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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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1764 points fatihky | 5 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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joesmo ◴[13 Oct 16 17:05 UTC] No.12702265[source]▶
Yup, those are SRE questions, but the fact that Google didn't interview him for the position he applied for makes them out to be even bigger idiots than I had them pegged at for using SRE questions on a director role. Regardless, just having such a stupid process exposed reflects badly on Google. In my own experience, Google isn't even able to call at the scheduled time so, while not the worst interviewers ever, they're pretty close and very far down the ladder. Put it another way, I doubt they could convince many to even interview without their extremely hefty compensation packages.
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sfrailsdev ◴[13 Oct 16 18:06 UTC] No.12702753[source]▶
From what I've heard, google intentionally screws with timing, who you will be speaking to, and other factors in order to try to understand how you deal with changes in circumstances.
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1. Morgawr ◴[13 Oct 16 18:50 UTC] No.12703096{3}[source]▶
This is blatantly false.

Source: I work for Google. Our daily schedule is packed with meetings and we try to be as on time as possible, interviews (which are something that everybody should be doing) work exactly the same, we don't try to screw people over with bad timing just to "test" them. Sometimes it happens that people miss interviews and somebody else has to show up, this is unfortunately a problem and it shouldn't happen but sometimes it does (accidents and unforeseen things happen). It's not done on purpose.

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2. civilian ◴[13 Oct 16 19:34 UTC] No.12703411[source]▶
I remember reading an article that this is how they interview for product managers? Not for engineers, but product managers are people who maybe need to deal with more craziness.
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3. Morgawr ◴[13 Oct 16 19:36 UTC] No.12703426[source]▶
I admit I am not familiar with the interviewing process for the non-engineering sides of the org, but I'd still find this very unlikely and weird. We are very very strict in our meeting and timing policies as our meeting rooms are usually packed with people all the time so we really need to be in and out at the given time. It's counter-intuitive that somebody would delay a meeting on purpose...
4. jpatokal ◴[13 Oct 16 22:56 UTC] No.12704845[source]▶
I interviewed for product manager at Google. It was tough, but no craziness involved: flew in, had a day of interviews, flew back.
5. wpietri ◴[14 Oct 16 01:31 UTC] No.12705598[source]▶
I know you don't set up the system, so I'm not blaming you here. But this is the problem:

> Our daily schedule is packed with meetings and we try to be as on time as possible

If Google's goal were to respect the candidate's time, interviewers wouldn't have daily schedules packed with meetings. The less slack in a system, the worse the failures are. That employees try to be "as on time as possible" is a sign that everybody understands the scheduling is unrealistic.

This isn't unusual, by the way. Most hiring processes don't optimize for candidate experience. Or even for good hiring decisions. Indeed, if you take a POSIWID view of typical hiring processes, the point is to make interviewers feel powerful and selecting for people people willing to put up with inefficiency and suspicious power dynamics.