Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

Re:Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test by throw_away_777 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @06:20PM (#12704582)

How do you know the people failing your interview process have "second grade coding skills"? The fundamental challenge with evaluating interviews is that companies don't hire people who flunk interviews - so there is no easy way to reliably measure the false negative rate. Does fizzbuzz ability correlate with coding ability? Maybe, but you'd have to hire people who fail fizzbuzz to definitely answer the question. I know that I use google extensively at work - interviews don't allow you to use search.

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Re:Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test by zeven7 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:36PM (#12705382)

I'm not sure about OP, but there is a tech company that has said it hires people who fail their interviews occasionally to see if their interview process is working. That company is the one that is the subject of this thread.

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Re:Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test by throw_away_777 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:54PM (#12705448)

Can you cite your source? I haven't seen this anywhere.

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Re:Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test by zeven7 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:58PM (#12705465)

I haven't read it myself, but I heard that's what Laszlo Bock said in Work Rules.

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Re:Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test by empath75 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @11:37PM (#12705985)

We actually do let people use Google during our code interviews. They'll use it at work, so why not.

We do watch them work though so if they just copy and paste from stack overflow and they don't understand the problem, it's pretty obvious.

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Re:Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test by Kurtz79 on Friday October 14, 2016 @10:53AM (#12708452)

It depends on the questions.

If you require using real, compiler correct language in a coding exercise, and the problem is not trivial, than allowing search is more than fair.

But the point of Fizzbuzz is being such trivial problem that it really should not require nothing more than an understanding of basic programming logic and constructs.

In my (limited) experience, there were instances where the candidate could not even decide on a programming language to use, I told them to use pseudo-code and they still flunked horribly.

Aside from that, Fizbuzz is rarely a dealbreaking task in itself, it tends to correlate pretty well with the overall performance, I would be surprised seeing someone failing fizzbuzz and excelling in the rest of the interview (once again, in my limited experience).

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Re:Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test by exDM69 on Friday October 14, 2016 @06:28AM (#12707163)

These were done in recruitment events at universities and the applicants were free to access Google if they wished. Some guys even went to the computer lab to do the assignments on a computer and then return a printout of their code. And we were completely fine with that.

But really, if an applicant needs to google to solve FizzBuzz, they don't have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. You're required to write one loop, a few if/then/elses and understand how the modulo operator works. Our jobs are much more demanding than that.

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