Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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.

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.

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".