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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)

#181

Post by zmarty »

s17n wrote: post #41
_Marak_ wrote: post #33

Google hiring has been fubar for years now. I think many of us here have been contacted ( unsolicited ) by Google for job interviews in the past. My Google interview story ends with me stopping the 8th interview ( 4th technical interview ) half-way in due to the frustration of listening to my interviewer loudly reply to text messages on his phone while I'm trying to write very complex source code into a shared Google…

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

I think that approach is misguided. The resume has background information and my opinion is that interviews do not correctly capture the capabilities of a person.

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

#182

Post by lisper »

My Google phone screen circa 2013 went something like this:

    for (i=0; i
Followed by:

Interviewer: You do understand that the position you have applied for is a managerial position, and that you're going to be dealing with schedules and budgets and not anything technical. Is that really what you want to do with your life?

Me: Um, no, not really.

Interviewer: OK, well, have a nice day then. Good bye.

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

#183

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

product50 wrote: post #147
Gargoyle wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent." Is this really true, though? Are they losing out on more top end candidates? There are other places with interesting work and big paychecks. Some of them aren't building reputations for annoying interview processes.

An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.

Liking money doesn't map to "best."

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

#184

Post by psyc »

GlennS wrote: post #175
psyc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intervie…

It doesn't sound to me like you did anything wrong. I think what I have in mind is more subtle than just asking questions. I don't have any objection to being asked questions in general. I would prefer you ask questions appropriate to the claims I'm making about myself - that is, I'll feel more insulted if you ask more than a couple of remedial questions. You may suspect I'm a fraud, but beware of communicating to me that you suspect I'm a fraud.

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

#185

Post by mancerayder »

vaxin wrote: post #168
geofft wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated , but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it…

You forgot one more thing, google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature. I was invited to interviews on multiple occasions but they are one of the last companies I would work for. I don't care about money, wherever I was working, I had it more than enough to have a really good life and a thousand $ up or down doesnt make much of a difference. But working for a company that actually engages into global spying of…

I can understand this sentiment.

To me, it feels like the Facebooks and Googles of the industry (by which I encompass other ad tech firms) are the 'banks' of 10 years ago. A few years ago, and I bet still today, there were/are a lot of new grads and experienced techies saying openly that they'd not want to work for a bank. Hopefully a similar spurning happens here.

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

#186

Post by golergka »

rayiner wrote: post #170
golergka wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I have had a pleasure of interviewing a 'veteran' who listed both Emacs and vim on his resume, among dozens of other keywords and many, many years of professional experience. I asked him, how do you exit these text editors? "As any other program", he answered,…

Is that answer wrong? Does using GVIM or Aquamacs mean you don’t know vim and emacs?

When I asked if he was using a console version or some wrapper that supported window manager, he didn't understand the question. When I asked if there's some another way to close it, he, just as surprised, told about the main program menu, just below the window title.

Any person who actually used either of these editors even once would have a pretty solid idea of what I was going for. It was a very simple, quick test to determine that he just assembled his CV from semi-relevant keywords at random.

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

#187

Post by bmcfeeley »

maxk42 wrote: post #166

This pisses me off so bad: Quicksort does NOT have "the best big-O". It's big-O time complexity is O(n^2). Big-O refers to the worst case time complexity. Quicksort will on average take (n log n) time complexity, but that's not its big-O, that's its big-Theta. Some try to skirt this by saying "if you randomize the order of the data first, it will be sorted in big-O of n log n" but again, that's the average time compl…

Big-Theta is not an average case, it is a special form of Big-O and Big-Omega wherein the worst case is also the best case from a complexity perspective.

This is sometimes true in sorting since comparison based sorting cannot be improved beyond n*log(n) except in specific cases for specific domains.

You are absolutely on the money about worst case being O(n^2) though for quicksort.

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

#188

Post by TallGuyShort »

huhwhaa23 wrote: post #171
TallGuyShort wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well the incident that sticks out in my memory was actually the kind where you show your work and circle your final answer. And as long as you get that work back and are confident you can then re-check the problem and can appeal with the teacher. That's a little harder to do with multiple choice because you have to replicate how you arrived at the answer you did, but the bigger problem is a general process problem. Standardized tests often don't yield individual results to the test-taker, so you're entirely dependent on the test writers and whatever review they seek out to ensure it's correct. And standardized test writers have been known to have some pretty BS questions (there was an article around where an actual author whose writing was used as material in a standardized test didn't know the answer to the questions being asked of students).

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

#189

Post by freyir »

Bjartr wrote: post #83
onion2k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does many hundreds (if not thousands) of these a week, and this false-negative is an unfortunate casualty of the process. Yes, and it's worth remembering that Google are the unfortunate casualty here. Being rejected as a false negative sucks as a candidate, but ultimately there are plenty more developer jobs around if you're actually good. As a business rejecting the right person could cost hundreds of million…

Google believes the opposite, that hiring the wrong person could cost that if they have a negative impact on the teams they work in so they prefer false negatives over false positives.

This happens because companies are unwilling to fire employees, even incompetent or toxic employees, for fear of lawsuit.

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

#190

Post by geofft »

vaxin wrote: post #168
geofft wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated , but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it…

You forgot one more thing, google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature. I was invited to interviews on multiple occasions but they are one of the last companies I would work for. I don't care about money, wherever I was working, I had it more than enough to have a really good life and a thousand $ up or down doesnt make much of a difference. But working for a company that actually engages into global spying of…

Yeah, I lumped that under "engineering culture," but AMP in particular and the nonchalance about centralizing everything on Google servers—and the fact that I knew AMP's PM would be rewarded for the project's success and not questioned on long-term good of the world in his promo meeting—was a concrete reason I wasn't excited about the job. I didn't want to be subject to the same incentives.
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