Not surprising, the candidate did fail at acknowledge who the interviewer was to adapt their answers. It was a recruiter reading answers from a sheet, the simpler you keep it the highest the chance of passing the stupid test.
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 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...
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.
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
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...
There's no level above which this stops being important. If anything, it only increases as you go up.
“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.