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 breezed through these kinds of questions with the recruiter since I'm younger have a fairly fresh CS background.

Then, my first SRE staff interviewer primarily asked how I would build a data center on the moon. I work on the FreeBSD kernel and TCP full time. I know what BDP, window sizing, head of line blocking, etc are way beyond what a typical SRE would and how communication latency would cause major issues. That confused the questioner. I can't think of anything else I'd have said wrong, my background is systems engineering and I know more about power distribution, HVAC, and data center design than I care to. The lady was skeptical of my answers and it felt really humiliating even though I would rate myself more knowledgeable than my questioner, because of the candidate/interviewer positioning and failure.

The next man, on another day, asked me a bunch of math trivia like estimating the angles on the hands of a clock and orders of magnitude guesses of a small item like a marble to fill a room. I told him I was no longer interested in working for Google and he was really startled because "he didn't get to ask me systems questions yet".. well, good luck with that.

Everyone was really sad at that point, including the recruiter. Nobody from Google has contacted me again, which is a relief. I found the entire process gross.

Don't get me wrong, I'm guessing you know your stuff, but you also strike me as someone who may likely have failed on culture fit down the line. Interviewers are often more sensitive to attitude than they ever are to aptitude, and for good reason, your HVAC knowledge may be irrelevant once you discover the custom designs in use behind closed doors, and a bad attitude toward learning where you're weak can be a much more fatal problem for a new hire.