Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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".

> "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.

My guess is when the number of applications per position actually drops far enough that the false negative rate starts to hurt.

Until then, an interview processed optimized for avoiding false positives at all costs will persist. Totally makes sense for a company worth hundreds of billions though, can you imagine if they had a few more bad hires sneak in? Oh my god, it would destroy everything.

Frankly, if you are more qualified for a position, chances are you will be rejected because your interviewers will fear for their own job security.

I've always found that type of logic strange, though. Wouldn't you want someone who was better than you currently are on your team? Wouldn't you be able to learn from them?