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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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1764 points fatihky | 2 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.441s | source
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lordnacho ◴[13 Oct 16 15:43 UTC] No.12701486[source]▶
I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing.

It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie. You end up with stupid discussions like the one about Quicksort. If you point out qs is one of several things with the same big-O, you'll probably also get it "wrong". But the real problem is that a guy who is just reading off a sheet can't give any form of nuanced feedback. Was the guy blagging the sort algo question? Did he know if in detail? Does he know what the current state of research on that area is? There's no way to know that if your guy is just a recruiter, but I'm sure even a relatively junior coder would be able to tell if someone was just doing technical word salad.

I wonder what would happen if ordinary people recruited for medical doctor jobs? Would you be comfortable rejecting a guy who'd been in medical school for 10 years based on his not knowing what the "funny bone" is? Wouldn't you tell your boss that you felt a bit out of that league? It's amazing you can get someone to do this without them going red in the face.

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dkonofalski ◴[13 Oct 16 16:16 UTC] No.12701805[source]▶
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.
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FoeNyx ◴[13 Oct 16 16:23 UTC] No.12701881[source]▶
> this guy always has to be right and would work terribly with people of different levels of skills

Are you talking about the recruiter?

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1. dkonofalski ◴[13 Oct 16 16:52 UTC] No.12702126[source]▶
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".
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2. lkbm ◴[13 Oct 16 18:03 UTC] No.12702731[source]▶
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.