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.
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%).
You're exactly right. I was asked some of these exact questions yesterday. The guy should have realised what he was dealing with, the recruiters don't claim to be technical, and the questions are flagged as being straight forward pre screen questions.
I'm glad that someone has some sense around here. I'm getting buried for saying the same thing. Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it. This was a culture interview, not a technical interview, and the fact that the author misinterpreted it only strengthens the interviewer's decision to not consider them further. They are very obviously not a good fit for a Director-level position at Google.
Speaking of making assumptions, you're making a lot of them.
You say "Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it". As a member of "everyone", I disagree.
I do suspect it's not as black and white as the article makes it out to be but the general attitude is not uncommon in tech companies. It's in fact so common it has become a bit of a meme. So I'm personally taking the article with that in mind.
> This was a culture interview, not a technical interview
Oh spare me. If a "Director of Engineering at Google", above in the thread, calls the interview "super strange" and "making [the recruiter] look like a blithering idiot", you can't start making random excuses up for Google. "It's about the culture!"
Where do you see a "Director of Engineering at Google" above claiming the interview is "super strange"? There are other (supposed) Google employees in this thread that are the source for every single one of my assertions.
Also, as a member of "everyone", how can you disagree with that statement when no one has even bothered to call out the fact that we only have one side of the story and it's the side of the story that wants our sympathies?
EDIT: I found the post you were referring to (it wasn't at the top when I first posted my responses)... The "Director of Engineering" was even saying that he doesn't buy the transcript because it's only one side of the story. That pretty much seals my point.
Your point that it's a "culture interview"? Or your point that it's probably not a verbatim transcript, which nobody argued? Or is it your point from way back that these are skills needed for a Director of Engineering, which apparently this wasn't an interview for?
My point that the author of the post misinterpreted the interview (which was apparently not at all for a Director-level position), my point that we only have one side of the story, and my point that the paraphrasing was done intentionally in such a way as to make the interviewer look bad instead of the interviewee. Or, if you want to simplify it, my point that this person is clearly not Director material, as they would like everyone to think.
Also, you're moving the goalposts here. At the time this was posted, the author of the post claimed it was an interview for Director, people were claiming that the interviewer acted exactly as written, and I, along with others, were claiming that either the author left out information, misunderstood it, or edited it.
I don't understand why a non-technical recruiter would be asking technical questions of a technical candidate, especially to a high-level one. Maybe for college hires, where you need to weed out an overwhelming field of candidates. Maybe Google just gets that many more applicants but jeez, I feel a web form and a minimal machine learning classification could do a better screening job.
Maybe it's more of a case that a technical person was asking the questions but doesn't really care about justifying why they should hire an applicant if they don't say exactly what is written down
The non-technical recruiter is asking technical questions with technical answers, but without the technical expertise to consider correct answers that are not literally the same words as the ones they have been given. That is not a good way to interview.
I more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.
Why is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.
That's wrong. The recruiter has a goal to get "correct" answers: if someone passes the interview without providing these answers via some "soft skills" (it more looks like a social engineering), then the recruiter fails. Because of that, there's no point in trying to explain your answers in hope, that recruiter will somehow agree that they match the answers from checklist.
More adequate approach will be to find the way to bypass this interview, by finding the right contacts who have the adequate expertise and can make the hiring decisions.
This situation is like trying to sell new fridge or delivery van to a waiter in restaurant, who was instructed to talk to business visitors while management is away. He was indeed put in charge, but he can do nothing for you or worse, communicate your offer to his boss in a wrong way, so you have to escalate - to find the contacts of management, to reach them etc.
I think this story makes sense as an illustration of how not to hire people.
What's wrong? I think this is exactly why this test exists. They don't care if you get the "correct" answers at this stage in the process. This is a glorified personality test that, in my opinion, the author misinterpreted as a technical exam. Directors at Google are not going to be the people that know the answer to everything and talk down to people. They're the people that have technical skills while, more importantly, having the personality and people skills to actually direct people and communicate with people of varying skill levels.
You and large amount of very technical people in this thread are the exact types of people that Google would, more than likely, try to avoid for a position like this.
Well, it's just your wishful thinking that it's a such kind of interview, not reality, and any personal attacks on me won't help you to prove your point. I have software engineering management experience in multinational companies and I have hired other managers: there are much more effective ways to find a person with good soft skills than such remote screening with a purely technical checklist. This way it's simply too costly: first, you need really smart recruiter with good soft skills himself, so he will expose the candidate's weaknesses and strengths. Then, there should be very well designed checklist that will allow to derive candidate's mentality from answers on purely technical questions. That's almost impossible, I'd say.
It's not my wishful thinking. Others in this thread have confirmed that they took a similar test when interviewing for Google and some of them actually got the job. One user even mentioned that the person doing the interview was a psychologist. I'm not attacking you. I'm simply saying that you're just like the author of the post. You assume, because the author says so", that this was a technical assessment when Google employees in this thread seem to be confirming that it is not. Your management experience is irrelevant to a basic failure to recognize this for what it is. This was a phone call. It's not like the interviewer was making these deductions of the interviewee simply by reading their answers on paper.
I don't disagree, although I'm sceptical that's intentional on Google's part. I think if you applied some common sense to the situation and you were able to get off your moral high horse about what's correct vs answering the questions he needs you to answer to get to the actual proper interviews.
What makes you skeptical, though? If anything, there are two things that make me almost certain of it:
1. The author of the post says that this was a phone call. That means that this, more than likely, is not a transcript of the call, but a paraphrase. The entire tone of the post lends itself to the author thinking that they're "correct" and that the interviewer was just a rude, monosyllabic simpleton.
2. The interview ended immediately after the author started to argue. Instead of trying to relate to the person and simplify their answers after the first few super-technical answers weren't accepted, they trudged on with the attitude of "this person has no idea what they're talking about and this is stupid" rather than "I'm clearly overshooting the mark here, maybe I should try and simplify the answers".
"This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills."
I disagree. The Q&A process isn't indicative of almost any skills on the job except patients when your time is being wasted in a formal process. He'd have to have memorized every trivial, algorithmic fact plus their textbook (not real-world!) answers with no further knowledge or answers. Such a candidate is not valuable in any function in Google unless they're trying out for an IT version of Rainman. Not even for HR since they read a sheet instead of memorize it themselves. ;)
You seem to have misunderstood. The "required skills" in question are communications skills, not technical skills. This wasn't a technical interview with an engineering team member as they seemed to think. This was a personality/psychological examination to make sure that their personality and communications skills match up with the culture and personality at Google. Directors typically don't do the low-level, high-skill technical work at companies like Google. They need to understand it, but, first and foremost, they need to be able to communicate with people of varying technical skill levels. This Q&A process, as you called it, is completely indicative of a person's communications skills.
Let's apply your interpretation. In this case, they are evaluating the social skills of someone who will direct projects by bright engineers. They will aldo interface with management about it. There's a lot of skills involved sith associated interviewing strategies, certifications, etc that might be employed.
Instead, the interviewer asks algorithmic questions, gets great answers, explains they're not on his sheet, and rejects the person. This is the total opposite of kind of social problems an engineering lead or project manager deals with. Plus, the requirement of keep guessing until your answer matches a sheet doesnt reflect how goals or requirements are done.
If this was assessing social or management skills, then it's the worst method I've seen to assess it. It still is a horrible result.
But most of these answers weren't even "technically right", or even dickish; they were pretty simple and straightforward answers. For instance, the recruiter asks what's the KILL signal, and then says the right answer is SIGTERM. If the answer itself is wrong, then what can you do?
Not sure where you're getting this "be a dick" routine thing from, but when I read through the transcript, it was clear that the recruiter was looking for an excuse to reject the author, and nothing else.
The right answer? It is hard to believe that there is only one right answer to these questions. There are different level of answers to any given question. Think about how you might explain the second law of motion F = ma (scalar) vs F(vector) = ma(vector). Same thing applies here, three way handshake can be explained at many levels. Anyways, I understand that if you want to get hired you have to compromise, but I also understand this upsets many of us.
How were the answers stated to the recruiter being a dick? There was no room to a be a dick given the recruiter was looking for verbatim scripted answers.
I agree with you on this, the job description said it was just as much management as engineering. Management means being able to tolerate irritating situations without becoming an ass.
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.