Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

So, as part of my job, I have been the hiring manager for directors for Google (3 in the past 6 months), and recruit quite a bit.

This was a simple phone screen, and it seems the recruiter was not given a good set of questions.

However, I actually doubt it was really a director of engineering screen, despite this person's experience level (maybe it should have been, but ...).

I say this because I know a lot of the leadership recruiters, (it's a separate thing from regular SWE/manager recruiting), and I know how the process works. They don't screen candidates this way normally precisely because it doesn't make sense. (Whatever you may think of Google's regular non-leadership recruiting :P)

Instead, they ask question directly relevant to what the hiring manager wants/needs (IE i give them the questions to use), and in most cases, do just enough to know whether it would be a waste of time for the hiring manager to talk to them. At which point, a hiring manager like me talks to the candidate and decides whether to bring them in for onsites.

This particular set of questions seems closer to standard non-leadership SRE questions.

It turns out this post is from 2016 and i already said the exact same thing then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272

DannyBee discovered to be idempotent.

Functionally pure

>This particular set of questions seems closer to standard non-leadership SRE questions.

OK, you've established your credentials, and cast a bit of doubt on the accuracy of everything in the linked post by pointing out a likley inaccuracy about the actual position.

But at no point do you claim that the phone screen didn't actually go like that. Nor do you offer defense of a call that did go like that.

And isn't that the part of the post that really matters? If that retelling of the call is even 30% true, Google flubbed it. Hard.

> And isn't that the part of the post that really matters? If that retelling of the call is even 30% true, Google flubbed it. Hard.

Please take a look at my defense of the retelling being about 80% true, and Google doing exactly the right thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702726 + my reply below

The important part is that if this person believed they were being interviewed for a director-level position, and if they actually got new-college-grad-level questions, then something else has gone very wrong already. Either Google flubbed hard well before the interview even started, or this person isn't capable of understanding things that Google recruiters are saying to them, at which point their entire retelling is suspect.

I thought Google hires into a general pool, and hiring managers don't "own" candidates like Amazon HMs do.

It's probably different for leadership candidates simply because there are far fewer available roles.

I was approached by some Google recruiter for a very specific engineering management role based on my background. I also thought the same about that general pool thing before that.

The process seemed quite different from what I've read here about the Google software engineer recruitment process.

(After a few phone calls/interviews I realized this was not a position I would likely enjoy, all things considered, so I told them I thought I was bad fit because of A and B, but please keep me in mind if you have another opening that's more suitable.)

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