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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

(www.gwan.com)
1764 points fatihky | 19 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 1.445s | source | bottom
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DannyBee ◴[13 Oct 16 16:22 UTC] No.12701869[source]▶
FWIW: As a director of engineering for Google, who interviews other directors of engineering for Google, none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets.

These are bog standard SWE-SRE questions (particularly, SRE) at some companies, so my guess is he was really being evaluated for a normal SWE-SRE position.

IE maybe he applied to a position labeled director of engineering, but they decided to interview him for a different level/job instead.

But it's super-strange even then (i've literally reviewed thousands of hiring packets, phone screens, etc, and this is ... out there. I'm not as familiar with SRE hiring practices, admittedly, though i've reviewed enough SRE candidates to know what kind of questions they ask).

As for the answers themselves, i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt, as there are always two sides to every story.

Particularly, when one side presents something that makes the other side look like a blithering idiot, the likelihood it's 100% accurate is, historically, "not great".

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potatolicious ◴[13 Oct 16 17:57 UTC] No.12702692[source]▶
Disclaimer: I also work for Google, opinions are my own, etc etc.

> "i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt"

I mean sure, a single instance of this might be overblown, exaggerated, or false in some way.

But there is an avalanche of reports like this, to the point where it's become widespread industry insider knowledge.

I enjoy working here, but the interviewing practices are such that I actively warn friends applying/being referred to temper their expectations of a repeatable/reliable process.

Most colleagues I've spoken to about this, including myself, have strong doubts we would have made the cut if we interviewed again - even though all are strong engineers with great perf records.

At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously? We don't have to accept every detail of the reporting as gospel, but there's clearly something here.

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1. odbol_ ◴[13 Oct 16 18:14 UTC] No.12702806[source]▶
The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory, but not one test on knowledge of languages, architecture, design, or actual real-world problem solving. I walked into an interview with one guy and he literally did not even say hello: he just jumped straight into some problem I had to solve on the whiteboard.

The problem with that approach is you end up with a very homogenous team of really smart, logical people, but without the balance of more creative, empathic types. Ideally, a well-functioning team will have both, and will have people from many different backgrounds and educations, because that's when you get true collaboration and innovation: by mixing unrelated disciplines.

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2. natmaster ◴[13 Oct 16 18:29 UTC] No.12702936[source]▶
This explains why Google is incapable of attacking any product that requires an understanding of humanity to be successful rather than just raw data. (e.g., google+, youtube comments, etc)
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3. potatolicious ◴[13 Oct 16 18:31 UTC] No.12702945[source]▶
> "The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory"

I'd be marginally okay with it if the interviews actually selected for this sort of engineer! I've seen multiple people who fit this description to a T who flunked the process, hard.

If the goal here is "pick the hyper-mathy, deep-CS types out of the crowd" I'd argue the process isn't even very good at that.

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4. kajecounterhack ◴[13 Oct 16 18:31 UTC] No.12702950[source]▶
(Standard disclaimer, speaking for myself)

1. Your interviewer didn't give you a good interview or follow guidelines. In interview training they tell you the first thing you must do to start an interview is to ask if the candidate would like to get some water / use the restroom, then break the ice before starting any questions (applicable also during phone screens).

2. Proper interviews actually are supposed to lean heavily toward real-world problem solving approach rather than arcane knowledge. For example, when I interview I look for rational decisions at every turn (not a random example but considering boundary cases, adding a new example to help you visualize the solution should give information gain rather than be something random). My questions are not math oriented, nor do they require deep knowledge of obscure theory. Based on what questions my coworkers ask, I know at least for my team this is not a correct characterization.

What we do test for: understanding of fundamental data structures and algorithms, ability to thrive in uncertainty (ask clarifying questions! state your assumptions!), ability to break a problem down and solve it from first principles.

Good interview questions are required to have multiple solutions.

And then you have the generalization at the end about creativity and diversity; in my limited experience we seem to get pretty decent diversity and even if there is some homogeneity (we need more women and minorities) it's certainly not the kind you described. No, it's not a bunch of mathy theory wizards writing code at Google, it's way more diverse than that. Not perfect, but not awful like you're describing.

5. rifung ◴[13 Oct 16 18:45 UTC] No.12703061[source]▶
> but not one test on knowledge of languages, architecture, design, or actual real-world problem solving

Maybe they fail to do so but I do believe the goal is to test real world problem solving. However, I think they stray from specific language or domain knowledge because they want you to be able to work in different roles, since you don't have to interview again to switch teams.

From what I've read, the idea is to hire people who would be smart enough to learn any specific domain knowledge necessary, because the expectation is engineers might have to tackle problems they wouldn't have seen elsewhere. I don't really know whether thats true anymore as my impression is now Google just has a bunch of overqualified people though..

> The problem with that approach is you end up with a very homogenous team of really smart, logical people, but without the balance of more creative, empathic types. Ideally, a well-functioning team will have both, and will have people from many different backgrounds and educations, because that's when you get true collaboration and innovation: by mixing unrelated disciplines.

Can't disagree with you there, but its a weird assumption to say that people who are logical are not creative or empathetic. I do think that they hire for "Googliness" whatever that means, which may lead to a monoculture though.

In any case, I guess you can call me a Google fanboy. I don't agree with everything they do but I feel like bashing Google's (or most other company's) interview process is the cool thing to do here, but most people don't seem to have tried to understand why it is the way it is, and thus don't offer any true alternatives that meet the same goals nor do they reject the goals in the first place.

6. ww520 ◴[13 Oct 16 19:12 UTC] No.12703251[source]▶
It tells more of the interviewer than the interviewee. They don't ask the questions you mentioned because they don't know or they don't know how to best judge the answers. They asked the questions they know well, that show you what the breadth of their knowledge is. It's like the saying A-players hire A-players while B-players have a hard time judging A-players.
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7. meshko ◴[13 Oct 16 19:14 UTC] No.12703262[source]▶
these are just lack of good product management, nothing to do with engineers. I do suspect Google's PM culture is... lacking.
8. coredog64 ◴[13 Oct 16 20:04 UTC] No.12703603[source]▶
B-players know an A-player when they see them, they don't hire them because they feel threatened.
9. dboreham ◴[13 Oct 16 20:06 UTC] No.12703622[source]▶
Off-topic pet peeve but why is "OK" now apparently spelled "okay" these days? (especially in bandwidth-limited situations such as SMS or IM). OK is not short for "Okay", OK?
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10. nl ◴[13 Oct 16 21:03 UTC] No.12703999{3}[source]▶
It has always been an alternative spelling.
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11. solipsism ◴[13 Oct 16 21:03 UTC] No.12704002[source]▶
Having a high degree of false negatives doesn't mean the positive signal isn't reliable.
12. scott_s ◴[13 Oct 16 21:16 UTC] No.12704103{3}[source]▶
I think "okay" looks better than "OK".
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13. dboreham ◴[13 Oct 16 21:45 UTC] No.12704326{4}[source]▶
But it is ...wrong. OK originated as an abbreviation so why spell out the pronunciation of the letters? Makes no sense to me.
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14. thaumasiotes ◴[13 Oct 16 22:02 UTC] No.12704435{3}[source]▶
"These days"? It's been spelled that way for nearly 100 years.

> Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh "it is so" (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=okay

15. thaumasiotes ◴[13 Oct 16 22:04 UTC] No.12704449{4}[source]▶
Not so; as you can see in my other comment's link, we can cite OK about 90 years before we can cite "okay", and more reliably than that we can cite the alternative spelling "okeh" to 1919, which establishes pretty well that "okay" was not standard then.
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16. thaumasiotes ◴[13 Oct 16 22:05 UTC] No.12704468{5}[source]▶
Because the connection to a 180-year-old fad for misspelling "all correct" is so obscure and non-obvious that it was lost long ago? Do you think we should be capitalizing LASER, too?
17. balls187 ◴[14 Oct 16 01:06 UTC] No.12705497[source]▶
YouTube is pretty successful (even if they acquired it).
18. ubernostrum ◴[14 Oct 16 03:31 UTC] No.12705969[source]▶
Google's interview process, and interview processes modeled on it, do not select for "math-oriented CS-conscious" engineers.

These processes select for recent CS graduates from a handful of universities where Google expends recruiting effort, and anyone not from that background mostly only gets in by blind luck or by knowing someone already in Google who can navigate them through getting hired there.

19. dijit ◴[14 Oct 16 13:01 UTC] No.12707751{5}[source]▶
by talking about this you've wasted all the bandwidth your two bytes would have saved a year.

As far as I understand this has been common vernacular since before my lifetime, I'm not usually one to welcome evolution of the base language but this one is before our lives we need to let it be.