The recruiter-screeners in this case don't know anything, they're just looking for you to answer some questions against a table of "right answers", and they wouldn't know it if you answered in a way that was technically correct, but not in the answer key.
The reasoning behind this, sadly, is that Google thinks it tuned its hiring questions to reduce the rate of false positives- hiring an unqualified person into a role- at the expense of false negatives (not hiring a qualified person). Eventually, I stopped referring people to Google as the process was quite capricious. I told anybody who wanted to apply to read everything online about the process, memorize CLR and leetcode, and then tell the interviewers what they wanted to hear.
Most Googlers I know are not at all confident that they would get their job back if they had to reinterview for it, including those with top performance review ratings.
I once helped author the hiring guidelines and questions used for recruiting and interviewing. After months of effort, the committee proudly, euphorically called the effort good.
I then asked the committee "Who here could pass the high bar we just set?"
Total buzz kill.
The upside was I was never asked to help again.
Obviously Google has had some success in this space as their opinions are highly influential, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if they were successful in spite of their interview practices—especially in the early days—because jobs at Google were much-coveted: talent from all over the world sought out a job there because the money and the prestige was just so damned good.
And it happened to me also. Those recruiters were hilarious, you cannot make that up. I got 8 of 10 by luck, but refused a 2nd exchange with those bots.
I also had one (I forget the exact question) where my answer was technically correct but “wasn’t what [they] had”, and my explanation about why it was the same thing went way over the recruiter’s head.
Whoever thought this would be a fun little trivia game to have people play for their careers…yeah, no.
I still got through to the technical interviews wherein the first technical screener told me he doubts he’d be able to get his current position again now if he had to go through the interview for it, and he told me seriously not to feel bad if I don’t pass. I did pass that one.
Second technical screen was with a person with a thick accent and bad VoIP who was getting obviously frustrated due to both of us having to repeat stuff a lot.
This was all after a 6+ month dance of scheduling and waiting and hearing nothing from their recruiters. Got a rejection weeks later and never tried re-applying. They still reach out like every 6 months.
It seems nowadays the process is much more reasonable, but Google is still far behind other FAANG companies in regard to their interviewing process, in my opinion.
IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate. The goal of which is to show you are serious about the tech stuff and give people a way to bow out gracefully.
“What is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection?” - as soon as I read the question, I knew right away the author would give the exact hex, and the recruiter would want the three letter acronyms.
Perhaps this was a brilliant engineer disguising a personality interview as a technical one. Personally I would want my coworker or boss to be someone with enough awareness to have passed this interview. Compassion, empathy, social awareness, understanding someone else’s role and perspective, setting aside your ego to help a conversation go smoothly - important for a director to have.
I wonder how many teams of working engineers would get them right without cramming?
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge"
If it was just their attitude, they’d not tell them they were wrong when they weren’t and tell them to work on x y and z to be qualified in the future. They’d just complete or end the interview and say something like, “Great! You should hear back in x days” and then reject in their ATS.
If not, then the recruiter is an asshole and gaslighting the candidate.
If someone is a pass in the first 10 minutes, the next 35 minutes are me trying to sell the company to the candidate. This is not, even slightly, a waste of time.
I have Allied Mastercomputer levels of HATE for whichever HR drone decided that "interviewing candidates" needed to be a bullet point in the "corporate evaluation process" and thus made the interviewing process even shittier than it needed to be.
I've also talked to people with terrible resumes who turn out to be great. They are just bad at resumes.
No is saying they should rely solely on resume review as a screen.
What is under question here is the perceived wisdom (on Google's side) of screening for Director positions using badly programmed chatbots (or recruiters, whatever) instead of having them be asked the same questions by an actual human.
IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate.
Perhaps, but companies like to screw that up as well -- having people code into a Word doc, for example (try it sometime), or assigning problems that are either brain teasers or essentially willingness-to-cram filters rather than what they should be -- a simple, straightforward test of minimal programming ability (to determine whether further time investment is merited).
However, being professional is also important and I don't consider it a waste. I've experienced the reverse. It was clear after one interview that I was not a fit for the position.
I still ran the interview out even after pointing out that I really wasn't a fit because that's what professionals do. I later got a contract out of that company simply because I was professional about things and so many other people aren't.
Generally, you want to select for successful employees in your company, which hirers normally are. If they can't get selected, something is very very wrong with your process.
If it's the latter (essentially a test of whether they've memorized quickselect) then that sounds like a horrible filter, actually. Unless it's for the position of "Senior Quicksort Engineer".
Also, my sense is that Python is something of an outlier in having a mean and median functions in it standard library. I could be wrong, but AFAIK Go and JS do not, for example -- so people using those languages would surely bomb (at least on the median calculation part -- again, assuming they interpreted your question as "calculate from scratch").
I don't mean to be pedantic or split hairs. The point I'm trying to make is that even simple-seeming problems can have gotchas to them, depending on the context.
Interviewers could do better by either thinking just a bit more about the problems they select, or just communicating better. But many do not, unfortunately -- I have the sense they just pull problems out of the air, and see what sticks. Meanwhile counting the high number of fails as a success signal.
Some people also under-rate their skills, because they are very demanding to themselves (the bad ones don't know "sort" and want to re-implement their own sorting method in Python).
I pre-screen using practical problems that I have to solve every day, and when candidates know their UNIX shell commands that's usually a really good sign.
By "probably solid" I don't mean "immediate hire" but rather "It's a safe bet this person isn't utterly incompetent and I won't be wasting 10 minutes of my time talking to them."
Yes sometimes you need to be able to simplify things for non-technical shareholders, but no that's not what this should be.
In an engineering focused organization if recruiters are reaching out for a position this high up they should either be solely acting as a data gatherer while a highly technical person reviews, or they should be technical enough themselves.
We're not talking about screening internships here, the person in the article didn't ask Google for an interview, it was on Google to provide competent points of contact. That doesn't necessarily scale if we're talking about applications they receive, but that's why the article states almost immediately it was an unsolicited interview.
There's no level above which this stops being important. If anything, it only increases as you go up.
There are probably thousands of 'director of engineering' or similar roles at Google. If it's anything like other companies, they will be managing something like ~50 people. It's a middle management role, not that high up - except in compensation relative to the median...
How high up is this? What's a director in FANG-land? In some places, a manager of managers is a director - which isn't very high, and can be closer to the ICs than to the CEO on the org chart.
But there are orders of magnitude fewer people are hired yearly into director positions than something like an L5.
So the expectation is past a point you're not going to reach out to someone and waste their time like this.
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Also a manager of managers is plenty high, some places are just so bloated it doesn't seem that way.
You'd think someone you're trusting to have that level of influence is worth the extra effort
The standard library is to sort, not take the median
min(x)
max(x)
statistics.mean(x)
statistics.median(x)
If they failed your test -- you just know they failed your test. That doesn't mean you now that they're incompetent.
They didn't even need a technical recruiter, having the recruiter do their thing when it comes to soft aspects, like lightly checking dates, seeing if the person seems interested, etc. Then bringing in someone technical to review the technical stuff... it's really not asking that much.
That is true, but gives no indication of how many Director candidates they have to go through as Google has "a lot* of L5s. I would expect the C-Suite to get the high-touch approach, as they probably screen less than a dozen interviewees for CxO.
Let's ballpark this (simplified). Say there's a 1:3 manager to L5 ratio, and 1:5 director to manager ratio. We'd roughly expect 1 director to be hired for every 15 L5s. If Google hires 1500 L5s a year, then it would hire 100 corresponding directors. If it averages 20 applicants per post, that's about 2000 screens per year. Would that justify getting specialized recruiters? I don't know
Aside: this used to be the kind of "estimate/puzzle" question Google used to ask it's interviews, allegedly
Allow me to inform you it is. Your ratios are unrealistic even for estimating unless you really think there's 1 L6 for every 3 L5s at Google. Also we're talking about around an L8 for director:
Yet it still holds for those numbers that yes, if you can afford to reach out to them, you can afford technical staff to be in the loop. Because it's not just about the company, it's about respecting the engineer's time. Not that many people are qualified enough to be getting calls to be hired in as directors, it's not a small feat even if it's 100 hires a year. You don't want them having experiences like this if only for the image it gives off to other potential hires..
> Aside: this used to be the kind of "estimate/puzzle" question Google used to ask it's interviews, allegedly
Used to use about a decade ago? And I believe the moment you said "1:3 manager to L5 ratio" your interviewer would give you a subtle but questioning look and expect you to revise that.
> And I believe the moment you said "1:3 manager to L5 ratio" your interviewer would give you a subtle but questioning look and expect you to revise that.
I deliberately chose a high number to show that the number of Director interviews is still large after steelmanning your PoV (at the lower boundary of director-to-L5 ratio): I don't imagine many teams have 3+ L5s on them.
Also, in the spirit of learning, could you perhaps plugin numbers that you think are more reasonable (L5 per team, and number of teams a director is responsible for)?
1. I'm calling the L5's skip-level manager a Director - I'm assuming that's what they are called at Google, but I could be wrong. That's the ratio I'm calculating
L6 is Engineering Manager 1. That's how far up an L8 is.
And L6s are usually estimated to be 10% of Google. You can assume that there are order of magnitudes fewer devs each time you go up from there.
Also to be clear, it's extremely to be hired into Google higher than an L6. Even getting hired in as an L6 takes more experience than it does to join as an L5 and become an L6.
Most L6s at other FAANG companies would be downleveled without a very very strong performance, so getting reached out to as an L8 is not a small deal...