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".

Disclaimer: I also work for Google, opinions are my own, etc etc.

> "i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt"

I mean sure, a single instance of this might be overblown, exaggerated, or false in some way.

But there is an avalanche of reports like this, to the point where it's become widespread industry insider knowledge.

I enjoy working here, but the interviewing practices are such that I actively warn friends applying/being referred to temper their expectations of a repeatable/reliable process.

Most colleagues I've spoken to about this, including myself, have strong doubts we would have made the cut if we interviewed again - even though all are strong engineers with great perf records.

At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously? We don't have to accept every detail of the reporting as gospel, but there's clearly something here.

(Same disclaimer)

If you interview frequently, at least for SWE, this is certainly not how we go about things. ghire guidelines for SWE don't allow for questions like this, or behavior like this.

Is it possible this was an SRE interview? I guess, but it really sounds ungoogly and these questions sound like they don't give great signal. I'd be ashamed if this is how we hire SREs.

Is there really an "avalanche" of reports like this? Most negative reports I hear have to do with our SWE questions which tend to be difficult.

You should be ashamed then, because these are definitely the questions used on SRE phone screens.

The questions are fine for SRE. The problem is the behaviour and the expectations of the interviewer.

The people doing these interviews are non-technical people who read off of a cheatsheet. The cheatsheet covers alternative answers, but a situation like the OP describes can never end well.