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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

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Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#171

Post by huhwhaa23 »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #95
huhwhaa23 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we'd all agree the correct answer is E, but I had multiple math teachers regrade my tests with higher scores after I pointed out that there were multiple correct solutions to the problem. In several cases, other students had provided the same solution I had but assumed they were wrong because the graded test said so. And these were tests the teachers had used for years. So let's change the question: if you're…

In my country of origin, multiple choice tests weren't really a thing in school so it never really came up.

I guess the US has multiple choice tests at all levels.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#172

Post by guilt »

geofft wrote: post #162
guilt wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're most likely trolling everyone, by commenting that you know more about their processes than most outsiders do. So stop right there and run back into your PR cave.

I do. I've interviewed twice and gotten offers twice (and declined twice). That's what I said in my post. I'm claiming no greater (but no less) knowledge than having gone through the interview process.

Are you implying that because you went through a couple of good interviews with them, and because one director who works at Google said that they don't hire this way, it doesn't happen?

That's the worst logic ever.

I'm blaming Google for doing this, and you take it to imply that I said you work at Google? Maybe you didn't accept those offers from Google. It still doesn't mean those things didn't happen at Google - and it is extremely shameful that you resort to defending them.

Congratulations, what you have done is just free PR for Google. I'd rather listen to everyone else than you.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#173

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

pinewurst wrote: post #2

Another data point - I had a very similar Google recruiter "test", being disdainfully dismissed because I couldn't/wouldn't regurgitate the same incorrect template answers they had. I've since terminated any approaches by Google recruiters as being a waste of my time and emotional energy.

I wonder whether there is some perverse pleasure from trying to make an honest hardworking technically accomplished person who contributes something good to the world feel like a loser.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#174

Post by rorykoehler »

jstimpfle wrote: post #79
rorykoehler wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the correct answer is you Google how to do it!?

These questions are supposed to work as a proxy for experience. Everybody can google the answer to trivia, but if an applicant doesn't know the answer by heart that's an indication for lack of experience.

I still google things i know how to do that i don't use often because it's quicker to copy and paste than to try remember details that are vague in my memory. The example given is exactly one of those cases.

Even Jeff Atwood tweeted that he does this the other day.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#175

Post by GlennS »

psyc wrote: post #74
crispyporkbites wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm? You just make your entire hiring call on talking to the person without looking at their career, academics and skills?

I doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my…

How do you interview someone more experienced than yourself?

In the last set of interviews I had to do, I've ended up doing the role of talking to people about the technologies listed on their CV and asking them detailed questions to find out just how well they really know them. This just because I happened to be the person in our company who knew a little bit about most of the things that the people we were interviewing claimed to be good at.

Sometimes you have a really nice technical conversation with them and discover that they're clever and knowledgable. Sometimes you uncover a blagger trying their luck. Sometimes a bit of both. So, it's a useful part of the interview I think.

So very recently we interviewed someone with 30+ years of experience, more than any programmer at our company (only 3 developers), and much more than myself (8 years).

So I went away and did a little bit of research about the technologies he'd talked about: COM and Corba and JBoss and other artefacts 80s and 90s, and tried to ask some questions in as respectful a way as I good, and I hope he wasn't too annoyed. In the end he was great (actually I found his enthusiasm and attention to detail pretty inspiring) and we hired him.

I can definitely see how a person would be annoyed by that sort of probing though, especially when the interviewer doesn't know what they're talking about.

But, what's the alternative?

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#176

Post by AboutTheWhisles »

zeusk wrote: post #97
AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #66

A lot of these were the recruiter having no understanding of what they were asking, but the bit counting is just nonsense. A lookup table requires an extra memory access that by its nature is incoherent. Contrast that to being able to read the memory straight through and having it prefetched, then using the popcnt instruction: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/POPCNT.html

> A lookup table requires an extra memory access that by its nature is incoherent. Pedantic but, the LUT would also remain in the cache if there wasn't some issue with cacheline contention. Although, I do agree that POPCNT + prefetch and unrolling will do much better.

I thought the same thing, although I've tried LUT approaches to other problems like gauss curves and the results were much slower than I expected. The LUT may stay in the L2 cache, but whatever was going on, there was actually a big discrepancy between looking values up and just calculating the gauss curve equation even though it had exponents on floats.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#177

Post by cm2187 »

dvt wrote: post #92
cm2187 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most resumes are full of lies anyway.

You really think the best way to start a new business relationship is with the assumption that the guy across the table is a lying scumbag?

I am not sure I understand your position. So you would not get a lawyer to review a business contract because doing so would imply that your business partner is a lying scumbag, a morally unacceptable position when starting a new business relationship?

No, and that's called due diligence. Same with hiring. I have come across enough candidates where there was a huge gap between claims written on the CV and what the candidate actually did or knew to blindly trust any CV.

And the best candidates are often not the best CV writers.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#178

Post by cpitman »

stevep98 wrote: post #126
itissid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the time a TSA person at the airport asked a programmer at the port of entry to answer some canned CS questions from wikipedia and expected the exact answers...

A friend of mine got into a little confusion at immigration when asked his profession to which he replied “programmer”, which was seen as lesser category of job than his visa was issued for, which was “software engineer”

Hah, that happened to me at the Canadian border. When asked what my profession was, I said "Computer Programmer", but my visa was issued for an "Architect". Had fun explaining that I am a "Software" Architect, not a building architect.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#179

Post by cm2187 »

hennsen wrote: post #106
cm2187 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most resumes are full of lies anyway.

And somebody putting only lies in a resume will turn super honest on the phone?

No but he wouldn't be able to answer questions that go a bit deeper into what they claim they did or know but didn't/don't.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#180

Post by vlovich123 »

waisbrot wrote: post #104
mindfulplay wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if any company hired you based just on your app, it would be unfair to you and the company. Most software companies thrive because of generalist SWEs who need to demonstrate consistent performance. It might be that the app was a foot in the door but might not be applicable past that initial point

I mean, you maybe wouldn't just send an offer letter to someone who wrote an app, sure. (But depending on what they wrote, maybe you would. Something reasonably large and open-source, where they ended up incorporating a substantial amount of code from other contributors?) But if someone's got 30kloc sitting there, why wouldn't you look at that body of work instead of starting from scratch with "please write FizzBuzz…

Because reading someone else's proprietary code exposes the company potentially to liability? Not just claims of IP theft, but there would have to be legal vetting that you have the right to show that code in the first place. Also, I have no way to confirm how much of the code you wrote yourself.
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