Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderFWIW: As a director of engineering for Google, who interviews other directors of engineering for Google, none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets. These are bog standard SWE-SRE questions (particularly, SRE) at some companies, so my guess is he was really being evaluated for a normal SWE-SRE position. IE maybe he applied to a position labeled director of engineering, but they decided to interview him for a different level/job instead. But…
This was posted previously, in October 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272 An actual Google director of engineering pointed out that these are individual-contributor SWE/SRE questions (and I can attest I got very similar questions as a new college grad). As I commented previously: "Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds like he thinks his current role, CEO-who-writes-code of a very small software company…
These are the prescreen questions that were used for senior SRE. It's not a hiring test- this person didn't even get to the actual hiring interviews (which would have asked you, for example, to implement quicksort in code on a whiteboard). 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…
Can someone please explain to me what the hell is going on here? This article screams butthurt interviewee, but a lot of people are getting on board with this guy, and I have no idea who to believe.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 2490
- Total comments
- 1327
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-10-13 | Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring TestFirst breakout · Best thread | fatihky | 1764 | 923 |
| 2016-10-18 | Suspicious Updates Around “Google's ‘Director of Engineering’ Hiring Test” | timanglade | 10 | 3 |
| 2018-04-26 | Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016) | josephscott | 569 | 333 |
| 2020-12-23 | Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016) | Whitespace | 3 | 0 |
| 2022-01-01 | Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring TestHall induction · Latest 20+ point return | iamthemalto | 144 | 68 |