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".

So you're saying Google's recruiters don't tell what position they are interviewing for and that they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process.

> they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position.

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.

Perhaps that suggests you're giving them the wrong interview.

Not being able to answer even a simple coding question with for-loops is a really bad sign, even if the question is "beneath" the candidate's level.

I'd expect any technical candidate to be able to do at least a fizzbuzz-type question.

Now take into account stress, lack of preparation, environment the person is not used to, unusual syntax patterns for them, biases against them, their way of talking, their appearance, etc. and you get yourself people good at your kinds of interviews in your biased view. You can only hope they are at least average at their job.

The most beautiful and elegant part of coding is the logic, Not how to use a for loop. Anything question that can be answered with google should be forbid from a interview test. show him a method, ask him how he can improve the performance. ask him a opinion based question on OO design.

if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?