Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

Without actually hearing the transcript verbatim, it's hard to give much enlightened perspective here, but there's a lot of "hur hur, dumb recruiter" responses here. What I will say, in general, is that figuring out what the "right" answers are here for what is obviously a technical phone screen by a non-technical person with answers on a piece of paper is also part of the challenge. This is a Director of Engineering interview. Understanding context & navigating "real people", having soft skills etc. is meant to be part of the job description. Feels like this gentlemen couldn't turn the hardcore engineer off who's technically right about everything but yet never seems to get anyone to listen to him.

Giving the hexadecimal representations of the 3-way handshake... really? You may have gotten a dumb recruiter and you may think you're smart, but from my perspective, you answered the questions in a pretty dumb way given the context of non-technical recruiter, very obviously reading answers from a sheet of paper.

I've done two of these before and I've often said "Oh well, it might be down on your sheet at this thing" and the recruiter goes "Ah, yeh, that's it. Tick" and moved through 3-4 questions that in theory I might have gotten wrong. If you take the "be a dick" routine... Congrats. You won the moral war. Best of luck with your next job.

"Dumb recruiter"? What?

Nobody's calling the recruiter dumb. Everybody is calling the process dumb. A process that puts somebody that cannot answer these questions, in charge of asking them and evaluating the answers.

Having the candidate evaluate the competence of their recruiter is not part of the interview process. What the hell.

I believe in the phone screen Google uses non-technical people to ask technical questions (as engineers are a scarce resource) so they're only able to handle "right or wrong" but you can probably work your way around that by being nice - this guy seemed to be being an ass...

I've had two phone screens with them and both times they were very technical people. Then again it was some time ago and with the bigger scale they may have changed it up.

It is unfortunate, but as mentioned above, you need to just play the game until you get to the real part. It's like when I call customer support, I gotta play along with the non-technical people and get them to bump me up the chain to someone technical when I need advanced help.

The unfortunate truth is that it's unreasonable to dedicate precious engineer time to screen millions and millions of people, they'd get no actual work done. So the first layers has to be like this. You just play along for the first step, and after that it'll get much much more interesting, trust me.

This guy seemed like the kind of person who loves showing off his knowledge and having the last word on everything. Honestly this kind of people, as knowledgeable as they are, usually do poorly in a work environment.

>I've had two phone screens with them and both times they were very technical people. Then again it was some time ago and with the bigger scale they may have changed it up.

Just to clarify, at least for the SRE hiring process, you first have a single technical phone screening with a technical recruiter (not an engineer) which is literally on the phone. At least it was for me, no webcam or anything. It's a pretty short and back-to-back question/answer type of conversation similar to what is told by the article (although the article strikes me as odd and does not match my experience). After that you have a couple (or more if need) of "phone" (read: hangouts with webcam and shared doc) interviews with actual engineers and those are more technical and require you to write code as well. Then you'll be moved to on-site interviews.

(This is for Europe at least, I imagine it'd be similar in other areas but can't know 100%).