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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

(www.gwan.com)
1764 points fatihky | 1 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | source
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endtime ◴[13 Oct 16 15:51 UTC] No.12701581[source]▶
I've been at Google for five years as a SWE and I've been interviewing for 3 of those. I'd fail this pop quiz.

This strikes me as bizarre and inconsistent with all the practices I'm aware of. The idea that we'd ask anyone this stuff, let alone director candidates, strains belief.

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1. scottlamb ◴[13 Oct 16 18:21 UTC] No.12702863[source]▶
I was asked similar questions when I was hired as an SRE nine years ago. The recruiter stopped after a few correct answers, iirc. There was probably at least one I didn't know / guessed wrong on, but I don't remember. They also asked me to rank my knowledge in several areas on a scale of 1-10, and I think the questions focused on areas in which I'd chosen higher grades. Following conversations with engineers also focused on those areas.

As I understand it, this is meant to be a shibboleth a non-technical recruiter can use to spot an experienced software engineer / sysadmin in a quick conversation ("pre-screen"). That's a hard thing to pull off. They can't ask someone to design a system, diagnose a problem, or write code because they're unqualified to grade the answer. Instead, they ask some simple canned questions. The questions may not test essential, first principles sorts of knowledge, but if someone can't answer any of them it's a bad sign. The questions should have a small family of correct answers that recruiters can recognize, and the recruiter should just see that a candidate can get some of them right before scheduling a phone screen with a Google engineer. If the transcript is accurate, this process failed.