Google's "Director of Engineering" Hiring Test

HUP cikkturkáló

Recently, I have been interviewed over the phone by a Google recruiter. As I qualified for the (unsolicited) interview but failed to pass the test, this blog post lists the questions and the expected answers. That might be handy if Google calls you one day.

For the sake of the discussion, I started coding 37 years ago (I was 11 years old) and never stopped since then. Beyond having been appointed as R&D Director 24 years ago (I was 24 years old), among (many) other works, I have since then designed and implemented the most demanding parts of TWD's R&D projects* – all of them delivering commercial products:

Global-WAN (a C/VHDL distributed L2 VPN
relying on a custom kernel-bypass IP stack and our own post-quantum encryption)

G-WAN (a 200 KB application
server with 17 scripted programming languages C/C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, Go, PHP, etc.)

Remote-Anything (a patented enterprise network management solution, 280 millions of licenses deployed in 138 countries)

Google's representative stated that both management and up-to-date coding skills were required (a rare mix). But having exercised the former for more than 2 decades and the latter for almost 4 decades was not enough: I failed to give the "right answers". Is Google raising the bar too high or is their recruiting staff seriously lacking the skills they are supposed to rate?

Let's have a look!