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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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1764 points fatihky | 1 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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lordnacho ◴[13 Oct 16 15:43 UTC] No.12701486[source]▶
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.

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tptacek ◴[13 Oct 16 15:55 UTC] No.12701606[source]▶
I knew all these answers too, because I was a developer in the 1990s.

There is absolutely no purpose to knowing off the top of your head how long an ethernet address is, or even what system call will retrieve an inode (his bickering over stat() "filling in" rather than "returning" was bogus, for what it's worth). The top Google search result for each of these questions has the answer. Knowing these things isn't part of being a practicing programmer; knowing how to find out is.

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rayiner ◴[13 Oct 16 17:24 UTC] No.12702435[source]▶
I don't think these questions are unreasonable as a spam filter. Yeah, they're trivia, but if you had actually worked in that space, I'd be surprised if you didn't know a lot of that trivia just by virtue of exposure.

The rejoinder, of course, is that it's probably misguided to structure your recruiting around a spam filter.

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tptacek ◴[13 Oct 16 17:25 UTC] No.12702443[source]▶
The length of an ethernet address is a trivia question. It's a good way to score a board game. Filtering out candidates based on it is lunacy.
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rayiner ◴[13 Oct 16 17:37 UTC] No.12702546[source]▶
I agree with the first and second sentence. As to the third: what would be your thought process as to someone who claimed to be a network programmer on the phone but couldn't answer most of those questions?
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1. ubernostrum ◴[13 Oct 16 19:55 UTC] No.12703536{5}[source]▶
And here it is.

I do plenty of interviews, and so I do have some sympathy for the idea that some overwhelming majority of applicants simply cannot perform even the most basic coding tasks but are somehow trying to sneak in anyway, but at the same time I can't escape the suspicion that a lot of the stories are actually from badly-designed or badly-calibrated interviews gone off the rails.

I absolutely believe that the article we're discussing here gives a fair view of a Google phone screen, since I've been through it too and even got asked some of the same questions. The only reason I "passed" was that I recalibrated way, way down to meet the expectations and the technical understanding of the recruiter I was talking to (who did very clearly seem to be reading off a prepared script). This was surprising since Google had reached out to me to ask me to apply, which one would think indicates a confidence in basic technical skills, but if I hadn't caught that and adjusted how I was interpreting and answering the random trivia they threw at me, I likely wouldn't have passed the screen and would have been labeled just another impostor trying to sneak into a job I'm unqualified for.

So when I hear someone else talking about all the "unqualified" applicants they get, I can't help wondering how many really were qualified applicant talking to unqualified interviewer using unqualified interview process.

(disclosure: I don't work for Google, don't ever intend to work for Google, and in fact hung up on a later screening call out of frustration with the way they ran their process, which at least finally got their recruiters to stop spamming me)