 side that happens to be the author's side. Others have commented that they took this same test and were told after that the person doing the interview was a psychologist that wasn't testing technical skill. That's where my speculation is based.

I flagged your comment because you basically created an account to shit on somebody.

Or to put it in terms you'll understand, clicking around on your comment history a bit, we get a pretty solid impression of what kind of guy you are.