"Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory. "

This is one reason why i find it super-strange. It's not a set of "high level employee" questions. It's a standard SRE pre-screening.

"How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?"

My view of unreasonable is not about whether there is a problem or not. It's not about the consensus. I don't actually have an opinion myself on the hiring process. If people i work on recruiting raise problems, i try to solve them. I have not had trouble trying to recruit in general. So i haven't formed a strong opinion, even after 11 years. If folks want to decide the process is horrible, okay. If folks want to decide it's great, that's also okay.

But it's unreasonable because it's both super-quick reaction without time to settle and think, and not aimed at anything other than trying to reinforce one view or the other.

Nobody is actually listening to each other, they are just trying to force whatever their view is, good or bad, on others.

So to answer you directly, i don't think pointing out a problem is unreasonable, but that's not my complaint. My complaint is that the actual discussion is not a discussion, but mostly people just arguing on the internet. IE You shouldn't take me saying "unreasonable" as a proxy for "me saying i think their viewpoint is wrong". I just think the mechanism of discussion here is unlikely to yield fruitful results.

> It's a standard SRE pre-screening.

To clarify, I was speaking of your standard SRE hires, whose position you referred to as "not maintenance drones".

I suspect for someone who has failed - rightfully or not - a recruitment exam in this manner, it may in fact be the only cathartic mechanism.

> Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process

I'm not sure what "nitty gritty details" you're talking about here.

As much as some people here think it's impressive knowledge[1] to be able to give the size of an ethernet MAC address without Googling it, that's something that anyone with experience in computer networking oughts to know. Not at all because it's useful knowledge, but simply because if you actually spend time looking at network traffic dumps or ARP tables or DHCP configuration or SLAAC assignments you'll be seeing MAC addresses so often that it just becomes obvious. Just like knowing that an IPv4 is 4 bytes and an IPv6 16 bytes. Or that a TCP connection starts with a 3-way SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK handshake.

And the same thing applies to the other questions that look like meaningless details: knowing what an inode is and what syscall returns inode data for a path is something that someone with system-level C programming experience should know. stat(2) is far from being something obscure. Knowing what signal is sent by the kill(1) command is maybe slightly more on the trivia side IMO, but it's still a very well known fact.

A candidate is most likely not expected to know the answer to all of these questions. But failing in all of the categories is IMO a fairly strong red flag for someone interviewing for SRE, where in general people are usually expected to be comfortable with at least one of {networking, system administration, Linux internals}. In fact, this domain specific knowledge is the biggest differentiator between "standard" SWE and SRE-SWE, even though the lines get blurrier and blurrier.

This also indirectly answers this:

> things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory

You would have to be out of touch with the field for quite a while to forget such basic things. Which is likely something that you want to test for in such interviews. To go with a metaphor: if you claim to be a fluent English speaker on your resume, you can't be excused of "faulty memory" if you forget how to conjugate "to be" in the present tense. It's not something you forget easily, and if you did forget you most likely can't say you're fluent anymore.

Disclaimer: I was an SRE at Google for 2.5 years, but I'm not familiar with the early phases of the recruiting process.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701486

So, as someone who went through the process and got through it (so is less inclined to hold a grudge):

> Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory.

AIUI you can get easily 5 or more of the pre-screen questions wrong and still proceed to the next stage, depending on your experience and how wrong you are. The point here is not that you know each and every one of those things, but to show that you are, in general, knowledgeable enough to spend Engineer hours on.

And your judgement of these questions is seriously impaired by the fact that they are written down wrong. I assume, that the author of this post has written down a rough transcript from memory and as such it's colored by their own (mis)understanding of the question and whatever got leaked from memory in the meantime. The questions he wrote down are, at the very least, not verbatim the ones from the checklist given to recruiters (and there is a strong emphasis on reading them out verbatim there, so I consider it relatively unlikely that the recruiter didn't do that).

> It's formed of the dozens of posts that appear every year about how someone who seems qualified is turned down for spurious reasons like "being unable to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard". It's what makes this particular post so believable - it fits the stereotype.

Exactly. You are reading "dozens of posts every year" from disgruntled interviewees who got rejected and are pissed. On the flip side, a quick internet search will tell you that Google gets on the order of millions of applications each year, meaning you don't hear from >99.99% of applicants.

There is also the widely advertised fact, that the Google hiring process accepts a high false-negative rate, if that also means a very low false-positive rate, so it is to be expected that a good percentage of qualified applicants still get rejected. It is thus also to be expected, that you hear from some of them. Meanwhile, again, you are not hearing from the thousands of qualified applicants that do get accepted each year. Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news, even if it was written.

> How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?

Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem.

From reading this post, I'd say a likely reason for the rejection is, that this person wasn't being particularly pleasant. Frankly, he comes of as kind of an arrogant prick. And, as a general rule, engineers at Google, just like everyone else, don't particularly like having unpleasant people on their team. And I also believe this post has gotten enough upvotes, that someone will look into the situation to see what went actually wrong here.

> they are written down wrong.

Please, feel free to correct the record, then, with the correct screening questions. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and has gone tearing down the street towards everyone trying to make a buck by "training" hopeful young graduates on how to make it through the Google interview process.

> Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news

No, it won't. Because it's the tech equivalent of a lottery winner saying they think the lottery system is a fair and equitable way to distribute money.

> Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem

Same problem. If you're in, you passed the Google employment lottery, so it's much more interesting (and should be more meaningful to management) when insiders agree that the hiring process has problems.

Now then, of course, so long as directors find that they have plenty of applicants to back fill attrition and grow, they have no reason to think the hiring process is broken; so long as Google is happy hiring not necessarily the best people for the job, but the ones lucky enough to dodge more false negative flags than everyone else. Better to be lucky than good.

All that said, yeah, Google's hiring process works for Google. Coming here, to a conversation started by a crappy screening experience, and expecting respect for a process with so many false negatives is a bit optimistic, though.

> Please, feel free to correct the record, then, with the correct screening questions.

No can do. I actually like my job. And I also like my coworkers and don't want to make their life any harder.

> No, it won't. Because it's the tech equivalent of a lottery winner saying they think the lottery system is a fair and equitable way to distribute money.

The same goes for a "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice but sadly I didn't got accepted" post.

The fact remains, that you don't read from >99.99% of people. My interview process was very pleasant. I had a bunch of nice conversations about programming and computers with friendly and humorous people.

> Same problem. If you're in, you passed the Google employment lottery, so it's much more interesting (and should be more meaningful to management) when insiders agree that the hiring process has problems.

There are a lot of insiders. With a lot of opinions.

> so long as Google is happy hiring not necessarily the best people for the job, but the ones lucky enough to dodge more false negative flags than everyone else.

Well, the thinking here isn't really "we want strictly the best". That would be a hopeless idea from the get-go. The thinking is "there is a hiring bar that we want people to pass and we want to hire exclusively from above that. We don't care about the sampling of that, as long as we get that". What they end up with is a pretty broad sample of that population. Some (like me probably, tbh) just barely pass the bar, some are the very top. Some other top-people got unfortunately rejected, some other barely passing people too.

So yes. There is indeed no ambition to actually get just the top 100K engineers in the world.

> All that said, yeah, Google's hiring process works for Google. Coming here, to a conversation started by a crappy screening experience, and expecting respect for a process with so many false negatives is a bit optimistic, though.

Well, mostly I (and DannyBee) are just pointing out obvious flaws in the discussion here. Like the obvious self-selection bias and selective reporting. And the also obvious fact that this particular post was written while angry and only represents one side of the story; and that not even accurately.

Secondarily, in these long-wound comment threads on reddit/hackernews/twitter, people seem to usually not even be aware of the goals of the hiring process and think "look, here, three prominent false negatives" is an actual argument about the process being flawed.