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".

It's an interesting recruitment setup where overqualified candidates are rejected.

You can have situations where you are prepared to recruit someone with potential versus being the final article. In those situations the overqualified candidates may not compare well with what you consider the potential of the slightly under-qualified candidate, and may not have some of their other attributes. It's obviously a risk, but it happens more than people think.