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 like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim.

Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it)

Second i'm going to point out a few things:

Experience may translate into wisdom, it may not. Plenty of companies promote people just because they last long enough. So 20 years experience managing may translate into a high level manager, it may not!

I hold a bunch of patents too on compilers and other things, it's not indicative of much in terms of skill, because almost anything is patentable.

Lastly, SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means. I"m not even sure where to begin to correct that. I guess i'd start here: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html

Does this mean this person is under/overqualified/exactly right? I literally have no idea. I just don't think it's as obvious one way or the other.

"Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process."

Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly.

If you want to do it, okay.

But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!)

I almost didn't jump into this discussion because it seems so polarized and rash compared to a lot of others

I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.

Now, instead, they generally don't recruit (google is too large to not have exceptions) without some specific hiring managers and headcount in mind.

They will tell you what those groups are and what they do. So for example, the person i interviewed last week was targeted at two teams. I actually specifically asked if he knew what he was being interviewed for, because i like to get some idea what the candidate thinks whatever job they are interviewing for means, and he was able to tell me the two groups and knew what they did.