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".

To be fair, I've interviewed people at previous companies that had patents and 15 years at IBM on their CV and completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. (fizzbuzz style).

There are a lot of people that read great on the CV but then it turns out that they mostly kept a chair warm and organized meetings over the last decade without actually retaining any technical knowledge.

Not saying that was the case here, but it happens and it's probably worth checking people on their stated qualifications.

I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing for Software Development Manager, so he got an initial phone screen and then a face-to-face with myself and another dev on the team he'd be managing. I was impressed with how little he knew about programming.

"Name some data structures." "What does MVC stand for?" "Name some design patterns" etc. All of which were unanswerable. Generally when it becomes clear someone was dishonest about their skillset, the ability to get hired for any position becomes impossible.

"Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?"

I'm really surprised at how many people can't do this. If you've spent five years developing web, surely you've had to look at raw requests, either debugging using netcat or with wireshark or just looking at the information in the Chrome/Firefox debugger?

"What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?"

"What is the difference between a statically typed and a dynamically typed language?"

I had one candidate try to tell me Java was dynamically typed and Scala was statically typed. It was for a Scala position. They also said "statistically typed" instead of statically, even after I corrected them.

-_-

Why should anyone remember what an http request or response should look like? Statically typed vs. dynamically typed language?

Fuck.

Are these entry-level positions or for someone with 10 years work-ex? A simple search on Google can tell anyone the answer of these questions, why do you expect people to carry an imprint of it in their memory? If the problem they'll work on mandates knowing these things it'd be pretty easy to solve with just one search. It is exactly questions like these that are worth kicking the host organization back in the butt.

Either your interviewing process is hilariously stupid or you're just spiking it up to boost the ego here.