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.

First, it is definitely standard process to tell him (if they didn't, that's a definite failure). Again, remember you only have one side of the story here.

I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim.

Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it)

Second i'm going to point out a few things:

Experience may translate into wisdom, it may not. Plenty of companies promote people just because they last long enough. So 20 years experience managing may translate into a high level manager, it may not!

I hold a bunch of patents too on compilers and other things, it's not indicative of much in terms of skill, because almost anything is patentable.

Lastly, SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means. I"m not even sure where to begin to correct that. I guess i'd start here: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html

Does this mean this person is under/overqualified/exactly right? I literally have no idea. I just don't think it's as obvious one way or the other.

"Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process."

Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly.

If you want to do it, okay.

But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!)

I almost didn't jump into this discussion because it seems so polarized and rash compared to a lot of others

I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.

>Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview,

It's not just this guy. There have been others: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years.

I've also heard a few stories about friends applying for a position and being shunted by the hiring process into the hiring funnel for other (plainly unsuitable) positions. When I hear a very specific criticism from two separate places it's hard to stay skeptical.

Yep, those engineers they took on in the last ten years must suck, they've only managed to develop technologies that grew Google's annual revenue from 10 billion dollars in 2006 to 75 billion in 2015. That's the kind of track record that has to make you question the hiring process, right?

You seem to be confusing "I have a smug twitter-sized sound-bite response" for "I have a worthwhile counter-argument".

It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed.

That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, and this suggests Google's success is not sustainable so long as that continues. They'll be able to hire fresh CS grads out of Stanford forever with this process, but the experienced/unconventional people they flunk out on the early screens are not going to come to them, and when their current crop of experienced/unconventional engineers retire or take jobs elsewhere, Google's finally going to have to fix this problem and stop pretending that it's better to pass on a thousand highly-qualified candidates than to give one unqualified candidate an on-site. That, or tumble back down into mediocrity.

(which, to be fair, is already mostly the case; Google is largely a mediocre company, with only a couple of externally-visible brights spots of talent or innovation clustered in a couple of particular teams, and otherwise Google runs on inertia and the hope that the 0.1% of interesting stuff they come up with will keep the 99.9% of mediocrity afloat)

I can expand beyond 140 characters if you like. The OP claimed that in the past ten years, as a result of their hiring practices, Google's product output quality has noticeably declined, presumably as compared to the search product on which their name was made, and gmail, which they launched in 2004. And it's easy and fashionable to knock Google because maps is not as good as you remember it used to be, or because they shut down reader, or because plus didn't manage to unseat facebook.

Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that). They have a credible seat at the top table in the cloud market. And they continued to develop their core ad platform to drive more revenue growth.

I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.

It's still the case that other than search and ads, most of Google's biggest hits were acquired rather than the result of in-house initiatives (even Google Analytics, which is probably one of their more heavily-relied-on products, was acquired). Google doesn't hire people who will create stuff like Android; they hire people who can pass their interview process, and get new product and service lines mostly through acquiring teams of people who probably can't pass their interviews.

It's also the case that Google is acquiring a reputation for bad interview/hiring processes, and for hiring people who have a Ph.D. in CS and putting them to work on CRUD web apps that any random coding-bootcamp grad could build, since there's just not enough interesting in-house work to keep all those top talents occupied.