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Comment by maverick_iceman | Hacker News Reader

This is very hard to believe. In most big tech companies technical interviews are conducted by technical people, not recruiters. Especially for a senior role like Director of Eng. the experience described here stretches credulity.

Also most of these companies have policies which don't allow any feedback to be given on interview performance. In light of that the recruiter saying "you don't have necessary skills" is extremely surprising.

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Many companies do a pre-interview screen performed by recruiters to filter obviously bad candidates. I have personally helped construct such screens -- though not at google.

Ensuring the recruiter understands the difference between an answer over their head and a wrong answer is crucial. What we did was to make sure the recruiters understood that answers they didn't understand needed to be surfaced to someone in engineering for a sanity check.

Often our strongest candidates would give an answer which recruiting wasn't capable of vetting. The key is making everyone aware that the answers may not fit the script, and that this is OK. Recruiters shouldn't be judging the technical details of an answer; they should be looking for "gosh I don't know I've never seen that."

Pre-screening is sadly necessary when doing high volume recruiting. There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.

It saddens me slightly how far down the page your comment is, as that's exactly what's going on here. I've also (and also not at Google) had a hand in constructing these. It's a nightmare on the hiring side, too.

We tried very hard to tailor our questions such that the candidate — if they new the answer — would only give one exact answer. Ours included a download of sample data to operate on; one was a question along the lines of "count the number of lines in any .h files that contain the following pattern <human description of the patter>"; the answer ends up being a single integer.

My experience has been — overwhelmingly — that recruiters hiring for technical positions are incredibly non-technical. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except for, as mentioned, the huge amount of winnowing required to just find candidate that are suitable to advance to a phone screen with an engineer.

> There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.

Exactly this.

As stated elsewhere, these questions have been very typical for what I'd call 'first level phone screen' for SRE positions at Google.

I interview with Google every couple of years for fun; I always learn a lot and have a lot of fun with the on-site interviews.

The recruiter does indeed ask these kinds of questions. I've been asked most of the ones mentioned here, some of the multiple times.

I find it extremely hard to believe that the answers the recruiter had in front of them was wrong.

So to be clear, how it has worked every time I've done the dance with Google is:

1. An initial, non-technical recruiter chat.

2. The recruiter gives me a series of technical questions with extremely clear-cut answers, as described in the article.

3. A phone screen with someone technical.

4. A second technical phone screen.

5. On-site, 5-6 50 minute interviews.

What the 5 different subjects of those 60 minute interviews?

This wasn't a technical interview. This was a phone screen. As dumb as it is, having non-technical recruiters do a "technical" phone screen like this is increasingly common. I don't think this practice is completely justifiable, but part of the root cause is the enormous volume of grossly underqualified people who apply for any particular position. It takes a hiring company a large amount of work to vet a candidate but it takes a candidate nearly 0 effort to apply for a job.

I've never interviewed for director-level positions, but I have definitely received a few technical questions from recruiters who didn't seem technical. The questions were generally easy.

I still think it's a bad practice, though. If you absolutely insist on doing so, multiple choice is the right way to go.

It's standard practice at the Googles and Facebooks of the world to have a recruiter lob a bunch of canned questions at you during a phone screen, including Director-level phone screens. My experience was a lot different that the writer's, however. The recruiter was friendly and I was friendly back. I think I missed one or two but still went on to the next round. This guy comes across sounding like a pompous asshole and I wouldn't want him as my Director of Engineering, either.

It's just a phone screen. I got some of these questions from a Google recruiter on a phone screen, for an SRE manager position. Actually the recruiter asked me if I prefer questions focusing on system or on complexity and general CS topics, and I chose the latter. After passing it I got to a phone interview from an engineer, which had more questions and some coding. But this sounds about right for an initial screening.

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