Plenty of discussion on the first time this was posted:
Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
11–20 of 344 posts
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#12This is so good I can’t tell if it’s literal or a parody. The part about inodes in particular.
I was asked to regurgitate Linux header file constants. I believe Google is attempting to push the boundaries of self-parody as they push computer science.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#13This is the pre-screen, very likely conducted by a poorly-trained (or incompetent) recruiter. IIRC, there is a ton of room for response variety in the answers, and the screeners are trained to handle them (obv. very difficult to do well.)
The pre-screens are act as first-pass filters before the actual interviews (conducted by engineers.) Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#14This has been posted before. Standard questions from a recruiter. The fact he wasn't able to work out how to play the game at this stage suggests he probably would have been cut out for the job anyway...
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#15I got the same test for an SRE gig just a couple years ago. Amazon fizzbuzz'd me on the first coding test before I even went on-site. I know both have very stellar hiring reputations and employ a ton of smart people but from my "man on the street" experience, it felt more like a test of answering the right questions than a test of skill.
the best tech interview I've ever had was at a company that didn't make me write a line of code, instead preferring a lengthy conversation about coding. On reflection it was a far more grueling test of knowledge than "implement a hash table in C, you have 35 minutes".
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#16It's like answering riddles for a troll under a bridge.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#17This would be better implemented as a multiple choice test... at least that way there'd likely be no quibbling over whether an inode is "metadata" or an "identifier"
But of course they wouldn't implement it in such a way.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is similar to taking standardized tests where you are smarter than the question-writer. What would you select as the answer to the following question: " x is an integer. If x² = 16, then x =? A. 1. B. 2. C. 4. D. 16. E. Not enough information. " Think hard and tell me what you would select. For me it is VERY clear that I have to select C, 4. It is just as clear that it is the wrong answer, and the correct answer…
I don't get it. Integers include negative numbers, so -4 and 4 are both integers. Why would you select C? Because you're assuming the recruiter doesn't know what an integer is, based on the fact that all the answer choices are positive integers?
I think the point was to deliberately choose an example that would be understood by most the readership but sufficiently technical that it might be seen as an ambiguous question to someone less technical.
Reminds me a bit of those facebook clickbait posts "This question is so hard that only 5% of people will get it right"
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#19What an absurd test.
However I'm more concerned that a "Director of Engineering" position has these sorts of questions as a phone screen. Especially at Google, which has no shortage of applicants for IC positions who would actually be doing this work in any healthy and sane engineering organization. Does "Director of Engineering" at Google actually mean "Software Engineer"? Is this like in Finance where everyone is a Vice President of something?
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)
#20Google hat or not, monkeys are still monkeys, but this case shows a problem that is very common to all the employee positions, from the very bottom to the very top: all monkeys must watch, hear, talk and jump to get their peanuts.