Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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".

This looks like a typical pre-interview recruiter phone screen… they're looking for shibboleths that identify the candidate as a genuine computer person who took CS 101, and exclude candidates who spam every job with bogus CVs. I'd start every candidate with this screen, unless I personally knew them & was familiar with their technical ability.

  > none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets

They'd be internal to recruiting, so you wouldn't see them unless you were heavily involved (doing interviews and recruiting trips isn't being heavily involved). They're for any recruiter to use to quickly eliminate bogus applicants.

  > 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".

You can just outright call him a liar… I'd expect this to be a fairly accurate report. It looks like the recruiter misused the screen; instead of eliminating obviously bogus candidates, they used it to eliminate a candidate who may or may not get an offer (and thus a commission). They should have proceeded to the technical phone screen stage. If the guideline on the recruiter screening is: drop anyone with <100% correct, then I think that's silly.

"They'd be internal to recruiting, so you wouldn't see them unless you were heavily involved (doing interviews and recruiting trips isn't being heavily involved)."

Actually, this is a super-bad assumption, pre-screening questions, etc, are all public to google internally. There are no magic internal-to-recruiting parts to the questions, and they are in fact, listed as SRE pre-screening questions, so ...

But they appear to be changed in subtle ways from what's listed on other sites. For example, googling for: Google SRE interview questions inode

returns a few hits, including:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Linux-system-call-for-in...

which lists the question as "system call for inode data" - which is importantly different from a system call to return an actual inode.

This post says something similar: http://gregbo.livejournal.com/182506.html

"There were some questions I just didn't remember the answers to, such as "What system call gives all the information about an inode?" and "What are the fields in an inode?""

(Argh, the blog post is down, so I can't compare some of the others, but several of them seemed to have been changed in ways that made the question itself seem wrong.)

((Thanks to leetrout below for bopping me on the head with the google cache. Next bit added thanks to said bop.))

Another one: The blog post lists "what is the name of the KILL signal?", but googling for: google sre interview questions kill signal

turns up this post on glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/site-reliability-enginee...

Which lists the question as "What signal does the "kill" command send by default?"

That matches much more the answer SIGTERM that the interviewer was described as insisting on.

That suggests a few likely possibilities: (a) The interviewer misread the questions; (b) There was a horrible communication failure between the interviewer and the interviewee; (c) The interviewee failed to actually listen to the questions before answering.

I have no information with which to assign weights to those possibilities, but all of them seem more likely than "the interview questions themselves are actually this horrible" (they're not as broken as the blog post made them out to be. After writing this, I looked.)