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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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1764 points fatihky | 3 comments | 13 Oct 16 15:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.015s | source
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DannyBee ◴[13 Oct 16 16:22 UTC] No.12701869[source]▶
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".

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1. wpietri ◴[14 Oct 16 01:22 UTC] No.12705560[source]▶
I gather you didn't run this by your PR folks:

> 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 get that you are happy at Google, that you want to defend your employer. But implying the guy's a liar or a fool does not help. If anything, it makes me more likely to believe that Google has something to be touchy about here.

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2. kentonv ◴[14 Oct 16 01:31 UTC] No.12705602[source]▶
Well, I mean, he's right: any time a story seems outrageous and unbelievable, it's often because it has been embellished at least somewhat. That doesn't mean it's completely false either, though.
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3. wpietri ◴[15 Oct 16 02:26 UTC] No.12712455[source]▶
"Often"? Would you be so kind as to show me your data on that? Maybe it's just this election season, but I seem to be hearing about quite a lot of outrageous things that are perfectly true.

Even if you're correct and he's merely saying something generically true about almost any concerning story, him saying it in the context of the post reads to me as a veiled accusation.

For example, suppose you posted an open-source project of yours here. If I were to comment, "Open-source projects are often half-finished, buggy messes," how would that seem? It is factually true; randomly looking at GitHub projects is enough to show that. But in context, it's an unkind thing to say because encourages people to look at your project as one of them.