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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

(www.gwan.com)
1764 points fatihky | 2 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.41s | source
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philjr ◴[13 Oct 16 16:04 UTC] No.12701674[source]▶
Without actually hearing the transcript verbatim, it's hard to give much enlightened perspective here, but there's a lot of "hur hur, dumb recruiter" responses here. What I will say, in general, is that figuring out what the "right" answers are here for what is obviously a technical phone screen by a non-technical person with answers on a piece of paper is also part of the challenge. This is a Director of Engineering interview. Understanding context & navigating "real people", having soft skills etc. is meant to be part of the job description. Feels like this gentlemen couldn't turn the hardcore engineer off who's technically right about everything but yet never seems to get anyone to listen to him.

Giving the hexadecimal representations of the 3-way handshake... really? You may have gotten a dumb recruiter and you may think you're smart, but from my perspective, you answered the questions in a pretty dumb way given the context of non-technical recruiter, very obviously reading answers from a sheet of paper.

I've done two of these before and I've often said "Oh well, it might be down on your sheet at this thing" and the recruiter goes "Ah, yeh, that's it. Tick" and moved through 3-4 questions that in theory I might have gotten wrong. If you take the "be a dick" routine... Congrats. You won the moral war. Best of luck with your next job.

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edanm ◴[13 Oct 16 16:16 UTC] No.12701793[source]▶
I more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.
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dkonofalski ◴[13 Oct 16 16:33 UTC] No.12701968[source]▶
Why is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.
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1. philjr ◴[13 Oct 16 16:41 UTC] No.12702040[source]▶
I don't disagree, although I'm sceptical that's intentional on Google's part. I think if you applied some common sense to the situation and you were able to get off your moral high horse about what's correct vs answering the questions he needs you to answer to get to the actual proper interviews.

Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved, I'm sure.

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2. dkonofalski ◴[13 Oct 16 17:02 UTC] No.12702229[source]▶
What makes you skeptical, though? If anything, there are two things that make me almost certain of it:

1. The author of the post says that this was a phone call. That means that this, more than likely, is not a transcript of the call, but a paraphrase. The entire tone of the post lends itself to the author thinking that they're "correct" and that the interviewer was just a rude, monosyllabic simpleton.

2. The interview ended immediately after the author started to argue. Instead of trying to relate to the person and simplify their answers after the first few super-technical answers weren't accepted, they trudged on with the attitude of "this person has no idea what they're talking about and this is stupid" rather than "I'm clearly overshooting the mark here, maybe I should try and simplify the answers".