←back to thread

Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

(www.gwan.com)
1764 points fatihky | 2 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(12): >>12701788 #>>12701793 #>>12701811 #>>12701815 #>>12701829 #>>12701856 #>>12701912 #>>12701935 #>>12702244 #>>12702549 #>>12703480 #>>12703598 #
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.
replies(1): >>12701968 #
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.
replies(3): >>12702040 #>>12702160 #>>12702162 #
ivan_gammel ◴[13 Oct 16 16:55 UTC] No.12702162[source]▶
That's wrong. The recruiter has a goal to get "correct" answers: if someone passes the interview without providing these answers via some "soft skills" (it more looks like a social engineering), then the recruiter fails. Because of that, there's no point in trying to explain your answers in hope, that recruiter will somehow agree that they match the answers from checklist.

More adequate approach will be to find the way to bypass this interview, by finding the right contacts who have the adequate expertise and can make the hiring decisions.

This situation is like trying to sell new fridge or delivery van to a waiter in restaurant, who was instructed to talk to business visitors while management is away. He was indeed put in charge, but he can do nothing for you or worse, communicate your offer to his boss in a wrong way, so you have to escalate - to find the contacts of management, to reach them etc.

I think this story makes sense as an illustration of how not to hire people.

replies(1): >>12702200 #
dkonofalski ◴[13 Oct 16 16:58 UTC] No.12702200{3}[source]▶
What's wrong? I think this is exactly why this test exists. They don't care if you get the "correct" answers at this stage in the process. This is a glorified personality test that, in my opinion, the author misinterpreted as a technical exam. Directors at Google are not going to be the people that know the answer to everything and talk down to people. They're the people that have technical skills while, more importantly, having the personality and people skills to actually direct people and communicate with people of varying skill levels.

You and large amount of very technical people in this thread are the exact types of people that Google would, more than likely, try to avoid for a position like this.

replies(1): >>12702333 #
1. ivan_gammel ◴[13 Oct 16 17:12 UTC] No.12702333{4}[source]▶
Well, it's just your wishful thinking that it's a such kind of interview, not reality, and any personal attacks on me won't help you to prove your point. I have software engineering management experience in multinational companies and I have hired other managers: there are much more effective ways to find a person with good soft skills than such remote screening with a purely technical checklist. This way it's simply too costly: first, you need really smart recruiter with good soft skills himself, so he will expose the candidate's weaknesses and strengths. Then, there should be very well designed checklist that will allow to derive candidate's mentality from answers on purely technical questions. That's almost impossible, I'd say.
replies(1): >>12702925 #
2. dkonofalski ◴[13 Oct 16 18:28 UTC] No.12702925[source]▶
It's not my wishful thinking. Others in this thread have confirmed that they took a similar test when interviewing for Google and some of them actually got the job. One user even mentioned that the person doing the interview was a psychologist. I'm not attacking you. I'm simply saying that you're just like the author of the post. You assume, because the author says so", that this was a technical assessment when Google employees in this thread seem to be confirming that it is not. Your management experience is irrelevant to a basic failure to recognize this for what it is. This was a phone call. It's not like the interviewer was making these deductions of the interviewee simply by reading their answers on paper.