Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

Without actually hearing the transcript verbatim, it's hard to give much enlightened perspective here, but there's a lot of "hur hur, dumb recruiter" responses here. What I will say, in general, is that figuring out what the "right" answers are here for what is obviously a technical phone screen by a non-technical person with answers on a piece of paper is also part of the challenge. This is a Director of Engineering interview. Understanding context & navigating "real people", having soft skills etc. is meant to be part of the job description. Feels like this gentlemen couldn't turn the hardcore engineer off who's technically right about everything but yet never seems to get anyone to listen to him.

Giving the hexadecimal representations of the 3-way handshake... really? You may have gotten a dumb recruiter and you may think you're smart, but from my perspective, you answered the questions in a pretty dumb way given the context of non-technical recruiter, very obviously reading answers from a sheet of paper.

I've done two of these before and I've often said "Oh well, it might be down on your sheet at this thing" and the recruiter goes "Ah, yeh, that's it. Tick" and moved through 3-4 questions that in theory I might have gotten wrong. If you take the "be a dick" routine... Congrats. You won the moral war. Best of luck with your next job.

I more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.

Why is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.

"This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills."

I disagree. The Q&A process isn't indicative of almost any skills on the job except patients when your time is being wasted in a formal process. He'd have to have memorized every trivial, algorithmic fact plus their textbook (not real-world!) answers with no further knowledge or answers. Such a candidate is not valuable in any function in Google unless they're trying out for an IT version of Rainman. Not even for HR since they read a sheet instead of memorize it themselves. ;)

You seem to have misunderstood. The "required skills" in question are communications skills, not technical skills. This wasn't a technical interview with an engineering team member as they seemed to think. This was a personality/psychological examination to make sure that their personality and communications skills match up with the culture and personality at Google. Directors typically don't do the low-level, high-skill technical work at companies like Google. They need to understand it, but, first and foremost, they need to be able to communicate with people of varying technical skill levels. This Q&A process, as you called it, is completely indicative of a person's communications skills.